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View Full Version : Initial FAs and number of offseason additions


Matthean
08-12-2008, 10:17 AM
Just created my SP league. I took over Buffalo for the difficulty factor of having the worst rated team. I played FPS: Football for about 10 years so I'm not exactly new to football sims, but I was gathering my initial questions up that wouldn't be answered in the manual and I've been weeding through the forum. Off the top of my head, here's the ones I got for now.

Do you look that much at the initial FA offerings, or do you wait for the season to kick in and for teams to drop some players? Since my team is so lowly rated, I can see a number of FAs that have better potential than what I currently have on my team. The problem is their initial stats are horrible and we are already looking at it being in the preseason versus a more full offseason to get them ready. All of these guys are initially rated at average stats in the end, so we are talking filler people at best.

In FPS, you could add 20+ rookies and not even blink. You did this with the draft pool and not the initial FA pool since it blew so horribly. In FoF, team cohesion/unity alone would kick my rear if I did that. I'm leaning towards waiting and seeing what gets dropped and then building mostly from the draft. I'm building through the draft anyway, but I guess I'll lean more towards my FPS stance for the first year of the team and just write off the first year and do my homework during the offseason.

This leads me to my follow up question. How many guys do you look to add in an off season on average? IIRC, in FPS I added around 5-6 per year once the team was built and I got to the point to where I would drop out of the "endless" draft fairly early. This would give me a full roster in about 9-11 years. Bust, early retirement, etc. happen and with FoF being even more indepth, ie contracts, I was curious if that number shouldn't be a little higher.

I'm also trying to curve my innate desire to try and load up Buffalo early and stick more with the recommended number of typical additions in the offseason. I'll try to aim for a sane amount of players, but pretty much aiming for nearly all starters just because the talent pool is so low.

TheMeat
08-12-2008, 01:08 PM
Your cohesion is going to be fairly bad in the next few years anyway because you'll be switching out pretty much all of your starters but I would say for fun and to save yourself some time ignore the initial FA's for the most part, unless someone really stands out as an immediate upgrade for a terrible starter on your team Play a season, see how your team does, which should be fairly badly, and head into the offseason with a clear plan of what areas should be improved first.

I found when I first played this game it was quite overwhelming, and I've been playing sport sims for about 18 years. The game really lacks user-friendliness and the learning curve is steep to start. I did quite badly with my first franchise but I could see the potential of the game was huge so I stuck it out and now it is almost the only video game I play.

My main advice would be to use the F1 key as much as possible. You can hit F1 from any screen in the game and it will bring up the help file which will explain much of the complexities of the game.

Skolleck
08-12-2008, 03:52 PM
Also you can go to the solesicmic.com site and get the new player guide.

Many of the members of this site has played FOF since the first version from 1998. The game has grown a lot since then. Once you master Single Player (which will happen) then I suggest you join a Multiple Player league for the challenge.

There are many tips on this forum as well.

Good luck,
Scott Kolleck

Matthean
08-13-2008, 02:04 PM
I already have the player's guide saved on my PC and been going through it. I went and cranked the diff. setting because I figured I would learn the game enough at some point and I would rather be on the higher diff than restarting although I'll most likely do other SP leagues at some point. Needless to say I went 1-15 with a season ending score of 62. :lol: Working on trying to decide on if I can get a better coach for a sane amount of money. My scout looks rather good right now.