Quote:
Originally Posted by Coltrane
What are the advantages of historical over fictional? I understand that the initial draft will be full of fictional players but I'm ok with that.
And yes, I will be going with random debut.
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If you're going fictional, David Watts is definitely your man. I can help out if you choose to go historical and get stuck.
If you go historical and start in 1901, you'll get 704 random historical players (16 teams * 44 players) per team to start. Sometimes you get big time players who are in the decline phase of their career. E.g. I got Babe Ruth as a 34 year old in my inaugural draft. It sucks, but sometimes that's the way she goes.
Also, both David Watts and I use recalc and the player development system together, at least I think so. David may have switched to player development only (memory sucks right now). I do this because I like players to be somewhat close to what they were in real life, but using the player development system insures that whenever the recalc numbers run out for the player, he's at the mercy of the player development system. I use 3-year with double weight on the current year, which means the numbers will focus 25% on the previous year, 50% on the current year, and 25% on the year after that.
To explain this let's say "Sweet" Lou Whitaker is entering his age 20 season (his RL 1978 season). Recalc would weight his 1977 season at 25%, his 1978 season at 50%, and his 1979 season at 25% and combine it all together. You can choose one year, three year, or five year recalc, and to double weight or not to double weight, or you could turn off recalc all together and just go with the player development system.
I use the default settings for the player development system (batter aging speed = 1.000, batter development speed = 1.000, pitcher aging speed = 1.000, pitcher development speed = 1.000, talent change randomness = 100), but you could also fiddle around with it until you find what suits you. The reason I use both recalc and development together is because you can't tell the game to retire the players when they retired because they're most likely playing in different eras than they actually played in. I've heard that without development being switched on recalc will just repeat the last year over and over again, and players won't change off of that last year.
As David Watts mentioned, I use 1984 as my league stats output, which means there were more HR and R/G than were hit/scored in the deadball era as I went through it. It should flatten out the 1930s and the steroid era though, so I'm happy with that. Every year is based off of those outputs. That year, teams scored an average of 4.26 runs/game with a .260/.323/.385/.708 slash line, so my season totals come in somewhat close to that.
I'm a Neutralized Stats nut, so I love to have all the guys that come into my game play under the same conditions, and see who comes out on top. I even neutralize park effects and take out weather effects. I'm weird, what can I say? I therefore uncheck the box that says "adjust league totals modifiers for accuracy", and every year on the day before opening day, I enter "1984" in the "Totals from year" box. Remember that there are two checkboxes for league totals modifiers and I uncheck both of them. One is on the "Stats & AI" page, the other is on the "Historical" page in Game Settings > League Settings.
I also uncheck the "auto-adjust league strategy when advancing to next season" box, so that my strategy settings remain 1984ish, with the exception of using "Strict Rotation, occasionally highest rested", and I use 6 relievers in both a DH and non-DH league (I set AL to DH and NL to no DH, because I don't want to see guys who were great hitters but didn't see much real-life time in the field ride the pine). There are also two league strategy boxes on the same pages as the league totals modifiers boxes and I leave them unchecked.
I do check the "Import adjusted financial settings after each year" box, and yet I seem to have to import said settings every year anyway. Weird. I'm still on OOTP16 though, so maybe it's changed. David Watts can speak to that because he's used OOTP17 much more than me.
That's all I can think of for now (and it's a lot to be dumping on you at once), but if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. I'm sure one of us will be able to get to you. Cheers.