Quote:
Originally Posted by Robster49
I have been trying to get OOTP to work correctly with handling an independent league, but always have problems. How is your universe set up, especially the financials?
|
The answer, truth be told, is "badly".
I mean, it's perfectly adequate for story purposes, which essentially requires a moderately-believable setup (or at least one that can be finessed into being moderately believable). But if I wanted to run some real high-accuracy sims rather than some real adequate accuracy sims with dramatic potential, I'd have some work to do.
I'm at work, so specifics aren't at hand, but here are a few things from my limited memory:
1) The financial system kinda almost works. The minimum salary for a league player is $10,000 and things tend to scale well from there according to the scale I set: the highest-paid players make a few hundred thousand and the teams stick to what they're told their budget should be nicely. However, particularly in the early years before I made a few adjustments, their incomes were
way out of whack with their expenditures, meaning that most teams have, for example, about $20 million (or enough to run the team for a decade without a cent in revenue) in the bank.
Since they set realistic salaries and players who make enough money to command the big bucks almost always go to higher-quality leagues anyway, this works if you're willing to close your eyes when the bank balances are on the screen.
2) However, they sometimes allocate their resources a little weirdly. I have a big United States high school league, a pretty large United States college league, and a modest Canadian college league all dumping out North American players to one full major league system, the ten-team Canadian league (which ranks below the major leagues and above the United League), and the eight-team United League itself. So there's a surplus of decent UL-level talent out there for the $10,000 minimum. Therefore, the logical thing to do is to sign your Bill Williams-level talents for whatever the hell they want and fill up the rest of your roster with replacement-level players who are going to be more-or-less as good as the guys making $30,000 or $50,000 a year because they've been around a while.
What the teams actually do is let their really epochal talents go because they don't think they can afford them and instead resign a bunch of depth guys. Sometimes I 'act as' for the other seven UL teams just to make sure some good players stick around. It's not always that they get outbid: a lot of these guys go unsigned and retire free agents. It's that they arbitrarily seem to say "no, we can't afford him" so they don't even try.
3) The player surplus I just mentioned means that you end up with really weird player histories where a guy doesn't play a competitive game for seven years then gets brought up off a reserve list and hits 40 home runs in his rookie season. This is probably what pisses me off most from a story perspective.
So yeah, don't learn from me. :P