The age old formation-audibles-in-CPBs issue, anyone figured this out yet? Long post!

[Rieux]

I spent more time than I want to admit chasing the mythical perfect CPB - the scheme, like many others before me, is a spread-to-run offense with Air Raid passing concepts. In my case, I used Ohio St. as a base. After plenty of indecision, I finally got it exactly how I wanted it, with the formation audibles (right stick audibles) I wanted. The formation audibles were surprisingly cooperative and took minimal effort. The final result was a CPB I'm absolutely in love with, definitely the happiest I've ever been with a CPB by far, and I can't wait to start rebuilding a program with it in Dynasty.

Since I had saved and loaded that book dozens of times, taking formations in and out and back in, I wrote down all my final forms and plays as I went, because my plan was to delete the book and do it over in one fell swoop - I'd heard that the more you tinker with a CPB, going in and out of it and moving stuff around, the sloppier the game's code gets, and the higher your chances of glitches. Given that it's EA and custom playbooks, this sounded pretty plausible, and that's why my plan was to delete the "rough draft" CPB that worked so easily and re-create it fresh - after all, I had the plays written down in the order I wanted them, so I shouldn't run into any problems, right? (Can't believe I was that naive )

So long story short, I got it done in ten minutes. 90% of my forms turned out how I wanted with regard to formation audibles, or close enough. But the most problematic plays, the ones I want the most, are being EXTREMELY finicky this time, when they were so easy the first time around! This is gonna be a long post, so bear with me - I want to make sure I describe the problems with as much detail as I can, in the hopes that someone will recognize the issue(s) causing this. These are the plays I want as formation audibles that are giving me so much trouble:

1. Shotgun - Spread Flex: Flanker Dig (deep)

This is the Flanker Dig where X and H (WR3) run the weakside post/wheel switch combo, which is what I'm after - I don't care much about the primary, frontside dig routes. I want this as my Deep Pass formation audible for that weakside switch route combo; I have Four Verts in all my other spread sets as one of my two main deep pass concepts in the scheme, and my second is this switch combo.

So of course I don't have 4V in Spread Flex, and Flanker Dig is in the second row, under my other formation audibles in the top row (Y Stick, HB Dive, PA Deep Outs). The troublesome plays that keep getting picked over Flanker Dig are Z Shallow and Inside Cross (more or less Spread Flex's H Shallow), so I'd hate to omit these plays since they're both Raid staples. In my "rough draft" CPB, I got Flanker Dig working fine - IIRC Z Shallow was getting in the way and I just had to take it out, save the book, and re-add it, and Flanker Dig got put into the Deep Pass slot in the meantime. Now, though, it's like the game wants every pass INSTEAD of Flanker Dig in the Deep slot.

Right now I stripped the form bare, down to the four quick audible plays - the three others and Flanker Dig - and it did get put into the deep pass slot, so I'm going to try carefully to re-add the rest of my plays and hope Flanker Dig doesn't get knocked out, but I'm not optimistic...

2. Shotgun - Trips HB Wk: Stick Bubble (quick) and Verticals (deep)

I love the Stick Bubble play, and want it to be my Quick Pass for this formation, because the regular Stick plays in this game's trips formations all have the option route tagged onto the hitch, which, of course, the receiver runs the wrong route the vast majority of the time, even when my receiver is 90+ AWR (I actually wonder if they programmed the zone/man read backwards...) It's unfortunate that the game doesn't really consider Stick Bubble to be a quick pass - regular Stick and of course Slants and Curls all get picked before it, as do any screen passes, so I dumped all of them. In my "rough draft" that worked instantly. Get this though...

This formation actually has two versions of all-vert: Four Verticals and just plain Verticals. I prefer the plain Verticals in this form because the inside slot receiver runs a flatter route, almost like a very deep cross, and the Z receiver has an outside release. So I want Verticals as my deep pass audible. Again, in the rough draft, no issues - I easily got Stick Bubble in my quick pass slot and Verticals in my deep pass slot. But now, the game puts Verticals in my quick pass slot, and leaves the deep pass slot empty! The hell?! I tried taking Verticals out, hoping to just be able to add it back in, but that stuck Air Raid Under in one of the slots - I don't remember which - with the other still empty.

(Ironically, Air Raid Under is another play I love and plan to run a ton, and in previous CPBs I've desperately tried to force it into a quick audible slot somehow, NEVER with any success - so of course THIS time, when I want Stick Bubble and Verticals as my quick audibles instead, Air Raid Under finally decides it wants to be the star of the show for once!)

Then I put Verticals back in, and also put in HB Slip Screen, knowing it would grab the quick pass slot and hopefully force Verticals into the deep pass slot - I went into practice mode and eureka, QP was the screen and deep was Verticals. Of course I never wanted to keep Slip Screen, my plan was to delete it and hope Verticals stayed in its new deep pass slot and Stick Bubble would inherit the quick pass slot, but nope, back to square one: Verticals is my *quick* pass and the *deep* slot is empty

Next plan is... I dunno. Might try it with Four Verticals instead of Verticals.

3. Pistol - Trips: Stick (quick)

Good lord, kill me now. In every other formation I've dealt with, if you have a Slant or a Stick play, they immediately grab up the quick pass slot no matter what you do - here's the thing though, what I said about Trips formations having the dumb option route that's always wrong, THIS is one of the Stick plays in a Trips form that DOESN'T have the option route attached. Hallelujah! But does the game easily assign it to the quick pass slot? Nope, not with this formation!

Again, I got it to work easily the first time around by just making sure I had no slants or screens. This time though... TE In grabs the quick pass slot! Wha?! (TE runs a Dig on top of the inside slot receiver's shallow cross, so it's basically an extension of the Shallow series, and thus another one I'd really prefer to keep). I delete it, hoping the QP slot will go to Stick and I can just re-add TE In... now SMASH is in the quick pass slot!

So I'm lost - I've made probably a dozen CPBs before, and of course getting the formation audibles how you want them is a pain every time, but everything I THOUGHT I knew about how to do it has gone out the window - I don't know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt!

I thought maybe it would be worth asking y'all, in case y'all had any solutions or tips to try. Heck, maybe this problem has finally been solved over the years, to some degree, and since most of the threads I read on the subject are several years old, I figured I'd make the topic.

I'm at a loss because it worked so easily the first time, and I'm using the Ohio St. book as a base, just like before. At first I thought it's because I was just modifying the plays in some of the forms the first time, instead of adding the forms from scratch like I did this time to get them in the order I wanted, but that's not the reason because I would've had to add Pistol Trips and SG Trips HB Wk from scratch either way - of these three formations giving me trouble, only SG Spread Flex is in Ohio St.'s book by default.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! In the meantime I reckon I'll keep dicking around with the book and seeing what happens.

[Rieux]

Quick update for the sake of future googlers with the same problem - no luck.

Stripping down SG Spread Flex to the 4 plays I wanted put them in the appropriate slots, but when I added the rest of my plays back, Flanker Dig was overwritten in the deep pass slot by Y Corner. I have RNS Switch Dig in the Pistol Spread form, which is probably a better play anyway, so I figured I'd just use a quick/button audible for that and cut my losses. I still didn't want 4v as my deep pass for SG Spread Flex, for the sake of variety, and thought Deep Attack might make a good option. I stripped the form down again to Y Stick, HB Dive, PA Deep Outs, and Deep Attack - and the quick pass slot was empty with Y Stick being in the deep pass slot. No mas, por favor! I give up.

I stripped SG Trips HB Wk down to the four plays I wanted, with Four Verticals replacing Verticals, thinking surely the game would put Four Verticals in the deep pass slot - I've never seen the game do otherwise. Still no Stick Bubble - Four Verticals, like Verticals before, was the quick pass and the deep pass slot was empty.

Paring down Pistol Trips to the four I wanted got them in the right formation audible slots, then adding back the plays I wanted again put TE In in the quick pass slot over Stick. I can only speculate that I've run into some obscure minor glitch - of course formation audibles are a chore in every CPB, but I've never seen them this unruly, especially after they behaved themselves so well in my rough draft of the book (which, good lord, I wish I'd kept! Ah well, lesson learned).

I can't really think of anything else to try, if anyone has any suggestions I'd be eternally grateful. If I do somehow manage to fix it, I'll update again just to get the fix on record.

[xToXiCxSAVAGEx]

This won't help you but it'll help me because I didn't know you could choose which play gets called for your quick pass audible or deep pass... How do you do that? lol

[Rieux]

Quote: Originally Posted by xToXiCxSAVAGEx

This won't help you but it'll help me because I didn't know you could choose which play gets called for your quick pass audible or deep pass... How do you do that? lol

Happy to help! But that's the thing, you can't directly pick them. It automatically fills every formation's slots from the plays in that formation. No one has really figured out how the game decides them exactly, but it seems to follow certain rules that apply 95% of the time (it's the 5% moments that make you wanna pull your hair out!). Rather than type those rules up I'll copy and paste from the Shootbone PDF:

Quote:

Formation Audibles also haven’t changed in how you get what you want to be you audible. In reality it is at the same time easy, hard, time consuming, and frustrating. Anyway here are the rules and example plays that typically lock in formation audibles. Run Audible – this is the easiest, if you have 1 run in the formation it will go there regardless. If you have more it will pick the run closest to a primary inside run. If you have a choice between HB Dive, HB Power, and HB Draw, the game will usually choose the HB Dive, unless it’s a short yardage, or Strong overload formation in which it will typically choose the HB Power. Short Pass – is another pretty easy one, in that there are really only a couple choices. What EA determines as a Slant play will always get top bill, then a Screen pass. Although unlike last year where a HB Screen got higher bidding than say a Bubble, this year it’s a bit more willy-nilly. Basically if you don’t have a Slant or Stick play, but have a screen in the set you get a screen. Deep Pass – If you have a 4 verticals play you needn’t worry it’s going to always go there. If you don’t want that play, then you pretty much have to remove it to get what you want. Even then that play prolly should be your only deep pass, or it can be a crap shoot fast. PA Pass – Any PA pass will go in first then, any Option based pass, and lastly if you don’t have a screen in the Short a non-PA based screen will go there. Anomalies: wouldn’t be EA without some strangeness. If you have a slant play and a stick play it typically will pick stick over slant. If you have too many deep passes but not 4 Verticals I have seen it put slant or stick there if you have the other in Short. In Triple Option Sets I have seen it load up with 3 PA/Triple Option plays.

So there ya have it. Other things he doesn't mention - it will often go by how the plays are ordered in your playbook, i.e. if the formation doesn't have Four Verticals, which will get insta-defaulted to the deep pass slot 99% of the time, it will just pick the first play in your CPB that the game considers a deep pass. The problem is, what the game considers a "quick pass" or a "deep pass" is pretty inconsistent and, as in my experience trying to get this CPB right, can seem almost random (i.e. Z *Shallow* as my deep pass in Spread Flex, lol).

Related to that, it seems to depend on the "type" of formation too. A jumbo running set, like he mentioned, might use a Power run. But in most of the formations that I use (Pistol and Gun) it's almost always the HB Dive in Pistol and offset RB formations, and HB Sweep or Off Tackle in regular SG formations. (Or Inside Zone if you have it in that formation and not Sweep or Off Tackle... even if you have one of those then sometimes if Inside Zone is listed first, the game will decide it's good enough to go in the run slot. It's all pretty much chaos lol).

How you can use this - it can be handy to have one formation you can audible into from your quick/button audibles, say without any slant or stick plays but just a screen (one of the ones that work, i.e., HB Slip/WR Mid/Bubble) so you know you can audible into that formation and will have a screen pass that you can formation audible/right stick audible into. Say if it's an obvious blitz or what have you.

It would be nice to have an option to customize each formation's right stick audibles directly, basically giving you 25 plays to audible into at any time - the 5 you have assigned to buttons, all from five different formations, plus the 20 from each of those five formations' four right stick audibles (quick/deep/run/PA). But as you can tell from my OP it's a nightmare to get them to cooperate entirely - it's no problem MOST of the time with plays like slants/stick/screens or four verts or any inside run or PA pass, since you know the game will pick those for your formation audibles and those are all good plays anyway, but if you want something specific like me - Flanker Dig in SG Spread Flex as a deep pass, or hell even just plain ol Stick in Pistol Trips which is an example of the 5% of the time the rules don't seem to matter - it's just a long and tedious process of trial and error, shuffling plays around and saving the book and testing the audibles in Practice mode, then going back into the CPB editor, etc.

The most SEMI-reliable method that people have found so far, when a book is giving you problems, is to remove every play from a formation but the four you want - the quick pass, the deep pass, the run, and the PA pass. This will almost always get them into the appropriate slots, and SOMETIMES you can even add other plays of those types back in - i.e., if you want Y Stick, you can safely put HB Slip Screen back in because Stick is higher priority as a quick pass. But if you want something besides four vert as your deep pass, you usually can't put four vert back in or have it in the formation at all. So if you want NEAR complete control, for certain formations, you'll be very limited in how many plays you can put in - and even then, if a game is in a bad mood or just doesn't like a play, it can do weird things like put Four Verticals in the QUICK pass slot and leave the deep pass slot empty, rather than giving you the quick pass and deep pass you want.

For all the years since EA introduced CPBs into the series, no one has figured out any more than that AFAIK. It's just time-consuming trial and error and hoping the game cooperates. Hope that all makes sense and is some help!

[OBinKC]

Let me preface this by saying that custom playbooks have always frustrated me to the point of going back to the stock playbooks. Once I get every play I want in one playbook, the game becomes almost too easy. So I prefer sifting through the 130-some-odd stock playbooks and finding the best fit for me, lol!

I was going to mention the details in the shootbone play guide, so I’m glad to see you mentioned it. The thing about the playbooks I found was that if there’s a fly route in any of the plays in Shotgun Spread Flex, those plays will take precedence over Flanker Dig in the quick audibles.

That was indeed a lot to read so I started to just skim through the last part of your posts. But what the shootbone author also mentions is that each base playbook you build from has its own grid, meaning it will list the sets in their own unique order. So this makes “knowing” how to make the perfect custom playbook even more difficult and nearly impossible. So there’s that to deal with too, lol!