Hi,
I'm thinking of a long career mode building a development team up but wanted to check if I will run into problems/annoyances?
Are Dev teams in continental division treated differently to other continental teams. From what I can see they play the same except their riders start a 1k...but I could see no other differences.
I simulated the first year and saw that the lowest wage I could offer in August is 2.5k ...so I will struggle to renew all my rider contracts.
My budget rose from 20k/month to 22k/ month. New sponsors didn't offer me anything significantly better.
How do new sponsor offers normally look? Will I only get current +10% or 20% or are there times I can get a bigger jump?
Anything else I need to consider/tips before starting this marathon career?
Cheers
The only way to significantly increase your budget over time is switching sponsors every single year, as that will increase the amount of additional money you receive per month, even though it doesn't look like it the first year.
Those new sponsors may initially offer you just the same amount as your old sponsor intends to increase the budget to, but with those sponsors having a higher budget ceiling if you did well, the "satisfaction tiers" next season will have a bigger spread as they are related to the difference between current budget and maximum budget.
With that being said, to improve from 20k/month to anything significant enough to give yourself a shot at promoting to WorldTour (with pretty much the minimum possible amount of riders then) would take well over 10 years, and it would obviously require that you reach maximum sponsor satisfaction every single season.
So yes, you will run into a big problem if you don't want to edit your savegame, and it won't be as much fun in a team without any sponsor identity. And beyond that, you'll pretty much have to rely on scouted talents on long minimum wage contracts as you likely can't afford to keep anyone getting too good.
20k/month is enough for 8 riders on the normal minimum wage. I'd worry a little about injuries, I'd usually recommend 25k/month and 10 riders. And you can get 10 pretty decent riders for that and then the sky's the limit, if you play aggressively. You can check out what I wrote about starting with a 1-star team and immediately replacing you riders with U23 riders or the start of my previous story which also shows you how a team develops quickly, both are about PCM14, but I don't think much has changed:
