Accurate Historical Setup

[murphbot1204]

I'm looking at doing a Historical Career starting in 2014 with the Boston Red Sox, but when I'm not sure about any of the pre-game settings. I'd like everything to be relatively accurate, including the development of players through the minor leagues (I just went through a previous game, and all drafted players were immediately 4-5 star CA. All settings were left alone when I set this game up.)

What settings do people change to make career play as accurate as possible?

[Brad K]

OOTP is married to randomness and playing as GM (and with AI GMs making different decisions than historical) means the best you can hope for is a plausible alternative reality.

Your max chance of accuracy, although not guaranteed due to OOTP's randomness, is to set ratings for single season play and use historical lineups and transactions. Your role then becomes watching.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by murphbot1204

I'm looking at doing a Historical Career starting in 2014 with the Boston Red Sox, but when I'm not sure about any of the pre-game settings. I'd like everything to be relatively accurate, including the development of players through the minor leagues (I just went through a previous game, and all drafted players were immediately 4-5 star CA. All settings were left alone when I set this game up.)

What settings do people change to make career play as accurate as possible?

1-year recap is where you need to start. That will give you as accurate ratings and statistical output as the game offers.

From there, it is up to you but remember every change you make is a small step away from the historical toward the fictional.

So I think you'll find that the absolute maximum verisimilitude comes with:

• 1-year recalc ON
• historical lineups ON
• historical transactions ON
• miss seasons according to history ON
• retire according to history ON
• TCR set as low as possible, IE 1

and everything else at default, with the historical season LTM applied.

Minors are problematic in a realist context. As soon as you introduce historical minors, pretty much all bets are off with regard to IRL alignment. Think it through, the only guys who come into the equation re the MLB level still come into the game without minors on, in their rookie MLB season. So for the rest it is purely, as my good friend Bradley pointed out, an exercise in randomness.

Sure, you miss out on the development career phase of the guys who feature in the game, but what 1-year recalc does is tie them to the flagpole of their historical performance in each given age season, so their talent always stays closely aligned to that historical level.

In other words, with all of these settings on, Big Papi should go close to replicating his 2014 performance and so on and so forth.

Hope that helps, if not, keep asking questions and we'll try get you where you need to be.

G

[thehef]

Great stuff above. A couple of comments...

Originally Posted by luckymann

• 1-year recalc ON
• historical lineups ON
• historical transactions ON
• miss seasons according to history ON
• retire according to history ON
  
• TCR set as low as possible, IE 1

and everything else at default, with the historical season LTM applied.

All of that ^ except, as an alternative: Instead of TCR set to 1 (which is totally fine, btw), disable Player Development, which will turn off TCR (essentially setting it to zero).

Originally Posted by luckymann

Minors are problematic in a realist context. As soon as you introduce historical minors, pretty much all bets are off with regard to IRL alignment. Think it through, the only guys who come into the equation re the MLB level still come into the game without minors on, in their rookie MLB season. So for the rest it is purely, as my good friend Bradley pointed out, an exercise in randomness.

OOTP doesn't recommend historical transactions enabled along with historical minors. Why this is hasn't really been explained. My hunch is that it's because a) there are few bugs that occasionally pop up that they haven't been able to find (I think these have mostly - perhaps entirely? - been fixed), and 2) the general idea that historical txns apply to major league players, but there is no "complete enough" historical transactions database for minor leaguers within OOTP or anywhere else - and this can be confusing to gamers. However, what's important to note is that historical transactions for minor league players generally apply to players who eventually make the major leagues. For example, if you were starting a game in the early 1960's, Reggie Smith would correctly import to the Twins' organization for 1963, then would move the Red Sox' org for 1964, would go to the Cards' org for 1974, and so forth... No problem. However, for career minor leaguers (guys who never made the majors) - and for guys who may have bounced around to/from some independent minor league teams before reaching the majors - their minor league career-transaction arc in OOTP will essentially be random; they'll very likely import to their historically correct minor league team, but from that point they will move from organization to organization based upon the whims of OOTP AI (and I think many of them will bounce around primarily on independent/unaffiliated teams).

That lengthy blathering shouldn't discourage you from using historical transactions with historical minors, though. The purpose of it is to indicate that it should work pretty well for you!

Good luck!

[Brad K]

To me, this phrase from the original post "I'm looking at doing a Historical Career starting in 2014 with the Boston Red Sox" means he wants to play GM or manager or both of the Red Sox. If so then the advice on historical lineups etc doesn't work for him because it turns him into an observer.

I don't know what historical accuracy means in the context of a save with a human GM and AI GMs making non historical decisions. It seems to me in such a situation the best outcome is plausible alternate history.

[thehef]

Originally Posted by Brad K

To me, this phrase from the original post "I'm looking at doing a Historical Career starting in 2014 with the Boston Red Sox" means he wants to play GM or manager or both of the Red Sox. If so then the advice on historical lineups etc doesn't work for him because it turns him into an observer.

I don't know what historical accuracy means in the context of a save with a human GM and AI GMs making non historical decisions. It seems to me in such a situation the best outcome is plausible alternate history.

Pretty much. The way I see it, the only thing left - other than observe - for the gamer to do in that scenario is to make the in-game substitutions (and/or fill out the depth charts and bullpen roles so OOTP AI's somewhat follows those).

I use historical lineups for one thing and one thing only: Testing historical accuracy. But not for actually playing the game for fun.

[luckymann]

Yes, Hef, I do believe you've correctly corrected me on this before. And thanks for doing so again here. I always leave dev on and keep forgetting it is an optional thing that can be turned off.

I agree with what Brad is saying re the OP (who, given their handle and lack of response, might turn out to be a very polite bot?), but wanted to give them the basis for full realism to be used as a base so they know what can be turned up / off if they want more involvement.

G

[murphbot1204]

Apologies for the lack of response, I've been away playing actual baseball for the last few days.

To give a bit more detail, I'd like to do a Career as the BM of the Red Sox, starting from 2014, mostly to see what I could do differently than the actual Red Sox leadership of the time. I did start a save, using OOTP's default settings, but when I got to that year's draft, all of the top players were already at their max CA, rather than being like actual draft picks. Hence asking if there were any settings I could change to be able to make this somewhat more realistic

[Brad K]

If you don't use full minors a player is in the draft for the first year he played MLB. If you use full minors players enter the draft for their first year in professional baseball.

[luckymann]

Originally Posted by murphbot1204

Apologies for the lack of response, I've been away playing actual baseball for the last few days.

To give a bit more detail, I'd like to do a Career as the BM of the Red Sox, starting from 2014, mostly to see what I could do differently than the actual Red Sox leadership of the time. I did start a save, using OOTP's default settings, but when I got to that year's draft, all of the top players were already at their max CA, rather than being like actual draft picks. Hence asking if there were any settings I could change to be able to make this somewhat more realistic

OK, then you just need to restart with Historical Minors ON. Then you get players at the age they entered the system, not the age they entered the majors.

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by murphbot1204

Apologies for the lack of response, I've been away playing actual baseball for the last few days.

To give a bit more detail, I'd like to do a Career as the BM of the Red Sox, starting from 2014, mostly to see what I could do differently than the actual Red Sox leadership of the time. I did start a save, using OOTP's default settings, but when I got to that year's draft, all of the top players were already at their max CA, rather than being like actual draft picks. Hence asking if there were any settings I could change to be able to make this somewhat more realistic

There is a bug being addressed with historical Minor League pitchers in Career Play that results in them coming in very developed. The bug does not seem to exist in Single Season Historical games, just Career ones (in the Step 1 set-up stage of the Wizard). I expect it will be addressed in the next patch.