We have said from the start that the biggest difference between Maximum Football and other football games on the market is that it will include both College Football and Professional Football. When the game launches into Early Access, you will have your first opportunity to get your hands on our College Football mode Dynasty.
In Maximum Football’s Dynasty mode, you will serve your university in two capacities: Coach and Athletic Director. This allows you an unprecedented level of control over decisions on how to take your team to glory. Throughout the years (which there is no limit to how many seasons you can play), your league will evolve.
In this blog, we’re highlighting how Maximum Football will give you the ability to create the college football universe you want to and take your program from the bottom of the barrel to the mountaintop of hoisting a championship trophy.
Dynasty Set-Up
Pick Team
The biggest decision for your dynasty journey will be selecting which team you’d like to take over. Do you want to go for back-to-back championships with an existing powerhouse or take a low-rated team and build them up over time?
From the pick-a-team menu, you can select from the 130 premade teams, or import your own to replace one of them.. When we say that you can make the league you’ve always dreamed of, we mean it. You can replace all 130 teams with ones of your own design if you would like to.
Each team has a few traits you will want to pay attention to in this menu:
- Overall, Offense, and Defense Ratings: These are pretty simple and straightforward. These numbers represent the aggregate skill level of the players that make up the team to start.
- Conference: The conference you participate in will determine the level of competition that you face throughout your conference schedule. More on conferences in the next section.
- Location: Your team’s location will play an important role in recruiting players to come to your program. More on that later in the blog.
- Total Budget: Each school has its own preset starting budget. This budget will be used for hiring your coach, and upgrading your stadium and facilities. Obviously, the higher the budget the more freedom you will have to make these upgrades early on.
Customize Conferences
Next, you can customize your conferences. Move teams around, rename conferences, and upload custom logos for each of the 12 conferences. Each conference is assigned an overall rank based on the aggregate overalls of the teams in the conference. As you move teams around, those overalls will reflect the strength of the new schools being added and removed from the conference.
Each conference also has a rank. You can edit these ranks manually from the set up menu or select an option to automatically assign ranks based on overall of the adjusted conferences.
Maximum Football’s default conference realignment system works using a relegation-promotion system. The bottom two teams in a conference at the end of the season are demoted to the conference that ranks below the one they were in while the top two from the conference will move to the conference that ranks right above the one they competed in the year prior.
Of course, you will also have the option to manually realign conferences at the end of the season, but more on that later.
Pick a Coach
Your coach will define every aspect of your teambuilding and Xs and Os strategy. On this screen, you will see quite a bit of relevant information that will shape your program’s future.
- Coach Level: The coach's level of experience. The higher the coach's level, the higher their cost to hire. However, the increased level also means they will come with better ratings and abilities.
- Offense and Defensive Playbook: These are the offensive and defensive schemes that each coach will have your team adopt. These can be changed once you start your dynasty.
- Overall Record: This is the coach’s career record before being hired by your school.
- Coach Ratings: Scouting, Charisma, Stability, Player Development, Reputation, Consistency of Success
- Cost of Hiring: The one-time cost of hiring your coach. For schools with a lower starting budget, you will have to decide on a cheaper coach that may have lower ratings.
League Settings
On the final set-up screen, you are presented with several additional options for your league. These include:
- Preseason Duration: Choose the number of weeks you would like preseason to last. Each week you will be able to recruit, scout, and upgrade players.
- Regular Season Duration: Choose how many weeks you would like the season to last.
- League Size: Reduce the number of teams competing in your league from the default 130.
- Playoffs Bracket Size: Determine whether you want 4, 16, or 32 teams competing at the end of the season for the championship trophy.
- Quarter Duration: Choose how long each quarter will last.
- Accelerated Clock: This setting causes the play clock to fast forward to a set time after play selection, allowing you to play longer quarters while maintaining a more realistic number of plays each team runs.
- Conference Realignment: Choose how often conferences will relegate and promote teams.
Preseason
Now that your dynasty is set-up, it’s time to turn your sights toward your team. Preseason is the time to assess your players, fill your recruiting board, and take stock of your school’s facilities and stadium. All of these will have a major impact on the growth and success of your program.
Roster Set-Up
The first thing that you should do when you start your dynasty is take a look at your roster. Assess where your team’s strengths and weaknesses lie, redshirt players to keep an extra year of eligibility, set your depth chart and cut players who you don’t see having a role in your program’s future.
Recruiting
Recruiting is the lifeblood of college football. Being able to scout talent and convince them that their best chance at success is at your school is what separates competitive programs from perennial failures. In Maximum Football, our goal is for you to learn about and build relationships with your recruits throughout the season as you pitch for them to come to your school.
Setting up your Recruiting Board
The first step to building your recruiting class is identifying prospects that are interested in your school and match your school’s needs, so that you can add them to your recruiting board. At the start of preseason, all information about recruits besides their name, position, home state, and recruit rank are hidden. You will need to use “Prestige” during recruiting to unlock vital information about recruits and take actions to increase their interest in your program.
The best place to start recruiting is in your school’s home state. Recruits who live closer to your campus are more likely to be interested in attending your school. The first unlock on a recruit will reveal a bevy of useful information that will help you decide if you want to further pursue that player. This info includes their height, weight, interest level, recruit grade, and several different combine results that give key information about their rating potential.
This initial report will also let you see if the recruit has hidden upside.
Continuing to spend Prestige points here will start to reveal the actual ratings of the recruit.
Once you’ve identified talented players with interest in your school, you can add them to your recruiting board.
Building Interest
Each week, you will accrue more Prestige points that can be spent on scouting recruits and building their interest in attending your school. There are multiple ways to interact with your recruits that require varying levels of Prestige investment. The goal in recruiting is to find talented players, identify what is motivating their decision, and make your school seem like the best option for them. Here are the actions you can take each week:
- Contact: Start learning more about your recruit by contacting them. There are three methods of contact, each with their own purpose.
- Email: When you email a recruit, you can choose up to three pitches to either unlock the prospect’s interest level in that area or influence it to become more important to the client.
- Text Message: Text message conversations with your recruit allow you to focus on individual areas of interest and talk more specifically about the parts of your program that might sway your recruits interest. These are low-risk, low-reward ways to steadily build interest over time.
- Call: Calling a prospect allows you to make either a soft or hard pitch for one of the areas of interest. These can be a great way to push your recruits' interest in your school forward. But if you make too hard a pitch before building that relationship, it can have a detrimental effect on your efforts.
- Scholarship: Once your recruit’s interest level increases enough, you can offer your recruit a scholarship to come to your school. This action will also make an impact on your recruit’s interest level.
- Visit: Finally, you can invite your recruit to visit an upcoming game at your school. The success of this visit rests on pitches that you select to give your recruit during his visit and the result of the game he attends.
In-Season
Now that your head coach has been hired, your roster and depth chart tweaked, and your preseason recruiting board set up, it’s time to kickoff the season. Each week you will face a new opponent and try your best to climb the national ranks and win your conference. There are plenty of off-the-field responsibilities you will have to tend to throughout the season.
Recruiting
The bulk of your recruiting responsibilities will take place throughout the season. Each week, you will be given more Prestige points to spend on scouting recruits, pitching your school, and scheduling visits. Each year, you will have 25 scholarships to hand out, so choose who you offer to carefully.
XP
Throughout the season, you will accrue XP in a variety of manners. You will earn XP through your on-field performance week to week and for completing game, season, and career coaching challenges. XP is used to upgrade your players and your coach.
- XP can be used to directly upgrade player stats from the “Improve Players” menu.
- Unlock new coaching skills using XP. There are two main ways to improve your coach through these skill trees.
- Upgrade Coaching: The higher your coaching level the more effective your coach becomes at influencing recruits.
- Skill Areas: The ratings in Maximum Football roll up into 7 main categories: core, passing, rushing, receiving, blocking, defense, and special teams. Upgrading your coach in any of these areas reduces the XP cost of upgrades in that category.
Money
In the same way that your program will accrue XP week to week, your school will earn and spend money each week. You will want to make sure that you are bringing in more money than you are spending in order to have profits to spend on improving your stadium and facilities. Let’s take a look at how you will earn money and how you will spend it.
Income
Your team’s income comes from 7 sources:
- Conference Distribution: Each year, your school will receive a payment from your conference that scales depending on the prestige of your conference.
- Government Support: Each year, every team across the league will get an on time payment from the government to upgrade their school.
- Merchandise: During the game, your team shop will sell items like jerseys, posters, and helmets, all of which you will be able to adjust the price of.
- Food Carts: You can choose to have as many or as few food carts as you’d like to serve your fans. Increasing the number of Food Carts at your stadium will increase the number of orders that can be placed during each game, but adding carts will also increase the upkeep cost for your stadium to run each week.
- Ticket Sales: You control the price of your tickets and each week, you can see how many of your available seats sold. Price your tickets too high and you won’t sell enough tickets. Price them too low and you won’t be able to cover your expenses. Attendance will also fluctuate based on the performance of your team. So if you are 1-5 going into Week 7, you might want to lower the price of tickets.
- Bowl Distribution: If your team reaches a bowl game at the end of the year, they will get a cut of the revenue generated from that event. This increases if you win the bowl.
- Championship Distribution: If you qualify for the post-season playoff, your team will receive a cut of the revenue based on how many rounds you made it through.
Expenses
The expenses that factor into your net income week to week include:
- College Upkeep: This is the cost to maintain your facilities (outside of your stadium). As you upgrade your facilities, the cost of their upkeep will rise.
- Game Expenses: These are the costs accrued by your team for each game they participate in, home or away.
- Merch Store Upkeep: This is the cost of stocking items in your merch store.
- Food Cart Upkeep: The cost of maintaining each food cart.
- Stadium Upkeep: As you upgrade your stadium and attract more fans, more money will be spent on maintaining your stadium. These costs only accrue during weeks with home games.
- Coach and Staff: The cost of paying the salaries of your Coach and additional staff.
Money is important in your Maximum Football dynasty because it allows you to upgrade your stadium, facilities, and coaching staff.
Stadium: There are two ways to upgrade your stadium.
- First, you can build a new stadium that seats more fans, allowing for more ticket revenue.
- Next, you can upgrade the tier of your stadium. Doing this will add new amenities to your stadium for fans to enjoy. Things like expanded parking, larger scoreboards, and upgraded wi-fi will make the fan experience better. This increases the amount of money your fans will spend at your stadium each week but also increases the cost of upkeep.
Facilities: Similar to how coaches can be upgraded through XP to impact player progression, you can use money to upgrade your facilities to the same effect. Upgrade facilities for core, passing, rushing, receiving, blocking, defense, and special teams to lower the XP cost of upgrading your player’s stats in these areas. Upgrading these facilities also dynamically changes the facility grade for your program in recruiting.
Weekly Match-Up
Funny to think that we are 2,500 words into this blog and just now starting to talk about on-the-field play, but that’s just a testament to the level of depth and control you have in your Dynasty.
Each week, you will take on a different opponent to try to climb the ranks to college football glory, and even with this, you have full control over! You have several options for playing your game each week.
- Play: You can play the game outright. Take control of your team and lead them to victory.
- Spectate: Want to sit back and watch the fruits of your labor? Spectate the game to watch the CPU play the CPU. Note: You can also spectate any playoff, bowl or championship games - even when your own team isn’t involved.
- Simulate: Skip the game entirely and let Maximum Football’s sim engine decide the winner.
In this menu, you can also choose to allow the CPU to apply earned XP and handle any unspent recruiting points. In the “Coaching Info” menu, you can change the recruitment priorities for the simulation choosing to prioritize high ranking prospects, filling team needs, and going after local prospects.
Bowl Season
At the end of each season, if you’ve put together a successful regular season campaign, you will find yourself in your conference championship taking on the other top team in your conference. Qualifying for this game isn’t just about bragging rights. The top two teams in the conference will receive a chunk of revenue generated from the game with the winner receiving even more.
If your team is good enough to make it to the College Football Championship Tournament at the end of the year, you will be seeded based on your end of year ranking and take on a wave of competition to compete for the trophy. For every round you advance, your team will earn additional revenue, with a championship obviously resulting in the largest amount. This is also a great time to continue to earn XP towards player and coach progression as you compete while most other teams are watching from home.
If you missed out on a chance to compete in the tournament, your team could still qualify to compete in a bowl. These bowl games are also fully customizable! Rename the bowl and upload your own logo to replace the logos that exist in the game to create your own Bowl Season.
Off-Season
Once the postseason wraps up, you will have a few tasks to take care of prior to starting your next season.
High School All-Star Game
You’ve spent the entire year trying to convince the top high school athletes in the country to attend your school. Now, you can see them in action for the first time before they arrive on campus in the High School All-Star Game. You can either play the game outright or spectate and watch how the incoming class competes on the field.
Conference Realignment
Depending on how frequently you have set conference realignment, you will be able to view the promotion and relegation of teams around the country.
Play Drills
Each offseason, you will have the opportunity to complete a series of drills. Completing these drills will earn you additional XP that can be applied to your coach or used to upgrade your players.
More to Come
Phew. That’s a lot of details! And there is certainly more to discover when you get your hands on Dynasty later this year. We can’t wait to see the leagues, teams, players, and storylines you create when you play Maximum Football’s Dynasty Mode. This mode, as with everything else in Maximum Football, will grow and evolve through early access and beyond.
Do you have questions about Dynasty Mode or want to connect with our community to see the College football universes that they create? Join our Discord to talk with the devs, see community team creations, and offer feedback and suggestions about the game.