OOTP 4 -> OOTP 22 -- tips?

[church]

Any tips for someone whose last significant experience with OOTP was version 4?

[AdequateRandomGaming]

Originally Posted by church

Any tips for someone whose last significant experience with OOTP was version 4?

Start small and with something you're familiar with (could be a specific team, or era, or both). Start with the knowledge the first save you will create will not be your last - use it as a testing grounds of sort to see what all the features do. Don't be afraid to turn things off/on, or to assign certain things to your AM as you learn from basically the ground up. You can literally tinker the experience to your liking in almost any way you can come up with.

Knowing what your focus for playing would be also would help with being more specific (do you want to play modern day ? historical ? fictional ? etc.)

[Sweed]

OOTP4 was my first version

Assuming you are going to play a MLB modern game I think it will all depend on your knowledge of roster rules. Baseball is baseball and you will quickly adjust to how the game is played with modern settings. IE starters going fewer innings etc.

The biggest difference in playing\simming your day to day games will be the plethora of options you have to control strategy (especially important if you sim) from individual players to how the team plays in different situations. This will mean exploring all of the options menus which, I think, will seem a deep dive. If you play out your games this becomes almost unnecessary as you will be making decisions in the moment.

Minor leagues can be handed off to the AI or you can have as much control as you like. I control promotions\demotions and let my managers set lineups
rotations. There is the ability to lock players to levels if you want the AI to handle most of it and also the ability to force players to start at a position of your choice. Again it will come down to exploring the menus and settings to get to what works for you.

Roster rules will be a deep dive and the more you already know about how things have been over the years since free agency came to be the easier it will be for you in your OOTP world.

There's an ability to setup "feeder leagues" to create players for your draft. I used to use these but would now recommend using OOTP's default drafts. They work just as well as feeders, if not better, at giving you realistic draft pools. The players in these drafts have stats and schools that are rated for their level of competition. The school names are real down to thousands of US high schools.

If it were me I'd go through the game setup menus thoroughly. Take a bit of time on each page. Seeing all of the options will seem daunting at first, there are a lot of them. If you can think of something you want some control over it's probably there be it schedules, finances, stat output, player development, scouting accuracy, DH-No DH, etc. etc. etc. It's pretty organized but, even after playing for years, you may find yourself searching through them to find the setting you want to change

I have to wonder with the long time away if you've come back to OOTP because you retired and have time to play? If that's the case and you are not hurried by work and real life I'll double down on my advice to take your time in the beginning to go through the menus and options. I'm sure some find that to be "dry as dust" where I find it quite interesting and impressive.

One more thing that might throw you off is managers can lock you out of decision making if they are controlling. Or they may let you make some decisions while keeping others for them selves. This can be overridden in the
game settings options. It's on the first "Global Settings" tab, bottom of left column. "GM's are always in control of lineups and hiring. (Legacy mode). So, if you want to be able to override your manager and have the total control you had in v4 you will need to check this option.

Hope this is of some help. Enjoy your journey

[Pelican]

Retirement is the key. Or having virtually unlimited time. You won't run out of things to do in the game, that's for sure. And it's surprising how creative you can be, setting up new leagues, designing stadiums and uniforms and logos (or downloading the wonderful efforts of others), devising strategy, fussing with finances, trades and free agent signings, player development. It is daunting to have the vast range of options; but as Sweed says above, take things one at a time, ideally starting with Spring Training. Most settings can be adjusted over time, particularly in Commissioner mode; but I would take care for those (like league structure and schedule) that are locked in after preseason. When I started, with OOTP 21, I took the advice of veterans, and chose a season I knew well, jumped in, learned as I went along. I have found that success requires a mix of fundamental baseball knowledge, a grasp of metrics and stats and scouting, and some management sense - both on field and as GM trying to find the right players and keep them happy and healthy. And of course it helps to have some insight into how the game itself functions, at the same time resisting the urge to "hack" your way to contrived results by overriding the AI engine. After thousands of games, still very much a work in progress for me. I am particularly grateful for a community of people who are very generous with their time, and developers who pay attention and come up with bug fixes and patches. I have learned a tremendous amount of useful stuff on these message boards.