Action PC Football Strategy Basics

Where to start conceptually

Action PC Football Strategy Basics

The more I play Action PC Football, the more I realize strategy is truly the name of the game.

Action PC Football can be deceiving. It’s easy to get caught up in real life statistics, or to spend all of your time looking at percentages.

What you should do instead is treat the game as if you were a real football coach.

Of course, that’s much easier said than done. For one thing, the game doesn’t give you much help. There’s no offensive or defensive coordinator to give you a clue, nor is there any mechanism to help you set a game plan, let alone call plays in advance Bill Walsh style.

Dave Koch created a free strategy guide back in 2011. It helps — kind of, that is. If you just look at the table of contents, you’ll see right away what the problem is:

The problem is that this isn’t a guide to strategy. Rather, this is a guide to the mechanics of the game.

In other words, this guide provides you with helpful information such as the types of plays the game refers to:

Now, this is somewhat helpful. It’s a lot more helpful than just looking at percentages and calling whatever looks best, at least. There are certain times where you’ll want to call a “short out” pattern, for example, and other times when you’d rather throw a quick pass. There are also certain players who perform better in one scenario or the other based on their ratings.

And that’s the real key — the ratings. Not the stats, but the ratings.

You don’t want to be too predictable, of course. But a good rule of thumb is that you’ll want to create mismatches in certain parts of the offensive line when you run, you’ll want to exploit mismatches on your receivers when you pass, and you’ll want to cover up those mismatches when you play defense.

In the coming days and weeks, I’m going to dive deeper into the real world of Action PC Football strategy. We’ll also do some research into actual football strategy and see if we can’t bridge the gap between the two worlds.

In other words — let’s create a strategy guide together, instead of relying on what is basically a misnamed manual.