BuzzerBeater Forums

The coach will always pick between starters/backups/reserves except on special occurances like chess-mate subs as you named it.
In game #2, he had no choice but to play the starters.
In game #1, because you didn't dress any player in the line-up, he went on to choose from the selected players.

I believe it worked as intended. I hope it helps :)

Neither tactical option completely excludes the other, which is to say that your selection on coaching tactics determines the relative weight of the lineup chart and the AI selection. Therefore, since the weight difference between "starter" and "not entered into the lineup" is pretty significant, it was enough for the said behavior.

On the other hand, when you leave everyone off the lineup chart, they have equal weight, so the AI will rotate them entirely on his own weights.

It's certainly less than 100% intuitive, I imagine, but this behavior seems to be necessary so that the AI can sub correctly in games.

Well, then I suppose perhaps I disagree with the implementation more than consider it "wrong". If it's "Let Coach Decide" then I don't think I should be influencing his decision so strongly. At the very least, this should be explained in the game manual -- the other options seem to act in a more straightforward manner.

My concern is that in game #1 the AI seemed to do as good or better of a job than I usually do in setting my lineup. I interpret this as it being privy to more information than me (sublevels of skills, the actual effects of stamina, the particular usefulness of certain skills at certain positions, possibly even the opponent's skills...). The results in that game were quite good -- I achieved very high team ratings (for what those are worth) and beat a solid team. The results in game #2 were pathetic for obvious reasons and I will make sure never to do that again until/unless the system is changed to something more useful.

I think it would be a good thing if you could set a starting lineup and have intelligent substitutions. In the all-blank-lineup game #1, I think 4 or 5 different players logged minutes at SF for me. I can't do that with any of the substitution patterns besides Let Coach Decide, but I also might want to prioritize certain players for gameshape/training/matchup purposes by setting them as starters. That seems reasonable to me. It's the same as this "weighting" system you propose but less radical/imbalanced.

I guess this is somewhere between a bug and a suggestion depending on perspective.