[nilodor]

Originally Posted by Passacaglia

That seems like a pretty good way to handle it. I don't think it's working right, though. I think I said before that four teams have everyone hit FA at the end of the year. I don't remember them all, but Houston was one, and if you take your 1976_players file and filter on team 5, you'll see that the salaryears field is 1 for all of them. The most notable single exception I see is Joe Theismann, who hits FA at the end of the year. The one time I've simmed to 1985, it looks like they franchised him, and the next year he signed with Minnesota. I'm not sure if that all is a huge deal, since you have to expect players to be on different teams from reality, but having the four teams with no players under contract seems like it will put them in trouble. I think some easy solutions are to either a) add a year to everyone's contract, or b) put a 2-year minimum on every contract. I've created a file where I added a year to everyone's contract, and it seems like that's working well.

Hmm, it seems to be the teams that changed their team number in the league structure file. I have a master database where each player has one line. There are a column for each season they played, with their team numbers in them. Anyways, I'll need to fix that.

Originally Posted by Passacaglia

I think that makes sense, too. I changed salaries in my file, but really all I did was make it so the salary cap was 9.7M instead of 100M, and I scaled everyone's first year salary down so the Steelers were right at the new cap, so it's effectively the same as yours, in terms of what percent of the cap each player is taking up. Then I increased the salary aspect of future years of each contract by 10% but kept bonus the same. There's still an issue that the Giants are only spending like 50% of the cap, compared to 100% for the Steelers, but that's not far removed from what the game is doing on its own. I've finished FA in 1978 and just about to start the season, and there were plenty of good FAs available, but 6 teams still have used less than 50% of the cap, and almost everyone is under 80% of the cap. The Steelers are over, and have lost 3rd round picks due to violations in 1978 and 1979, just signed 20 players at the league minimum to fill their roster the day before training camp, and are STILL over, and the Rams are also over it, too, after losing a 3rd pick for 1979 and signing 15 players at the league minimum, so the cap is affecting some teams at least. I think it's working fine -- the Steelers have a great team, and are having to deal with the trouble of keeping it together, and the Giants don't, but have a lot of room to play with and build it up, and it will all even out over time.

I might scale things a bit differently. I think it's one of the 90's 49ers teams that had the most talent ever. Does the salary cap work well using realistic numbers for the year? It didn't in FOF8 because the increases were by dollar amount so the first increase basically doubled the salary cap, if FOF9 by percentage?