Need Advice on Creating a New Custom League With Just One League... No Minors

[Eugene Church]

I need the help of you game experts... I know you can help me avoid pitfalls in setting up a New Custom League.

I am going to replay the Southern Association 1946 to 1960... it will just be one league... with no minors.

Do I make the new custom league the "Major League"? Or should I set it to "Double A"?.. the Southern Association was a Double A league.

Will use real players and will manually create their ratings based on stats from the Baseball-Reference... I also researched newspaper archives and got a lot of stats on my own... I should be able to come up with real rosters from those years... I will update them manually each season with new players... beginning with the 1950 season I watched many of the players in New Orleans and Mobile... so I am pretty familiar with the skill of many of the players.

Development is turned off... I just want to replay the league.
No financials... if financial are turned off, will the game generate attendance figures... it would be nice to have that, but not required.

I need your expert help in creating this new Custom League... I will post the screens where I am not sure of what to select and would appreciate your advice on what to choose.

This is the first screen that I couldn't figure out what choices to make.

Do I want to "Save a Template"?... would it be good to have a template?

What do I select in the WORLD DATABASE COMPLEXITY?... I will have only 8 cities in my league.

The choices are:
Complete: All cities will be loaded for all nations.
Medium: All cities will be loaded for baseball nations.
Compact: less cities will be loaded.

Should I just use DEFAULT in the DATABASE FOLDER SECTION?

Would appreciate your help and expertise... I know you guys and gals know far, far more about this game than me.

[Eugene Church]

I went ahead and tried to set up a single league with no minors... but the game also had 5 minor leagues... AAA to Rookie leagues.

Each team in my major league has minor league affiliates in each level of the minors.

Anyone know how to set up custom league with no minors?

Is it possible to delete minor leagues after you have created the custom league?

I saw in the "Available Actions" on the League Structure page that the "league" could be deleted... does this mean the league that you have on the screen or will it delete the entire league, major league and all minors?

[Eugene Church]

Also how do you have a 20-man roster with a 20-man reserve roster?

[Eugene Church]

I went in and deleted the unwanted minors leagues.
And now my 20-man roster and 20-man reserve roster is showing up.

Will have see how the game functions with their minor league removal.

Still wish someone would answers my other questions from the above screenshot...

I suppose no one plays new custom leagues.

I haven't set up a league since OOTP12... except for my State Line League using OOTP15 and then converting it to OOTP16.

All went easy and well in setting up the SLL.

But so far OOTP17 has not been easy.

I'll just keep using trial and error to set up the custom league.

Why did the game create the 5 minor leagues... I never selected anything about the minors in the setup wizard.

[Bigrod]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

I went in and deleted the unwanted minors leagues.
And now my 20-man roster and 20-man reserve roster is showing up.

Will have see how the game functions with their minor league removal.

Still wish someone would answers my other questions from the above screenshot...

I suppose no one plays new custom leagues.

I haven't set up a league since OOTP12... except for my State Line League using OOTP15 and then converting it to OOTP16.

All went easy and well in setting up the SLL.

But so far OOTP17 has not been easy.

I'll just keep using trial and error to set up the custom league.

Why did the game create the 5 minor leagues... I never selected anything about the minors in the setup wizard.

Important....save what you've got so far as a template....and as you make changes, save as a template again (You can't overwrite templates so name each one SLL1,SLL2 and so on so you can keep track. Trust me, you're gonna wish you did. Any mess ups, and you can always start where you left off by creating a new game from the last good template you want. These templates can be found in ootp's world_templates folder.
Once you've got everything the way you want...Save it as a quickstart.
Then go to the Game Settings/Database screen and run the purge tool. It's in the Available Options dropdown on the right.
This will delete all the stuff you deleted in game. Even though you delete things in-game, it doesn't get deleted in the database and can mysteriously reappear later on...When done, check everything to make sure it's ok. If so, then it's safe to save your game and create the final template and the last quickstart.
Reason for both template saves and quickstart saves is that templates only saves the basic setup. Quickstarts save everything photos, logos, unis, etc. templates don't.
I'm currently scraping the rest of all College data, so I have some time to help if you bare with me.

[Eugene Church]

Really good news.

I ran a test league and the league stats were really close to the real Southern Association stats for that year.

I will only have to make some minor adjustments.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

Important....save what you've got so far as a template....and as you make changes, save as a template again (You can't overwrite templates so name each one SLL1,SLL2 and so on so you can keep track. Trust me, you're gonna wish you did. Any mess ups, and you can always start where you left off by creating a new game from the last good template you want. These templates can be found in ootp's world_templates folder.
Once you've got everything the way you want...Save it as a quickstart.
Then go to the Game Settings/Database screen and run the purge tool. It's in the Available Options dropdown on the right.
This will delete all the stuff you deleted in game. Even though you delete things in-game, it doesn't get deleted in the database and can mysteriously reappear later on...When done, check everything to make sure it's ok. If so, then it's safe to save your game and create the final template and the last quickstart.
Reason for both template saves and quickstart saves is that templates only saves the basic setup. Quickstarts save everything photos, logos, unis, etc. templates don't.
I'm currently scraping the rest of all College data, so I have some time to help if you bare with me.

Bigrod, thank you so much for your help... I'll take your advice on templates and quickstarts.

Do you know anything about the Database setup questions in my first post in the thread?

Should I just use the default setting shown on the screenshot?

I will not use any of the other professional leagues or any foreign leagues in the database... will "Compact: less cities will be loaded"... will that cut down on computer clutter at all?

[Bigrod]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Bigrod, thank you so much for your help... I'll take your advice on templates and quickstarts.

Do you know anything about the Database setup questions in my first post in the thread?

Should I just use the default setting shown on the screenshot?

I will not use any of the other professional leagues or any foreign leagues in the database... will "Compact: less cities will be loaded"... will that cut down on computer clutter at all?

Default..you only need to change those if your files/folders are in a different location than where you installed ootp.
Example: You add a subfolder in ootp's Photos folder called SS1...then you would need to change the database path to that folder so ootp would know where to find the photos.
Or you use a custom default_world file and it's in ootp's database/custom world folder, then you'd need to change the default path to that.
NOTE: You can always change those paths on the fly anytime you want by going to the Game/Game Settings/Database screen and clicking the "Edit" link for whatever you need to change paths to.
Hope this helps
One more thing...doesn't matter how many cities you have...those options are only for fictional/expansion. In your case, you're using real data so it doesn't matter. Use what you think best.

[Bigrod]

Got a thunder storm coming so may have to shutdown for a bit. Get some real bad ones here somtimes

[BigRed75]

Seems to me that you might want to have as many cities as possible, if only for the purposes of getting the player's real-life hometowns correct.

Really looking forward to this. Have you downloaded No Pepper's Southern Association caps and jerseys already?

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Seems to me that you might want to have as many cities as possible, if only for the purposes of getting the player's real-life hometowns correct.

Really looking forward to this. Have you downloaded No Pepper's Southern Association caps and jerseys already?

Thanks for the help, BigRed75.

Now I understand why it might be best to just accept the default database settings.

Wow!... No Pepper's caps and jerseys for the Southern Association... that sounds great!... that will save me a lot of time... I am just a novice creating logos, caps and jerseys using Instafan's wonderful software... No Pepper is a super Modder and creates beautiful work... gosh, I getting excited... this is an unexpected gift!.. thank you very much.

To be honest, my first thought is to set up the league with real players for each season and get their ratings as close to reality as I can for each separate season... also get the league stats pretty close to the real thing, too.

My new dynasty Southern Association will be a "replay" of each season... I will create new rosters for each new season based on the players and stats I can find in Baseball-Reference... it would be nice to just import them, but you can't do it at this time... I will have to create each player myself and place them on the proper teams... no big deal... about 250 players should do it for each season.

I tried using OOTP17 historical rosters, but they were not too accurate... this could have been caused by my ignorance... I abound in it when it comes to navigating OOTPB and knowing the right procedures and choices to make... that's why I posted this thread, hoping the community could save me some pitfalls in setting up a new custom league.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Wow!... No Pepper's caps and jerseys for the Southern Association... that sounds great!... that will save me a lot of time... I am just a novice creating logos, caps and jerseys using Instafan's wonderful software... No Pepper is a super Modder and creates beautiful work... gosh, I getting excited... this is an unexpected gift!.. thank you very much.

Here's the link from OOTPMods...

[Bigrod]

Eugene, are you comfortable using spreadsheets? If so I can send you all the SA league's data. I have it in both Open Office and CSV format. You won't have to go to bbref as this is the exact same data.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

Eugene, are you comfortable using spreadsheets? If so I can send you all the SA league's data. I have it in both Open Office and CSV format. You won't have to go to bbref as this is the exact same data.

Bigrod, you are too good to be true... I'm going to have to buy you dinner or something for helping me out so much.

You know it's a given that I'm a computer dunce... but I'm willing to try... my wife is familiar with spread sheets so she may be able to help me once I get the info from you.
We both have Open Office, but I never use it... but she does.

How will you send it?
Do I need to send you my email in a private message... or would it be better to give you her email address?

Would I have to have any special software to open up what you send.
Send it in the format you think would be best and easiest for me... if CSV is the format used for the names in the OOTPB database, I can read that.

Once you send the data, how do I use it?

As I think I understand you, all of the player data would be in the spread sheet and it would be in readable form for me to transfer the data to create players in OOTP17... do I have it right?

This means I would not have to navigate each player individually on the Baseball-Reference website to get the players stats... it would save me a whole bunch of time.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Here's the link from OOTPMods...

BigRed75, I don't know how I did it, but I manage to unzip No Pepper's minor league logos, jerseys and caps using your link... I used a free software 7Zip... really don't know how to use it, but I saw "Extract" on it and clicked on it and VOILA... it was placed in a folder on my computer.

Really appreciate the help!

You guys are really special!

[Bigrod]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Bigrod, you are too good to be true... I'm going to have to buy you dinner or something for helping me out so much.

You know it's a given that I'm a computer dunce... but I'm willing to try... my wife is familiar with spread sheets so she may be able to help me once I get the info from you.
We both have Open Office, but I never use it... but she does.

How will you send it?
Do I need to send you my email in a private message... or would it be better to give you her email address?

Would I have to have any special software to open up what you send.
Send it in the format you think would be best and easiest for me... if CSV is the format used for the names in the OOTPB database, I can read that.

Once you send the data, how do I use it?

As I think I understand you, all of the player data would be in the spread sheet and it would be in readable form for me to transfer the data to create players in OOTP17... do I have it right?

This means I would not have to navigate each player individually on the Baseball-Reference website to get the players stats... it would save me a whole bunch of time.

Here you go...You might need 7zip (It's free) to unzip it. Any problems, let me know.
The files are open office files. Just open them with that and all the data you need is there. You can create the rosters.txt files and the stats.txt files from within open office. Just copy what you need one of the blank sheets and save it as a csv. Once saved, rename the stats files from csv to .txt. No need to rename the extension for rosters as ootp will import rosters.csv just fine.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dqllclbnwz...iation.7z?dl=1

Another way to get the data is to export your rosters and stats in ootp. Open or import those in open office and just copy/replace/add to those, save and reimport into ootp..
You can do everything ootp needs with open office including schedules.
BTW....check your post in the mods/schedule section..

[Eugene Church]

Bigrod, thanks for doing all of this.

And thanks for giving me the link to the Southern Association schedule.

I again got lucky and unzipped the schedule to a folder... now to figure out how to get it into the game.

[Bigrod]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Bigrod, thanks for doing all of this.

And thanks for giving me the link to the Southern Association schedule.

I again got lucky and unzipped the schedule to a folder... now to figure out how to get it into the game.

To import a schedule, simply go to the Edit League Structure and click the Edit League Schedule link. On that page, click the Available League Actions dropdown and click Clear League Schedule first (I've found that if you don't do that, ootp sometimes won't completely clear things so best to do). When done, click the dropdown again and select Import from file, navigate to your schedule and select it. As long as the schedule matches your setup exactly, it'll import just fine. If it did, then click the dropdown again and select Report Evaluation. It'll bring up the schedule summary which you can review and check how many games each team plays against one another and the total number of games for the season.
Report Grid will show the entire schedule...Away team is the top row.

[Eugene Church]

Originally Posted by Bigrod

To import a schedule, simply go to the Edit League Structure and click the Edit League Schedule link. On that page, click the Available League Actions dropdown and click Clear League Schedule first (I've found that if you don't do that, ootp sometimes won't completely clear things so best to do). When done, click the dropdown again and select Import from file, navigate to your schedule and select it. As long as the schedule matches your setup exactly, it'll import just fine. If it did, then click the dropdown again and select Report Evaluation. It'll bring up the schedule summary which you can review and check how many games each team plays against one another and the total number of games for the season.
Report Grid will show the entire schedule...Away team is the top row.

Great instructions, Bigrod... I experimented yesterday checking out the Schedule Editor... I learned a lot about importing a schedule... will give it a try this afternoon.

I'll let you know how it goes later today.

[Eugene Church]

Bigrod,

I decided to do some trial-and-error to find out what I don't know about importing a league schedule.

I went to Schedule Editor... chose "Available Actions"... Cleared Schedule... then chose "import file".

This window came up... had no idea of what to select.

I clicked on OPEN (thinking I have to get the schedule file on my computer to import).