I don't want to go into great detail here about Gameplanning, but I do want to point out a few details that may not be completely clear.

* The offensive and defensive gameplan screens give you the opportunity to select the weights of various play types and personnel. This is used in conjunction with the plays you have selected from your playbook to decide what plays will be called in a given situation. There is a "View Plays" button below each quadrant to see the weight of the plays that will be called in that situation. During a game, if there are no plays available, a random play will be chosen from your playbook.

* On the play selection screens, the stats displayed (times called and avg per call) indicate the performance of those plays by your team in the previous two seasons. The red bar indicates how familiar your team is with that play. The scouting screens show your upcoming opponent's stats, and the red bar shows how familiar your team is with that play. The more familiar each player is with a given play, the better they will perform it. This considers the play that your team is calling as well as the play your opponent is calling. You may want to keep the same offensive and defensive playbook through the entire season in order to improve your familiarity; however, your opponent would also have an easier time scouting you if you do so. The balance of this is up to you.

* If you leave the plays empty, your coach will randomly choose a fairly even distribution of play types to fill your selected plays.

Feel free to post any question or other observations you might have that you think would be helpful to the other players.

Guess I better get to work. lol

Is there a way to ignore personnel and have an even distribution on the specific play type?

For example, say 1st and medium I have 20% of all 5 choices (inside run, outside run, short, medium, long). I would like the coach to randomly choose a play type from those choices, then go to the plays of that type and have an even chance to pick any play. I prefer to pick the specific plays to match what personnel choices I want through the game rather than using the personnel screen.

In the above example, 1st and 10. I'd like the game to randomly pick one, let's say short pass. In the gameplan, let's say I have 10 short passes. Rather than the computer picking one based on a choice for personnel, I'd rather the gameplan be able to pick from the 10 plays. Let's say I have 3 plays using 2RB, 2WR, 1TE, 3 plays using 1RB, 1TE, 3WR, 3 plays using 2RB, 3WR, and 1 play with 5WRs. That is the distribution I want in that play call. If I have mostly 2RB, 3WR plays in the gameplan as a whole, and I choose to focus on that personnel group for most of the game, then I don't want that one play called over and over and over every time a short pass comes up.

I hope you understand what I'm trying to get across and can give me some advice about this. Thanks!

I think I understand, you basically want to have your plays chosen based on play type and available plays period without any regard to the personnel type, correct? That's actually not a problem, all you need to do is set the same value for each personnel type - the easiest way to do this is to switch to the text mode and push all the sliders for one quadrant to 100, then click "copy" and copy it to all the other situations. If you do that, then each personnel will have an equal weight, effectively eliminating its influence in your play calling.

OK, great! Thanks for the quick reply. That's what I did, hoping I was right in the choice, LOL.

Also, I just want to verify... After I create a gameplan for one team, I can save it and use it on another team? Obviously, some of the plays may not be there depending on coaching, but the basic numbers in the gameplan will be available to all teams I own?

Thanks again, JDB!

That's correct, your saved game plans will be available across all of your leagues. Any plays that are common will be selected when you load it for another team, but you are right, you may have more plays to select to fill out the available plays. (It acts the same if you save a game plan and later load it with a different head coach who has a different playbook).

One more question, then I won't ask any more for a while... and next time I'll save them up and ask all at once. Sorry to keep adding more questions!

Is there a way we can choose when to go for it on 4th down? Any way we can influence the coaches decision on that? I promise this is my last question for today. I'll start writing them down and asking once a day :D

No worries, these are all good questions!

At this time there are no controls for this, your team will only go for it on 4th down if they are in hurry-up. I hope to roll this control out before too long.

I'd like to make a feature request for gameplanning.

The ability to go for it on 4th down with a specific set of controls exclusive to this setting:
- In 10 yard swaths of the field rather than 25. It's not the same on the opponent's 49 as it is on their 33.
- The ability to force only 1 or 2 plays to be chosen when used
- Distance settings of 4th and <=1, 4th and <=3
- Explicit formation choice
- Scoreboard conditions
- Time conditions