CPU Recruiting Logic

[bussiejr]

Has anyone tried to figure out the recruiting logic in this game? It seems to suck hardcore, and if the CPU recruited better we'd probably have no need for house rules.

I posted my house rules here the other day, and they work great but I still feel like I'm cheesing a bit at times when recruiting. Plus I don't like that I'm limiting myself so much on who I can reach out to for recruiting(my rules only allow targets w top 3 interest when recruiting above team prestige level). In a perfect game world, I'd be able to try recruiting anyone in the country and deal with the consequences of not recruiting anyone good because all of my targets had little to no interest and signed elsewhere leaving me with scraps. But currently I can recruit someone not even on my recommended tab and have a very high chance of landing them even if not in one of my pipelines.

I was trying to study the AI recruiting logic and it doesn't make sense to me yet. For example 5* teams tend to offer 35 scholarships immediately with one round of scouting for each one in week 0. Weeks 1 & 2 they spend almost exactly 35 hours each on 17 recruits. It switches up on week 3 and starts to get kinda random from there, sometimes spending max recruiting points on a player but usually only spending 5-35 hours. And they never spend they're full hours available for the week. Out of 1000 hours available, in my short testing the most I've seen was about 800 hours used. I've seen as little as 300 hours used as well.

So even when using house rules, I'm spending 50+ hours per week on a recruit when the CPU could be spending anywhere from only 5 to 35 points(sometimes max like us human players though). Makes the game too easy. I wish I could understand what makes the CPU decide how many hours to spend, and why it doesn't spend it's max hours per week. If I can figure out the formula then the perfect house rules could be created and we could recruit just like the CPU and be on an even playing field. We could still recruit better by scouting and finding higher quality recruits it would just take better strategy than just recruiting the highest stars possible.

It took me quite a bit of time testing my house rules with all 134 teams. So before I spend another few weeks trying to figure this out I'd like to see if anyone in the OS community has already spent time figuring out the AI recruiting logic or has any pointers for me?