House Rules for Sim CFM

[eric7064]

Me and my 3 buddies do a CFM every year and do 10+ seasons and it's alot of fun. The problem is, 3 years in 3 of us always seem to win 11-12 games every year. I want it to be more sim, and have a 12 win team go to 8-9 wins the next year. But that never really happens for us.

What are some house rules to implement in order for the CPU to have more success against us? Progression wise, draft wise etc... let me know what you guys do.

I really want us to feel accomplished when we win the SB not been there done that.

[underdog13]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

For progression...

You're qb must have equal awr to his lowest accuracy rating. Means you can't increase any accuracy rating until the qb's awr is equal to the lowest one (short,med,deep).

Increase the slider difficulty with each year just a bit

Don't do the weekly training stuff. Aka always get the bronze award for the drill.



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[underdog13]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

Also note with off ball injuries this year it'll mean human players are another step closer to on the same playing field as cpu teams.

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[BreakingBad2013]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

I haven't tested these, but here are some ideas to make it more challenging, and less monotonous.

- Use a new playbook every week.
- Don't allow players to start until their AWR is at a specific agreed upon number.
- Anyone who doesn't meet specific AWR requirements drop their key position attributes.
- Make sure players aren't running the same plays over and over. Have a realistic run/pass % requirement.
- Find a slider set that presents a good challenge, but doesn't make the AI unstoppable.

Team building wise:
- Try running a 0 progression system, where no one ever gets better. Or make it very difficult to progress players.
- Maybe allot less scouting points or do 0 scouting and go into the draft blind.
- Sign/Draft only players who fit your scheme fit.
- Research contracts of players irl, and try to make a contract scale so no one is signing good players for really cheap. Require certain bonus money in these scales.
- Don't allow trades with CPUs

Once a player wins a SB, make him rebuild a worse team.

[ForUntoOblivionSoar∞]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

In-game stuff:

Use player lock on defense

Outlaw pre-snap adjustments of any kind

Limit the number of times a play can be called per game

Force punting/field goal kicking except when trailing late in the game

[Jimbo12308]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

These have worked well for me:

-The only CPU trades that are allowed are done via trade block.

-Human trades offered to the CPU (still only through trade block) may be tried a maximum of two times (e.g. If you offer a trade to the cpu and its rejected you can't keep bumping up the offer slightly until they accept for the bare minimum, you must instead try to make the trade happen on the 2nd offer, so there is the possibility of over-paying or not being able to put a deal together.)

-For CPU offers for players you put on the trade block, the only offer you may accept is the worst one. So if there's one team that's offering a 4th round pick while all the others are offering 2nd rounders, you can only accept the 4th rounder.

-I do not resign any of my players at all, everyone goes to free agency where I have to compete with the CPU in order to bring them back.

-For the free agency period, you may make only 1 offer to each player that you wish to sign. This means that if a CPU team comes in with a higher offer, you cannot bid again to beat their offer. Additionally, it means that you have to guess how many points your offer will be (e.g. A team has offered a FA a contract with a value of 96 points, you can only make one offer and cannot change it, so if your offer comes in at 93 points - you will not sign that player.) This means you might also accidentally over-bid for a player to compensate (you choose to pay a ton for the player and your offer winds up being for 113 points while the next highest was only 96. You're stuck overpaying.)

-In order to sign a player that has no offers by other teams, your offer must be worth at least 90 points. If it is not worth 90 points you must withdraw your offer and you may not try again.

-For the draft, I allow myself full scouting, but I look away/close my eyes when I draft a player so that I can't see the draft card w/ ratings etc. NFL teams don't suddenly learn more about the talent of a player the moment they pick him, so why should I? This will lead to a lot of anxiety during the draft - maybe you badly need a RB and the one you pick is a bust (but you don't know that until after the draft). If you were overconfident and didn't have a backup plan you'll be scrambling in free agency. Also, perhaps you were nervous of a bust and drafted 2 running backs only to find that the first one was fine and you wasted a pick with the 2nd one.

-I also do this for the draft, which is taken from an article online by NoobtubeTV:

"Scouting and The Draft

Here’s the deal. You get to scout any players you want. Feel free to go bonkers and even get the Scouting Perk for your coach. The catch is that you are limited once the draft arrives.

Using the ‘Watch’ function is key to this rule and it will make the draft a hell of a lot more fun for you. Not to mention more challenging from the perspective of adding some realism.

First, your draft picks will have limitations (This will also help you avoid weird salary cap penalties if you want to cut a rookie with guaranteed money – this can and does happen).

Scouting and Watching –

Each draft pick you own will allow you to watch a certain number of players projected in that round (prior to drafting them)

1st Round – 6 Watchable Players (2 Picks = 12 Watchable Players)

2nd & 3rd Round – 7 Watchable Players (two picks = 14 watchable players per round)

4th – 7th Round – 8 Watchable Players (three picks = 24 watchable players per round)

HERE IS THE CATCH!

You must select your watched players before the draft begins.
You only get to manually draft a player that you have watched.
You may draft any player from any projected round at any time.
If none of your watched players are available you have two options
Simulate the pick (you get to keep any draft pick obtained if it is traded and you must keep the player drafted for at least one season, if only on the practice squad.)
Trade the pick
You may trade this for any pick or set of picks. However, you need to even out your pick numbers prior to Week 9 of the regular season.
You get a maximum of 12 picks in any one draft each year.

1st Round – Maximum of two picks in one draft (Never two years in a row). If you have two picks in one year you only get one the next year. If you find that a team wants to trade up and give you a pick you can only do it for lower round picks OR must trade the new First Round Pick to a team with one of the ten WORST records without giving them more than two picks as well.

If you make an Washington/St. Louis for RG3 kind of deal with a team you must count your 1st Round Picks as two picks each. This means you lose two picks extra picks that year. You must trade two picks two another team.
2nd Round – Maximum of two picks

3rd Round – Maximum of two picks

4th Round – Maximum of three picks

5th Round – Maximum of three picks

6th Round – Maximum of three picks

7th Round – Maximum of three picks"


-A lot of the Madden contracts are wrong, especially when it comes to guaranteed money. If you want to spend a lot of time, adjust all your players contracts to match their real life counterparts with the bonus being equal to the guaranteed money of the real contracts. If you don't want to spend that much time, see how much cap room your team has in real life and adjust a few contracts of players you plan to keep around until the game cap room matches the real cap room.

-No long contracts for low rated players. Oldest trick in the book is finding a young player with great physical ratings that is rated in the low 70s because his awareness is low, offering him a 6 year contract for garbage money, then quickly upgrading those cheap attributes to get him up into the 80s/90s with 4-5 years still on his contract at like $1mil/year. Instead, something like 69 and below get 1 year deals only, 70-74 get 2 year deals, 75-79 get 3, 80-84 get 4, 85-89 get 5, and 90+ get 6. The only exception to these is for players 30+ years old. For them, any amount of years is fine.


On the field stuff:

For this I really like to increase the challenge without making the game seem dumb and unfair towards the CPU. Before these rules, the only time I would lose a game is if I adjusted the sliders to the point where the CPU had absurd advantages or where my QB would throw 3-4 errant INTs per game, which is just not fun. I still make the game very difficult with the sliders, but only to an extent that maintains realism. To add the needed additional challenge, I do this:

-I use "very fast" as my game speed. This is a good way to increases the challenge because it reduces reaction times for us humans without adjusting how the CPU plays like how making absurd sliders does.

-First off I avoid any cheese stuff like scrambling on every pass etc.

-I play no-switch on defense and on offense I do not control wideouts until after the catch (the AI has to take the route to the ball and make the decision of the type of catch).

-On offense I use a very specific system to choose plays. I use the coach suggestions and scroll over to "Strategy" suggestions, from there I may choose either the first suggested run or the first suggested pass in the list. If it's 3rd and 5 and the first suggested pass is a hail mary and the first suggested run is a FB dive - tough luck, gotta try to pick it up with one of them. 3rd and 19 and the first pass is curl flats? Too bad, gotta make it work. 3rd and 1 and there are no running plays suggested? Then you have to choose the 1st passing play. Wanna go for it on 4th but the top suggestion is a punt even though your down 14 with 4 minutes to go? You still must punt. No audibles and no hot routes allowed. The only adjustment I allow is the direction of the run.
*The only exception to this is in goal-line situations. Maybe it's just the playbook I use (Eagles) but inside the 5 yard line for some reason the strategy suggestions almost never include any runs at all, even on 1st down. This is the only time I choose a different play. I go to recent plays and scroll to the oldest (least recent) run and have the option to run that or to go with the 1st passing play from the strategy suggestions. If I run the ball and then want to run again the next play (and if there are still no suggested runs) then I go back to the recent plays and have the option to choose the 2nd oldest run play.

All of these playcalling restrictions adds a distinct challenge to the game that helps even things out with the CPU. Sometimes the CPU calls drive-killing plays, and now so will you.

[eric7064]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

Thanks everyone. Will definitely try and use some of these suggestions.

[Sheba2011]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

I have a few I use to try to make it somewhat realistic/even.

1. Only sign players to 4-year contracts and never increase it beyond the suggested offer. It creates a good mix of players staying and leaving.

2. Do automatic XP upgrades for players.

3. Only scout the first 3 rounds of the draft, after that it's hit or miss, you might find some gems you will definitely have some busts.

4. Don't edit rookie ratings no matter how tempting it is. Adjust equipment/names/personal stats but leave their ratings alone.

5. Player lock on defense for the entire season. I usually just play the defensive line and let the skill position players be controlled by the AI. When I was using LB's or CB's it was too easy to influence plays.

6. Any injuries during preseason that are over 6 weeks I put them on IR, especially if they are big name players. For me this just createst an added level of team building.

[Bull_Dozer]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

Awesome ideas in here. I'm gonna have to start using a lot of these to make my franchise more interesting!

[vrtkolman]

Re: House Rules for Sim CFM

I found that games against CPU teams with similar team ratings to your team (or higher) are pretty competitive and you will lose pretty often. Once your team rating gets too high, you will pretty much wipe the floor with anyone the CPU comes at you with. So, the issue is how to limit the ratings gap between CPU and user controlled team rosters?

From my experience in Madden 2017, the issue is the draft. The CPU is awful at it. Every single off season I will go through each team's draft and edit names I don't like. It's shocking to see some of these team's draft hauls. Maybe 3 CPU teams a season will have good drafts, most will have crap drafts, and a few should fire their GM on the spot. I'm talking about 3 total draft picks, all with ratings in the 60's. Those teams are screwed in the future and will provide no competition at all.

Basically the CPU trades far too many draft picks to move up in later rounds (dumb), spends high picks on positions of strength (especially QB), and doesn't really scout. There are clear as day busts that get scooped up around where they were projected to go.

If you play with a bunch of friends, it might be a good idea to give each friend a different group of teams to draft with. That would improve their haul and limit the dumb trades the CPU does. If that isn't a possibility, then simming your own draft is an option. That is not fun at all but it will dumb your team down to match the CPU. The other option is to draft for all 32 teams, if you have unlimited time.