a stack of questions (for a relative newbie)

thehynes · 03-15-2007, 06:47 AM

hi all, I have played ootp before but it was a few years back and my memory is fading!I know that the reason I couldnt really get on with it was that my 'ideal' game involved a fictional league and ootp at that time couldnt provide me with what I was really looking for.
Anyway, if one of you could humour me and answer some or all of the following questions I would be very grateful.
Before I begin what I would love to do is create a British League in 1875 and play on from that point (I might also create an Australian League). My questions are:

1) If I start a British League in 1875 would I be able to further down the line create an English League, say in 1890, and have them then have championship playoffs against each other? I'm pretty sure the answer to this is now yes when it the past it wasnt doable. Can anyone confirm?

2) Can I stop all play in my fictional universe for seasons at a time but still have the players ageing? I ask because my league(s) would, unlike the American majors, if they had existed in 'real life' have stopped play throughout both WW1 and WW2. Can I suspend all games at the end of the 1914 season and then restart in 1919 and have all of my players aged accordingly?

3) If I did have an Australian League - entirely separate from my two UK Leagues - how would I arrange occasional championship games between them? Exhibition games? Is this easy to do?

4) I would like to have occasional games between the World Series champions and my UK champions. I dont want to be running the American leagues in my fictional world though so..........for example, if I wanted my 1927 champions to sail off to the States to do battle with the NY Yankees am I able to import the 1927 Yankees from Lahman and then have them sitting separately from my leagues and then stage an exhibition series against them?

5) Is there the capacity in OOTP2007 to stage international games i.e England v Australia ? If this isnt one of the features would I be able to achieve this by setting up an exhibition game where I pick players from different teams and put them into international teams? If I did this would it ballsup my player history?

6) I see that you can now set financials going back to 1901. Can I change this year by year? For example could I set the financial year as 1901 for every season I have between 1875 and 1901 and then let it progress from there so that 1920 matches 1920, 1970 matches 1970 etc etc?

7) I also think the answer to this one is yes but would like a confirmation - if I delete a team and let all its players become free agents I do get to keep that teams history?

8) I can still import players from Lahman and then change their name? For example if in 1875 I wanted WG Grace (the giant of English cricket) to play for one of my teams, I could import Babe Ruth from Lahman and then change his name to WG Grace??

9) errr, thats all I can think of at the moment!!!

thanks in advance

thehynes · 03-15-2007, 08:36 AM

10) can you run knockout cup competitions or would this be another 'exhibition game' thing?

11) I know you can set the amount of foreigners and their nationality but can I change this each season? For example could I have in 1875 80% of my players being American but by 1990 that to be 10% but also to by this point to add Dominicans, Japanese etc etc

skywalkr2 · 03-15-2007, 11:02 AM

Wow these questions sound like Football Manager.

chimanbj · 03-15-2007, 12:45 PM

8) Yes

Solonor · 03-15-2007, 01:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

1) If I start a British League in 1875 would I be able to further down the line create an English League, say in 1890, and have them then have championship playoffs against each other? I'm pretty sure the answer to this is now yes when it the past it wasnt doable. Can anyone confirm?

The answer is "maybe". If you have them as two separate leagues, then no. If you have them as two sub-leagues of the same league, then yes. Only sub-leagues and divisions within sub-leagues have playoffs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

2) Can I stop all play in my fictional universe for seasons at a time but still have the players ageing? I ask because my league(s) would, unlike the American majors, if they had existed in 'real life' have stopped play throughout both WW1 and WW2. Can I suspend all games at the end of the 1914 season and then restart in 1919 and have all of my players aged accordingly?

Yes. Players age no matter how many games are played in a year.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

3) If I did have an Australian League - entirely separate from my two UK Leagues - how would I arrange occasional championship games between them? Exhibition games? Is this easy to do?

Can't be done. Independent leagues don't play each other.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

4) I would like to have occasional games between the World Series champions and my UK champions. I dont want to be running the American leagues in my fictional world though so..........for example, if I wanted my 1927 champions to sail off to the States to do battle with the NY Yankees am I able to import the 1927 Yankees from Lahman and then have them sitting separately from my leagues and then stage an exhibition series against them?

Yes. You can import a real historical team from Lahman into any other league.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

5) Is there the capacity in OOTP2007 to stage international games i.e England v Australia ? If this isnt one of the features would I be able to achieve this by setting up an exhibition game where I pick players from different teams and put them into international teams? If I did this would it ballsup my player history?

Again, you can't have two independent leagues play each other. However, if England and Australia are teams in the same league, then they can.

I have had good luck importing individual historical players into any league I want (though it's tedious to do one-by-one), but not so much with fictional teams and players without heavy tweaking.

That said, I did do a tournament of all-time teams from our first 10 years in our online league in OOTP 2006 by exporting/importing rosters. It was a pain, but it worked.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

6) I see that you can now set financials going back to 1901. Can I change this year by year? For example could I set the financial year as 1901 for every season I have between 1875 and 1901 and then let it progress from there so that 1920 matches 1920, 1970 matches 1970 etc etc?

Yes. You can even do that with fictional leagues now, which is cool.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

7) I also think the answer to this one is yes but would like a confirmation - if I delete a team and let all its players become free agents I do get to keep that teams history?

I'll have to check. I think so, but I'm not sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

8) I can still import players from Lahman and then change their name? For example if in 1875 I wanted WG Grace (the giant of English cricket) to play for one of my teams, I could import Babe Ruth from Lahman and then change his name to WG Grace??

Yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

9) errr, thats all I can think of at the moment!!!

Whew.

Kelric · 03-15-2007, 01:11 PM

1) The answer is now yes, as you thought.

2) Don't know. The only way I can think of this is for you to not create a schedule for those seasons and just sim through the year. I don't know how the game would react to it though, so someone with more knowledge on the subject will have to give you a better answer.

3) Yeah, you'd need to run exhibition games if you have the Aussie teams in a different League.

4) Again, yeah, you'd need to run exhibition games. I believe it is doable to import a specific team, though I've never done it.

5) The best way for you to do this that I can think of is to put your players in their own database, create a new league file and import specific players to each national team. But, again, I've never tried something like this so I'm probably not the best person to answer this one.

6) Yepp, without a doubt. If you edit the financial file, you can even come up with 1875-1900 financials for yourself if you put them in so you can have the financials change every year of your league.

7) Up to the point that you last saved the game and exported the history, I believe that yes you do keep the team history.

8) Yes.

10) Exhibition games. American baseball only runs the playoff series type of playoffs so that is all that is in OOTP so far.

11) Yeah, you can change it every season.

Edit - Damn you Solonor, but at least I got questions 10 and 11!

Solonor · 03-15-2007, 01:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

10) can you run knockout cup competitions or would this be another 'exhibition game' thing?

11) I know you can set the amount of foreigners and their nationality but can I change this each season? For example could I have in 1875 80% of my players being American but by 1990 that to be 10% but also to by this point to add Dominicans, Japanese etc etc

10. Yes, I think so (assuming I understand what a "knockout cup competition" means).

11. Yes.

Curtis · 03-15-2007, 01:30 PM

So, you pays your money, and you takes your chances.

fhomess · 03-15-2007, 02:26 PM

A word about international leagues. Every league you define has two settings that affect the nationality of players in that league:
1. The league must be assigned a home nation.
2. There is a league setting to determine how many foreign players your league will have.

If you set the league to have 0% foreign players, and give it a home nation of England, then all your players will be from England. Well, I found this to be not entirely true. It's still possible the scouts will turn up a foreign talent and sign him to your league. I haven't tested to see if that's possible with scouts off.

Now, let's say you want a league that consists of Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland, and you want players from just those 4 countries. That's not possible to do with a single league as I described above The reason for this is that each league has just 1 nation assigned to it, and if you set the foreign player percentage above 0%, you don't really have a good idea where those players are going to come from. Probably from the US and Japan, and other baseball talent rich nations (more on this later). However, if you create 4 separate feeder leagues, one each for Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland, you could theoretically get players from just those four nations fed into your league. That still leaves the question out of how to initiate a league with players from just those four countries. When you start up the league, you want a good mix of players already, and you don't want to wait for those players to come out of the feeder leagues. Your desired ~25% split for each of the four nations won't be there.

You could start your league, sim out 20-30 seasons, then erase all player history and stats. However, I think I stumbled upon a better solution to this last night. If you delete a league, all those players are released as FA's. So you could theoretically create 4 additional leagues at the start of your game. Again, one each for each of the 4 nations. Give the league just enough teams to get the number of players you want from each nation. Delete all the players in your main league. Then delete the four "starter" leagues. Now you've got the right split you want sitting in FA. You're welcome to hold a draft, let teams sign them via FA, or assign them manually yourself. The one thing none of this addresses and it's something you simply can't do at this point is telling the game that you have a Wales team and you only want players from Wales to be able to play for them. There's no way for the game to do that. That said, if you want that to happen, you'll have to manage rosters yourself. Trades, FA signings and the like will mess up national teams if the AI is left to it's vices.

Ok, now to address my previous comment about baseball rich nations. The nations.txt file is a file which allows you to specify information about nations. The different types of names and ethnicities that facegen uses are in this file. There's also a setting for each nation that defines the nation's baseball level. 5 is the max, and 0 is the min. Another method to restricting where players in your league come from would be to edit all the nations you don't want down to 0, and all the nations you do want up to 5. I haven't tested this out yet to see how well it works.

battists · 03-15-2007, 02:40 PM

fhomess,

In addition to the Foreigner Percentage, which is the % of players from non-home nations generated during a player generation event (league creation, ammy draft, etc.), could you not also do the following:

1. Disable scouting
2. Disable hidden players, which would eliminate scouted players from other nations.
3. Set the "foreign player limit" in your league's roster rules to 0?

Any one of these would likely eliminate foreigners on your team entirely...

fhomess · 03-15-2007, 02:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by battists

2. Disable hidden players, which would eliminate scouted players from other nations.

I think that's the setting I always forget about. Thanks!

battists · 03-15-2007, 02:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fhomess

I think that's the setting I always forget about. Thanks!

It's a global option, and one that cannot be changed after your game starts, so make sure you get it during the game creation process!

thehynes · 03-15-2007, 04:59 PM

thanks to all you guys - I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my (lengthy!) list of questions. Just thinking about all the opportunities has had me fumbling for my credit card and I have now placed my order - bring it on!

I think what I shall do for Country v Country play (not League v League) is have another league set up with England,Ireland, Australia, USA etc etc and whenever I feel an International Series is called for I will place the relevant players in the teams from my 'real' leagues. Could be a bit of a chore but they wont be regular events.
I'd also set up another 'inactive' league into which I would occasionally import a team from the US Major Leagues so that I can set up exhibition games against 'my boys'.
One thing I had thought was that I could set which foreign nationalities would appear in the game through a drop down menu but now I realise I have to tinker with the nations.txt file mentioned - can I tinker with this throughout the game - changing nations Baseball level from 0 to 5 whenever I feel like it?
As for tinkering for a true British feel I'll be happy with the nationality being set as English and then doing some editing as the majority of my teams and 'native' players will be English (I want to try and mirror the history of pro baseballs fitful existence in the UK - almost all of which has been in England. I'll start with a team in Dublin and will probably then go on to have two teams there who will eventually drop out of the league after WW1 - it wouldnt have been advisable for British teams to visit Dublin during that period so I guess they would have had to fold. I think a couple of Scottish teams will appear in the 20th century and there probably wont be any Welsh teams at all)
One ongoing concern is how the game will take to my idea of 'hibernating' during the war years but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

thanks again guys, its nice to come across like minded obsessives! Play Ball!

Kelric · 03-15-2007, 08:55 PM

You can change the nations.txt file throughout the game, though be advised that you of course have to save/exit the game, go change the file, then reload the game for the changes to take effect. It will also have an effect on every .lg file you have IIRC, so be careful with that if you play several leagues at once.

I don't know what consequences there will be for current players, if any, but it should turn the trick for any future amateur players you want to generate each time you do this.

Curtis · 03-15-2007, 09:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kelric

I don't know what consequences there will be for current players, if any,

There SHOULD not be any effect upon current players.

thehynes · 03-16-2007, 04:11 AM

thanks Kelric & Curtis

thehynes · 03-16-2007, 04:34 AM

oh hold on, I've got another one....!

Is it possible to set up the league to allow tied games? Or is that concept dangerously un-American?

bleachercreature · 03-16-2007, 07:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

oh hold on, I've got another one....!

Is it possible to set up the league to allow tied games? Or is that concept dangerously un-American?

Tied games are definately unamerican. Even MLB changed their rules this year, to prety much eliminate situations where ties could occur.

I would say the answer to the question is no.

Raidergoo · 03-16-2007, 09:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

oh hold on, I've got another one....!

Is it possible to set up the league to allow tied games? Or is that concept dangerously un-American?

Dangerously un-American.

Swimmer · 03-16-2007, 11:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thehynes

I think what I shall do for Country v Country play (not League v League) is have another league set up with England,Ireland, Australia, USA etc etc and whenever I feel an International Series is called for I will place the relevant players in the teams from my 'real' leagues. Could be a bit of a chore but they wont be regular events.
I'd also set up another 'inactive' league into which I would occasionally import a team from the US Major Leagues so that I can set up exhibition games against 'my boys'.

In v2006 I ran a World Cup style league in which each of 24 countries had a national league that played 80 games. Then I would move the champions of each national league into the international league and play out a 40 game season followed by playoffs and the World Cup. It wound up being quite a bit too much work to be fun.

As I recall, the laws of unintended consequences were VERY active in this setup, particularly related to finances. The national leagues had in-league Free Agency and trading, but the international league did not, and sometimes team financials would get messed up in the various moves. The team histories and player stat histories got whacked too.

It's possible that this won't be such an issue in the new game. We'll know soon....

03-15-2007, 06:47 AM	#1
thehynes Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 24	a stack of questions (for a relative newbie) hi all, I have played ootp before but it was a few years back and my memory is fading!I know that the reason I couldnt really get on with it was that my 'ideal' game involved a fictional league and ootp at that time couldnt provide me with what I was really looking for. Anyway, if one of you could humour me and answer some or all of the following questions I would be very grateful. Before I begin what I would love to do is create a British League in 1875 and play on from that point (I might also create an Australian League). My questions are: 1) If I start a British League in 1875 would I be able to further down the line create an English League, say in 1890, and have them then have championship playoffs against each other? I'm pretty sure the answer to this is now yes when it the past it wasnt doable. Can anyone confirm? 2) Can I stop all play in my fictional universe for seasons at a time but still have the players ageing? I ask because my league(s) would, unlike the American majors, if they had existed in 'real life' have stopped play throughout both WW1 and WW2. Can I suspend all games at the end of the 1914 season and then restart in 1919 and have all of my players aged accordingly? 3) If I did have an Australian League - entirely separate from my two UK Leagues - how would I arrange occasional championship games between them? Exhibition games? Is this easy to do? 4) I would like to have occasional games between the World Series champions and my UK champions. I dont want to be running the American leagues in my fictional world though so..........for example, if I wanted my 1927 champions to sail off to the States to do battle with the NY Yankees am I able to import the 1927 Yankees from Lahman and then have them sitting separately from my leagues and then stage an exhibition series against them? 5) Is there the capacity in OOTP2007 to stage international games i.e England v Australia ? If this isnt one of the features would I be able to achieve this by setting up an exhibition game where I pick players from different teams and put them into international teams? If I did this would it ballsup my player history? 6) I see that you can now set financials going back to 1901. Can I change this year by year? For example could I set the financial year as 1901 for every season I have between 1875 and 1901 and then let it progress from there so that 1920 matches 1920, 1970 matches 1970 etc etc? 7) I also think the answer to this one is yes but would like a confirmation - if I delete a team and let all its players become free agents I do get to keep that teams history? 8) I can still import players from Lahman and then change their name? For example if in 1875 I wanted WG Grace (the giant of English cricket) to play for one of my teams, I could import Babe Ruth from Lahman and then change his name to WG Grace?? 9) errr, thats all I can think of at the moment!!! thanks in advance

03-15-2007, 08:36 AM	#2
thehynes Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 24	oops, some more... 10) can you run knockout cup competitions or would this be another 'exhibition game' thing? 11) I know you can set the amount of foreigners and their nationality but can I change this each season? For example could I have in 1875 80% of my players being American but by 1990 that to be 10% but also to by this point to add Dominicans, Japanese etc etc

03-15-2007, 12:45 PM	#4
chimanbj All Star Reserve Join Date: Nov 2004 Location: Chicago, by way of Philly Posts: 791	8) Yes __________________ People ask if I'm a Cubs or White Sox fan...I tell them, proudly, I'm a Phillies Phan!

03-15-2007, 01:11 PM	#6
Kelric Hall Of Famer Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Greater Boston Area Posts: 3,992	1) The answer is now yes, as you thought. 2) Don't know. The only way I can think of this is for you to not create a schedule for those seasons and just sim through the year. I don't know how the game would react to it though, so someone with more knowledge on the subject will have to give you a better answer. 3) Yeah, you'd need to run exhibition games if you have the Aussie teams in a different League. 4) Again, yeah, you'd need to run exhibition games. I believe it is doable to import a specific team, though I've never done it. 5) The best way for you to do this that I can think of is to put your players in their own database, create a new league file and import specific players to each national team. But, again, I've never tried something like this so I'm probably not the best person to answer this one. 6) Yepp, without a doubt. If you edit the financial file, you can even come up with 1875-1900 financials for yourself if you put them in so you can have the financials change every year of your league. 7) Up to the point that you last saved the game and exported the history, I believe that yes you do keep the team history. 8) Yes. 10) Exhibition games. American baseball only runs the playoff series type of playoffs so that is all that is in OOTP so far. 11) Yeah, you can change it every season. Edit - Damn you Solonor, but at least I got questions 10 and 11! Last edited by Kelric; 03-15-2007 at 01:12 PM. Reason: Beaten to the punch

03-15-2007, 02:26 PM	#9
fhomess Hall Of Famer Join Date: Nov 2002 Posts: 3,648	A word about international leagues. Every league you define has two settings that affect the nationality of players in that league: 1. The league must be assigned a home nation. 2. There is a league setting to determine how many foreign players your league will have. If you set the league to have 0% foreign players, and give it a home nation of England, then all your players will be from England. Well, I found this to be not entirely true. It's still possible the scouts will turn up a foreign talent and sign him to your league. I haven't tested to see if that's possible with scouts off. Now, let's say you want a league that consists of Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland, and you want players from just those 4 countries. That's not possible to do with a single league as I described above The reason for this is that each league has just 1 nation assigned to it, and if you set the foreign player percentage above 0%, you don't really have a good idea where those players are going to come from. Probably from the US and Japan, and other baseball talent rich nations (more on this later). However, if you create 4 separate feeder leagues, one each for Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland, you could theoretically get players from just those four nations fed into your league. That still leaves the question out of how to initiate a league with players from just those four countries. When you start up the league, you want a good mix of players already, and you don't want to wait for those players to come out of the feeder leagues. Your desired ~25% split for each of the four nations won't be there. You could start your league, sim out 20-30 seasons, then erase all player history and stats. However, I think I stumbled upon a better solution to this last night. If you delete a league, all those players are released as FA's. So you could theoretically create 4 additional leagues at the start of your game. Again, one each for each of the 4 nations. Give the league just enough teams to get the number of players you want from each nation. Delete all the players in your main league. Then delete the four "starter" leagues. Now you've got the right split you want sitting in FA. You're welcome to hold a draft, let teams sign them via FA, or assign them manually yourself. The one thing none of this addresses and it's something you simply can't do at this point is telling the game that you have a Wales team and you only want players from Wales to be able to play for them. There's no way for the game to do that. That said, if you want that to happen, you'll have to manage rosters yourself. Trades, FA signings and the like will mess up national teams if the AI is left to it's vices. Ok, now to address my previous comment about baseball rich nations. The nations.txt file is a file which allows you to specify information about nations. The different types of names and ethnicities that facegen uses are in this file. There's also a setting for each nation that defines the nation's baseball level. 5 is the max, and 0 is the min. Another method to restricting where players in your league come from would be to edit all the nations you don't want down to 0, and all the nations you do want up to 5. I haven't tested this out yet to see how well it works. __________________ StatsLab- PHP/MySQL based utilities for Online Leagues Baseball Cards - Full list of known templates and documentation on card development.

03-15-2007, 11:02 AM	#3
skywalkr2 Major Leagues Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: St Louis, MO Posts: 438	Wow these questions sound like Football Manager.

03-15-2007, 01:30 PM	#8
Curtis Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Watertown, New York Posts: 4,567	So, you pays your money, and you takes your chances.

03-15-2007, 02:40 PM	#10
battists Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 18,506	fhomess, In addition to the Foreigner Percentage, which is the % of players from non-home nations generated during a player generation event (league creation, ammy draft, etc.), could you not also do the following: 1. Disable scouting 2. Disable hidden players, which would eliminate scouted players from other nations. 3. Set the "foreign player limit" in your league's roster rules to 0? Any one of these would likely eliminate foreigners on your team entirely...

03-15-2007, 04:59 PM	#13
thehynes Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 24	thanks to all you guys - I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my (lengthy!) list of questions. Just thinking about all the opportunities has had me fumbling for my credit card and I have now placed my order - bring it on! I think what I shall do for Country v Country play (not League v League) is have another league set up with England,Ireland, Australia, USA etc etc and whenever I feel an International Series is called for I will place the relevant players in the teams from my 'real' leagues. Could be a bit of a chore but they wont be regular events. I'd also set up another 'inactive' league into which I would occasionally import a team from the US Major Leagues so that I can set up exhibition games against 'my boys'. One thing I had thought was that I could set which foreign nationalities would appear in the game through a drop down menu but now I realise I have to tinker with the nations.txt file mentioned - can I tinker with this throughout the game - changing nations Baseball level from 0 to 5 whenever I feel like it? As for tinkering for a true British feel I'll be happy with the nationality being set as English and then doing some editing as the majority of my teams and 'native' players will be English (I want to try and mirror the history of pro baseballs fitful existence in the UK - almost all of which has been in England. I'll start with a team in Dublin and will probably then go on to have two teams there who will eventually drop out of the league after WW1 - it wouldnt have been advisable for British teams to visit Dublin during that period so I guess they would have had to fold. I think a couple of Scottish teams will appear in the 20th century and there probably wont be any Welsh teams at all) One ongoing concern is how the game will take to my idea of 'hibernating' during the war years but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. thanks again guys, its nice to come across like minded obsessives! Play Ball! Last edited by thehynes; 03-15-2007 at 05:04 PM.

03-15-2007, 08:55 PM	#14
Kelric Hall Of Famer Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Greater Boston Area Posts: 3,992	You can change the nations.txt file throughout the game, though be advised that you of course have to save/exit the game, go change the file, then reload the game for the changes to take effect. It will also have an effect on every .lg file you have IIRC, so be careful with that if you play several leagues at once. I don't know what consequences there will be for current players, if any, but it should turn the trick for any future amateur players you want to generate each time you do this.

03-16-2007, 04:11 AM	#16
thehynes Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 24	thanks Kelric & Curtis

03-16-2007, 04:34 AM	#17
thehynes Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 24	oh hold on, I've got another one....! Is it possible to set up the league to allow tied games? Or is that concept dangerously un-American?