My "solution" to the minor sim problem

[turdfurgeson]

Ok, after quite a bit of testing this is what I have come up with to get around having to fill minor leagues with fictional players every few years.
For me, I am beginning a historical sim with the Arod/Garlon DB beginning in 1901. I want to have some sort of minor leagues in place when I take over a team (most likely the M's in 1977) and also just want the satisfaction of doing a historical sim.
So the early years of the minors are just "palce holders" for me, so I have 3 levels with two teams each, not affiliated with any major league teams.
Then so I can sim and not have to continually have to refill these leagues, I set each leagues "scheduled games" to zero. It is also important to disable the playoffs and all star games for these leagues (I also have spring training disabled for now, I will test it later with it on, but i have a very bad feeling this will cause an error that will shut it down) if they are not disabled the computer will have an error and will shut down.

SO far I have had no problem simming many years at a time, so this appears to be a very workable solution for people who want to sim with minors but dont want a ton of fake players or being stopped every year.

I just tested this with a team with zero players afraid this might cause a problem , but it simmed great through two straight years.

Hope this helps some of you out, and if anybody might see some potential problems, please pass them along.

It sucks not having any minor league history, but for now I can live with it.

[JWay]

i'd rather have the minor league history and simulate the year by year deal, good idea though.. I read in one thread that you can add fictional players to the drafts, so i wonder if you can cap the limits they come in at. If a bunch of players come in at 18-25 each year who would be bottom barrell players, its very unlikely that any would reach the majors, and the rosters would stay full. Time to test it!

[turdfurgeson]

Cant you change the modifiers on the setup screen for each minors league? So you could set those pretty low, and try the solution offered by somone to change the status to enable draft after the players have been imported. This might be something to consider

[JWay]

well i forgot to change the player creation modifiers in a test, but its like a 2 second process to add an x amount of players to the draft. So if we can tell the game to create them terrible, this will solve the issue cause they come in 16-20 yrs old.

[Le Grande Orange]

I think it helps in the early years to reduce the active roster limit. There simply aren't enough historical players to support a 25-man active roster in 1901. Try knocking it back to 22 or even 20.

For what's it worth, historically speaking, the active roster limit from 1901-1908 was only about 15-16. The 25-man figure wasn't established until 1909, and even then it was reduced to 21 or 22 in some later years.

Check out this page from this web site for a table detailing how the roster limts have varied over the years. There's quite a bit of interesting stuff on that site, it's definitely worth checking out.

[JWay]

well the computer so far drafted the prospect rated potentially less than 30 in each category like, 31, 15, 24, etc. for hitting categories, and this LF went first overall, he was 17 years old, but still. The computer wont' draft the old guys. =/ My computer died so i have to wait to get home from work cause i left the charger at home. Maybe you can create the remaining draft pool before the last player is picked or something. =/

[turdfurgeson]

hey LGO, Yeah, when I began my replay, I had roster limits down to 20, only two teams at each level of the minors and still had the problems. First I had the teams affiliated with a major club, but spring training the Big Club would bring up extra players which would cause problems, so I turned off spring training, then just left them un affiliated. The main thing was that half the time, the team had the right number of players, but would have too few pitchers, but like 4 2b, 4 cf's etc, so I would go to the game set up screen, change the pitcher rotation to six and "use of relievers" to very often, then use the "fill all teams with fictional players" option to create more pitchers, then reset the rotation to 3 pitchers or 4 and back to rarely for relief use. This would geive me plenty of pitchers. But within a year or two the teams would have half a roster or less again. I think the main problem is the created players were pretty old, many times in thier mid to upper 30's.
Hopefully at some point they will have a patch to let you sim minors with partial teams, but in the meantime it is still fun to mess around with all the different options.


On a separate note, when messing around with the HOF criteria, I thought I had removed VORP, but had made it 0, turning the Hall of Fame into the "Hall of did not completely suck", which was pretty funny to see.

[turdfurgeson]

Hey JWAY, just curious if you have done any testing. I have and so far I have been pretty happy with the results.
What I wanted to accomplish is to have historical players placed on to their correct teams, and still have a draft to fill out the minor leagues, while not allowing fictional players to infest the Major league level, and having players on their correct teams.
So taking the advice from one of the other posters, what I do is simulate until the pre season begins with the draft disabled, then once the database loads, I change the settings to allow for a draft and disable imoprt from rosters (very important, other wise game will crash) and hold the draft (five rounds) on March 1st. I have the PCM set at .2 and when the draft is finished I change the settings back to import rosters, disable draft, becuase it is still pre season.
This has worked very well for me, no fictional players have made any sort of splash in the Bigs, at least that I can tell, and I have gon through about 45 years without having any illegal roster issues. Plus, you only need to do this about every 5 years, you do not need to hold the draft every year. It is pretty easy to keep tabs on how many free agents there are for the minor leagues to grab, usually about 230 the first year after the draft, and by the 5th year there are still roughly 30, but checking the rosters there are about 25 to 30 players on each team with good reserves of pitchers.
The only problems I have had is that trying pre 1910, the game would crash, but this might have been due to the fact that it was my first attempts at doing this, so I could have very easily forgotten to uncheck import players from database.
I am planning to re test again by raising the modifiers a bit, the stats in the AAA systems are a little bit low, but have been steadily increasing each year. Lg Era has increased with a pretty consisten arc from 1.9 to 2.5 (with a highwater mark of 2.80) and league BA form 2.10 to 2.45 or so. I ran this first test with the option to auto adjust league total modifers, just to see what the averages would do with the same modifers, hopefully isolating the created fictional players to see how they would progress over time. My best guess is that with the historical settings with high pitcher endurance, low use of relievers and short rotations, more pitchers have been demoted and have been able to dominate the lower league. But it has been interesting to see pitchers ending their careers bouncing from the majors to the minors before retiring.
I am also very encouraged that this has not slowed down my sim times at all.

And it is also important to remeber to disable auto import PCM modifiers.