Suggestions: Game/League Setup Options

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Cryomaniac

Suggestion

The option to automatically generate geographically sensible minor league teams. For example in an English league a Nottingham teams AAA team would probably be in Southwell or Mansfield. There should be an option when you set up a minor league that says something along the lines of "Generate geographic affiliations".

Reason

It would be easier to make minor league teams that seem more associated with the Major League team.

Priority

Medium.

While I would second this suggestion, there's one obvious problem with it: how do we get OOTP to understand what geographical regions are? How do we tell it which cities belong geographically with which?

The cities.txt file does contain the latitude and longitude for each entry; so perhaps that info can be used. But how?

One idea that comes to mind would be to create pre-designated geographical regions, and add a column to the cities.txt file for that purpose. Each region then gets its own number, starting with 1 for the first one and going from there, with no upper limit on the number of regions, and then cities are assigned the region number to which they belong. The advantage of this approach is if the user doesn't like the way the cities have been geographically grouped, they can easily change it by changing the region number of that city to that of another region. The drawback is someone is going to have to go through the exisiting cities.txt file and make the initial decisions on which cities go into which region, and given the huge number of cities in the file, that could be a daunting, time-consuming task.

But then again, this task could be made simpler by not having every nation having its cities assigned region numbers. It could be limited to the more likely baseball nations to be used in the game, such as the U.S., Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and/or by limiting it to the larger, more populous nations.

The task also could be made more manageable if a number of people were willing to volunteer to come up with a suggested geographical region grouping for a particular country, thereby spreading the workload around.

[enuttage]

Suggestion

Eliminate the redundancy of city names automatically changing when the nation of origin is changed.

Reason

There is already a change cities button that is easy enough to hit once the nation of origin has changed. This would prevent a small mistake from taking a long time to fix due to having to re-input all the city names. Also (although perhaps less critical to the new game), this would make league conversions from 6.12/6.5 much smoother.

As it stands now this is a redundancy that is a royal PITA.

Priority

Low to medium. It ain't the end of the world, but it's annoying.

[Charley575]

Suggestion
Add the ability to edit team specifics such as Fan Loyalty and Fan Interest to the setup screen. (Note, I do not include Market Size in this request. See my suggestion in "Front Office Finances")

Reason
The initial values for these are currently chosen at random, and some users may wish to establish them at the outset.

Priority
Low, as these can already be edited after game start.

[Charlie Hough]

Suggestion

Allow the user to set a limit to the number of extra innings that can be played, and implement tie results if the two teams cannot decide the game within that limit.


Reason

The Korean Baseball Organization limits regular season games to 12 innings. If the two teams are tied after 12 innings, the game goes into the record books as a tie. Standings are kept for wins, losses, and ties. If OOTPBB is going to realitically represent the top leagues around the world, this feature needs to be implemented.


Priority

High - because this relates directly to the realism of the game.

[JerryArr]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Suggestion

Allow the user to set a limit to the number of extra innings that can be played, and implement tie results if the two teams cannot decide the game within that limit.

To kind of tag along...

Suggestion
Allow for the changing of innings in 'regulation', not only as the league default, but for any exhibition games that are scheduled (and allow it to go from, say, 1, to 20, 25, or whatever). After however many innings, extra innings would be activated.

Reason
I dunno... Little League sim?

Priority
Low

[Hazza]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Suggestion

Allow the user to set a limit to the number of extra innings that can be played, and implement tie results if the two teams cannot decide the game within that limit.

Further more, is the mercy rule in OOTP2007? Doesn't the J-League have that?

My main suggestion:

Change the league location layout to:

A) Remove some smaller nations, like finland, from the main group, but have them selectable somewhere else (Under, say, "Rest of world.")

That way you can easily select the Dominican Republic, for example, without have to scroll through a bunch of nations that don't play baseball.

But with the nations not there it allows you to

B) Select a league "region", so with the spare space you have in the county list you can then do something like this
League Country:
USA (All) (High/Mid)
- US WEST (Mid)
- US EAST
- US SOUTH
- US - Carolina (Low)
- US - Texas

High/mid thing stops, for example, New York fielding a team in the bumpkin rural north east league, but not say, Pumpkinpatch, NY state.

Additionally, you can then create a

Europe (High)

which would put in berlin, london etc

and a Europe East (Med)

which would put in Manchester etc etc

C) Further more, based on the "affiliation" scheme, make it easier to create three minor league AAA leagues affilated equally between two MLB leagues. Not particually nessecairy, but seems like a logical step forward from the current way of doing things.

D) And finally, based on the international structure and the affilation structure you can have a German club, filled with 50% Germans, 25% Europeans, and 25% American "Drop outs" (OOTP is going to handle this anyway.)

[redsoxford]

Suggestion

Following on from other people's suggestions. In the nations setup we have the percentage of namesets and the ethnicities.

I propose a new file nations_source.txt that gets read into world.dat at startup (and is editable in game - or via a nations reimporter program - preferably in game as it involves a change to the database structure and will take me a while to change my code)

It's layout would be

Country Code,Source Random Frequency,Count of Sources,Source Country ID1, Source Frequency 1, ...., Source Country ID n, Source Frequency n

for each country

So for example with the default nations.txt settings, if you wanted the initial split of the US to be for every 1000 US-born players you'd get 10 from the Dominican Republic, 20 from Japan, 25 from Canada and 45 from anywhere in the world you'd have the following line:

206, 45, 4, 206,1000, 56,10, 98,20, 36,25

So at the initial player set-up point for each team it would add players according to their home country's setup to the draft pool (if inaugural draft is on) or to the team. Hence a Canadian team in an American League would probably cause a few more Canadians to be added to the draft pool.

Reason

Would allow leagues to be set up in a much more world accurate way. If I currently set up a league in San Marino with the default 10% foreigners it's going to create around 90% of the players being San Marinese and there just isn't the population to justify it! 99% of the players in such a league would likely be Italian by nationality.

The ability to change it in-game would allow for a bit more customisation of the amateur draft for example.

If you wanted the MLB draft to be just French players you'd go and edit the nation creation figures for any nation in the MLB to be just French!

It also removes the rather arbitrary 'Foreigner Percentage' setup variable.

Priority

High

[enuttage]

Suggestion

Allow control of the number or percentage of 'Other Major Leagues' free agents that can enter your FA market.

Reason

Right now, unregulated, a huge number of very good players from other leagues are entering the FA market with this option turned on. This can throw the 'balance' of a league in just one FA season. It's certainly not realistic to how things happen IRL right now, either.

Priority

Medium

[BostonRS14]

Suggestion
when creating leagues/divisions, have the option of input the number of teams for a division rather than having to manually select "add team" for each one. when selecting "add/create division" have a pop-up asking for the number of teams for that division. (same for subleagues too with divisions replacing teams in that example)

Reason
to make it easier to build multi-division leagues with numerous teams (ie, 120 ncaa teams) that do not follow an already established template.

Priority
low

[lt2cents]

Suggestion

When customizing settings with multiple leagues involved provide for a change to be applied to all leagues, such as choosing or tweaking base year settings, or turning off the DH .

Reason

If you have a circa 1950 setup with 60 some minor leagues it would eliminate some carpal tunnel causing repetitions.

Priority

[JerryArr]

Suggestion
Change "Automatically Expand League" to "Auto-Change League Structure"

Reason
Less confusing, as that option changes the whole league structure, not just expanding the league.

Priority
High

[Cryomaniac]

Suggestion
Have an option to automatically define the player creation modifiers based on a nations baseball ability, or whatever that is called.


Reason
If you create a league in Afghanistan or Rwanda or some place like that, the players are going to be appaling, at least to start with, so the player creation modifiers should be like 0.150 or something. It would be a lot easier if there was an option to automatically do this.

Priority
Medium. It would be useful, but I can't justify it being high.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

While I would second this suggestion, there's one obvious problem with it: how do we get OOTP to understand what geographical regions are? How do we tell it which cities belong geographically with which?

The cities.txt file does contain the latitude and longitude for each entry; so perhaps that info can be used. But how?

One idea that comes to mind would be to create pre-designated geographical regions, and add a column to the cities.txt file for that purpose. Each region then gets its own number, starting with 1 for the first one and going from there, with no upper limit on the number of regions, and then cities are assigned the region number to which they belong. The advantage of this approach is if the user doesn't like the way the cities have been geographically grouped, they can easily change it by changing the region number of that city to that of another region. The drawback is someone is going to have to go through the exisiting cities.txt file and make the initial decisions on which cities go into which region, and given the huge number of cities in the file, that could be a daunting, time-consuming task.

But then again, this task could be made simpler by not having every nation having its cities assigned region numbers. It could be limited to the more likely baseball nations to be used in the game, such as the U.S., Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and/or by limiting it to the larger, more populous nations.

The task also could be made more manageable if a number of people were willing to volunteer to come up with a suggested geographical region grouping for a particular country, thereby spreading the workload around.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it could be done with the cities.txt thing. I don't think it wouldn't be that difficult to just compare longitude and latitude numbers, and base the associations on cities within a set distance. The only way this could potentially cause problems is for cities close to national borders (eg. Berwick upon Tweed on the England-Scotland border and Chester on the England-Wales border) because it wouldn't be unreasonable for Berwick to have an affiliated team that was technically in Scotland (Since the football team plays in the scottish league) and OOTP wouldn't recognise this.

[RMc]

D) And finally, based on the international structure and the affilation structure you can have a German club, filled with 50% Germans, 25% Europeans, and 25% American "Drop outs" (OOTP is going to handle this anyway.)

This is something I've suggested before: a multinational option.

Suggestion
A "mutinational option" to create a continent- or region-wide league representing several countries at once.

Here's how it would work: let's say you want to create a four-team Euro League with teams in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin. Under "League Nation," instead of single country, there would be an option called "Multinational." This would restrict the league to creating players only from the countries where the teams are; in this case, England, France, Italy and Germany.

Want to slip in a few players from outside Europe? There would be another option: "Multinational Percentage" (MN%), sort of like "Foreigner Percentage" in reverse. An MN% of 100 means no players outside the four-country group; 50 means half the players created would be English, French, Italian and German, while the other half would be from other countries, with the "big baseball" nations (US, Japan, Korea, etc.) getting the lion's share.

What about individual teams? You'd have two options: "Nation percentage" (players from the team's own nation, or N%) and "Group percentage" (players from the other countries in the league, or G%). Let's say you wanted all the players on the team from Rome to be Italian; that's a N% of 100 and a G% of 0. If you set, say, the Berlin team at N% of 50 and G% of 30, you'd get half your players from Germany, another 30% from England, France and Italy, and the remaining 20% from outside the four countries in this league.

Reason
To solve the problems of regional (such as pan-European or pan-Asian) leagues. Or what if, say, your version of MLB expands to Tokyo, but they would prefer to have a larger percentage of native Japanese players on their roster? Now, it would be possible.

Priority
Desperately high, of course.

[stevebydac]

Suggestion

A true "World Series". The ability to run a MLB, and pro leagues in Japan, Korea, Cuba, etc. and then have those league champs meet in a tournament to determine the true World champ.

Reason

We've taken the step of being able to run leagues in other countries. This is the logical next move. Let's see the Tokyo Giants face the Boston Red Sox for all the marbles, after having to eliminate teams from Havana and Santo Domingo, for instance.


Priority

Medium. Many of us would love it , but I realize that it's not a critical addition.

[ELDoro]

Suggestion

The ability to contract teams from leagues and hold a "contraction draft" with the players formally from the contrated teams.

Reason

Would give more control on user's create worlds. Further enhancing the user's ability to create their own little baseball world.

Priority

although I admit its not a must I believe the little things like this feature is what continues to make OOTP the best baseball sim out there.

[westendcards]

[t-bone shuffle]

Originally Posted by ELDoro

Suggestion

The ability to contract teams from leagues and hold a "contraction draft" with the players formally from the contracted teams.

Reason

Would give more control on user's create worlds. Further enhancing the user's ability to create their own little baseball world.

Priority

although I admit its not a must I believe the little things like this feature is what continues to make OOTP the best baseball sim out there.

Just so you know, I play this way also, but there is a work-around. Just contract (delete) the teams you want, then export the rosters. Once you've done this, hit the release all/have inaugural draft button. After doing this, import the rosters back, and viola, you're ready for your contraction draft.

It can be a little more complicated than that depending upon whether you're playing solo or not, but it works, I've done it many times. What it doesn't account for very well is the financial side of the equation.

And finally, I'd certainly support making this an option rather than having to use the work-around.

[silvam14]

Suggestion
More flexibility in saving box scores. Possibly make it so that there would be a checkbox for every league in the setup screen that says "Save this league's box scores"

Reason
Eliminates saving unwanted box scores, or not saving enough box scores.

Priority
Medium

[demetrios999]

Suggestion

If the major league affiliation of a minor league team is changed, the players assigned to the team from the major league organization need to follow the prior major league organization, not stay with the minor league team and become the property of the organization with which the minor league team is newly affiliated.