Making a Salary Cap League work?

[Gai1997]

So I decided to test out a salary cap league with $125 million as the cap. So I took over a team and signed 6 players to $20 million deals, putting the payroll at $120 million. Then when I had to fill up my roster with $500k players to fill it up from 7/25 to 25/25, it put me over the salary cap at about $128 million or so. This isn't always an issue, but there's always teams that are $3-4 million over the cap due to this.

How do I stop this from happening? I get that they need to fill up their rosters to 25 players, but I want the team to have to trade or release someone with a high contract instead of keeping him and going over the cap. I also want that team to be COMPLETELY unable to add anyone that ups the payroll. I don't want the CPU allowing them to go over just because roster spots need to be filled.

Also, does anyone have good financials for a salary cap league? Please share yours because I'm stumped.

Thanks guys!

[beezer2434]

I believe once you go over the cap you cant sign anyone else until you are under the cap? I did a fictional league with a salary cap and so far it works great just a team or 2 that go over by a couple million

[Fyrestorm3]

Originally Posted by beezer2434

I believe once you go over the cap you cant sign anyone else until you are under the cap? I did a fictional league with a salary cap and so far it works great just a team or 2 that go over by a couple million

Yeah, that's always been my experience, too.

However, I've never encountered the AI having to fill its roster, either, and I can see it going over the cap because of it. The obvious solution here is just to raise the cap or lower the average salaries, because as of right now, the AI isn't advanced enough to recognize the need to switch around their financials. It's easy to a human mind, but it'd likely be highly complicated to program.

[Gai1997]

Originally Posted by Fyrestorm3

Yeah, that's always been my experience, too.

However, I've never encountered the AI having to fill its roster, either, and I can see it going over the cap because of it. The obvious solution here is just to raise the cap or lower the average salaries, because as of right now, the AI isn't advanced enough to recognize the need to switch around their financials. It's easy to a human mind, but it'd likely be highly complicated to program.

So make the minimum salary like $1,000 to avoid this? Do you think it will cause an issue later on due to them wanting more money in free agency or something like that? Because if I do make the minimum salary $1,000, my problem will be fixed, but I don't want it to cause other problems.

[Fyrestorm3]

Originally Posted by Gai1997

So make the minimum salary like $1,000 to avoid this? Do you think it will cause an issue later on due to them wanting more money in free agency or something like that? Because if I do make the minimum salary $1,000, my problem will be fixed, but I don't want it to cause other problems.

I suppose that would work, but I wouldn't necessarily only lower the league minimum. Maybe bump a million off of every average salary.

Salary cap leagues always take a lot of trial and error, but you should eventually be able to find a setup that works for you. For reference, here's a salary cap league that I ran back in OOTP12 and 13:



It had its quirks, but it ran. Note the absurd revenues from the media contract/merchandising - that's up to personal preference; it just ensured that all teams had plenty of money on hand. I didn't want any team going into the red or not being able to spend to the cap.

[Le Grande Orange]

I think the easier way is to regard the salary cap as a soft one (like the NBA's) rather than a hard one (as in the NFL and NHL).

[TGH-Adfabre]

Originally Posted by Gai1997

So make the minimum salary like $1,000 to avoid this? Do you think it will cause an issue later on due to them wanting more money in free agency or something like that? Because if I do make the minimum salary $1,000, my problem will be fixed, but I don't want it to cause other problems.

Globally control income so that free money in the league does not drive up player demands.

1) Equal National Contracts
2) No or $1 local media contracts, then they do not grow as much. They will grow
3) Decide how the teams that are successful will be financially rewarded. Manually by you? Attendance income and merchandising (read winning)?
4) You can spread the money around a little more with gate % shared.
5) Then you can chop down player demands.
If you only chop player demands the game has a hard time with it. It has a supply and demand element built in and if the teams are making a ton of money the players will want their cut.
6) You can manually set the ticket prices and uncheck the option that teams can change ticket prices.

Just a few ideas.
We have a hard cap (out of game) online league that we do not move the cap. It has been going since 2007 with an $80 mil cap. We adjust finances globally to keep the money stable.

Good luck,
Tom LP
5)

[Fyrestorm3]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

If you only chop player demands the game has a hard time with it. It has a supply and demand element built in and if the teams are making a ton of money the players will want their cut.

This absolutely could have changed from OOTP13 until now, but when I ran my salary cap league, I never noticed that. In the screenshot above, you can see that teams were making an average profit of over $100,000,000. Even with that absurd number, I never noticed player demands going up at all - the game ran for 35 years, and the highest contract I ever saw was almost $8M, and that was for one guy. Most top contracts hovered between $5M and $6M, which was what I expected.

Purely anecdotal, and it was a couple years ago, but still.