Originally posted by mikemart
Whats the advice when it comes to deciding which formations to use? I generally just picked plays I think would work and trimmed down what got poor results but I noticed in some situations I would only use a formation for 1 play or only have running or passing plays out of a specific formation. I don't like the idea of a DC scouting me and just seeing that they can tailor a play for a specific formation if they know whats coming.
I was thinking of starting a fresh playbook and specifically looking at 3 or 4 formations to run plays from to make it a little bit more difficult to game plan against but I don't know if I'm over thinking an ineffective strategy or just pigeonholing myself too much.Cool my first question in this thread (possibly ever if you remove the trolling and Theo trying to take over my thread).
So generally, DAI's are fucking massive. A DC basically needs...
-Plays for every single formation
-In each formation, different plays for multiple combinations of tagged personnel
-And for each combination of formation and tagged personnel, multiple downs/distances (especially when it comes to 3rd/4th down, but some are differentiating calls on 2nd down base don distance as well).
-Also just to mention, every defensive play has to be manually designed or adjusted.
This is to say, if we give an OAI a complexity of 10, DAI's (if well made) have a complexity of 10x10x10= 1000.
This means while I can scout+adjust a full offensive gameplan in 20-30 minutes including self-scouting and opponent scouting, you are talking multiple hours on the low end to do a full scout on defense. Nexill who at one point (and possibly still) one of the best in the biz, would do like 4-6 hour playoff gameplans to adjust his DAI in WL. So unless we are talking about specifically short yardage, there just aren't enough hours in a day nor cares in the world for any DC to truly scout and alter their gameplan in a meaningful way for anything other than WL playoff games and maybe Natty Pro championships.
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As an OC, you are basically wasting time trying to confuse someone that's afk and not paying attention, and whom would have to try so hard to radically adjust their gameplan every game that it's not worth their time.
This is why the number one flaw most OC's have is using WAY too many plays, as if running plays 1x a game is keeping the afk DC honest or somehow improving your scoring. You need to use the same play more than 8 times in a game for GLB to even include a repeat play penalty that gives defenders a vision bonus...
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Generally, your personnel are going to give away your intentions way more than your formation. If you have singleback with a bTE and pHB, DC's are going to trigger run defense plays, regardless of it you have never ran out of singleback in your entire life. The majority of your strategy (if trying to trick DC's) should be anti-tagging using custom positions to force a certain defensive formation personnel.
There are a lot of garbage plays in GLB, I encourage you to use any that fit your personnel and let you attack the defense in a certain way. Very often, DC's will have certain formations they are better at defending and certain formations they are worse at defending, so being able to consider attacking from any formation is definitely helpful.
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Follow-up questions welcome if you have any.
