THE SETUP
The Republican League is a recreation of the solo fictional league that I used in
my original dynasty from OOTP6, which died due to inattention caused by a severe lack of fun with OOTP2006. The universe is loosely based on the assumption that baseball in the United States never really took off West of the Rockies.
I’ve simmed 100 seasons, from 1901-2000, to generate some history and give a flavor to the current day happenings in the league. You can view an export after those 100 years
here.
We’ll have two leagues with two divisions, each with six teams, for a total of twenty-four teams. The top team in each Division goes to the playoffs, with the first round being the League Championship Series, and the winners meeting in the National Championship Series.
I’ve veered away from the default league settings in a number of places:
- I wanted more SBs, fewer HRs, and generally lower levels of offense than present-day MLB. I used v1.01 the league strategy settings presented by SkyDog.
- In addition to full minor leagues (AAA through Rookie), I also have College and High School feeder leagues (which cause no end of problems - I should have left them out, but wanted the additional depth during drafting.)
- My financial settings are a significantly different. I have a $50,000,000 cash cap (to allow for significant dynasties, and to allow for quick rebuilding by larger market teams). My league minimum salary is $125,000, with superstar quality players earning upwards of $7.5 million. I have no salary cap, and media contracts are based on market size, with an average media contract of $10,000,000. Average attendance is 27,000 at $8.00 per ticket.
- Speaking of financial settings, as I’ll go into more depth about this in a future post, there are definitely large-market and small-market teams in the Republican League, with some teams in between, and during the 100-year sim, I periodically stopped and checked/fixed the market size settings so as to ensure some consistency there. I wanted a league history in which some teams did significantly better than other, that was divided between haves and have-nots, as I think that makes for more interesting stories moving forward. You can judge whether I’ve been successful.
- I’m using a schedule based on MLB’s 1976 schedule, which has 18 games played against in-division team (5x18=90 games) and 12 games versus out-of-division foes (6x12=72 games) for a total of 162 games. Interleague play, which was created by Bud Selig/the Devil, is disabled and spat upon.
- My Hall of Fame criteria are much stricter than the game’s default settings, as I want a HoF that truly contains only the greatest talents. You can view the Hall here, after the 100-year sim. I’ve manually removed four players from that list – Earl Brennen, Jason Dougherty, Dave Kramer and Dave Nelson, as I didn’t think they were in the same class as the other players inducted.
- Ratings scales are 1-20.
- Trading settings are Low / Hard / Favor Prospects.
- AI Player Evaluation Options are 43% Ratings / 42% Current Year Stats / 10% Previous Year Stats / 5% Two Years Ago Stats.
More in a bit.