What should be the limit on finances in FM09?

At the moment I think its 2 billion, should it be more?...stay the same?

Yeahh around that

But i'm not too fussed about that stuff tbh

I don't think it can be more. SI would have to change how the whole game is programmed make it go higher which would not be worthwhile.

The 2 billion limit is not their to limit your money but its there due to technical restrictions. It should stay the same because if they increase it there will be a significant increase in RAM usage.

It should be harder to get rich in the game, so this 2 billion limit wouldn't be a problem.

It should be harder to get rich in the game, so this 2 billion limit wouldn't be a problem.

I agree with that even though i voted for infinate funds

I think I read on here somewhere not long ago, the reason for it being 2 billion is a coding issue, something to do with it being the highest you can express in binary or something, that's why, before the patches, the finances would reset themselves to negative if you exceeded it, so I think that 2 billion is the complete upper limit that they can use, I may be wrong though

2 billion is fine... I can never get that high anyway.

i think if it is more than 2 billion i won't get annoyed and as example clubs as real madrid and man city and milan excess this budget

Why does a football club need more than 2 billion to spend anyways? Surely all the transfers and wages come comfortably underneath 2 billion? Just seems like some people are being a bit greedy with some fake money here

I don't think a club should even be able to amass 2billion. It's just not feasible, at least shouldn't be without cheating, anyway. I don't know MUCH about programming (perhaps someone who does can enlighten me) but don't infinite values in games really mess things up? And if you set a really high limit, will that start to eat memory or something? I expect the limit was placed originally due to the idea that 2billion is aready plenty.

IMHO there's too much money floating aorund in the game. A financial revamp would make this discussion void as you'd never be able to get near the aforementioned figures.

After all, who's heard of a club having a 800+M pounds bank balance?

The limit exists because of a technical reason not that it was anyone's idea .

I don't know anything about programming but some devs use floats instead of integers and floats can handle values bigger than trillions .

Surely they could just stick another binary field in, so the finances are tied to two digits. When it hits 2bn or so, the "massive money" variable ticks over to one and it can continue growing. Likewise, if its less than -2bn you have a "massive skinty" variable the ticks over and you continue to lose money.

Surely we can get past the 2^32 problem somehow.

When writing code you have to decide which data type to use for numbers and when FM/CM was first made they obviously chose to use Integer to represent the bank balance. An integer can hold 32 bits of information, i.e. a number between 0 and 4 billion (or in the case of a signed integer, -2billion and +2billion). It is not possible to simply say lets add another bit to it to make it bigger.

One possible data type to use would be Long, which is 64 bits (+/- 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 I think). But first off it uses twice the memory and as you can imagine there are a lot of places in the game where finanicial stuff is store (player prices as well as team balance etc). So an increase in 4 (rather unneccessary) bytes for every instance of financial information is a lot. Another thing is that the entire code would have to be modified to use Long rather than integer, which would mean testing loads of little things that have been working for ages, which would in turn delay the release of the game.

So basically to summarise: 2billion is enough for any club to have at one time, so there is no need to change the code. In those cases where a football club owner in real life has more than 2billion e.g. Man City now, a system of cash injections when it is needed is fine. A club is never going to spend more than 2billion in one season. And that is what happens already, so no change needed.

2 billion is fine. The "bug" is not that when you go over 2 billion it flips to negative, it is that you can get to 2 billion in the first place.

There would be plenty of programming ways to get around the problem, depending how it is coded, but it is totally unnecessary. For instance, only numbers pertaining to bank balance would need to be > 2 billion, not every instance of fiinance in the game, but still...it is totally unnecessary since no club in the world has or ever will have £2 billion

city and chelsea dont have this loadsa money, thier owners do.

wasnt the only club to make that money off thier own back manu? sweat i heard they broke the 1bill barrier, or was that 'worth' 1billion

2 billion is fine. The "bug" is not that when you go over 2 billion it flips to negative, it is that you can get to 2 billion in the first place.

There would be plenty of programming ways to get around the problem, depending how it is coded, but it is totally unnecessary. For instance, only numbers pertaining to bank balance would need to be > 2 billion, not every instance of fiinance in the game, but still...it is totally unnecessary since no club in the world has or ever will have £2 billion

If you made just the bank balances a different data type to be bigger than 2 billion then you have the problem of combining two data types, i.e. casting the integer (player wages, transfer fees etc) to long (bank balance) to be able to do the sums, which would be wasted processor time just to add all the zeroes to make the 32 bit integer 64 bits.

There's actually a pretty damn easy way to make the figure £20billion.

How, you ask?

Consider 1 to be £10. 2 to be £20. 1000 to be £10000. It's not like we have any transactions that need to be expressed to the nearest £1 anyway. Round everything to the nearest £10, be it wages, seat prices, or taxes. Hell, even make it 1 = £5, which would leave £10billion as the limit? The problem with that is if looking at a memory value, it's easier to work out what's wrong if you just have to take off a 0 rather than divide by 5...

Obviously 'infinite' is never going to happen, because (as David Johnston clearly explains) a data type needs to be chosen. A limit will always exist depending on which way the programmers decide to go.

On how high the limit should be: I don't know what people expect to be doing with these billions they seem to want, but so far I've been able to buy every player I wanted in a single season even before ever reaching 1 billion (barring reputation).

2 billion seems more than fine for now.

Never has a football club had £2bn in the bank. Ever. Think about the amount of money that actually is.

As previously said in the thread: revamp the finance model so we can't acquire this insane amount of cash.

It is a little too easy to sign and sell youngsters by way of cash flow, but there needs to be a line between rich club and rich owner.

Man City's finances therefore should not be all that high, they should however benefit from a "sugar_daddy" effect where major players can be signed above budget (if they want to come) and cash is injected where needed in reasonable amounts.

The idea that Man City now has £6bn in the kitty is laughable.

What SI don't realise is the world today, they think 2 billion is enough? We have seen in the past 5 years people coming from abroad and buying clubs here and they are worth more than 2 billion, look at Man City for example. Someone could come and but a club and say invest 50 billion into it, they would be worth like 5 trillion. Also look at the transfer market and the fees, they are getting more unstable and where is this reflected in FM?...nowhere at all.

If people have suggestions on how to "revamp the finance model so we can't acquire this insane amount of cash", I'm all ears and like always, suggestions are more than welcome

It is a little too easy to sign and sell youngsters by way of cash flow, but there needs to be a line between rich club and rich owner.

Improve AI scouting so it scouts like human managers (doing so strategically after every newgen refresh date, scouting youth competitions). This way managers will actually have competition for youngsters and will be less likely to stockpile all of the game's best youngsters (assuming they have gotten to a position where their scouts have no travelling limits).

Obviously have no clue as to how 'implementable' this is (or if AI managers do scout like us, which I suspect they might not as some clubs do not have scouts if they are in an inactive league) and chances are it would result in annoying people who like to play this way with threads along the lines of 'I can't get any youngsters because the AI beats me to it'.

Doing this would be walking the thin line between realism and fun though, so alienating a percentage of your customer base by reducing the likelihood of their preferred gaming style being successful might not be the way to go.

What SI don't realise is the world today, they think 2 billion is enough? We have seen in the past 5 years people coming from abroad and buying clubs here and they are worth more than 2 billion, look at Man City for example. Someone could come and but a club and say invest 50 billion into it, they would be worth like 5 trillion. Also look at the transfer market and the fees, they are getting more unstable and where is this reflected in FM?...nowhere at all.

No club is going to have £2 billion in their bank account - for starters it wouldn't be good business!!!

It needs to be acknowledged that Manchester City, or more particularly their owners, want to win things and they are willing to spend pretty much anything to do that. Therefore in the game there should be a message like..."The board want to win xxxxx...and are willing to back you in the transfer market up to £300million until the end of the transfer window".

Now, this money would never appear in the bank account of the club, but would be in the transfer budget. When a player is signed it would be removed from the budget and the user would be informed that it has been paid for via Cash Injection.

Furthermore, it is obvious that the owners of Man City will be heavily investing in the Backroom setup - stadium (if they can), training grounds etc. The game should allow this too - the owners saying that the training ground, stadium etc. are being upgraded (the game does, but more often than not you have to ask).

Of course SI realise that, it's just not the point.

Roman Abramovich might have £8bn or whatever, but that's not Chelsea's money. He has the option to either inflate or deflate their bank balance at the end of each season, but it's not as if Abramovich and Chelsea FC have a joint current account at Lloyds

What SI don't realise is the world today, they think 2 billion is enough? We have seen in the past 5 years people coming from abroad and buying clubs here and they are worth more than 2 billion, look at Man City for example. Someone could come and but a club and say invest 50 billion into it, they would be worth like 5 trillion. Also look at the transfer market and the fees, they are getting more unstable and where is this reflected in FM?...nowhere at all.

As already said it is not as simple as just raising the limit. The game would needed to coded diifferently and it would probably make them game much slower.

Anyway, as also already said, I would highly doubt any club would have anywhere near £2 billion in their bank account let alone anything higher.

Just to highlight as well 50 billion is nowhere near 5 trillion. 5 trillion is 50 billion multiply by 100.

It cant be changed because the game would run slower, then people would still complain.

No one has invested 50 billion into a club so its a ridiculous example. It's fine the way it is, the only people effected by the 'bug' (not bug) is people who cheat to get that much money anyway.