From the Devs
The
Franchise Hockey Manager series returns for the 2020-21 season with plenty of new additions to the deepest, most authentic hockey strategy gaming experience you can find.
Choose one of dozens of leagues around the world and select a team to guide to glory, including a chance at the ultimate prize: FHM7 is licensed by the NHL®, allowing you to take the reins of your favorite franchise to capture the Stanley Cup®. Take control of a national team and try for international supremacy. Choose a historical game, where you can begin in any year in NHL® history right back to the beginning in 1917. Or if you'd like to create your own customized league, you can do that as well!
However you choose to play, you have control of your team and can oversee finances, select strategies, hire your staff, make trades, sign free agents, and draft the newest generation of stars as you try to build a championship team - and then make it into a dynasty!
FHM7: Live Every Moment.
All new for Franchise Hockey Manager 7:
- 2D Game Engine: Our game simulation has been rebuilt from the ground up, and now shows games in a top-down, fully-animated view that lets you see every second of the action!
- Historical International Tournaments: International games have been added to historical play, so you can control a team in legendary events like the 1972 Summit Series and the Miracle on Ice in 1980. We've also added a large number of non-NHL players to the historical database, so if you want to see what the cold war-era NHL would've looked like with the stars of the Soviet bloc added, that's now possible.
- More Customization for Custom Leagues: We've made the custom league setup much more flexible - you can now add as many leagues as you want, all of them fully customizable. The playoff editor also has a new custom configuration option in addition to the pre-set default systems.
- Redesigned Scouting System: The scouting interface has been simplified and made a little more visually appealing with the addition of maps showing the coverage your team (and individual scouts) have. Scouting reports have also been changed to provide more useful and relevant information, and Scouting Levels now include an estimate of the player's likelihood of reaching his potential.
- Reworked Draft Screen: Mock drafts, a draft review, and scout recommendations have been added. Additionally, we've moved the draft dates in modern and custom games - they now occur in early July, as they do in historical, which allows expansion teams to participate in them during their first season.
- Configurable Historical Evolution: When when you opt to turn on historical editing, you can now specify if you want changes like league foundings/closures, team expansion and deactivation, and rule changes to continue as they did historically or not, in any configuration you want.
- More Farm Team Control: If you want more control over your farm team, you can now have direct control over their depth charts and staff hiring.
- Schedule Editing: A long-requested feature, schedules can now be exported for editing, and then re-imported.
- Waiver and Intraleague Drafts: The beloved Waiver Draft has been added to historical play in the years it existed, along with its predecessor, the Intraleague Draft. Additionally, both are also available as options that can be activated for any other type of league.
And that's only the beginning! Other significant changes and additions include:
- Reworked the news screen to show more headlines and flag personal messages and those which need a reply.
- Real-life full-career stats are now included on the player screens in historical mode, so you can see if a player is matching his real performance...or cheat a little, if you want to see how a potential draft pick really turns out.
- A team search tab has been added to the player and staff search.
- Various international upgrades: national teams run by the user no longer clear rosters after tournaments end, so you don't need to rebuild them, international staff histories are now recorded, and we've made various UI improvements and fixes to get the international screens working a little better.
- The continue button now alerts to you to upcoming events like drafts and trade deadlines.
- Database improvements like significantly expanded international stats histories for players, award histories for most leagues, and more
- The success of a national team now has an effect on the quality of new players generated by that country.
- Players can now be designated as Untouchable if you don't want to get trade offers for them, and players on other teams can be flagged as "Not Interested" if you don't want them to be included in trade offers to you.
- The Aging attribute had been split into Aging and a new attribute, Development Rate to make our modelling of player career arcs more flexible.
- Roster AI has received a number of adjustments, mainly in the area of how the AI determines player value; most of these are designed to take advantage of systems (line chemistry, etc.) that didn't exist when the last major roster AI revision was done. AI teams' free agent-signing behaviour has also been improved.
- The player search screen's filter now allows minimum ratings scores to be included in the filter criteria.-We've made some database and player generation changes to significantly reduce the memory usage of long-term leagues, allowing much better long-term game performance for users with limited RAM.
- Many new things are editable on the player, team, and league screens - contract settings, favourites, foreign player restrictions, among others.
- Boxscores can now be exported as csv files.
- The later years of historical player data got a lot of re-work, fixing some inaccuracies and significantly adding to the number of post-2010 players who haven't made the NHL yet
In addition to all of that, there are the usual large variety of smaller and internal changes, tweaks, database changes, interface improvements, and the 20-21 team and player updates!
