Multiplayer questions

[The Dr]

I have the original FOF and one of the EA releases but have not touched the games for a few years (funny how starting a family "redistributes" your time!) Some coworkers and I play in a FFL together and we were moaning about the fact that the NFL season is almost done. I mentioned how FOF provided me with many, many hours (and late nights) of enjoyment and told them all about the game. My curiousity was high, so I Googled "Front Office Football" and discovered, to my suprise, this forum which I joined years ago! Its great to see things are still active!

I have a few quick questions re multiplayer mode in FOF2004:

1) Can a league have 3 or 4 "real" managers and have the rest controlled by computer?

2) If #1 is "yes", what are the PC hardware requirements for the commish? Does it increase due to the "extra work"?

I've searched through the "Sticky" post at the top and read the FAQs here and at Jim's site but have not found the answers to those questions. Thanks in advance!

[QuikSand]

Hello "The," If I may call you that,

Short answers are "Yes" and "Modest" in that order. Running the game (or even a MP league) doesn't seem too taxing on a computer system at all.

I'm sure some MP commissioners here can help you out more than I, but I think you might be in good shape.

[gstelmack]

Originally Posted by The Dr

1) Can a league have 3 or 4 "real" managers and have the rest controlled by computer?

Most definitely. My office league has 7 human managers and the rest AI. Only real issue we've run into is that the AI won't respond to trades, so we've had to take a sort of committee approach, where if a GM wants to make a trade with the AI they submit it to everyone else for approval, and the other GMs decide if they'd take that trade if they were the AI GM. We've got a good group, so everyone does a pretty good job of being honest about this (and it helps that someday you might be submitting a trade to everyone else, that keeps everyone fair). Everything else just works. You can even switch a human team over to AI and back as needed, for vacations, or people leaving the league, or any other temporary emergency.

Originally Posted by The Dr

2) If #1 is "yes", what are the PC hardware requirements for the commish? Does it increase due to the "extra work"?

There isn't really any "extra" work per-se, and it doesn't take very long to run a stage (no longer than it does in SP as far as I can tell). Exporting can take a short bit as it copies big files around, but nothing too outrageous. I don't think it's ever taken the computer more than a minute or so to do everything, and that's usually when I've got a build running on the same box. Biggest issue is that in MP you want to save box scores and log files for every team in the league, so the disk space requirements are often higher for an MP league than a lot of typical SP leagues. But any reasonable PC should have no trouble here.

[The Dr]

Thanks for the responses! With the NFL a month away from its mid-winter nap and the NHL no longer on the radar I need some sort of sports fix.