Requesting Help Creating My Universe

[Kelric]

I used to be able to sit in front of OOTP and spend hours running tests to get my leagues functioning as I want them too but I simply don't have the patience any more after one or two tests. With that said, I hereby ask the community for some help.

What I Want:
I'm trying to create a historical MLB with a lower quality independent league that is fed by colleges and high schools. Basically I want my MLB players to be historical, the indie league to be fictional with a few players crossing the lines every now and then.

What I've Managed To Do So Far:
I've got the indie league to be set up to about Double-A standards and have gotten them stable financially. Teams in it have budgets that range between $3-8M while MLB teams vary between $28-88M. Perfect.

What I Can't Figure Out How To Fix Without Putting More Time Into It Than I Can Stand:
1) After a few seasons, a lot of the indie teams have under-manned rosters and virtually nobody on their reserve rosters. My test sims keep stopping because one team or another runs out of players. I have twice as many feeder teams as indie clubs, so population isn't an issue. For some reason the scrubs just aren't signing into independent ball and prefer sitting in free agency purgatory when they have no shot at MLB. There are 76 pages worth of free agents in my universe, yet teams can't fill out a roster.

2) Almost every MLB team has two or three (at least) really good players that came through the indie leagues. I don't want that. I want one or two bench warmers with the odd starter to come from indie ball.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might get those rosters healthy on a consistent basis without having to run them myself? And how can I set the talent/PCM/whatever settings to keep indie leaguers from consistently becoming MLB All Stars? Any help is appreciated.

[robc]

Did you use this formula (from manual) to calculate the number of teams in the feeder leagues?

[Number of teams in your parent league] x [Number of rounds in your first-year player draft] = total # of players needed in first-year player draft
[total # of players needed for draft] / 6 (rounded up) = minimum # of feeder league teams required

[Kelric]

Originally Posted by robc

Did you use this formula (from manual) to calculate the number of teams in the feeder leagues?

[Number of teams in your parent league] x [Number of rounds in your first-year player draft] = total # of players needed in first-year player draft
[total # of players needed for draft] / 6 (rounded up) = minimum # of feeder league teams required

No, but I don't believe that is the problem. Here is what I have, using that formula.

66 indie teams x 5 rounds = 330 players needed
330 / 6 = 55 feeder teams needed

I have 128 feeder teams. (Ok, I can probably tweak that to have slightly less, but this was just a test league after all.) Guys are being drafted by the indie league, staying for the two years before free agency and then never re-signing. I was thinking it might be because of the monetary disparity between MLB and the indies, but isn't a bad paying baseball job better than no baseball job?

[robc]

Yep, you definitely seem to have enough feeder teams!

This setup is out of my league (no pun intended). I always have played pretty standard leagues. I hope someone more knowledgable can give you a hand.

[Kelric]

Thanks for trying, at least.

[OldFatGuy]

After all the help you've provided others on here, I sure hope someone can return the favor.

Unfortunately it's not me. I STILL can't get my dream set-up to work like I want it to either.

Really at this point considering paying someone to set it up for me. Don't know if that violates something or not, but I'm at my wits end too.

Good luck Kelric.

[Tullius]

@ Kelric

It is only an idea because i do not use this setup. Perhaps you can adjust the salaries so that the minimum salary or salary for fringe players in the MLB and in the indie league are on the same level so that these scrubs will have a motivation to sign a contract with AA teams. It could work when your ML pays these guys much more.

[Thundercrack]

If somebody could help out with this, would be appreciated. Would love to know good settings for an indy.

[superdaws]

I had something like this set up in OOTP 10. I didn't track it as closely as you did, but I had probably 10 seasons without the indy league shutting down. For the record I was running every league available in the game (Japanese, Taiwan, Korea, both Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, etc) plus a indy league.

As far as I remember there isn't much you can do about preventing star players from coming out of the indy league. I had stars coming out of that league but not that often. In my setup up I had it as an international league, but set the number that controlled player quality to, I think half of what the MLB was. That seemed to depress the talent level, but I don't think it stopped player development.

I am going to assume the league you set up has financials in it, maybe the reason that the players refuse to sign is that you set it up as a Double AA team and they see that as an equivalent to signing a minor league deal. Have you tried offering players that you think should be in the indy league a minor league deal with a MLB team? Maybe you could try setting up the league as an international league and see if that works.

I haven't tried the setup I used in 10 in 11 yet because the game really bogged down on my system running all those extra leagues so I can't tell if there something has changed in 11.

[Ktulu]

Not sure how you setup the indy league... try setting the indy league to be a Major League and then decrease the player creation modifiers down to AA levels. That way free agents should consider the indy league as a Major league and be more willing to sign. I suspect the free agents don't sign because they "don't want to play in the minors".

As for #2, if your player creation modifiers are low enough in the indy league the players shouldn't be good enough to be "really good" in the MLB. If you set the PCM's to .600 the players will be basically 60% as good as the MLB players, so even the best indy player won't be a star in the MLB.

[Kelric]

I'll try both the tweaking the salaries and the changing it to an international league ideas. Thanks guys, I'll report back.

Edit - And dropping the PCMs a bit more.

[Kelric]

Not many changes in the last test. Trying it again...

Originally Posted by OldFatGuy

Unfortunately it's not me. I STILL can't get my dream set-up to work like I want it to either.

What is yours again? I can't recall.

Originally Posted by superdaws

As far as I remember there isn't much you can do about preventing star players from coming out of the indy league. I had stars coming out of that league but not that often. In my setup up I had it as an international league, but set the number that controlled player quality to, I think half of what the MLB was. That seemed to depress the talent level, but I don't think it stopped player development.

I am going to assume the league you set up has financials in it, maybe the reason that the players refuse to sign is that you set it up as a Double AA team and they see that as an equivalent to signing a minor league deal. Have you tried offering players that you think should be in the indy league a minor league deal with a MLB team? Maybe you could try setting up the league as an international league and see if that works.

Originally Posted by Ktulu

Not sure how you setup the indy league... try setting the indy league to be a Major League and then decrease the player creation modifiers down to AA levels. That way free agents should consider the indy league as a Major league and be more willing to sign. I suspect the free agents don't sign because they "don't want to play in the minors".

As for #2, if your player creation modifiers are low enough in the indy league the players shouldn't be good enough to be "really good" in the MLB. If you set the PCM's to .600 the players will be basically 60% as good as the MLB players, so even the best indy player won't be a star in the MLB.

I've set the indie league to MLB level, bumped the superstar salary level to be slightly higher than MLB's minimum (which means it will be lower eventually as MLB changes, but whatever, I'm focusing on the first few sim seasons at the moment), set the PCMs to 60% of MLB and lowered the feeder league PCMs a bit as well. We'll see how this next run goes.

[Kelric]

Alright, simmed into 2008 this time around. After a cursory look at each big league roster, it seems there are a handful of backup catchers, middle relievers and one starting pitcher currently playing in MLB that came from my indie leagues, as well as a few guys who got their start in the college/HS feeder system and never played indie ball. I'd actually like a few more, but why mess with what seems to have worked?

Looking through the indie leagues, there are plenty of failed major leaguers/guys who got old. In the first handful of teams I looked at I saw Jose Offerman, Placido Polanco, Mike Leiberthal, Julian Tavarez, Rick Ankiel, etc., etc.

Ankiel, for example, pitched nine seasons with the Royals and was solid, but his lack of control finally caught up to him after a 1-17, 7.15 ERA season in 2007. Now in '08 he is making a $333k salary in indie ball and has a 1.96 ERA through 96 IP. The highest paid indie ballers are almost all guys from MLB, with team payrolls ranging from $1.7M to $5.4M (though budgets go from $3.5M to $18M).

Here are my Sabermetric PCMs for each league:
MLB - 1.000, of course
Indie League - .650/.650/.600/.650/.650
Indie College Feeder - .430/.430/.325/.350/.430
Indie HS Feeder - .350/.350/.250/.270/.350

I wound up with 32 feeder league teams on each level, by the way.

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

The frustrating thing about all of this is that it shouldn't require this much work to play with functional, realistic independent leagues. Why should we have to spend hours of our time, just testing, to fail at something? Independent leagues are the only thing I want in this game, and no I don't mean unaffiliated major leagues. For the past week I've been testing universe after universe, just trying to get something functional. The problem is simple: the game isn't sophisticated enough to understand the operations of an "independent" league. In some of my most recent tests, most teams won't sign players (although their finances are perfect and there's over 2k free agents). In another test, the teams did sign players, but they were all catchers! There's only so much you can do using the interface and game itself. Parts of this game need to be recoded and implemented entirely, and independent leagues need to actually be introduced as a feature, not an obscure "possibility." I think Markus undervalues the concept of a truly independent league. It's basically the historical backbone of the minor league system.

[Ktulu]

Independent leagues work fine, I've used them in every universe I've created since OOTP 9. Could they work better? Sure, but to say that they're an "obscure possibility" is a stretch.

[Dr. P.R. Park III]

Can you unaffiliate a league, as to make it "independent"? Yes, but does this make it realistic? No. Different strokes for different folks, friend. Really depends on your interpretation of an independent league. In reality, an independent league is so much more then just an unaffiliated league. I'll take your admission that they could be better at face value, and agree with you. This is something I have tested extensively with previous versions of OOTP, and especially 11, and it's ridiculous the amount of time and effort it requires. If you simply want old dudes to wander to your independent league, well sure, that's real easy. But if you're more concerned about emulating reality, like myself, it's a bit more challenging then creating a beer league.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Dr. P.R. Park III

The frustrating thing about all of this is that it shouldn't require this much work to play with functional, realistic independent leagues. Why should we have to spend hours of our time, just testing, to fail at something? Independent leagues are the only thing I want in this game, and no I don't mean unaffiliated major leagues. For the past week I've been testing universe after universe, just trying to get something functional. The problem is simple: the game isn't sophisticated enough to understand the operations of an "independent" league.

It really goes back to OOTP's roots, which began with emulating MLB. As time went on in new verions you could add more leagues, have minor leagues, and many other enhancements, but it still retained at its core the restrictions it began with; the notion of two subleagues within a league is an example of that.

OOTP still essentially treats leagues as entities within separate universes rather than as entities within a single, common universe. Separate draft pools and separate feeders for each league are manifestations of that 'separate universe' philosophy; the lack of a genuine city-based economic system is another.

To really advance things, OOTP needs to make a clean break with that 'separate universe' approach and move to a 'common universe' methodology. This is a fundamental paradigm shift, but one which would dramatically push the game forward into new, exciting, and realistic possibilities.

A 'common universe' approach means ALL leagues created in a saved game are all part of the SAME universe. There is only ONE pool of players from which all leagues draw. All leagues within that common universe can interact and affect each other. A proper city-based common universe economic model means that if a city is already host to a club and you set up a new league with a club in that same city, you would see an impact. There are now two clubs competing for the same fan base, so there would be an effect on attendance and revenue for both the existing and new club.

To manage how leagues interact within that common universe, you need league associations, which govern precisely how leagues relate to one another. Baseball history can be the guide here in terms of what kinds of relationships leagues have had with each other and what kind of effects those relationships exhibited.

Put all this together, a 'common universe' philosophy combined with league associations and a city-based economic system, and OOTP takes a gigantic leap forward in possibilities. You want to set up independent leagues? It'd be a snap. Want to recreate a rival major league scenario? No problem. Want to mimic more closely the kind of history the minor leagues have had vis-a-vis the majors? Have at it. It all becomes possible, and OOTP truly becomes the ultimate baseball simulator.

But it all starts with that 'common universe' philosophy...

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

But it all starts with that 'common universe' philosophy...

Which is all well and good, but it would be a massive amount of work to implement, so the chances of seeing it are slim to none.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Cryomaniac

Which is all well and good, but it would be a massive amount of work to implement, so the chances of seeing it are slim to none.

Who's to say? I've been surprised in the past about things which seemed to me to be complicated to code turned out to be a breeze for Markus to add. One can never tell unless he says so directly.

Yes, it's not going to happen in a patch. But it's certainly possible in a future version. And, indeed, I'd say it's a necessity. OOTP is nearing the limits of its current foundation in terms of league operation and management. The league and economic model foundations need rebuilding to really move things forward beyond workarounds and kludges.

Rebuild those foundations right and they need never be touched again.

[superdaws]

Originally Posted by Kelric

Alright, simmed into 2008 this time around. After a cursory look at each big league roster, it seems there are a handful of backup catchers, middle relievers and one starting pitcher currently playing in MLB that came from my indie leagues, as well as a few guys who got their start in the college/HS feeder system and never played indie ball. I'd actually like a few more, but why mess with what seems to have worked?

Looking through the indie leagues, there are plenty of failed major leaguers/guys who got old. In the first handful of teams I looked at I saw Jose Offerman, Placido Polanco, Mike Leiberthal, Julian Tavarez, Rick Ankiel, etc., etc.

Ankiel, for example, pitched nine seasons with the Royals and was solid, but his lack of control finally caught up to him after a 1-17, 7.15 ERA season in 2007. Now in '08 he is making a $333k salary in indie ball and has a 1.96 ERA through 96 IP. The highest paid indie ballers are almost all guys from MLB, with team payrolls ranging from $1.7M to $5.4M (though budgets go from $3.5M to $18M).

Here are my Sabermetric PCMs for each league:
MLB - 1.000, of course
Indie League - .650/.650/.600/.650/.650
Indie College Feeder - .430/.430/.325/.350/.430
Indie HS Feeder - .350/.350/.250/.270/.350

I wound up with 32 feeder league teams on each level, by the way.

Glad I could help.