19th century financials

[Biggio509]

I am alpha testing some changes I made to the financials files. Lessons learned so far.
1. The defualt financial files balance things out for a 162 game season. When you set the games to 30-98 this puts things way out of whack.
2. Due to loss in short season the game pumps in media contracts above what is in the file well beyond what it needs and then increases scouting and PD costs.
3. The game wants the average team to not lose money but what target it sets is unknown. Return on Total Cost(ROTC) and Operating Margins are very high when it does this. Profit is > payroll and sometimes >payroll + other expenses.
4. The game has a linear progression in ticket prices and attendance built in. There is a simple growth rate of both these variables.
5. The avg payroll does not keep up with the growth rate. So even when the game stops bumping in media contracts profits are extremely high from 1892 to 1900 when the numbers no longer result in losses and the default financials are used. This leads to money no longer being an object budgets are enough to pay for double or triple your payroll. Free agency might mitigate this since more players would be chased by teams with more dollars.

What I am trying to do.
1. Target a OM of around 10% or a ROTC of around 11%(equivalent to an OM of .1)
2. Adjusted payrolls. The method isn't perfectly accurate. What I did was take the highest paid player each year and create a ratio with super star pay. That ratio was applied to all other salaries. So if the highest paid player got 2.5 X superstar all levels were multiplied by 2.5. By around 1940 this starts to a little less than the linearly growing payroll numbers in the file so I left it alone after that.Not necessary per se.
3. For most of the 19th century I peg ticket prices at $.5
4. 1890's are different high games and lower payroll (player wage caps along with huge payments from buying out teams to make the monopoly lowered profits and salaries in the era). Due to large number of games and lower payroll I pegged attendance at 1000 min. and adjusted ticket price.
5. Other than 1890's I adjusted attendance so the projections came out to be 10 to 15% ROTC. Adjusting revenue here so using a ROTC is easier.

I will post results.

[Biggio509]

1871
already trouble on import. I used the scouting budget set from the default file and set PD to 0.
Should be 4800 att. and .5 tickets no media

Import 5280 att. .5 tickets media > 0.
Prior 26200 average payroll is a little off at 26000
scouting and PD budgets have gone up to 29,000 above payroll
interestingly enough average profit is set 0 though.


Lesson game will also adjust attendance. Question why is average profit 0 under these conditions when in the past it has gone up to a very high OM? I have no idea. The game is certainly not targeting a margin when imports financials.

This can be fixed by lowering scouting or PD to get profit to 5800 which is 10% of revenue. Lesson projections may assume average team set scouting slightly higher than what is listed or there are rounding errors..Really wierd with scouting at 24000 avg. non-player expenses are 2600 if it goes up 24200 avg. expense project at 27000 (?).

Suggestion to Devs include a scouting budget and/or PD column in the financial file so game will import scouting. It seems to set non-player expense to some percentage of revenue since profit is clearly not the target.

I also noticed slight changes to payroll numbers.
Super star file 2800 import 2820 2732 import 2740, This might be rounding errors. I never cleaned up the decimal results from the coefficient so the game might be rounding the nearest 10's. Could be a file error maybe due to decimals in the financials.txt excel added " before and after the numbers I manipulated. Doesn't crash the file but it could be part of the problem.