[1.2.1] Salary budget reverting down, then getting stuck.

[Shindigs]

I've been playing a save as Mora in Swe-2, I was promoted to Swe-1 and as expected my salary budget was increased, but only by about 3 million from 15MKr to 18MKr. Since you don't get the updated budget until the 30th of June* and continuing all the way to there had made it fairly late I decided to save and call it a night. When I loaded up the save the next day my Salary budget was down to 15M again. Which sucked since I had planned my roster around having an extra 3 million, but whatever. I'll get a huge salary budget increase next year since TV Rights in Swe-2 are 500k, in Swe-1 they are 30M. But imagine my surprise when, despite making it to the Semi-finals in the first year of the league and having over 40Mkr in the bank, my board didn't increase my budget at all. It was still stuck at the 15Mkr it had reverted back down to when I loaded up the save. Since the lowest team I can see on the "Higest Team Wage Bill"-tab is in the region of 33Mkr this is really holding me back. Not to mention it's clearly unintended behaviour.

Ill upload the save to the FTP named "Shindigs_MORA".

*The fact that you don't get your next season budget as soon as the previous season ends (like in FM) is awful when you play in Europe, the Trade window opens on May 1st. This is when you NEED to be able to sign players as a European side (at the very latest that is, ideally you want to get all important trades agreed upon in April and have them go through on the 1st of May). But you don't get the budget until the 30th of June. By then any free agent you wanted, or prospect you wanted to buy, will be gone. It forces you into either sacking half your team in the window between the Trade window opening and your season ending to free up budget and then end up with X million budget that you don't have anything to spend it on once the 30th rolls around since you already built your team. Or alternatively use nothing but North American Free agents since a fair few of them will still be available at that late time.

[Riz Remes]

The issue of budgets not updating until the season update is something that is planned to be reviewed at some point in the future. I cannot guarantee it will be in the next update or so, but it is on the list of improvements to implement.

I'll have a look at the other issue about the budget in this save in general.

[kidhander1983]

Yes Euro teams should update on May 1st, not July 1st...

[Shindigs]

Just to necro my own thread. Even when this bug of the salary reverting back and getting stuck doesn't happen. Salary budgets in Sweden are completely messed up. One of my favourite youth development saves is starting with my home town team that I put into the lowest playable swedish league (Swe-2) and give them the same money/rep as the lowest team. Then I build a full team of junior players and rocket to the SHL in 2-4 seasons. The issue is that the game can't handle progression that fast at all. By the time I hit the SHL I still have a 3MKr salary budget (tied lowest for Swe-2) while being promoted to Swe-1. The issue comes in due to the salary budget calculation seemingly not figuring in the TV-rights money. In Swe-2 you have 500k a year in TV-rights payout. In the SHL (Swe-1) you have 30Mkr TV-rights payout. And you do get it the first year. However your board will not consider this money when setting your salary budget. So in the save I just did, the following thing happened:

I get promoted to the SHL, my budget goes up from 3Mkr to 3.18MKr, which is ridiculous. I will be getting 30MKr a year just for playing in the league, having barely 1/10th of that as my salary budget makes no sense what-so-ever.
This update obviously happens on June 30th, as does me getting the TV right money, but it seems like you get the TV-rights money just after you get the new salary budget which would be a possible reason for you not getting the correct budget (but it isn't,same thing happens in the 2nd season). The following day on July 1st you actually see the shiny new 30MKr cash injection, as well as the board letting me know they expect us to struggle to stay up this season. On July 2nd the board then backtracks and LOWERS my Salary budget down to 2.75Mkr, while we have 37Mkr in the bank.

It's at that point I just stop playing almost all my saves, because it is so unfathomably stupid that I just can't bring myself to play through it. But on the rare occasion I actually continue, you'd expect the board to up the salary budget by A LOT the next season, since you'll have in the region of 42MKr in the bank by the time they look over the budget (June 30th). But no, they generally either don't up your salary budget at all. Or best case scenario up it by another 200-500k. I obviously don't know what is happening behind the scenes there. But it seems like you put in an upper % based cap on how much the salary budget can go up, to stop weird budget changes (or something). But the actual effect is making it so that if you "overperform" and get a low budget team into a high budget league you end up in a situation where your players' wage demands skyrocket, but your salary budget can't skyrocket. Which completely ruins you long-term. You can still compete with a 3Mkr budget in the SHL, despite all other teams having at least a 30Mkr budget due to how abysmal the AI is at building teams. But the fact that you get 30MKr a year, and can only use a 10th of that for your salary budget is just so stupid I can't suspend my disbelief.

 

This has happened in every single iteration of this save that I've done (I'm on the 7th one atm) as well as happening every time I've gotten normal Swe-2 teams up. So it's not team specific or save specific. It's just how the game works (or doesn't, in this case). And it really needs to be fixed to make leagues that you can be promoted from functional in the long-term. Cause I'd rather not spend the ~130 or so seasons it would take to catch up to the 2nd lowest wage budget*, assuming the 200k increase is linear, which it probably isn't. But regardless. Under normal cirumstances a team would use maybe 1/2 the TV money for wage budget year one, due to the high risk of being demoted again. By year 2 they will be near 30MKr budget and 3rd season onwards it's 30MKr+ and never looking back. Meanwhile in EHM you'd need to spend anywhere between a few decades and more than a century to hit the point that you should hit after 2-3 seasons. And I sincerely hope that is not the intended behaviour.

 

*In a real gameplay scenario I would obviously never catch them, since their wage budgets would also be increasing every year, and by more than mine, due to them having a higher "base salary" to gain a % of as an increase. My longest save so far is 20 seasons long, and I gained wage budget every single season (which obviously isn't a sustainable economical model, but it's a hockey game so I don't necessarily expect it to be) which means that it should be impossible to ever catch up without using the editor to give yourself a more realistic budget. And I loathe needing to use something I consider cheating (editing a save using the editor) to make the game actually function as you'd expect.

[IvanIvanovich]

Quote

 I obviously don't know what is happening behind the scenes there.

What's happening is that this game was originally made in order to GM an NHL team and then other leagues were tacked on in order to produce and develop draft eligible players for the NHL.

Making these "other" leagues playable came second and involved not much more than changing dates and schedules and and a few rules (like no-touch icing). The financial mechanics haven't been changed at all as that would mean that the developers would essentially have to code an entire new game for each and every league in the game.

I don't know if there are plans to improve this or not but that's the history of it. 

PS. All leagues in Europe play on NHL size rinks, even if it says International size in the game the 2D is rendered NHL size and the physics is NHL size. There are loads of signs that this game's heredity is NHL-based.