Do You Need New Saved Game Ideas?

[Charlie Hough]

Every year we see many posts from people looking for inspiration or ideas on new games that they can create in OOTP. I've resurrected a post that I wrote in the OOTP 13 General Discussions to provide some ideas. Rather than doing the usual modern MLB leagues, MLB with expansion, or standard historical and fictional options, why not try some of these?

• Serve as GM for all teams in your major league and attempt to manage them equally with a view toward winning championships. Can you beat yourself? It would be incredibly time consuming, but it might be the ultimate challenge.

• Create a new historical, MLB, or fictional game and take over the worst team in the league each year for exactly one season. Can you make enough moves in just one year to help the franchise turn it around? How do they do after your brief time at the helm? How long will it take you to eventually serve as GM for every team in the league?

• Create a fictional league outside the U.S. and Canada. Dealing with cities, languages, and names that are unfamiliar may create an interesting change of pace.

• Play a historical league with development turned on and stats only. Don't look at real life stats and see how well you can do and, later, see how your league differs from real life history.

• Manage in the minor leagues. Take over a short season club in A ball and see if you can work your way up to the major leagues. See if you can deal with the roster call-ups and demotions that make it tough to field a consistent team. Better yet, spend a whole career managing in the minors and see how many future stars you can help develop.

• Play a league using all of the toughest settings. Heavily favor prospects, trading very hard and rarely, no free agency, and stats only. You might even want to turn off the draft and have rookies created as free agents (don't do this in historical leagues, though, because the AI in those leagues doesn't handle it well). Then take over the worst team in the league with the worst finances and see if you can build a championship club.

• Build your own fictional world from the ground up and then create a league that plays in it. Be careful, though. You can become so addicted to creating the world, graphics, and other elements that you never get around to actually running the league!

• Create a one-season league by importing the worst teams in baseball history. Find out who's the best of the worst and who's the worst of the worst!

• Get experimental with the physics of your baseball world. Use league totals modifiers or the engine.cfg file to create a world in which home runs and extra base hits are far more or far less frequent. You can tweak other tendencies as well, like wild pitches, passed balls, stealing, etc. You'll need to study the manual section on league totals modifiers because they don't work the way you might think. But if you experiment with these settings and do some tests, you might find an entirely different way to play.

• Use the bad decisions deck from an OOTP 13 General Discussions thread to make life tougher on yourself. Determine random events that you must carry out and that create hurdles along your track to success!

• Attempt to assemble a team of all Americans, all Latin players, or something similar. If using the inaugural draft, limit yourself to only those players. There are a couple of Spanish soccer clubs that use only players from the Basque region or of Basque ethnicity. This makes it very difficult for them to compete against teams that can draw talent from all of Spain and elsewhere in the world. Using all Americans or all Latin players won't be anywhere near as difficult, but it's perhaps the closest you can get to this kind of experiment.

• NEW BONUS IDEA: start a 2013 MLB game, but change all the strategy and settings to be based on the deadball era. Make sure to disallow the automatic update of these settings and turn off dynamic league evolution. See how today's players will perform in a deadball environment. You can even use deadball ballparks and factors for maximum effect.

[jdyi87]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

• Build your own fictional world from the ground up and then create a league that plays in it. Be careful, though. You can become so addicted to creating the world, graphics, and other elements that you never get around to actually running the league!

I fully agree with this.

I've been building fictional Korea Baseball League for 3 weeks, not complete yet.

[Storm]

After building my Red Sox into the league's most dominant team (two consecutive World Series championships and 100 win seasons), I decided to shake things up and take control of the team with the lowest budget.

The thought of having to contend with several powerhouse teams in the division, coupled with the Red Sox in the east and my limited budget, has renewed my interest in the game greatly. I'm scouring the waiver wire looking for steals; drafting in the Rule 5 draft; waiting until the end of the off-season to nab a deal; and trading for Triple-A players and starting them in the Majors.

I wonder how things will turn out for me.

[mgom27]

I plan on doing full blown Drafted by Teams League will get down but going and looking at every person History ion Minors is going to take a long time and also would like to expand it to all Retired people for All-Time Greats and Cooperstown.

Also maybe do a full blown year League the year the Rays entered the League and full blown last 4 Expansion Teams with real Minor League Teams.

[olivertheorem]

Taking a break from gaming tonight to work on what I'm calling a "random league generator", which will randomize a lot of league-specific settings, which could end up with some really weird realities. I fully expect the first run to give me a league with 1 pitcher rotations and low stamina. :P

[elfsutton]

Be like using teams from the 1800's with 140+ game schedules without changing the era settings. Having a one pitcher rotation like that can do some extremely strange things to your stats output.

[catcherjul]

I Just started a standard mlb Game but I created two feeder leagues ( 1 collège and 1 HS) and I manage one feeder team. I find it exciting to see your players get drafted

[shawa666]

PCL goes rogue in 57.

[gglennwill]

One idea I've had fun with is importing my favorite team growing up (the 1974 Dodgers) into the 1927 American League. Could they beat out the 27 Yankees? The Philadelphia A's were a good team also. Anyway, take your favorite team and put them into a different year yourself to see how they would do.