[QuikSand]

The Highlander Challenge

It’s been a while since I played a public, documented, solo FOF career. I thought I would give it a shot once again. I will again make a try to come up with a set of rules that make the game a long-term challenge for me – what I want is for the game to be interesting to play, challenging to win, but allow me to play “all out” within the rules that I have adopted up front. You may have heard me refer to this as a holy grail… it’s tougher than it seems.

So, my current thinking is that I’ll try a set of rules where I am allowed to do lots of different things – but none of them more than once per season. Thus, the play-on-words title of the challenge, which I hope won’t be lost on quite everyone.


So, here are the limitations for the career. In any given season:

-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a one-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a two-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a three-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a four-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a five-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a six-year contract
-there can be only one unrestricted free agent signed to a seven-year contract
-there can be only one year on any new offer made to a restricted free agent
-there can be only one renegotiation before the season starts
-there can be only one renegotiation toward the end of the season
-there can be only one trade, either within the current draft or AI-initiated

Yes, I include my own out-of-contract players among the limits for FA signees. I am also aware that the ability to sign contracts for longer than three years generally means committing either huge money or else stuffing huge backends to the deals forcing a release some way through – so in essence, it will be very difficult for me to keep players around in this career, I expect. That is absolutely by design – the worry I’m targeting here is that I generally find it far too easy to just re-sign lots and lots of decent role players for minsal or a bit more year after year – and all of my solo teams turn into cohesion monsters as a result.

So, basically – my rookie draftees are mine through their rookie contract and for whatever I can sign them to as restricted free agents – meaning that I can get an easy four years out of most of them who turn out to be worth keeping. Past that, I will have a pretty limited ability to keep players around.

I’m also limiting my ability to sign undrafted rookies here. I’ll have to bend these rules as I initially build a team (empty cupboard will demand it) and fill in with one year rookies, but my intention is to have these limits apply to those players too.