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WELCOME
Welcome to Football Mogul.
If you already know how to play, you can close this window by clicking the
'x' in the upper right corner. These "help pages" are available
from inside Football Mogul using the Help Menu.
STARTING THE GAME
1. To start a game of
Football Mogul, click the 'Start a New Game' button in the Football Mogul
startup screen.
2. In the New Game Dialog, select your difficulty level. Fan
is easiest and is recommended for new players. (Coach is moderately
challenging, Manager is tough, and Mogul is most difficult).
3. Select your city and
enter your team name at the top. Then, add your name. This will be the name
shown in the Mogul Hall Of
Fame if your score qualifies.
Hit the 'Play' button, and
the first season schedule will set up.
PLAYING THE GAME
1. Use the menus to make
changes to your team before playing your first game. The Team Menu accesses your Offense,
Defense and Special
Teams.
If
scanning your team information shows it to be weak in a particular
area, you can look to add a team by signing a Free Agent or by arranging a Trade.
If your team is near or exceeding the salary cap, you may need to release
some players before you sign others.
2. If you wish, you can create new plays (or alter existing plays) by
choosing "Playbook..." on the Team Menu. You can also do this in the
middle of a season, or save and load groups of plays into an offensive or
defensive "Playbook" file.
3. Once you've prepared
your team, you can play a game, or a series of games using the 'Play' menu.
This allows you to run a week, a month, half a season, or even a whole
season of games in just a few minutes.
Alternatively, the context
bar along the bottom of the screen can be used to navigate through the
season, playoffs and offseason by selecting a game or phase to proceed to
by clicking on it.
Before a game involving your
team, Matchup Screen will show each team’s relative strengths and
weaknesses.
4. After playing a game or
games, use the News Screens to check game results. Each of the news screens
gives different information about your team and others in both conference:
- The
Calendar Screen shows all played games for
any one team.
- The
Games Screen shows details for any one played
game.
- The
Finances Screen shows financial stats for
all teams in one conference.
5. After viewing the
results of played games, readjust your team through the menus, and play
another game, set of games, or entire season.
Repeat steps 1 through 5 as
much as you want, using the Mogul Hall Of Fame on occasion to check your Mogul Rating.
Contract
Negotiation
At the end of each season,
the contracts of certain players on your team will expire. You can notice
these players easily at the end of the season because their names are shown
in parentheses on the Offense, Defense and Special
Teams dialogs. You can renegotiate with any player on your own team (by
pressing the 'Negotiate' button in the Scouting
Report), but you should focus on these players who are in the final
year of their contract.
If you are close to the
salary cap at the end of the season, you may have trouble keeping players
whose contracts are expiring. For this reason, after you are eliminated (or
the season ends) you should clear space from under your salary cap by
releasing players you don't need, and negotiating new contracts with
players you wish to keep. You can use the Finances
Page on the News Menu to determine where
your total payroll stands in relation to the Salary Cap.
The "Sortable Stats" dialog (on the Players Menu)
will also show your team's current salary cap status. To clear payroll, you
can use the Team and Player
menus to:
1. Find players (shown in
parentheses) with expiring contracts
2. Release these until
below cap (click 'Finances' to view the finances
page)
3. Negotiate with other
players in parentheses using 'Negotiate' button in scouting.
One method to insure you
don't lose any players because of the salary cap is to sign a new contract
with every player you'd like to keep before choosing to 'Start New Season'.
The only players left with expiring contracts will be players you've
already decided not to retain.
College Draft
Before each new season, a College Draft is held. The team with the worst record
in the previous year gets the first pick in each round. The World Champion
gets the last pick. The College Draft lasts seven rounds. You can make all
your team's draft picks personally, or you have the computer finish the
remaining draft rounds for your team by going to the Play Menu.
Continuing in this way,
negotiating player salaries, scouting the free agent list, and drafting
players each year that fit your needs, you can play Football Mogul into the
next century, and beyond.
ADVANCED FEATURES
Running a Game with More
than One Player
Football Mogul has new
features to help you run a league with more than one human-controlled team.
All Football Mogul games start as a single person game. To add more
players, go to the League Editor and click
on the radio button opposite the one labeled "Computer". Then type
the player's name in the empty edit box.
Running A Draft League
One way to run a league is
to let every player involved take turns choosing which players they wish to
have on their team. There are a number of ways of
deciding which players end up on which teams. You may wish to let everyone
take turns picking players, or auction every player with every player
starting with the same number of "draft dollars". You can use the
ROSTERS.TXT file in Football Mogul's INPUT directory to show all players in
the database. And you can use the Print functions to create files or
printouts showing player's recent stats.
Once you have decided which
players start on which teams, edit the ROSTERS.TXT file until each team's
list of players is correct. Then run Football Mogul and select "Roster
File" from the New Game screen. If you wish to put every team on an
equal financial footing, you should also check the "Equalize
Cities" check box.
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