Online play

[Hrbek14]

Hi – I have been looking for a good baseball strategy simulator and decided to give OOTP a try, so I've pre-ordered the upcoming version. I grew up playing Strat-O-Matic and tried the computer version a few years ago. I’m still a fan, but the computer game is so limited and I wanted more. While I’m guessing that SOM will be more “historically accurate”, that aspect isn’t all that important to me. What I want to do is build and manage a team, so I want the GM side (which the SOM game is very marginal at simulating) and the game management side as well. From the screenshots I've seen, I believe this game will be everything I'm looking for in the single player realm and I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

Now for the down side of what I can see - the online options don't appear to be what I'd like. Let me explain what I'd be looking for and maybe someone will have thoughts on how I could acheive it (or something similar to it).

What I'd like to do is have an online league with a mixture of human and computer managers. Each human would GM their team and manage each and every game. Any games between computer managers would be simulated.

OK - so here's what I see as problems with that. First, OOTP doesn't seem to allow playing a game online against someone else. This is the biggest obstacle. I was thinking of alternatives - for those games, the players could get together at the same computer and play each other. However, one of the people who would be playing is in Seattle and it would be impossible to do that with him. Perhaps having him on the phone and having him describe what he wants to do as the game progresses? Are there any other reasonable alternatives anyone can think of?

The next problem is that I believe every human would have to be a commissioner and would have to be able to play their own games. We'd probably set it up so that I would be the "overall" commissioner and would handle the normal commissioner duties including simulating all games that don't involve the human players. So how could this work?

I was thinking that I could, for example, play out say 6 days worth of games (my own, plus all of the computer only matchups) but not play any games that involve humans and let each owner do that on their own, creating an updated league file that would keep getting passed on until the entire 6 day stretch was complete at which point I'd update the web information and start on the next block of time.

There are some problems with this method - first of all, the human players would also have to do some of the computer vs. computer simulation themselves. For instance, if Human #2 is playing Computer #3 for the first three games and then switches to playing Computer #4 for the three following that while Computer #3 moves on to playing Computer #6, I can't simulate any of those all-computer games until the human vs. computer series is complete. That would necessitate a lot of work to constantly map out those issues and who will simulate what.

Now, I suppose one way around that is to standardize the schedule so that will never happen. Say I declare a week to be the standard time period for updates. Each week will feature 2 series against the same team, one in each team's stadium. I could declare all Wednesdays to be off days, meaning that every series will be three games or I could allow for a 2 game and 4 game series (it would be more work to do that).

Sorry for the long post - let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks!