[Killebrew]

Okay, more test sims in a new league & I think I found out what happened in my first couple of examples. This was a historical league in 1995 with the "import financials" unchecked, a salary cap of 70 mil, 25 mil in equal media contracts, and everything else at default level. There are some issues with player releases, and it is a financial loophole.

- FWIW, the max cap on an extension is $20,999,999 for the first year of the extension. Following years can be up to 10 million/year more via back-loading.
- If a team that is broke (and not allowed to offer any more extensions) releases a player they will then have money for contract extensions. If they use that money up (EG "$40 mil left for contract ext.") in new extensions, then wait a few days, they can then have that same amount of new contract extension money again (some sort of reset - not sure if it is related to the player accepting the extension offer after a few days). This cycle does not appear to have a limit (the $550 mil payroll example in a previous post).
- As could be imagined from the previous point, you can go well over the following seasons salary cap via contract extensions, the only real limit is that the games finances "turns over" once you get figures that are too large (this seems reasonable - there is no reason to expect that teams would be having payrolls this big... except maybe when testing the finance logic:-)).
- When you release $142 mil in 'contract value', the game says it will add only $127 mil to your player expenses - this figure is always about that % less than the listed contract value, not sure why (there might be a reasonable explanation). That number is correctly added to the player expense's and the projected budget room as some have mentioned in this thread.
- Team cash resets at the beginning of the season (January 1st) to a negative max of -$10 million.

That last point is the basis for my concern in earlier posts - the financial loophole when releasing players. The game does not make the owner accountable for his financial actions when releasing players.

Regarding the earlier mentioned salary cap concerns, I think there is a bug here, but probably not with the salary cap logic - the bug appears to be in the "money left for contract extensions" calculations that reset. I'll continue these tests before posting that issue in the tech forum. The issue with owners not being held accountable for player releases is a bigger design issue that wouldn't be a patch fix. It's probably been the same formula for the last 5 or more versions of OOTP, but IMO it would be worth looking at this during the development of future versions of OOTP.