Best Sliders

[Wjkporter]

Can someone point me to the best sliders....

Thanks

[VCdolphin]

I'd have to say the best Sliders was the episode where they landed on that alternate world where most everyone was turned into zombies.

What?

[bgiese]

Quote: Originally Posted by Wjkporter

Can someone point me to the best sliders.... Thanks

I think these settings and tips make a great game:
For maximum franchise difficulty, slider settings alone won't do the job. There are also some simple 'house rules' that, if followed, will make the GM portion of the game as challenging as the onfield action.

Every sports game has A.I. weaknesses in the General Manager portion of the game. ESPN is no exception. Fortunately, though, it's possible to compensate for them, so you can get a more 'real' general manager experience that will provide a very stiff challenge.

By the way, in the first few years of a franchise, the CPU GM's will sometimes trade away players for salary cap reasons that will leave you scratching your head. To greatly reduce how often this happens (down to one strange deal every couple of years or so), turn off preseason games and weekly prep. If not, you'll have to endure some odd trades for the first several years.
Here are the rules, and I'll have discussion below.
Salaries:
--Max out the player's interest slider before making an offer.
--Increase the players requested bonus percentage by an additional ten percent.
--Six year contracts are the maximum allowed length.
Trades:
--Max out the trade interest slider before making a deal, even if it's offered to you from the trading block.
--No trading for an opposing team's starting quarterback.
--No trading for rookies.
--No trading of players from your team in the last year of their contract.
--No trading for/away kickers.
--No trading away of players rated below 70.
Draft:
--no more than two draft picks in a round, and no more than ten picks in any one draft.

That sounds like a lot of rules, but they're not. I use some version of them with any sports game, including Madden. In short, they force you to make some very hard decisions concerning personnel each year. Players can't be stockpiled, and they can't be cut without incurring significant penalties due to the bonuses involved. It can be extremely difficult to build a strong team inside the constraints of the salary cap, and it is impossible to keep that team together for more than two or three years. In other words, it's much like the real NFL.

The sliders also reinforce the difficulty. To the best of my knowledge, every slider setting is such that the corresponding rating matters in terms of onfield results. So if you draft a team of bad tacklers, I hope you enjoy watching running backs break tackle after tackle. If you draft wide receivers who can't catch, enjoy all the drops. If you draft running backs with a low 'secure ball' rating, here come the fumbles.

These house rules force you to 'go without.' Do you want marquee players with huge salaries? Fine, but you're going to have to do it at the expense of depth. Want to sign guys to long-term deals to reduce your cap expense down the road? Just make sure those guys don't puke out on you, because you could be paying three or four years worth of bonus when you cut them. That also means you do better do a good job at the Combine, because those big bonuses for first round draft picks can come back to haunt you.

I was able to put together a very, very strong team last week, and at 11:00 p.m. on Saturday night I won the Super Bowl for the first time. At 11:00 a.m. the next morning, I was dismantling that team. I had kept guys who had one or two years left on their contract, knowing I couldn't afford to resign them, because I thought the team could make a run. I lost fifteen players rated 80+ after the Super Bowl. My team went from being rated a 95 overall to an 82, which took it from the strongest team in the league to below average.

That's a decent approximation of what happens in the real NFL, and it makes ESPN a fun and challenging game.
I made a few final changes based on some additional testing I've done. These are not changing. They're final. To give you an idea of difficulty, these are rated at 1.73 (you can see this in the crib tally option at the end of the game--difficulty rating is at the bottom, I think), which is right around Legend level. They're actually harder than Legend except for the pursuit rating, which is lowered to neutral for the CPU defense instead of giving them a giant speed cheat.

These settings are part of a package that includes the house rules for Franchise mode. Together, they make the game extremely challenging. Franchise house rules are in the post just above this one, along with an explanation of how they reinforce the slider settings.

Here are the settings. First value is Human setting, second value is CPU setting:
Blocking: 16,40
Passing: 0,40
Running: 16,40
Catching: 40,40
Coverage:4,28
Pursuit: 4,10
Tackling: 0,8
Kicking: 0,40
Fatigue: 4,4
Injury: 20
Fumbles: 28
Interceptions: 0

Penalties--all at max except the following:
Offensive holding: 32
Clipping: 24
Roughing the Kicker: 32
Ineligible Receiver Downfield: 32

In the Gameplan option during the game, you can set substitution in/out thresholds. Using out 60%, in 85% provides with a good substitution pattern in conjunction with the fatigue settings.


--- I took this from a great blog...
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com

[randogu]

I just want to give a quick shout out to the above sliders/house rules that were done by Bill Harris. Once I tried them they were what I used throughout last season. Very good stuff.....and made even more difficult by my insistance on using the Cardinals LOL