Roster Sizes and Game Speed

[Hal_10000]

I found something odd when simulating a large league over many future years. Because it might play into the context, this is a league with a handful of human controlled teams that we occasionally simulate a decade or so into the future to check the effects of changes in the setup.

The simulation was painfully slow -- even with the usual changes of not preserving box scores/logs, etc. that are listed elsewhere. Then one year it suddenly got much much much faster.

Looking back, I found that, specifically, when the computer took over a former human teams, the minors went a little crazy. It was constantly juggling players between levels (like dozens every day) and expanded some of the minor teams, including the higher levels, to absurd roster sizes. At point the AAA team had 51 players with about 20 middle relivers.

This was unique to formerly human-controlled teams as other teams stuck to the ~25 man rule for the high minors and has sensible roster composition.

So I set hard limits of 25 men for high minors, 30 men for A and SA, 50 for rookie. The minors went back to normal. And suddenly things sped up. Does this make sense? Why would the computer get so nutty when taking over a human-controlled team? Are we doing something really stupid in our minor-league managment?