Can anyone help me with setting up my fictional league?

[scubasteve]

Not new to the game, but I've always played either a Modern or Historical game, but always with real player & teams. Now, though, I'm wanting to try my own ideal fictional league

Okay, so here's the kind of league I'm trying to set up:
1) Fictional players & coaches

2) Real MLB teams (fictional minor league teams is fine but I want the Reds, Yankees, Dodgers, Twins, etc as team names with the logos & uniforms and such)

3) Minor league setup of just 1 AAA, 1 AA, 1 AA & 1 R team for each MLB squad (may need to set injuries below default to account for the smaller farm systems but I'm fine with that if I need to)

4) Start the league sometime in the 90s so when I sim to build up history, I can take over starting in 2015

5) Have strategy & stats based on circa 1993 MLB (give or take a couple years) that don't evolve or get changed each year (I know where these checkboxes are)

6) Have finances where the top players in the league would be making in the $12-15M range and the league min is somewhere in the $200-400K range and like #5 above, where the finances don't get changed/imported each new year (again, I know where these checkboxes are)

7) Have it so there's not a huge disparity in the team budgets. Ideally, I'd like to see the top team budgets around $100M and then the lowest team budget to be no lower than half of the top team (so the low team would be at least $50M)


Okay, so setting up goals 1-5 is easy and can be done a number of different ways (make a fictional league and rename the teams & import the strategies & such or make a historical game with the real teams already set up and then import the strategies & such)

Step 6 isn't hard, but whatever I set the top tier player salary to be the highest paid guys are always making 25-50% more (so I need to set the superstars to make $10M if I want them getting $12-15M a year). I am curious if anyone has any suggestions on how I should be staggering the salaries for the middle tiers, everything between league min & superstar level

Step 7 I can't figure out how to do at all. I've tried simming a decade without touching anything but the financial disparity was way outside what I wanted to see. I then loaded my pre-sim backup & tried editing each team's finances to have Fan Interest, Fan Loyalty, Market Size & Budgets to be equal to each other as well as National, Local & Total Media Contracts (all on 5 year deals) and Merchandising to be equal. I then set attendance & ticket prices lower than they were originally set to (down to 25,000 attendance & $20 tickets) to try to lower the variation in gate revenue since that appeared to be the toughest revenue to control. I can't go further than a few years into the sim though without noticeable financial disparity popping up

Am I just going to have to live with financial disparity? What about a Salary Cap? Everything I've read has said that it's easy for teams go go above a set Salary Cap, is that correct?


Thanks for any pointers/advice in helping me set my league up

[The Game]

The Wizard will guide you through most of these. Start your league say at 1991, you can use financials for any year or manually set what you want players to make and just uncheck the box to make sure financials do not change from 1991 to 1992 when you get to 1992.
Step 4 or so will give you the option of which minor league levels you want. You will have to manually change team names to match what you want.

If you go to advanced options the the 3rd tab from the left (Star game then the other 2) you can set the logo file you want to use jerseys & cap file to get your 1993 Reds jerseys and they will change year to year.

You can manually change the amount of $$ a team starts with and maybe use teams all use same markets. It will be trail and error to get that set exactly as you want. i never bother with that. Make multiple backups to go back to a previous point instead of starting over.