Ashes Cricket General Discussion

This is really interesting discussion and I have about 10-15 games of stats down in Ashes cricket, purely bowling at the AI. I've had to tweak every team to my liking, but the PC teams were far more accurate than the vanilla ones out of the box. I didn't deliberately under skill anyone, so Kohli would be 85 and Mitch Marsh say 60 batting.

So they went and got a barmy army cheer, a Nice Gary, and yet Cook was down as a Brute player?

I had Dawlat Zadran hit 95 on a road against the West Indies, in what was otherwise a very realistic test. So as usual I don't think we can make complete bunnies in AC. He had very poor skills all around.

Do mentalities still sort of work? Even with the supposedly inferior new patches? I can see them to a degree, I think! (I am completely paranoid about this every time I play).

By the third iteration we should be able to possibly differentiate between playing spin and pace, and tests and ODI. But this is all wishful thinking when we have absolutely nothing as usual from Big Ant that is of interest to how the mechanics work. I guess they feel they have something to protect code-wise. I think some of the over-skilling is apparent in the slog overs of ODIs where the ball can fly everywhere without batsmen even looking like getting out. I think there should be greater risk when the AI goes aerial.

I myself am having reasonable results on Ashes Cricket, but every time I check this forum I get paranoid. I will attach my stats output for people to look at. Obviously I've skilled them as I think suits, but I work for Cricinfo and have watched cricket since I was 6 (25 years), so I like to think I have reasonable eye for what a player might do. So for all these attached stats I was bowling on Veteran, a mixture of patch 1.03 and 1.06, Hard Bowling, random pitches.
I thought I was a nerd. :p

Honestly though, keeping those sort of records is almost the most sensible thing to do in finding out what works. Like if you reduced Steve Smith to 1 skill point what would be the difference between that and the default over a few matches.

I think mentalities do work, although not necessarily well. I played 1 1/2 ODIs bowling at Australia 1993 side that I'd experimented with. Due to the era a lot of their mentalities are conservative/precise/balanced. Hayden is aggressive and he batted the best on both occasions. The conservative/precise played bad shots to get out. I don't know how accurate it is, it might just be speculation or something I picked up from one of @francobaldo1 hack threads, that batsmen play according to scoring at a certain rate? So it would kind of make sense that conservative batsmen would struggle and end up playing stupid shots. Of course, if that is the case, it would be better if they were more adaptable to the match.

Threw together this clip from a session of bowling having reduced each batting skill of the players by ten points. There's still a bit of a mixture of good and bad but in comparison with the 167 overs I bowled the other day there was a lot more going on. But that was a second innings and I always find in second innings the batting is stronger. I don't know if there's a skill that can be reduced to stop keepers moving so rapidly without affecting them in other ways.

 
Generally I don't have a problem with getting more or less edges in a given game - that is a huge part of cricket after all, sometimes it' in your favour, some times it's not.

For me the issue is general AI approach and general types of dismissal.

Even on dead tracks, wickets are still likely to fall from edge/bowled/lbw where batsmen misjudge or the bowler produces a magic ball.

@BigAntStudios have made 3 cricket games over 4 years. It's absurd that we are still having to tell them - not all wickets are equal, mindless slogging in tests has a negative impact on enjoyment.

And as I have stated earlier they can just change the default always active physics for different pitches and grounds.
 
I'm going to take the punt and go to default PS4, unpatched, so obviously I won't be able to use the Academy and there will be no custom logos.

If there is any sniff of gameplay being affected by these logos and patches, then I don't want to be a part of it. Apart from the beta holy grail of cricket games only a handful of us got invited to play, is vanilla out of the box PS4 largely considered to be the best build?
 
My last 3 bowling innings have had everything!

For me batting is too easy and my main issue on default difficulties.

I'd say my only gripe with bowling is the random slogs every now and then.

I can only put the Randomness down to skills and user input when bowling.

Bit of U turn from me, but you cant have 3 great innings on the bounce and dislike it.

Pitches for me still need work.

Batting styles definitely change how the AI play.

Skills work to an extent, lowered Bancroft defence to 10 he nicked off playing a forward defence.

Lowered Warners drive stats and he drove and missed 3 in an over.

There are SOO many variables
 
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Batting styles definitely change how the AI play.

Skills work to an extent, lowered Bancroft defence to 10 he nicked off playing a forward defence.

Lowered Warners drive stats and he drove and missed 3 in an over.


There are SOO many variables

Thanks for those tips WealeyH...i generate bowling a lot in test matches and have been looking for AI tweaks
some sides score way to many runs while other sides crash in the 1st innings
 
My last 3 bowling innings have had everything!

For me batting is too easy and my main issue on default difficulties.

I'd say my only gripe with bowling is the random slogs every now and then.

I can only put the Randomness down to skills and user input when bowling.

Bit of U turn from me, but you cant have 3 great innings on the bounce and dislike it.

Pitches for me still need work.

Batting styles definitely change how the AI play.

Skills work to an extent, lowered Bancroft defence to 10 he nicked off playing a forward defence.

Lowered Warners drive stats and he drove and missed 3 in an over.

There are SOO many variables


So what have we learned?
 
Have a play with skills etc and taylor it to how you see fit.

Too highly skilled, confidence goes up to quick.
I lowered both openers defence and drives to 10-20

12 overs in and 12 or so play and misses later they were 41/0 but still on orange confidence.

No random slogs.

I don't like batting 3 or 4 seems to have some ugly ways
 
I lowered both openers defence and drives to 10-20

12 overs in and 12 or so play and misses later they were 41/0 but still on orange confidence.

No random slogs.

I don't like batting 3 or 4 seems to have some ugly ways

And mentalities? I wasn't seeing much difference which is why I went back to default. I seem to remember it working well out of the box.

I've just watched Quinton de Kock IRL smash three fours in a row with his team on the ropes somewhat at Newlands. It needs to be prevalant in the game. A lot of other players wouldnt have chosen that approach
 

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