We introduce the family of limited model information control design methods, which construct controllers by accessing the plant’s model in a constrained way, according to a given design graph. This class generalizes the notion of communication-less control design methods recently introduced by one of the authors, which construct each sub-controller using only local plant model information. We study the tradeoff between the amount of model information exploited by a control design method and the quality of controllers it can produce. In particular, we quantify the benefit (in terms of the competitive ratio and domination metrics) of giving the control designer access to the global interconnection structure of the plant-to-be-controlled, in addition to local model information.