Hello everyone!
I am the author of
this thiread over in the Historical/Fictional Simulations forum, and after a few people expressed interest in a Quickstart i've made one.
For those unfamiliar, back during the initial months of Covid in 2020 my wife gave birth, and there were complications to both - wife was okay in a few weeks but the newborn spat up everything she ate for about six months. That meant I got overnight duty.
During that time I came up with an idea for a fictional league that would mirror the development of the
National Association of Base Ball Players, starting in 1857, then move on to a split between amateur & professional baseball, and go from there.
The first version of that universe lasted until about 1903 until there some old problems made it unwieldy for me to continue, so the linked thread details version two.
The Quickstart begins on the first day of the 1864 offseason, with the NBBO just having finished its eighth season of play. Its after season eight where players start to change teams more often - I set Eight Years as an arbitratry number for Free Agency - to simulate the rise of under the table cash payments in baseball as it became more popular.
The kings of this version of base ball are St. John's B.C, who just won the NBBO's championship, the Tucker-Wheaton Cup, for the 4th time in its 8th year of existence, having gone 9-1 in the playoffs.
While the NBBO is meant as an analog for the real-life National Association of Base Ball Players, there are many more teams. Here are the 48 active teams in the game world:
The 48 fictional teams are a mix of ones I made up, one that existed at the time but don't anymore, and ones that existed at the time and have come back as teams in Vintage Baseball revival leagues.
Here is a
link to a zip file of the Quickstart in the Public folder of my OneDrive. Unpacked it runs about 300mb, but that's because I have all of the graphics (caps, etc) included.
Because I'm running a game where the date is pre-1871, there are some quirks:
- You will either need to change the "Historical Year" back to 1871 at the start of each preseason, or turn off all of the automatic adjustments & imports in League Settins -> Options
- I tried a test running the league with 1-man or 2-man pitching rotations and no relievers, which would have been the norm at the time, and the game engine didn't seem to like that for a fictional league instead of a historical re-sim. So, teams have two starters & two relievers.
- Baseball beyond small stipends was considered amateur then, but under the table payments were well-known. I've created custom financial settings to try to reflect this.
- I changed the playoff format from league playoffs and a final to a Round Robin format after teams in the weaker divisions kept hogging #1 seeds. However, I didn't realize that if two teams tie at the top of a Round Robin the engine just picks a winner - couldn't figure out what tiebreaker it used and I went back and manually schedule a one-game playoff to rectify the issue. So, in the Quickstart the playoff final, the Tucker-Wheaton Cup, is a Round Robin of six teams playing each other twice for a total of ten games, with the top-two teams taking part in a one-game playoff to determine the champion so one isn't seemingly given at random.
- There is an All-Star game. It's covered in the story thread, but there was a real-life All-Star game that took place in about 1858 so I decided to make that canon here.
- There is one real-life star in the current version of the game universe: Jim Creighton. That is because after a poster asked if I'd consider adding 1850s-60s stars and I decided to go all-fictional, the Excelsior club made the independent scouting discovery of a young pitcher in the winter of 1859-60, which oddly was when the real-life Excelsior club discovered the real-life Jim Creighton. I decided there were too many coincidences to pass up.
There is a custom database in this universe, but as far as I know it should work. I imported the game from OOTP 24 without copying my modified database files over, and everything regarding player creation works as it had been.
Hopefully everything works for any of you who decided to download this Quickstar.