Was that the team that's 72-88?   If so, I dare say you could have found a use for 28m in player payroll.

You'd think so. I signed 2-3 FA and made a run at some of the bigger ones. With relatively sh*tty coaches and a poor ML club, it's not surprising that no FA wanted to come to my team. Nothing left at the end of FA was worth their asking price, especially relative to what I already had on my roster.

That's a bit of a contradiction.   "poor ML club" and "Nothing left at the end of FA was worth their asking price, especially relative to what I already had on my roster ".

In every world I've been in, even with a great team, there's usually somebody unsigned that I could use as a 24th-27th man.   If there's a decent player with options, I sign them and put them in AAA for injury replacements.   Nonetheless, if you had 28m leftover, you made a mistake somewhere.   

I'm not saying there was nothing better than what I had. But I knew next season and beyond, I was going to improve drastically with some of my prospects reaching the majors fulltime. Any of the remaining "scrapheap" FAs who were going to improve my team wanted multi-year deals, and thus would have been a poor investment just to get 4-5 more wins this season. Now, would I have done it had I known 70-75 wins would win me the division? Quite possibly. But they would have been wasted salary after this season - which is exactly my problem this season. No point in hamstringing myself in future seasons as well.

Anyway, my original point was, I had three options: hope for a stud IFA, waste it on mediocre FAs and hurt my cap in future seasons, or eat the money.

It seems to me there should be more flexibility than that in the first season, especially if they're trying to encourage people to take over teams. And I want to make it clear - I'm not whining. I understand no system they come up with is perfect. I just think there has to be a way to create a little more flexibility without hurting the game.

OK, I'll give you a hint.   Mutual options and wait until the 3 PM cycle after the 8th ST game.    That helps you with future salary.    But, anyway, it sounds like your plan was "Stud IFA" and you missed.  I've done the same thing.  Left holding the bag with 17m in unused prospect money(the last stud IFA went for 17.5m or so).  I screwed up.   A different budgeting system wouldn't have saved me from myself.

I guess I'm not articulating it well. Yes, I went with the IFA holdout because that was the best of my remaining options. I'd have much rather had more flexibility to put that into other areas of my budget. Again, I don't know what the best solution would be - I just think the issue of default budgets is still worthy of discussion.

Sorry, if I'm understanding correctly, you know you made a mistake somewhere, right?    But you think there should be better initial budgeting options for first season owners, right?

I'm not sure I disagree, I think allowing any starting point then enforcing the 4m per season would work if not for alias abuse, but I'm not sure there is a better option.  Alias aside, a n00b doesn't really know.   So he drops 0 in training.  Then he realizes that's a bad idea about halfway thru the season.   Now he can't fix it until S6. 

Hasn't it been generally accepted that a reasonable "solution" to default budgets would be to allow an incoming owner either retain the previous owner's budget (+/- $4m), or restart with the defaults?

I think a reasonable compromise on budget shifts would be for it to cost $2 for every $1 after $4M.

So if you're at $10M in IFA and you want to go up, you can move it to $14M by moving $4M from salary, just like it works now. 

To go higher, you have to move $2M for every $1M bump. This would all big changes, but there would a cost in other areas.

And while they are fixing this, they should get rid of the penalty for moving money between prospect & salary all season. And between anything in & out of coaching at any time. Transfer penalty is one of the silliest parts of HBD. It removes strategy. And it the real world, you don't lose money when you decide, based on new information, do alter your budget plans.

The transfer penalty adds strategy.  Without it, budgeting has little to no importance.

It's ironic that you argue against the transfer penalty in a post where you essentially propose one during the budgeting process.

Tecwrg - Let me go slower for you. Or maybe you could take a moment to read and then think before posting.

Not all of the budgets work the same. Some really aren't what the real, non-HBD world would call a budget.  They are actually expenditures.

The way it works now, we don't really budget on scouting, doctors, and trainers.  The money is spent the second day when budgets are locked.

You decide how much to invest in hiring scouts, medical, etc.  and then the game takes care of the details.  The game logic is reasonable for a real world simulation. You have to hire & deploy scouts early, as they'll be busy working for someone else later and you can't created good scouts or scouting just by throwing  money at it.

For those budgets, we currently can't go plus or minus more than $4M in a season.  I'm proposing it would be realistic to allow 2-for-1 spending above that limit that as a way to accelerate an increase or decrease.  In the real world, a lot can be solved by throwing more money at it.

I think it would be OK for that to be allowed at any time during the season.  So if starting today, if you took $2M from salary and moved it to int scouting, you'd get $1M in benefit starting today.  Could argue that the 2-for-1 into these budget can only be done before the season starts. A small insignificant detail, as WIS isn't going to do any of this.

Probably a good idea to pause here and be sure you understand that point before going on.

Other budgets represent cash to be spent on particular players and coaches.  We don't just throw money into a player salary budget and get players (like we do scouts, trainers, and doctors). We have to hire players and (unfortunately) coaches individually.

Those budgets are spent when and how we need them. Not on the second day.

In the real world, business and people make plans on how they expect to spend their money.  I'll call that a budget.

When we get new and more accurate information, we change our plans. I'll call that not being an idiot.

Probably a good idea to pause here and be sure you understand that point before going on.

Games where you can update your moves based on new information are known as strategy games.

Setting a budget the first day, when we have the least amount of information we're going to have all season, is what I call guessing.  In the case of HBD, it can be educated guessing, but it's still guessing.

Losing half our money when we update our budget plans based on new information is silly.  It's not realistic. It punishes new GMs.  It punishes GMs with lives and responsibilities who don't have Mike and your awesome lives that allow you to be on the internet playing a game 365 days of the year.
 

I assmue tecwrg would consider this a better game than the one most of us play -

Tecwrg Texas Hold Em:

Before the cards are dealt, each player writes on a piece of paper (hidden from the other players) exactly how he is going to play this hand. For example, "I will bet twice if needed before the flop, but not three times. Then I'll take 2 cards. Then I'll call two time and max raise the 3rd round of betting.  If the hand is still being played, I'll fold."

When all players have written down their plan, the cards are dealt.

If, upon seeing their cards, the other players cards, the betting, the flop, etc., a player wishes to change his plan, he may do so, but only after taking 1/2 the chip in his pile and throwing the into a shredder and/or wood chipper. That amount of money goes to the house and is removed from the game.

After destroying 1/2 his chips and before making a play, a player must write down his new plan for the rest of the hand.  If, based on new information learned later in the hand, the player wishes to update his plan, he must again destroy 1/2 his chips before creating and acting on the new plan.

Tecwrg HBD Strategy Chess:

Pieces are placed on the board.

Before anyone moves, each player must write down every move, in order, he will make for the entire game.

If at some point during the game, based on new information, such as the other players moves, if a player want to change his plan (or if the next move on the players list cannot be made because it is blocked by another piece), that player must remove 1/2 his remaining pieces from the board, and then construct a new move by move plan for the rest of the game.

If the player wants or needs to change that plan, he may repeat the previous step.

Thanks for the lecture.  I think I already understood how the game worked before your soliloquy.

Removing the transfer penalty removes strategy from the budgeting portion of the game.

If you don't agree with that, fine.  If you don't understand that, then take a few minutes and think about it.,  But don't try to lecture me like I'm a five year old child.

Thanks again.

P.S. Did the stick in your *** hurt on the way in?