Football Mogul's New Difficulty Settings

​The most common way to enjoy Football Mogul is to take control of one team and try to build it into a dynasty. This is the most fun when this task is challenging but not too challenge. This is why Football Mogul was created with a simple 4-level difficulty system:

You can start on 'Fan' level the first time you play. When that gets too easy, you can change the difficulty level in the Options Dialog, or you can start a new game on a higher difficulty level.

There are lots of ways to may the game more difficult. The best option would be to create computer opponents that are smarter than you, but that's not an easy task. So I implemented these difficulty levels by adjusting multiple aspects of the game:

Simulation
Higher difficulty levels reduce the performance of your players and increase the performance of your opponents. The adjustment is only about 3%, but it's enough to make it harder to build a championship team.

Finances
Higher difficulty levels decrease your team's revenue. This doesn't matter much in General Manager Mode, but it is one way that the difficulty level affects the game.

Trades
Computer GMs demand lopsided trades, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example you might put a #1 draft pick on the Trading Block and the best offer you get in return is a 2nd round pick in next year's draft.

Contracts
Players demand a higher salary from your team than from other teams. This includes both free agents and players seeking contract extensions.

The problem with this system is that you, the game player, might not enjoy the different ways the difficulty level is implemented. Maybe you don't mind overly greedy players, but you don't want the computer to actually cheat during game play. Or you hate that the computer teams insult you when you offer perfectly reasonable trades.

For Football Mogul 25, I've split the 'Difficulty' rating into each of it's individual components. You can now use the Options Dialog to set how the game tweaks each of the aspects listed above.

I've also reworked the Trading and Contract AI to be more realistic, to eliminate results like the nonsensical draft pick offer mentioned above. One more small change: I've added numbers from 1 to 4 next to the Difficulty Levels to help avoid any confusion.