ABA financials
 

To get familiar with the new version of the game, I ran a 100 year simulation of the ABA league that is included with OOTP 9. What I noticed is that every team's P&L was in the red every year. It's so bad, that over the 100 years, some teams lost more than a Billion dollars! What's the point of financials if every team simply operates in the red?

Never saw that big a problem. I'll see if I can duplicate and find the problem tomorrow... did you tweak any settings, or just load whatever it is you loaded and went? Not sure what ABA League is... but surely will be able to figure it out.

ABA League is the 1951 fictional quickstart that is packaged with the game.

Tom

Could it have something to do with the park sizes?

Tom

I've played out an ABA league and am currently at the 1969 season. The real big problem I can see is that the attendance numbers can't possibly keep up with the superstar salaries. Right now the superstar quality salary is 1.2 million! While the average park attendance is 12,000 with ticket prices at $2.35.

So out of the 16 teams right now, not a single one has a projected budget that's in the black and some are over 5 million in the red! Without tinkering I can see this league ending up just like the OP's.

Since the QS is set in 1951, financials should not have been on. Whoever decreed that they be turned on for a fifties league - it must have been a person with no sense of baseball history whatsoever - is at fault here.

Just turn the financials off, as they should have been off anyway.

I turned them on. I have a sense of baseball history. If they had been turned off, there would have been complaints.

if you don't change the stadium sizes, and run 100 years into the future, you will have odd financial results.

Some sense! Money was clearly not invented until 1976.

:)

In my case, I'm not talking about 100 years, I'm talking about well, actually right from day 1 and now up to year 19 every team is seriously in debt. Even from year 1 the superstar salaries are in the 400-500k range which seems to kill the budget of most teams, especially when they're only pulling in 1.35 per ticket sale with maybe 8,000 people per game.

The salary range sounds ok, as do the ticket and attendance numbers, though I do not have my spreadsheet with me. The owner is supposed to come up with cash from time to time. Is he?

How does this one work? Does it go through the usual creation, so everytime you start everything is a little different, or is it set in stone and starts the same every time you play?

The first thing I notice is that salaries immediately outrun revenue. Which means every team immediately goes in the red. For instance, only 2 teams started with cash at all, every team started off with a budget equal to their revenue (basically) which doesn't happen in fictional setups... and every team went way over their budget in the first year. Overall teams expenses sum to 47 million, while they only brought in 41 million in revenue.

I'm seeing normal stadium sizes. For example, the Atlanta Rebels have 39,600 capacity. Just how big would they need to be made? :)

Enough to seat Sagan's billions and billions.

Generally, I chopped 8 to 12 thousand off of capacity on each park after they were generated. I would hope that most stadium capacities would grow that much by the mid 1970's.

Is it possible that "editing" all the drafts with the forum members and making sure they were good makes a "talent inflation" that results in an out of whack number of very high salaries?? Just speculating, as I've only tinkered with it a bit. And, BTW, love the work on that league.

It's not pretty. After 4 years no team is good still. The expenses are way over the budgets every year, but the budgets are set right (they roughly equal the revenue). They're mostly sitting at the cash max negative... I'll run this for a while, check up on it after work.

I did not edit talent. All I edited were names, nicknames, place of birth, and in a select few places, the player number.

There were great prospects in the game. I just made sure that they were board members.

Then there must be something out of whack in the financials.txt file. And if that were the case, it should affect all leagues, not just the ABA, since it "looks" to that file every year if the option is selected. This one is weird.

Thanks for answering my question re: ABA league.

If OOTP didn't change the way it looks at financials.txt (and it appears it didn't in reference to era_modifiers.txt and the other .txt files), then there is absolutely something wacky in the financials.txt file. It has no years in it, and it is all on one line.

EDIT: WRONG. It still has the years in it. Just doesn't separate into a new line for each year like it used to. I would think that would matter much less than having no year. It probably looks for the year anywhere in the file than follows the comma separated logic to import numbers so not being separated by lines anymore probably has ZERO affect. It does LOOK strange when you open the new financials. txt file though.

Tysok, if you can, replace the current financials.txt with the one from OOTP8 and see if that helps when you check up on it.