Baseball ( and other team sport ) sims

[oykib]

I've been thinking about what is missing from sport sims recently. This is probably because of the whole OOTP vs. Puresim thing that's been going on.

I started looking at FOF, and the baseball sims, Fastbreak, etc.

I think the main thing that is missing, compared to the ultimate sim, Championship Manager, is a challenging player procurement system.

In CM you have to work to:

1. Identify the players
2. compete to procure the players
3. manage your resources

Now all of these sims have this. But most of them present little or no challenge in at least two of these areas.

FOF-
1-- looking at red/green bars is incredibly easy. If the bars were good enough, I rarely even looked at a Free Agent's stats.
2-- You did have to compete to procure players. But there were too many very good players that you had a sole shot at.
3-- Here's the real problem: You had to deal witha salary cap. But it was too easy to renegotiate contracts. And the boss gave you a limitless supply of bonus money to help you do it. Also, you could sign a ready to go young turk to come in and sit behind a guy with years left. As long as you spot-started him, he'd be perfectly happy.
Without severe house rules, it never came down to resource A vs. resource B.

And FOF is the best non-CM series I've played. But the problem is that it is still too easy to do these thre tasks.

[oykib]

My favorite sport is baseball. I think that it should make the best sim. But they have all been mediocre.

You'll never see a human player behave like a real GM. He doesn't have to deal with circumstances even approximating reality.

In CM, you can be fired at the drop of a hat. So players don't squander their capital by pissing off the boss. If the boss likes a player. You keep that player. You work around his deficiencies.

The same is true in reverse. Sometimes the board, in a CM dynasty, wants you to get rid of a guy you know fits your scheme. But you have to consider doing it anyway.

You don't have to listen to the boss in either situation. But the game is unpredictable enough, without having to cheat, that you don't want one of the previous situations to combine with a bad run of form and get you ousted.

This kind of thing happens in reality.

Look at my favorite team, The Yankees. Big George wants Mondesi. He wants White gone. Newman and Cashman don't want Mondesi. They knew last year what position they'd be in now. But George demanded it. These are smart guys. But sometimes the decision is out of your hands.

Maybe you think that Steinbrenner is an extreme example. But look at the Astros. They just gave Biggio a contract extension. He doesn't desevre it based on any reasonable metric. But the owner doesn't want to take the pounding he'll get in the media if he lets a popular player walk. So, the word comes down to the GM to sign him.

Hunsicker's gotta have something he'd rather spend that money on. He know's that its his neck if they fall a few games short of the Cards again. But...

And he's got half the veterans on the team whining that they need Brad Ausmus, who hasn't hit since he was a Yankee farmhand.

These kinds of things would make a baseball game interesting.

[FBPro]

So start programming......

[oykib]

Why do teams spend millions on players whose numbers are easily replaced with rookies who make the minimum?

In most sims you don't have to ever wonder about this. But IRL every GM does it. EVERY GM. Even Billy Beane and his ilk. Why?

There is no value in consistency in most sport sims, because prediction is too easy. The unpredictability of young players is not reasonably modeled in any baseball or harldy any other sport sim I've played.

But this really hurts in baseball-- especially in regards to pitching. Young pitchers are almost impossible to predict. And they almost always get hurt. Pitching should eat awy at your sim teams budget like having a new girlfriend does in your real one.

Let's take the Pirates of a few years ago. These guys were all set to conquer the NL. They had Jason Kendall ( the 2nd best catcher in the league ) with one more year of arbitration available. They had acquired Brian Giles ( the 2nd best rightfielder in the league ). They had Aramis Ramirez ( the top hitting prospect in the league ) poised to come up. And they had Ritchie, Benson, and Anderson ( which looked like the 2nd Best top three in the league ).
They could have basically had all these guys under contract for three years for less than $20m/year. You take the other $15m and you could get the rest of the parts to championship team.

We all know that the wheels fell off this team. Basically, all three pitchers broke down. They made a catcher their franchise player, and he broke down in the manner of catchers.

This killed the team, and got the GM fired. Now he did some stupid stuff, too. But he was under pressure. You do dumb stuff when you're under pressure. But we're never under pressure in these sims.

But we never will get to this point with the baseball sims as tey're presently constituted. It's not a gamble to go with young players. This kind of thing never happens to you in Mogul or OOTP.

IRL, you have to pay a few million to get that .500 pitcher whom you know will give you 200 innings. You don't know if the young guy will do either. Veterans don't blow up. Youngsters do. When you ass is on the line, you pay for security.

You couple this with what's going on in the post above and you've got a situation where you're pushing the curve of mediocrity rather than trying to win 127 games every year.

[Kevin]

I tend to agree with the points put forward, but everytime a programmer attempts it the fan base screams that development is too random. There's no satisfying all interests because there's not enough market for sports sims to support the twenty different products in each sport that would be necessary to make a user completely happy with the one he eventually buys.

[oykib]

It's not random at all with pitchers. They all look great at 22. 70% of them are no longer playing baseball at 27. Of the other thirty percent, most have learned to pitch with diminished capacity from their injuries and become, in a few years, the .500, 200 inning guys that I wrote about.

I don't think that everyone should blow up. But there is no need for organizational depth in these games. And it doesn't even resemble reality in regards to pitchers. If you look at any of the teams with the big payrolls, you'll see that most of their bad money is tied into pitching.

[cincyreds]

isn't there or wasn't there an indoor soccer sim game somewhere being developed?

[FBPro]

Originally posted by cincyreds
isn't there or wasn't there an indoor soccer sim game somewhere being developed?

Right here.

[cincyreds]

yep, FBPro that is the one!

I hope it comes through. Maybe .400 could help them out.

I like Indoor soccer!

[Qwikshot]

I cannot wait for CM4, anyone preorder yet?