How do you do it? The game guide says the easier challenge levels will give you earlier, but smaller score gains, and that difficult challenge levels will give you later, but larger score gains. But a couple of my competitors have already added 10, 11, 12 points to their opening score in just the first couple of weeks.

For comparison, I have shows with fairly high difficulty (out of what's available to me), have been adding/upgrading staff regularly, and I've added 5-6 points to most of my groups' scores. But it's a little disheartening only two weeks into the season to see groups zoom past me and disappear into the horizon.

How is it done? Higher difficulty? Lower? (Side note: what unlocks the higher difficulty levels? Game guide doesn't say.)

What am I missing?

Higher Staff levels open up higher difficulty levels.

Welp, most likely they are at a very low difficulty level with a much higher ranked staff. You probably will see them start to loose those big gains towards the end of the season. The other thing is you might be setting your difficulty too high. I generally don't go past 3/4 of the way in the difficulty spectrum unless I feel like I am going to be on everyday, every time my groups have energy.

My difficulty probably is too high, as I usually set it one below max... but then I am on every day, usually several times per day. Hm. Don't think they could have higher staff than me (younger ensemble, never hosted a show), but maybe.

We'll see if it peters out.

My difficulty has always been set to the max, every season.

I either do the max on all of my groups, or whatever is next to being max. Everything takes into account. I normally jump between 3-8 places from the first show to the last.. but my groups start out "low" and end up strong. It just goes with the strategy you set in the game.. do you want to build for a few seasons by worrying about $ and then staff? Or do you want to start out strong while others build and go from there? They both have their advantages and disadvantages

I always seem to start on top and falter towards midseason before settling in a decent position at the end. Prolly because I always forget to rehearse.

Well, if you're referring at all to my marching band/drum corps groups I can tell you that I don't fundraise or promote during the day when I am awake, make sure I always rehearse my groups as soon as they are above 300 energy so I conserve all of my energy, and fundraise on 60 while I am asleep. Right now I'm about average on the challenge level.

Kinda off topic - What is a good daily score gain (All Div-III if that matters)?

I would say that a good score gain for anybody would be almost a point.

Well I normally rehearse 2 or 3 times a day with all my difficulties maxed. My groups are getting from .3 to .8 a day I think.

It'll all depend on what captions you are rehearsing more. GE captions are a larger portion of your score, so they should get more attention when rehearsing. But if you ignore the other captions, they can weigh you down in the long run.

Yeah the GE and Ensemble captions are the hardest, because you can't just rehearse them individualy, resulting in less of a gain and more in cost.

MarimbaMan: Your Silver Falcon MB is one of the groups that has me puzzled, yes.

"I don't fundraise or promote during the day when I am awake" -- same here
"and fundraise on 60 while I am asleep." -- same here

"Right now I'm about average on the challenge level." -- I'm more on the difficult side.

SibFU has 13 levels and about 5000 influence on the Silver Falcons, and I'm sure higher staff (a combined 127 ranks across 13 staff members). On opening day SibFU was 3.7 points ahead of Silver Falcons. Now SibFU is ~2.0 points behind (a 5.7-point swing in literally only two weeks) and losing ground every day.

My challenge levels are set to 11 for winds and visual, and 10 for percussion and guard. I think my max available this season was 13 and my minimum was 4 or 5?

Intriguing. The only thing I can take out of this right now is that difficulty is badly, badly overrated (indeed, should probably be completely avoided) until you have a TON of influence and can recruit ridiculous performers. Something to experiment with next season, I suppose.

How much do you actually rehearse during the day? As I said, I don't waste any energy points by letting groups sit at 400. Here are my marching band stats as of this current moment: Winds 12,433 Perc 12,125 M Ens 11,577 V Prf 11,172 Guard 7,090 V Ens 11,268 M GE 11,415 V GE 11,576

My challenge levels are set to Winds: 6 Percussion: 5 Guard: 3 Visual: 4

And yes, my staff and influence are definitely a lot lower than that.

For my Guard

Influence 22,908 /Equip 19,499 /Mvmt 19,541 /Ens 26,682 /GE 31,331

Challenge levels at 18 each.

Results in a score north of 90.

Staff is maxed out plus I think 3 of them are level 21.

"How much do you actually rehearse during the day? As I said, I don't waste any energy points by letting groups sit at 400."

Me neither. I try to rehearse several times a day, four at least. I have motivation so I can get a little over 400.

But! I think I've finally hit upon the source.

My stats are lower across the board, all about 10,000 right now. I was out of town for several days the first weekend in January. I guess not being able to rehearse AT ALL those 2-3 days hurt me far more than I realized.

This brings me back to some of my initial concerns with FMA vs. FMB. I'll have to think about some stuff now.

Thanks for helping me narrow it down.

Yeah, I thought that what was good about the original FMB was that it wasn't about spending so much time on the game necessarily as much as really thinking about what you are doing when you submit. Where I think this version has that one beat is the staff members, competitions with tickets, fundraising, influence, etc. But I'm not sure I'm totally a fan of this whole "you basically need to submit every 4 hours to win" thing.

You don't need to play every 4 hours to win. You can play every 3 and be just as well off.

lol but it really comes down to strategy..

Well, here's the basic formula right now:

You get 100 energy per hour, so potentially 2400 per day outside of campaigns.
As you say, you'd have to play every 4 hours to use all of that because the cap is 400 outside of extra director skills.

So...if a general consensus is that people don't want to have to log in as much (not sure how we'd find what a consensus would be), our options would be:

Increase the cap to something higher than 400
Decrease the amount of energy you gain per hour so it doesn't fill up as fast (would require score system reworking)