Potential buyer has questions

[Pirates Fan]

I’ve been spending some time with the manual before buying. Whew, OOTP8 sure looks nice.
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And, yes, I know I’ve asked some of these questions before, but humor me:
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Here’s what I want to do:
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Create a FICTIONAL League with 2 sub-leagues. No minors, no financials, no injuries, no manager/coach/scout, no history.
No interleague play. 7-game season, or 14 games if schedule generator needs an even number.
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Questions:
1. Can I generate teams with no players, or will the 400 fictional players be generated anyway?
2. If the player generation is automatic, can I release all players to free agency and delete them? (It seems I can do this in Commissioner mode from the Free Agents Subpage -- is that correct?)
3. Though it would be tedious, could I import 400 historical players (25 per team), regardless of what era they played? (It seems I can also do this in Commissioner mode from the Free Agents Subpage -- is that correct?)
4. If I select the “peak seasons” setting, at what age will they import?
5. Can I set each one to be age 21?
6. Would they be imported directly onto the team of my choice, or to the free agents pool?
7. After the short season, will I be able to have all 16 teams play off?
8. If not, if I divide the sub-leagues into divisions, am I limited to 4 teams per league in playoffs?
9. After the playoffs, I want to release a few players per team, then import historical replacements who would be age 21 with ratings based on peak seasons. Doable?
10. During the following season, would the players age as though they had played 154 games or ... what could I expect?
11. If injuries are off, do position players still get tired?
12. Is spring training mandatory?
13. Can weather effects be turned off?
14. Can ballpark effects be turned off?

Thanks.

[The Wolf]

1. Can I generate teams with no players, or will the 400 fictional players be generated anyway?

No, and yes.

2. If the player generation is automatic, can I release all players to free agency and delete them? (It seems I can do this in Commissioner mode from the Free Agents Subpage -- is that correct?)

Yes and yes.

3. Though it would be tedious, could I import 400 historical players (25 per team), regardless of what era they played? (It seems I can also do this in Commissioner mode from the Free Agents Subpage -- is that correct?)

Yes and yes.

4. If I select the “peak seasons” setting, at what age will they import?

Whatever year you select.

5. Can I set each one to be age 21?

I suppose. Don't see why not.

6. Would they be imported directly onto the team of my choice, or to the free agents pool?

Pool I believe.

7. After the short season, will I be able to have all 16 teams play off?

Doubt it.

8. If not, if I divide the sub-leagues into divisions, am I limited to 4 teams per league in playoffs?

As far as I know.

9. After the playoffs, I want to release a few players per team, then import historical replacements who would be age 21 with ratings based on peak seasons. Doable?

Yes.

10. During the following season, would the players age as though they had played 154 games or ... what could I expect?

Season = year, essentially.

11. If injuries are off, do position players still get tired?

Yes.

12. Is spring training mandatory?

No.

13. Can weather effects be turned off?

What weather effects?

14. Can ballpark effects be turned off?

They can be neutralized.

[1998 Yankees]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

13. Can weather effects be turned off?

What weather effects?

Wolf did a job here. I just wanted to chirp about this one. There are some weather effects in the game, but they too can be neutralized by loading generic weather data.

[injury log]

To clarify a couple of things about importing historical players:

-when the game imports a historical player (or creates a fictional player), two sets of ratings are created: Overall ratings and Potential ratings. When you import a historical player, the Overall ratings will be based on the player's stats in the year you've chosen to import from. In the player's first season, his stats should then be similar to his stats from the import year. Choosing 'Peak season' here, for example, has no effect at all on Overall ratings. The 'Peak season' setting only affects how Potential ratings are generated. Potential ratings can be thought of as targets for Overall ratings; unless you turn development off, Overall ratings will trend towards Potential ratings. That said, there's a lot of randomness and unpredictability built into the OOTP development engine; some players develop more quickly than others, and Potential ratings can themselves change, sometimes dramatically, over time.

-if you import a player and let things play out a few seasons, these Potential ratings (and the unpredictability of the development engine) will determine how players progress over several seasons. Some players will have realistic careers this way, others not- the game doesn't know the shape of players' career arcs. If you want things to hew more closely to real life, you can enable the 'recalc' option, which recalculates player ratings periodically by referencing their real life performance.

For ballparks- you can set all ball park factors to 1.000, which will make all parks behave as neutral. I think you'd need to edit each park, from the Team homepage, but that would only take a couple of minutes.

For weather- I've never tried to turn it off, but I *think* there is a text file with weather data that can be edited. If that's the case, I'd guess it would be relatively straightforward to customize the 16 lines in this file that correspond to the cities in your league to have whatever weather you want (sunny year round, or hail and snow in mid-July). I've never tried editing weather, but in general, editing the game's customizable text files is an easy thing to do.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by 1998 Yankees

Wolf did a job here.

Thank you, thank you.

Originally Posted by 1998 Yankees

There are some weather effects in the game, but they too can be neutralized by loading generic weather data.

Like I wrote, what weather effects?

[Pirates Fan]

the wolf, 1998 Yankees and injury log,

Thanks for the quick replies and depth of answers.

One more question. If Lahman is included in the game, where is it found? Or is that only if you get the full version, i.e., the non-demo?

Thanks again.

I lurk on all the boards, and OOTP's forum is not only the most enjoyable but most helpful.

Have downloaded the demo but am having a devil of a time remembering how to get to screen that allow me to do things. The long history dropdown helps, but it'll take a while to get used to. (And to those who were wondering the maximum wild cards is indeed 4 -- and you have to break into 2 divisions to get them.)

[Carplos]

the csv files are in the /stats folder in your data directory.

[1998 Yankees]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

Like I wrote, what weather effects?

Not a big deal, but they're in there, supposedly.

[Pirates Fan]

thank you, carplos.

now i've created a team's worth of historical free agents but can't get them on any of my fictional teams.

perhaps that's because i've started spring training?

but let's say I had started fresh, imported the historical players I want into the free agent pool. how would i have gotten them on any single team?

[Carplos]

You can go into the player editor and assign them to a team.

[Pirates Fan]

ha! obvious to everyone but me.

thanks again, carplos.

[zekester91]

For 7 and 8, if you really wanted to get all 16 teams in the play-offs could you set it up so that each team was in it's own division, I've never tried to have one team division but it should be possible. I know you can have 50 or more divisions, is there anything from stoping you from having only 1 team there.

[Pirates Fan]

zekester,

cool, thanks, I'll see how that works.