09-28-2011, 08:49 PM
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#7
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Rookie
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Re: What is your Franchise style?
The fun thing for me in any sports franchise mode is building my team up with my own hand-picked players and following their careers. Outside of only a few original players who I like enough to keep, I imagine I'll have turned the entire roster over after 5 years or so. To hurry the process, I find myself making lots of trades to hoard draft picks (made 14 picks in my last draft). Though, to be fair, unless I'm dealing really good players, I try not to take picks that are too high, mostly just stockpiling 5th, 6th and 7th rounders. (Though when I deal my star QB or perennial Pro Bowl receiver or whoever, I take the high picks and don't feel bad about it.)
Even though CPU logic is a mess, I can't control all 32 teams. It'd just take away too much of the fun factor knowing computer teams can no longer say no to me in trades (or trade amongst themselves). And I'd feel like I had to micromanage all their roster minutiae, which would take way too long. So I'm rolling with one-team control.
In the preseason in Year 1, I left CPU teams along and let them make their cuts (and saw how dumb it was and realized I can't let them do that anymore). I briefly tried correcting stupidity, by signing guys who shouldn't have been cut and trading them back to their original team. But then the teams would cut them the next time around, and I realized it was pointless so I stopped bothering.
So in year 2, I went team-by-team editing their fake generated undrafted rookies (not guys who were in the draft but went undrafted, I mean the garbage players who got randomly generated to pad rosters) to punters so they'd cut them instead of draft picks or real players. The problem is teams went into the year still keeping a handful of backup fake punters, because they had more of them than they needed to cut, so they didn't cut them all and replace them with legit players like I imagined they would. Also, IT. TOOK. FOR. EVER. Such a pain to make all those edit, every position, every team. So I decided I can't edit away ALL of the undrafted players anymore. It's just insane how long and boring it was.
So in year 3, I took a slightly different approach. I used a combo of editing away guys at about half the positions (edited away QB/RB/REC/DB, leaving OL/DL/LB alone for the most part).... and signing/trading useful free agents to help pad CPU rosters with more journeyman veteran types to compete for roster spots (usually trading 1 free agent for 3 of those fake undrafted guys, so I was killing 3 birds with 1 stone each time I made a trade). It got rid of a lot of undrafted guys, it bolstered a lot of CPU rosters by giving them better backup players, and it still left them with a little free will to make some roster decisions. So now sometimes they'd cut draft picks (more than Year 2 when they never cut them, and less than in Year 1 when they cut way too many).
In Year 4, I might do the same as I did in Year 3, but reverse the positions I edit (so edit the FB/OL/DL/LB and leave the QB/HB/WR/DB alone). Or, God forbid, maybe a patch will be out that fixes some of the stupidity so I don't have to do this anymore.
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