Help with setting up a league with feeders

[Ruthian23]

After toying with the idea for a few versions now, I've decided to make the plunge and give a fictional stats league only a try. This necessitated the creation of feeder leagues, for which I selected the default full feeder leagues option during league creation.

I'm using a 30 team league with 5 levels of minors. In some testing, everything seems to be working pretty well, except for (maybe) the draft. I set the draft to use feeder league players only and to generate enough players for 0 rounds (since I'm only using feeder league players, not OOTP generated players.) I'm seeing two issues:

1. I have my HS minimum age set to 14 and max to 17 and then my College minimum age set to 18 and max to 22, with draft eligibility beginning one year before the max. The first issue, and probably a less significant one, is that I am seeing some 23 year olds still playing in college, or guys who play all or part of 5 or 6 seasons in college (though a lot of those only play a few games a year. Most viable players only play the 4 years.) Is the maximum age of 22 when the college season starts, or at any point during the season?

2. More significantly, I'm seeing huge numbers of players in the draft, generally 4000+. A very large portion of these (maybe 50% or so) are dreck that has gone undrafted for a few seasons. They seem to give it up when they hit about 25 or 26, but guys who clearly aren't pro prospects will stick around after college entering the draft 3 or 4 times. Is this working as intended, or is there some setting I have on/off that shouldn't be? Do others who use feeders see this as well? Is that normal behavior when using feeders?

Thanks for any assistance.

[Syd Thrift]

1. If a player is still only 22 when their year begins (I'm actually unsure when the game ticks that off, so I'll let someone else answer that), they'll stay on the team. So yeah, if your max age for the college league is 22 you will be likely to see a lot of 23 year olds in there.

2. Yeah, if you set up a "normal" high school and college system, you'll end up producing way too many players because the game treats each and every player on each and every team as a probable draft pick. If you want to get the right number of guys coming into the league, you'll need to map out teams based on a calculation. This is how I do it:

a. If you're playing with modern rules, assume that each high school and college team will produce 6 1/4 draftable players (25 divided by 4).

b. Next, you'll want to figure out how many rounds you need for your draft. If you're using a modern-style, every team is affiliated kind of setup, then it's pretty simple: 3-4 rounds per minor league level (I have had good success with 3.3 rounds). If you have a different shape than that, you'll want to figure out how many "levels" you have by dividing your total number of minor league teams (affiliated and unaffiliated) by your number of major league teams, and then proceed by multiplying that total by 3-4 to get the number of rounds you need for your draft. You might then want to add an extra round or two just to give teams more options in the last round or two.

c. Okay, so now that you've got the total number of rounds, multiply that by the total number of teams drafting to get how many players you need in the draft, and then figure out how many feeder teams total you need by dividing that by 6.25 (or, if you're using smaller rosters in the feeder leagues, whatever the roster size is divided by 4).

d. You'll probably have noticed that the number is a lot smaller than the one you might have expected. Yeah... that's kind of the big issue with feeder leagues at the moment. In any case, distribute the teams in HS and college depending on how many players you want to draft at each level (so if you come up with 48 feeder teams and you want 1/3rd of your draft to be high-schoolers, you'd want to set up a 16-team high school league and a 32-team college league).

e. Go in and name the high schools and colleges and you're set. Given that there tends to be an *extremely* small number of high schools, what I do when I use this is either say that those "schools" are baseball academies or regional All-Star teams. So instead of having, like, Mount Pleasant High School, I might have California All-Stars or something.

f. Make sure you've set up your draft for the right number of players as well (I think the game tries to default to 5 players drafted per level of minor leagues, which IME is too many guys). If you have unaffiliated teams, make sure that you have more drafted players than rounds so they can snap up the remaining guys. Note that if you don't create enough feeder league players for your league, the game will generate extra players for the draft for you.

The ideal time to do this is some time deep in the offseason (I don't *think* you have to add feeder leagues during preseason) or, ideally, when you're starting up a brand new league. You also might want to test my method above out on a league, sim forward 20 years or so, and make sure nothing bad happens like the lowest levels of your minor leagues constantly not having enough players to continue, or having so many players in the pool that the AI platoons everyone.

[Ruthian23]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

1. If a player is still only 22 when their year begins (I'm actually unsure when the game ticks that off, so I'll let someone else answer that), they'll stay on the team. So yeah, if your max age for the college league is 22 you will be likely to see a lot of 23 year olds in there.

Thanks very much for the reply. Before I started testing I saved it as a Quickstart on day one (which is 1/1), so I assume I can just go into the college and HS feeder leagues and delete teams to get them down to the proper number and then re-test, correct? (And maybe change the max age of colleges to 21.) I'd hate to start the whole league over, because I did a lot of busy work with saving logos and jerseys/caps and stadiums for teams and whatnot.

Thanks again.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Ruthian23

Thanks very much for the reply. Before I started testing I saved it as a Quickstart on day one (which is 1/1), so I assume I can just go into the college and HS feeder leagues and delete teams to get them down to the proper number and then re-test, correct? (And maybe change the max age of colleges to 21.) I'd hate to start the whole league over, because I did a lot of busy work with saving logos and jerseys/caps and stadiums for teams and whatnot.

Thanks again.

You *should* be able to do that, although I think it may release the players into free agency rather than deleting them outright so that may be something you'll want to check on (I'm pretty sure that the feeder leagues, weirdly, have their own FA pool for you to look at).

[Ruthian23]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

You *should* be able to do that, although I think it may release the players into free agency rather than deleting them outright so that may be something you'll want to check on (I'm pretty sure that the feeder leagues, weirdly, have their own FA pool for you to look at).

Thanks again. So I'm running a 30 team major league. I'm also not using international FAs/international amateurs/scouting discoveries because I'm setting it up to give stats only a try. Because of that, I'm thinking it might be better to err on the side of caution and go with 4 rounds per league level. I have five levels of minor leagues, so that would be 20 rounds. 20 times 30 teams is 600, and 600 divided by 6.25 is 96.

So, I should have a 20 round draft and 96 feeder teams. Does that look correct?

Edit: Also, that 96 numbers should feed the league correctly without changing any other setting, correct? I don't need to set anything so that they only produce 6.25 draftable players per team or something?

[Syd Thrift]

No, that should do it. Some teams will have 8 seniors to start, others with only have 4, so it should all work out. If for some reason you don't create enough guys, as noted, the game will auto-generate extra players for you (of course, it won't do anything if you generate too many except stick them in the draft pool). I might still add an extra round or two with the teams to match just so you can pick something other than a relief pitcher (or, conversely, only draft for, say, 18 rounds) but otherwise that should work out OK.

[BusterKing]

96 feeder teams, but do you need to split them HS and College? like 48 each?

[Biggio509]

Check your draft rounds and if you have selected feeders only for player creation.

There has been a nasty bug or unintended feature for many versions now that sets the draft rounds to 99 after you add feeders. I am not sure if it is fixed in 2016. After adding feeders always check to make your settings have the number of draft rounds you want. Adding feeders might change settings you don't want changed and you have to manually change them back.

[Ruthian23]

Originally Posted by Biggio509

Check your draft rounds and if you have selected feeders only for player creation.

There has been a nasty bug or unintended feature for many versions now that sets the draft rounds to 99 after you add feeders. I am not sure if it is fixed in 2016. After adding feeders always check to make your settings have the number of draft rounds you want. Adding feeders might change settings you don't want changed and you have to manually change them back.

Thanks. I've been running some more tests, and making sure that my generate players for...is set to 0 rounds and that the draft is fed by feeder leagues only. I have tried choosing different years for the league stat totals and trying both with modifiers all at 1 or automatically adjusted to those league stat totals and no matter what I do, the league seems to explode offensively sooner or later. The OOTP default when I set up my league had the HRs at like 5900 and all the modifiers at 1. When I ran it at those numbers the league had a steady uptick in offense for about 20 years and then ended up evening out with BAs around .290 and ERAs around 4.80.

When I tried to choose, say, 2014 or 2010 as a league statistical set, with or without pressing the auto adjust modifiers button, I'm seeing league stats jump greatly within a year or two. I have not tried the checkbox under the league totals to automatically adjust anything. Would that do anything? I'd ideally like to play in a league with statistical totals around, say, 2009. More HRs than 2014, but not 1998 levels or anything.

For the record, I don't have evolution on.

Anyone have any ideas of what I might be doing wrong? I've been playing OOTP for many years, but I'm something of a novice in league creation, so I'm sure it's some setting I'm using/not using. I'm planning on eventually posting this as a quickstart for people who want to give stats only a try (or for people who want another fictional option with everything set up, who can just turn stars/ratings on if they want them), so I want the quality to be right, but every change I make seems to be having an adverse impact on something else.

If anyone who has experience setting up leagues would be willing to either take a look at my quickstart as is currently stands and check out the settings to see where I might be going wrong, I'd greatly appreciate it. Alternatively, if there are screens I could screenshot and post here to help people diagnose my problem, I would be happy to do that as well (when I get back to my game later today.)

[Ruthian23]

I managed to solve the above issue (the checkbox I mentioned above, which was the only thing I hadn't tried, seemed to be the culprit.) However, I'm now seeing another issue, and I'm not sure if it's an issue with my feeders/league set-up, or with OOTP's AI draft logic/feeders in general.

The AI is set to evaluate players 0/50/33/17, as has been recommended to me for a stats only league.

I was following along with a draft in 2029 to make sure everything was working right in that regard, and the AI picked this guy first:

As you can see, he played 5 high school games in 2025 at the age of 14 and played very well. Then it seems he did nothing for the next four years, entered the draft, and went #1. His history doesn't mention injuries or anything.

Since the AI should not be using ratings to evaluate this guy, what is making him go #1 overall? Maybe he's fantastic, but it looks like he didn't play. As a secondary question, why didn't he play? Are there stats that aren't appearing due to some bug? I'm going to post about this in tech support, too, but thought I'd see if anyone here knew anything before I report it as a bug, because it's possible, or likely even that it's some setting I have. By the way, the #4 pick pitched a total of 56 innings in high school at the ages of 14 and 15 with good but not amazing numbers, then seems to have taken the next three years off and got drafted #4.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[sreem]

+1 to this. I haven't seen this issue but I am in the process of setting up my own fictional + feeders, although I was planning on using some scouting. If this turns out to be a big issue I might just want to put my plans on hold

[Ruthian23]

Sorry for the bump, but I'd really rather not report this as a bug if it isn't one and it's just something I did. Anybody?

[Jay_Fieri]

Did you ever figure this problem out? Im running into this issue now. Players only playing one year in HS/College basically then entering the draft

[andyhdz]

Post a screen shot of your feeder setup