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JeffR · 10-07-2017, 09:32 AM

The AI is deliberately conservative about using cap space. If most of a league is aggressively spending to the cap, the lack of free cap space around the league limits the ability of teams to dump salary, they tend to get in progressively more and more financial trouble, and the cap space shrinks even more. Eventually, it snowballs into a situation where teams are making extreme roster moves like buyouts and sending good players to the minors to stay under the cap. That was a serious problem in early versions of FHM, and it took a lot of time to work out exactly what was going on. Once we had teams maintain a little more distance from the cap, the problem disappeared. Keeping the teams spending slightly less is a reasonable price to pay to avoid watching them send players earning $3 million to the minors to save a million in cap hit.

Additionally, some teams - as they do in real life - have an internal cap which limits what they spend. Arizona and Carolina were $14-15 million below the cap on opening night. Now that we know the starting cap situations of the teams, I'm going to go through the team budgets and adjust them as necessary, but there will probably be somewhere between 5 and 10 teams whose ownership won't spend the full $75 million under any circumstances.

10-07-2017, 09:32 AM	#2
JeffR FHM Producer Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Kelowna, BC Posts: 17,425	The AI is deliberately conservative about using cap space. If most of a league is aggressively spending to the cap, the lack of free cap space around the league limits the ability of teams to dump salary, they tend to get in progressively more and more financial trouble, and the cap space shrinks even more. Eventually, it snowballs into a situation where teams are making extreme roster moves like buyouts and sending good players to the minors to stay under the cap. That was a serious problem in early versions of FHM, and it took a lot of time to work out exactly what was going on. Once we had teams maintain a little more distance from the cap, the problem disappeared. Keeping the teams spending slightly less is a reasonable price to pay to avoid watching them send players earning $3 million to the minors to save a million in cap hit. Additionally, some teams - as they do in real life - have an internal cap which limits what they spend. Arizona and Carolina were $14-15 million below the cap on opening night. Now that we know the starting cap situations of the teams, I'm going to go through the team budgets and adjust them as necessary, but there will probably be somewhere between 5 and 10 teams whose ownership won't spend the full $75 million under any circumstances.