10-29-2010, 06:47 PM
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#1
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Rookie
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Playing within the Limits of 2K4's Franchise AI
I've developed a set of rules that I use to play 2K4's franchise mode within the limits of the game's artificial intelligence.
2K4 is my preferred football game but I found that I could always assemble teams that were so good as to rob the game of challenge. These rules have provided me with a simple, conceptually clean way to keep the game consistently challenging. No doubt others have posted on this topic before in the long history of this forum, but I wasn't privy to those discussions, so please pardon the redundancy of my remarks. Using these rules has has kept 2K4 consistently fun and challenging for me for years, so I thought I'd share with other passionate 2K football fans.
No doubt this will be anti-climactic after all that prefatory puffery, but here are my humble rules:
1. Only acquire players via the draft, i.e., no free-agent signings.
2. Only sign players to three-year contracts.
3. Only negotiate player contracts once current contracts expire (i.e., only negotiate the contracts of players with expired contracts during the "player resigning" phase of each off-season).
4. Only trade draft picks for other draft picks.
5. (Optional) Never talk players out of retirement.
Before I started using these rules, I found that it was too easy to build an overwhelmingly talented team by (1) signing players to low-price seven-year contracts before they developed into much better, more expensive players, and (2) accumulating several first and second round draft picks every year (as a result of the AI giving draft picks too freely in exchange for players).
I've found playing with these rules to be akin to the consequences of playing without quick-saves as described in the recent article at Ars Technica, "Accepting the consequences of a life without quick-saves": I've had to make choices that carry consequences in playing a franchise, because while I only acquire players through the draft, I cannot get anywhere near all of the prospects that I'd like. Trading up in the draft is truly costly, while trading down is truly risky. Even my best teams have a weakness somewhere, and I have to play around those weaknesses in games.
Combined with these player acquisition rules, I've found a set of difficulty level adjustments that make my ability to win a game map onto the rankings of team talent that are displayed before games (but that's a different subject).
Oh, and I do one more crazy thing: I'm much more interested in building a franchise than in working with the teams that come out of the gate. So to begin a franchise, I use a roster that has been edited such that every player's overall rating has been set to 50. I then simulate through the first eight years of franchise play, which goes through just enough drafts to completely fill my roster with computer-generated players. Of course, all the other teams' rosters are now stocked with nothing but computer-generated players, as those players are all upgrades over the edited players with which each team began. So when I actually start playing the franchise in earnest, it's my team-building skills against those of the computer... and by limiting what I allow myself to do, I've made that a fair fight!
Last edited by PRB; 11-01-2010 at 04:29 PM.
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