Guide to Deleting Minor Leagues.

[sprague]

I love the MLQS but I just don't like having to deal with 6 minor leagues (of mostly 1* filler players) and the slowed sim speed that makes. In my fictional worlds I only have 3 even 2 minor leagues.
That means getting rid of minors in the MLQS

I have been doing this for a long time, thought some others may like to as well, but may not know a good method. Here is the one I use.

The problem is that you just can't go and start deleting minor leagues, as that will send all of the players on those teams into the free agent pool- and we want to reduce the number of minor leagues and teams, we still want all of a team's best prospects to be within their system.

So here is the method. If you follow along it should all work well. Expect to make a few errors the first time- Ie delete a league but forget a team or what not- if so just call up a new game and start again.
If I say something that is unclear, just ask, and I will go back here and try to say something more clear.


REMOVING TEAMS AND PLAYERS
Call up a fresh MLQS

I like to play with a world with 3 minor leagues AAA AA A. So this is what I do.

First I don't like having two separate leagues for each of these, so I combine them into 1 league, with 2 subleagues. IE AAA is one league, with a International League and a PCL subleagues.

Here in the league screen for the IL I set up a second subleague (with whatever divisions you want), then go to the PCL and move all the teams to the new subleague and divisions you want. There will now be no teams in the game PCL so it can be deleted. I do this for the AA and A leagues as well, just to cut it down to 3 world leagues, and help with the next step.
AA and A can be tricky as their are 3 leagues that have to be squeezed into 2. I just divide the 30 teams into 14 and 16 leagues but that is for you to determine.
Note- know which level of A you want. The game tends to like the low level minors above the high level minors in its ranking importance, so keep that in mind with the next steps.
Also don't forget to make new schedules for these new 2 subleague leagues! Click the generate schedule button, or you can import (in many cases) the specific schedlue for each subleague- if the league and divisions are in tact.

Now we need to make sure all the players start in the organization. So in the rules page for each of the 3 new AAA AA A leagues, give them a roster limit of 50. (for the low A league make it 15, just to be sure the game doesn't load players onto a team you don't want them on)
Now we need the AI to move the rosters. Sometimes "run computer manager on all teams works" sometimes I doesn't. What you want are all teams with 50 players on AAA 50 on AA hopefully 50 in the A (one to keep) and 15 or less on the one you don't. SA and R teams should be empty.
If the computer manager didn't work, as I find it tends not to, go into each ML team's transaction screen and click on the action "manage AI minor league rosters" or something like that. It only takes a couple of minutes.

What this now means is there are no players on the SA or R leagues. Each of these can now be deleted.
That could leave a few players left on the low level A league. Take a quick look through each team when you "run minor league rosters" and see if a 3 or 4 star player is stuck on a team you don't want them to be. Just move them to one of the higher minor league teams for a worse player you drop to the low level.
With that done you can then delete your low level A league as well

NOTE- Don't forget before deleting a league to check if there are good prospects on the DL, for the stay with that team (ie Rookie) when everyone else moves. If they players or 1 or even 2 star i never care, but of they are 3 or above, then they have to be moved to a higher team for safety.

OK so now we have a league with only 3 minor league teams, but ALOT of players.

Go back to the rules for AAA AA A and reset the rosters limits to 25 25 35 for example. run the computer manager, or go into each team "manage minor league roster" click. and voilla. We have 3 minor leagues, and only a team's best prospects and possible major leaguers left.

That now leave a MASS of crappy players in the free agent pool. We need to get rid of those. Click on a mass select of all free agents, then unclick the say 40-50 you might still want major league teams to bid on to start the year. Then delete the rest. Some 1200 crap minor leaguers have just disappeared.


COACHES
Somewhere along the steps above you have to think about the available personel. Because you will be winding up with 120 managers, hitting and pitching coaches on the league deletes.
You can just mass delete them all, but then you will need to recreate a few to have teams to replace retiring staff or fired staff.
I take what the game gives at the start of available coaches, move a few to AA or A that I really want in the game. Then mass delete the rest.
After the R and SA league deletes, I mass delete the coaches again.
When the low A league is deleted, I delete about 10 more of each, to leave around 20 managers, coaches. I then make 4 GM, Scout and trainers to have some free for choice.


RETIRED and EXPORT-IMPORT
If you also want to up your sim speed, you can mass delete all the retired players, if you don't need to have their stats and history floating around in your league.
I also don't want any history in the my league as well (just history for the game's current players). So after I delete the retired players, I save an "export stats" file in the game screen
I then "erase league history"
The import "stats file" which brings back the stats for all the players still currently in the game, so they have peronal history, but teams and seasons are not filled with extra data.

Another thing you can do at this stage (save the game first now as a template and qs) but you can also run the purge tool, which will get rid of all the deleted players, coaches from the DB.



I think that covers it. A MLQS with 3 minor leagues, no history- but personal stats for all current players in the game. I find it much easier to keep track of, and the game sims MUCH FASTER as I tend to sim a month at a time.

Suggestion then to go and change the draft rounds in your draft, as their is no longer 6 teams worth to fill but 3. I change it to 20 rounds to keep a good number of players but no longer overload my now lowest A league team.

Don't forget to now save this new game as a quickstart, then I also save it as a world template as a backup just in case so I don't have to do all this work again.


I think that is it. Can't think of anything I missed. Please ask away if something in this is unclear.
But it really makes the MLQS more enjoyable for me, it might for you as well