Gameplay Needs To Be More Fun

Genesis League Goals's gameplay is just too simple. You have three actions to select from; one is usually an OBVIOUS right choice. Just do the clicking and your chances of winning will be maximal considering your team's potential.

Not only is this highly bot-able (I could make a bot myself), but I doubt GLG has the resources to track any more sophisticated bots that don't move the mouse in perfect lines after pre-established constant DELAY_CONSTANT. But an even bigg'r problem is that gameplay as such is not very satisfying and skills are most definitely not going to solve that.

Strategic Choices

First, to introduce some strategies such as targeting a player to deplete his stamina or building up morale with lateral passes, we need to see the stats of the opponent's players and the full bench. The player will in all likelihood miss a replacement for one of his positions or it won't be as good.

With the configuration of 7 players but only 5 substitutes, it is impossible to have TWO of each ROLE. Many teams won't even fill the bench and will field stronger players to the maximum roster points a team is allowed.

Considering the above, a player can choose to purposefully play on a side where the irreplaceable players reside. Coaches like Tanner, Gail, or Jurinovic give you an advantage when losing, Tailwind and Sprightly improve your passing game and Millwall with Erikson boost your team on successful tackle...

All of these can be used to target the opponent's resources rather than trying to score in the first half.

Unique Rules

There are three kinds of players.

1. All-around high stats, particularly useful with Gail, Genepool, and Ivy who boost your energy dynamics (~5%)
2. Players who are experts on one thing that they do well and have reasonable split defensive stats, who are perfect for substitute plays with all other coaches and Duce especially (~5%)
3. Useless players (~90%)

My focus here is on the last group. You can't have a game design where nearly all assets have a minimum price and can't be effective in any given circumstance. It is better to have one low-level goalkeeper with high stats rather than to play a weak one that you can afford to progress somewhere with.

Can we change that? The best way I reckon is to introduce custom randomly applied rules similar to what was done in Splinterlands, f.e.:

• The weakest player on the field gains (+6/+6/+6) to defensive stats
• Reverse talents (shoot): every player's shooting ability is recalculated as [1 + (10 - CURRENT_SHOOT_VALUE)]
• All are Underdogs: after all coach abilities are applied, each players in the same position get an individual Underdog buff if they are on top (the first condition is to balance it against Duce, so he doesn't get a guaranteed win here)
• Strong winds: passing forward gets increased by +3 for team A (the opposite team gets this buff in 2nd half)
• Pro-active Goalkeepers: The goalkeeper who has lesser ATTRIBUTE_SUM will gain intercept equal to his block and can now intercept passes between forwards
• Universal Chaos Theory: For every round, 3 players out of the weakest 10 get 15 random ATTRIBUTE_POINTS divided randomly among all ATTRIBUTES.
• Orc Rocklobbers: Every player has one player other than Goalkeeper downed to 0 Health for the duration of the game. The effect applies again in the second half.
• The players that haven't made a play this half get a boost to (SPECIFIC_ATTRIBUTE)

There can easily be 50+ such rules that would require weaker players to utilize. Duce alone can't do that. And of course, coaches that make keeping the same team in both halves more viable, there should be something for them too, so the cards aren't devalued.

Coaches

In addition, I think some coaches should be revisited. I think that, for example, GKSkillz could apply a maximum bonus any player on the field has to the Goalkeeper Block...

Other Ideas

Of course, this is not solving the problem completely but it is the best I could think of. Do you have any ideas?