Auto Calc and Modifiers

[Dargaaz68]

I'm not playing a SIM just yet, I'm playing every batter of all games, but will look to do some SIM stuff in the future. That said, is there a common or more "realistic" setting for the League Modifiers section that you guys use when doing playthroughs? I have Auto Calc checked off, and if I am understanding that, I believe that should keep the year to year stats kind of in balance and growing proportional with the influx of new players, or am I misunderstanding that part?

Am I correct in assuming that even with auto calc, there should be some natural regression of established MLB guys, i.e. Juan Soto shold see peaks, and then a drop off as he gets older, or do I need to adjust the modifiers to achieve that?

I'm a little confused by the fact that when I go to the League Totals and use the Select Year drop down, and move down to a recent era and choose a year, all of the modifiers just remain 1.000? i thought the drop down would change those figures if I chose a different era, but no matter what I choose the modifiers remain 1.000, so either I'm doing something wrong or I'm not understanding it.

I'm not looking for a major change from normal progressions, I'm just trying to wrap my head around the best process so I can go out and experiment with a Historical save once I fine tune it and come up with a template. Thanks for any input.

EDIT TO ADD: I forgot, is there a Limit to the number of Short Lists we can create?

[Carplos]

I'm a little confused by the fact that when I go to the League Totals and use the Select Year drop down, and move down to a recent era and choose a year, all of the modifiers just remain 1.000? i thought the drop down would change those figures if I chose a different era, but no matter what I choose the modifiers remain 1.000, so either I'm doing something wrong or I'm not understanding it.

If you choose a different year, you'll want to autocalc for the modifiers to change.

When you enter new league totals, or choose a year, it doesn't do the sims autocalc does automatically so it leaves the modifiers at 1.

EDIT TO ADD: I forgot, is there a Limit to the number of Short Lists we can create?

There is... someone posted about it a while back cause they wanted more. I don't remember what it was... you might try searching the forums for "shortlists". It wasn't too far back IIRC.

[Carplos]

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...72&postcount=1

The post I was thinking of doesn't say the limit, just requesting more.

[kq76]

I think you could maybe do with some background.

In the early versions all we had were the league totals and if you wanted to increase or decrease something you had to actually do the inverse. That is, if you wanted more home runs, you actually had to lower the home run total. I forget why it was/is like that, but it was workable if you just accepted that you had to do the inverse. But because it was so confusing for some people, eventually the modifiers were added to make it more intuitive. So instead of lowering the home run total to get more home runs, you just increased the home run modifier.

So, do you actually need to touch the modifiers? No, but it's probably easier to adjust them than the league totals.

So what does the auto-calc feature do? It looks at the ratings of the players in your league and adjusts the modifiers so that the end of season results are at least close to the run environment of your league totals. Note that I said, "the run environment of..." and not just "the league totals". The reason why is your league might not have near the same # of PA as the league totals (for example, say you're playing a fictional league with only 12 teams, but you're using modern day MLB totals to get a modern day run environment) and so of course you wouldn't have the same # of home runs as the total number. If you think of the league totals as ratios instead of totals, it might make more sense.

So, should you check auto-calc? Well, you might not want to use it if you just want to see where the engine takes you, but if you want your league to be similar to the run environment of the league totals, then yes, you do probably want to use it.

This old post may explain it all better than I have.

If it's still confusing, the best thing to do might be to make a backup, copy it a few times, and just sim them doing different things and compare the end stats. That's probably how a lot of us learned how to do exactly what we wanted.

[Pelican]

Having struggled with this over the years, and having some grasp, I would say kq76 gives an excellent brief explanation of a confusing metric. I was not aware of the history, and that context helps make sense of it. Many thanks.

[Eugene Church]

Thank you, Kq76.... that was very, very helpful.

If I understand you correctly, if I just want my league to develop overtime naturally as it would with the game default settings, I should not use auto-calc.

I think my problems began when I started to use auto-calc about 3-4 seasons ago. It seemed to change the direction of the development of the league.
It seemed to change a little too much the first year.

[Eugene Church]

Kq76, the link you provided was in 2013.
It say to raise league totals, you must lower them... to lower them, you must raise them.

That is not the case today, is it?

You raise to increase the league totals and you lower to decrease the league totals.

[OutS|der]

Adjusting league totals has always been a nightmare. Not to mention Auo-Cal modifiers change every time you run them. Then add league wide strategy settings and it's just a mess.

I'd much rather have the ability to set player totals instead of league. Being able to set the totals for league leaders and the variance between them and the bottom leaders would give me the results I want.

[Dargaaz68]

Originally Posted by kq76

I think you could maybe do with some background.

In the early versions all we had were the league totals and if you wanted to increase or decrease something you had to actually do the inverse. That is, if you wanted more home runs, you actually had to lower the home run total. I forget why it was/is like that, but it was workable if you just accepted that you had to do the inverse. But because it was so confusing for some people, eventually the modifiers were added to make it more intuitive. So instead of lowering the home run total to get more home runs, you just increased the home run modifier.

So, do you actually need to touch the modifiers? No, but it's probably easier to adjust them than the league totals.

So what does the auto-calc feature do? It looks at the ratings of the players in your league and adjusts the modifiers so that the end of season results are at least close to the run environment of your league totals. Note that I said, "the run environment of..." and not just "the league totals". The reason why is your league might not have near the same # of PA as the league totals (for example, say you're playing a fictional league with only 12 teams, but you're using modern day MLB totals to get a modern day run environment) and so of course you wouldn't have the same # of home runs as the total number. If you think of the league totals as ratios instead of totals, it might make more sense.

So, should you check auto-calc? Well, you might not want to use it if you just want to see where the engine takes you, but if you want your league to be similar to the run environment of the league totals, then yes, you do probably want to use it.

This old post may explain it all better than I have.

If it's still confusing, the best thing to do might be to make a backup, copy it a few times, and just sim them doing different things and compare the end stats. That's probably how a lot of us learned how to do exactly what we wanted.

Thank you for providing that context, that actually helps me understand it on a more granular level, I really appreciate it.

I think I was more confused because when I chose a different era the modifiers all remained at 1.000, and for whatever reason my brain was thinking those values would adjust to "appear" as a higher or lower number. Now I understand them to be an adjustment to the League Totals if that was the way I was going to pursue trying to keep balance.

So hopefully my last question, when I have read a few posts I see the option to "run" auto-calc, but for me it just shows up as a check box. Does that mean that it will just simply run at the specified point in the year? i.e. pre-season or whatever designated date? I assume there wouldn't be any reason to run an auto-calc in mid season.

Thanks again for helping me to understand, this is an amazing game, that keeps my threadhead fetish alive and well.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

If I understand you correctly, if I just want my league to develop overtime naturally as it would with the game default settings, I should not use auto-calc.

Yes, but... Is that really what you want? I mean, the word "naturally" sounds great and all, but if the league veers way off one way or another, is that really what you want? Or do you want a league that stays pretty consistent, it won't be exactly the same every year, but it also won't feel like you entered a dead ball era or the opposite? If that's the case, then you probably want to use auto-calc.

If you really want some "natural" change, maybe enable dynamic evolution (Options screen) and its "more/less offense" and "more/less pitching" options.

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

I think my problems began when I started to use auto-calc about 3-4 seasons ago. It seemed to change the direction of the development of the league.
It seemed to change a little too much the first year.

What exact problems are you having? If you told me things changed too much without saying what settings you had, I'd assume you weren't using auto-calc because that's more what you run the risk of when you don't use it, getting results you might not want. Keep in mind, it very well could be something else unrelated, or in conjunction with other changes, and it could have been even worse if you hadn't used auto-calc.

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Kq76, the link you provided was in 2013.
It say to raise league totals, you must lower them... to lower them, you must raise them.

That is not the case today, is it?

You raise to increase the league totals and you lower to decrease the league totals.

To be clear, I haven't tested it in at least a few years as I'm happy enough using auto-calc so maybe it has changed, but: 1) the last manual and the wiki say the same as I have (and I never worked on the manual so they aren't my words originally), and 2) I don't see why they'd change it when they have the modifiers that work intuitively, and 3) they're very clear in saying they advise not touching the league totals.

In summary, just ignore the league totals (that is, don't touch them) and ignore what I said about doing the opposite with them. I only said all that to give the OP some background perspective as they sounded confused by it all.

Again, if anyone wants to be absolutely sure of all of this themselves, make a backup of a league, copy it several times, sim a few, then changing different settings, sim a few more, and then compare the league end total stats (League > Statistics > Team Statistics > Open Report > Open in Browser > copy and paste each sim's data into different tabs of a spreadsheet, and then compare them).

Actually, I've got some time. I'll throw together a spreadsheet and run some tests...

...

I haven't run a lot of tests for this (I used to run a minimum of 10 sims per set of settings, but I don't have the time for that right now), but here's a few things I noticed:

- with auto-calc checked (tests 1-3, 7, and 8) the ratios are very very close to the league totals ratios (see the Ratios sheet)

- with auto-calc unchecked (tests 4-6, 9, and 10), H, HR, SO, uBB (all /AB) are a fair bit higher than the league totals ratios (again, see the Ratios sheet)

- having auto-calc checked did seem to override the changes to the HR modifier (test 8), which isn't surprising since the league started on Mar 16, but opening day wasn't until Mar 20 (auto-calc runs on OD IINM).

- the change to the HR total (tests 7 and 9) changed back when the league totals weren't "locked", but it did stick when they were locked (tests 11 and 12)... so if you insist on adjusting the totals instead of the modifiers and want them to stick, also check the "Lock..." checkbox underneath.

- test10, where auto-calc was unchecked and the modifier was increased to 1.2, lead to the highest HR/AB ratio, higher even than expected though

- test12, where auto-calc was unchecked, the HR total was increased by 20%, and the league totals were locked, also, however, lead to a higher HR/AB, although not as high as test10's; this was the most surprising result by far, but who knows why, maybe things have changed since we had to invert our changes to the totals, or maybe if I ran this total 10 more times it'd prove that this result was an anomaly, I don't know. More tests should be done to know for sure.

- notice that 1.2x.033 (.033 is the totals' HR/AB ratio), equals .040 and also notice which tests produced a matching .040 HR/AB (tests 9 and 11, when totals were increased, among other changes) and which produced ratios considerably higher (test 10 and 12, when modifiers were increased, among other changes); were these just coincidences, or anomalies, or did I do anything wrong? I don't know. More tests should be done to know for sure.

So what have I learned from doing all this:

- it sure looks like auto-calc works, if you want your league's sim ratios to be as close as possible to the totals' ratios

- if you want to change the totals and have them stick, lock them

I can't stress enough, however, that if you really want to know the truth, you really need to run multiple tests using the same settings. Even in tests 1-3 and 4-6 where I ran 3 tests each of the same settings, while better, really shouldn't be what you do to conclude anything. 10 would be better, but 20 would be even better, and so on. It's all about how sure you want to be. And if you're only running single sim tests of settings, like I did with tests 7-12, you really shouldn't conclude anything from them! If anything, they should only elicit questions.

File > Make a Copy and change the spreadsheet however you want. I'd recommend, however, only entering your own data (with the exact same headers) in the Test* sheets (Ctrl+Shift+V from your web browser), after clearing them. Notice I used a custom "view", but you can easily copy it or make your own (I tried to make the formulas so they'd work with whatever you used), just make sure row 1 matches your headers if you do use different as the formulas rely on the totals sheet. The Ratios sheet, however, won't work without edits if you use different headers.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by Dargaaz68

Thank you for providing that context, that actually helps me understand it on a more granular level, I really appreciate it.

I think I was more confused because when I chose a different era the modifiers all remained at 1.000, and for whatever reason my brain was thinking those values would adjust to "appear" as a higher or lower number. Now I understand them to be an adjustment to the League Totals if that was the way I was going to pursue trying to keep balance.

So hopefully my last question, when I have read a few posts I see the option to "run" auto-calc, but for me it just shows up as a check box. Does that mean that it will just simply run at the specified point in the year? i.e. pre-season or whatever designated date? I assume there wouldn't be any reason to run an auto-calc in mid season.

Thanks again for helping me to understand, this is an amazing game, that keeps my threadhead fetish alive and well.

You can't run autocalc once a season has started. There is a button to do so before the first game is played, but it disappears once the season has started.

I believe checking the box will have the game run it on opening day before any games are played. If you do it manually you will want to make sure you don't forget to do it before any games are played. If you do it manually it is best to do it on the morning of opening day. This way the 26 man rosters are set and is what AC will use to set the LTM's.

You'll also want to do this for you minor leagues, or any leagues you have in your game. Each league level has their own League Totals and LT-Modifiers. The check box is there to run autocalc for each level, or you can run it manually if you want. Again if you forget and start your season there is no going back to do it later.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Dargaaz68

So hopefully my last question, when I have read a few posts I see the option to "run" auto-calc, but for me it just shows up as a check box. Does that mean that it will just simply run at the specified point in the year? i.e. pre-season or whatever designated date? I assume there wouldn't be any reason to run an auto-calc in mid season.

Someone can correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure auto-calc runs on opening day, before any games are played. So as you can see by my previous post (tests 7 and 8), if you make some changes before opening day, they might be overridden by auto-calc running.

Originally Posted by Dargaaz68

Thanks again for helping me to understand, this is an amazing game, that keeps my threadhead fetish alive and well.

No problem! I learned OOTP from others and maybe one day others will learn OOTP from you.

[Dargaaz68]

Originally Posted by Sweed

You can't run autocalc once a season has started. There is a button to do so before the first game is played, but it disappears once the season has started.

I believe checking the box will have the game run it on opening day before any games are played. If you do it manually you will want to make sure you don't forget to do it before any games are played. If you do it manually it is best to do it on the morning of opening day. This way the 26 man rosters are set and is what AC will use to set the LTM's.

You'll also want to do this for you minor leagues, or any leagues you have in your game. Each league level has their own League Totals and LT-Modifiers. The check box is there to run autocalc for each level, or you can run it manually if you want. Again if you forget and start your season there is no going back to do it later.

Thanks Sweed, and everyone else, you have shown me the light!!! All my questions have been answered and I am grateful you all took the time to respond.

[Todd R]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Thank you, Kq76.... that was very, very helpful.

If I understand you correctly, if I just want my league to develop overtime naturally as it would with the game default settings, I should not use auto-calc.

I think my problems began when I started to use auto-calc about 3-4 seasons ago. It seemed to change the direction of the development of the league.
It seemed to change a little too much the first year.

Auto-calc doesn't gradually change the direction of development. It's an on/off switch. When you turn it on it immediately makes your league produce historical output for the selected year. Your "too much" comment, well, your league talent must be quite different from the historical year. Turn it off and you'll see a similar change in the opposite direction.

[Eugene Church]

Thanks to all who responded. I appreciate the help and advice.

[Dargaaz68]

Ok so one more silly question. What function does the "Automatically control in game engine" button actually do? Does it give you some kind of in game control? Or is it more of a SIM engine modifier? And when I look at my minor leagues it appears they defaulted to this option instead of auto calc? Why would that be? If I use auto calc in the majors shouldn't i also use it in the minors?

[luckymann]

You can kind of look at autocalc as recalc for the league as a whole.

If you apply it, the game will attempt to have the league in question mirror the totals / modifiers you apply. If you don't, think of it as a "development-only" environment taking over the league, whereby the longer you refrain from applying auto-calc, the less the gravitational pull of the last time you did and the totals / modifiers applied at that time.

Historical buffs tend to use autocalc to get the league as closely as possible to the corresponding historical season's stats, in the same way they tend to use recalc for players at either a 1-year, 3-year, or 5-year setting (with or without double-weight applied) depending on how precise they want to replicate the IRL. Some prefer not to use it, or to apply their own run-environment settings, to achieve specific results or just see how things might play out differently.


For non-historical saves, autocalc allows you to grab a snapshot in time from the past and apply it to your league. If you want this merely as a starting point, then just autocalc in year 0, perhaps one or two after that so it sticks, then stop applying it.

Let's say you want to change the run environment of your league from low to high. Pick a steroid-era season and apply autocalc once or twice, then just let it run.

Or you can use pre-calc, which kind of assesses your league's talent on its merits and sets LTMs accordingly, or none at all and just roll the old diceroony.


I have my own set of totals I on occasion apply if I want to avoid the deadball era boredom and the steroid era fraud. Or you can lock the totals you want from the league and set it to auto-autocalc, and your run environment will stay fairly stable.

It really is a very handy tool if you know what you want from it and how to use it to achieve that result.


I thoroughly recommend you use the totals to set the environment rather than the modifiers, because while the logic of the latter is more straightforward these days, it is still a difficult one to fully understand and therefore use to your advantage properly.

I also would avoid the sim-engine control except for minor and developmental leagues. To this day, I have no idea what it means or how it works.

G

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by luckymann

You can kind of look at autocalc as recalc for the league as a whole.

If you apply it, the game will attempt to have the league in question mirror the totals / modifiers you apply. If you don't, think of it as a "development-only" environment taking over the league, whereby the longer you refrain from applying auto-calc, the less the gravitational pull of the last time you did and the totals / modifiers applied at that time.

Historical buffs tend to use autocalc to get the league as closely as possible to the corresponding historical season's stats, in the same way they tend to use recalc for players at either a 1-year, 3-year, or 5-year setting (with or without double-weight applied) depending on how precise they want to replicate the IRL. Some prefer not to use it, or to apply their own run-environment settings, to achieve specific results or just see how things might play out differently.


For non-historical saves, autocalc allows you to grab a snapshot in time from the past and apply it to your league. If you want this merely as a starting point, then just autocalc in year 0, perhaps one or two after that so it sticks, then stop applying it.

Let's say you want to change the run environment of your league from low to high. Pick a steroid-era season and apply autocalc once or twice, then just let it run.

Or you can use pre-calc, which kind of assesses your league's talent on its merits and sets LTMs accordingly, or none at all and just roll the old diceroony.


I have my own set of totals I on occasion apply if I want to avoid the deadball era boredom and the steroid era fraud. Or you can lock the totals you want from the league and set it to auto-autocalc, and your run environment will stay fairly stable.

It really is a very handy tool if you know what you want from it and how to use it to achieve that result.


I thoroughly recommend you use the totals to set the environment rather than the modifiers, because while the logic of the latter is more straightforward these days, it is still a difficult one to fully understand and therefore use to your advantage properly.

I also would avoid the sim-engine control except for minor and developmental leagues. To this day, I have no idea what it means or how it works.

G

The one slight change to this, the pre-calculated modifiers do not look at your league, they effectively take a neutral run using default options from that historical season to produce the output. Essentially they are there to correct for some sort of era bias in the roster set or default AI.

Whether someone prefers changing the totals or modifiers, that's a preference. As has been mentioned above, we have simplified the process so that more or less, if you added 10% to the league HR totals, that would function the same way as changing the HR modifier up by 0.1. Although the caveat with playing with the league totals is that they're all in balance - as in, if you added 500 HR to the league totals without adjusting the AB number, then you're also adjusting the league BABIP by doing that. So generally, be cautious whenever you change the totals.


The control engine function is an alternate way for the league to apply modifiers. What that function does is basically calculate everyone relative to the average player in the league, adjusts their ratings relative to that average player, and then shifts that to apply to the totals in the engine. It might technically be a little less precise than using the modifiers directly, and it's most useful when the talent levels in the league shift around and the auto-calc might not be a reliable adjustment. It tends to handle some of the extreme talent level disparities, so that you don't have like the one outlier player hitting 97 HR.



But we have put a lot of effort over the last few years to make sure that league totals try not to run out of line, so that keeping auto-calc on is not needed. Running it once manually in a fictional league (or having it on for the first season) of a league can help set the modifiers to catch any issues with the initial setup. Or if you adjust the league strategy or setting to match some other era, it can be useful to set the baseline. But after that, if you want the league to potentially ebb and flow based on the talent of players who enter and leave, then I would suggest to disable it, and then your league totals will not be as static year on year.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

...

Whether someone prefers changing the totals or modifiers, that's a preference. As has been mentioned above, we have simplified the process so that more or less, if you added 10% to the league HR totals, that would function the same way as changing the HR modifier up by 0.1.

...

Do you recall what version this changed? We should probably update the wiki.

With what I suggested, "If you really want some "natural" change, maybe enable dynamic evolution (Options screen) and its "more/less offense" and "more/less pitching" options.", how would you expect it to run when auto-calc is set? Would you expect auto-calc to override those options or would you expect them to still have a fairly noticeable impact just not as much as no auto-calc?

Are you at all surprised or concerned that in test10 the HR/AB ratio went up, not by the expected 20%, but by 45.7% when using the modifiers? It surprised me and I think it would likely surprise others who got an increase much higher than they were expecting. (And in test12 it went up by 42.2%, instead of 20% again, when also changing the modifiers.)

I plan on running more tests because I'm intrigued to find out if changing the totals is better than changing the modifiers now, but it'd be good to know what you'd expect given what you know.

Okay, I have to say it, it's frustrating that we don't document our changes better. I mean, I'm lucky, I've only been counting on auto-calc working like I expect it to the last while, but if someone else was making changes without going through testing it all, and maybe even relied on what the manual / wiki / past experience told them, they'd be getting results contrary to what they expected without maybe even realizing why. I understand, you or someone else probably mentioned the change somewhere on the boards or discord and I'm sure some people here probably saw it (I may even have, but if I did I forgot about it), but this is a change that definitely should have been documented in the manual for all the people who likely wouldn't have seen it posted in some random post. And this isn't at all to blame you specifically, for all I know Markus may have changed it several years ago, but I just feel like OOTP in general has not been great at documenting important changes. It'd just be nice to see us do better at this in the future.

/mini rant

[snepp]

I play each save a little differently. In one I may let auto-calc run every single year, keeping the stat output tighter year to year despite talent fluctuations. I like to do this in my smaller leagues that are more susceptible to dramatic outliers.

In the next I'll run it in year one then leave it off for extended periods of time to see where the "natural" talent fluctuations take me. You may get a run of exceptional pitching at the same time, leading to lower offense, followed by a bunch of generational hitters at the same time combined with weaker pitching. If you were running autocalc every year in this case the ebbs and flows get flattened out considerably.

I also like to handle any stats "evolution" manually. If I see a decade+ run of declining offense I may choose to run autocalc once to force things back to the original baseline, simulating an abrupt change from one year to the next. I may manually change the league totals for one season then back again the next (like the '87 power burst).