Internation League Testing and Problems

[Jupiter]

When I purchased OOTP 15, rather than bringing over my long-term OOTP14 league, I decided to play around with a historical league to see if I could learn a few things. Needless to say, I have done that and my league, started in 1934, now has 50+ years of history that I am happy with, although it is far from perfect. So, long story short, it is kind of a scratchpad league, where I am trying to figure some things out as I go along, rather than a league I expect to be perfect.

In keeping with this idea and to take advantage of some of the new features in 15, I want to add a few International leagues to see how they operate, how free agency works, how posting works, etc., over the last 25 years of so of my historical league before I catch up to date and decide to either turn it into a working fictional league or just scrap it and use what I learned elsewhere.

Toward that end, in November 1988, I am attempting to add both a Cuban League and a Japanese League, based on the fictional standard league setup. I am attempting to set up both with a financial system that will allow posting of players to the US, and will allow free agents to move back and forth, in the case of US/Japan. Generated players for the amateur draft will be fictional players from those specific countries, while hopefully maintaining the historical rookies in the MLB league. Once I have the leagues set up, I will sim out 5-10 years and I am sure I will have to tweak PCMs and financials a bit, but I am hoping to create a robust International system with some player movement.

Unfortunately, I am having problems with even the basic setup, likely because I am doing things wrong.

Japanese League: The financials seem to be working okay and players have a range of contracts. Free agency works as expected and some players move back and forth. I did accidentally leave trading allowed between MLB/Japan for a year, which led to some unexpected player movement, but I know what I did there.

The primary issue I have is that both the major Japanese league and its minor league had a schedule that started immediately on November 1, 1988. I would prefer the Japanese seasons to run concurrently with the MLB season. I have tried in multiple ways to change the schedule to April 1989 and it successfully generates a fictional schedule, but as soon as I start simming forward, the game seems to recreate the November 1988 games to attempt to get the 1988 season completed. Playing this out to its natural (word used very loosely here) conclusion, I end up with a 1988 season that stretches from Nov 1988 until apparently the end of time:




Actually, I'm kidding. The year doesn't go on forever, it just lasts exactly two regular seasons, the one the game decided to recreate in November 1988 AND the one I created in April 1989, totally 288 games. And by the time that is over, the schedule is so messed up that the Japanese league actually never plays another game... EVER.

I am thinking that I can avoid this problem by creating the league at a different point in time (early 1989?), but I am curious how the heck the game creates the league such that it will start play in November in the first place? I have checked online and verified that the Japanese League season does not start in November, so I am thinking this is a scheduling quirk due to creating the league at the wrong time. Is there an accepted time period to create a new league in an existing universe?

At this point, the Japanese league is essentially toast, but I decided to keep running through a few more years to see how the Cuban league works out... which led to a completely different set of issues.

Cuban League: The Cuban League setup seems to be working okay, albeit with a few surprises. It also created a default schedule starting in November 1988, but I changed this to a schedule in April 1989 and generated a fictional schedule. Oddly, this one worked perfectly fine even though the Japanese league started adding games back in. So the Cuban schedule starts in April 1989 and seems to run okay. Good news!

One major oddity did occur, perhaps through a mistake of mine. When the league was created, it created players to go with it. I then added the financial system and tweaked the salary levels to get a mix that I thought would create a healthy system (although extremely lower than the US system). Then I assigned financials to each team and contracts to each player. I had thought this would assign contracts based on their talent level/age, which seems to be the logic of the note on that option. But instead it assigned all players a minimum contract, since they had zero service time. I assume this will work itself out over time, but I'm curious if anybody has a solution. Would I do better to delete all players and generate new players, or would they also have 0 service time/minimum contracts?

More importantly, I am having a significant problem with the Cuban amateur draft. I set up the amateur draft to run in April 1989 and to generate enough players for 6 rounds (5 actual rounds in the draft, plus some free agents). Here is the setup:



The first draft ran fine. In March 1989, 96 fictional Cuban players were generated and in April 1989, the five-round draft was held. In November of that year, the MLB draft ran with the correct historical players, which is exactly how I intended it to run. Even the Japanese draft ran fine, creating 108 fictional Japanese players and having teams make selections, which was fairly impressive considering the massive scheduling problems in that league.

But the next year, things stopped working. In March 1990, the Cuban league never generated another draft pool, for some reason. In April 1990, the Cuban draft actually did take place, but the only players in the draft were players that had been created in 1989 and failed to sign:




I'm wondering if it still has something to do with the change in schedule that I created by moving the league year from November to April. The preseason for the Cuban league starts on March 13, which is before the draft but after the draft pool should be generated and I'm thinking that timing just does not work right, so the generation gets skipped. Any thoughts??

Interestingly, in 1991, things got back to normal (somewhat). I stopped my sim on the first day of the preason (March 13) and the Draft Pool Published item showed up on March 14, which 10 days later than it should have occurred based on the setup. But it worked, perhaps because by stopping the simulation there it gave the calendar a chance to generate and catch up. And from that point, the draft ran fine. But in 1992, as a test, I simulated entirely through the preseason and draft process and the 1992 draft included no generated amateurs and only the 15 players that had been drafted and failed to sign in 1991. So I think this is definitely an issue with the scheduling of the preseason and the draft pool creation, which apparently can't fix itself unless the simulation is stopped during the appropriate time period.

General Note about International Free Agents: There is one final thing that I did not expect, though I think it kind of makes sense. Since I had started the MLB league as historical and will continue it that way (notwithstanding some possible fictional players entering from the other leagues as free agents), I have the league set up to not generate any international amateur free agents. On the other hand, I set up the Japanese league to allow allow international amateur free agents to be generated to be each year. So in July 1989, the league generated six international free agents. The notes on these players show them as being added to the Nippon league. However, as soon as they become amateur free agents in this league, they become amateur free agents in the MLB league as well, since this league is set up to allow free agents to enter from other leagues. Mind you, it won't generate amateur free agents on its own, but once they exist, the MLB can see them and the teams have enough money to outbid the Japanese leagues for the players.

I don't necessarily think this is a bug, because it makes a certain logical sense. Once a player is created as a free agent, he is a free agent to any league that allows players from other leagues to enter as a free agent (specifically, MLB can bid on them but Cuban League cannot). So I can live with this, but I'm not sure if that's exactly how it is intended to work, since the players were actually created in the Japanese league and none of the good ones will ever end up there due to differences in the financials. I'll just chalk this one up to bad planning on my part.

In short, this is a test league. If anybody has ideas for fixes, I'd love to hear them, but I am willing to chalk this up as a learning experience and start over again in 1988 (or perhaps better in early 1989) and add the leagues again. But I'm curious if those with more experience have any specific advice on the specific issues I'm seeing:

1) Is there a specific time during which new leagues must be added to the universe?
2) Is there a generally acceptable time period to hold the amateur draft so as to avoid issues? Do these same non-generation issues occur in other leagues if the timing is off, or is it solely an International League issue?
3) Does anybody have any advice on changing the schedule for a league? I would really like to have all of my leagues run concurrently and maybe I can make it work if I time the creation right, but it seems like it should be possible to change the season and not have it mess things up so drastically.
4) Is the International Amateur Free Agents issue the way the game is intended to work? Is there any way to generate international amateurs that can only be absorbed into the Japanese league? I know I can do it through scouting finds, but those are so low quality since the addition of the International Amateurs, that it hardly seems worth it.
5) Is there a way to get the Cuban league player contracts to make sense? I still do not quite understand why they were all assigned minimum contracts, although I suspect it has something to do with a lack of service time due to free agency not existing when they were originally created.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or advice you may have.