Fatigue

Managing (or turning off) Action's fatigue system

The Fatigue Problem

If you caught last week’s game, you’ll know already what the fatigue problem is.

The problem is that our players are fatigued. I had numerous plays last week in which neither Logan nor Rucker were in the lineup. And this is caused by Action! PC Football’s aggressive fatigue system.

The Curse of Success

Don’t think there’s a problem? Well, just take a look at our offensive player usage screen:

We’re on pace to overuse, well, everybody.

Greg Pruitt hasn’t featured into our offense yet, for reasons that somewhat mistify me. I’m going to have to take a closer look into the automated substitution system in the future to see what I can do to get him at least some gametime.

However, as you can see, the problem we have is that we’re running more offensive plays than the Browns ran up to this point in real life. After 5 games of this project, every single offensive player is on pace to exceed his real life contribution — and some by a wide amount.

Now, I don’t mind having a penalty for running with Pruitt or White too often, or for throwing the ball to Rucker every single down. I like systems that encourage variety.

However, in this case it’s absolutely clear that we’re seeing “overuse” simply because we are running more offensive plays than the Browns ran in real life. I find it absolutely bizarre that we would be penalized for having offensive success to the extent that our starters can suddenly no longer start.

After looking into this and reading advice on various message board posts, I finally decided to simply turn the fatigue system off.

Want to do the same? Read on.

Modifying the Fatigue System

First off, you need to know where to find the settings.

Action! PC Football is a great game, but the user interface is far from great. Instead of having a single “settings” window, there are at least three places in the game where you can adjust certain settings.

In this case, we want to go to “Rules.” This can be found by clicking on “Rules” on top of the screen you see when you first open the program:

You’ll come across a pop-up with several tabs along the top:

Don’t ask me why in the world “Usage,” “Injuries,” and “Fatigue Meter” are in the “Rules” menu. It makes no sense to me.

We want to adjust “Usage” and “Fatigue Meter.” Let’s look at “Usage” first:

Unfortunately, because the game is closed source, it is not readily apparent what these settings actually do. If you turn on either “Season Usage” or “Game Usage Penalties,” certain penalties will be assessed on players who are overused. However, it is not clear what the difference is between “mild,” “moderate,” or “major,” nor is it clear that you can adjust any of those penalties.

My recommendation is to simply turn them off.

Now, there is a problem with doing so. By doing so, players who were seldom used but had good results in their abbreviated gametime can easily be overused in your project.

However, I would rather face that problem than run into severe fatigue issues because a team is playing more efficiently than they play in real life. I’m baffled as to why this system apparently only takes into consideration the total number of successful runs, catches, and passes, rather than looking at a general breakdown of offensive play calling. In other words, I could see where a penalty would be assessed for an in-game coach who calls the same running play every down with the same running back. But that’s clearly not what’s happened in our case; if you don’t believe me, you can go back and watch the games.

Our next stop is the “Fatigue Meter” tab:

I’ve turned this off as well, as you can see here.

I have no idea whether this will solve the substitution issue or not. I may have to do some fiddling around in our next game to see if I can’t get things to work right.

I’d be interested to hear what everybody else thinks about this. Personally, I would prefer a game and season fatigue system based on actual fatigue ratings, and not based on “usage” alone. Otherwise, in-game head coaches who manage to run more plays in game than were run in real life will be arbitrarily punished for their success.