Posts tagged "Draft"
Bug fix for trading picks during the draft
This isn't that important of a bug fix, and I bet most people won't notice either way. But it does need a bit of explanation to make sense, so here is a blog post!
The AI now considers roster fit when making free agent signings and draft picks
This update is only for Football GM and ZenGM Hockey. I didn't do it yet for Basketball GM because position matters much less in basketball, so whatever minimal gain might be achieved from this new feature would not be worth the risk of changing the AI.
But for football and hockey, it's very important for the AI to know that you can only play one quarterback/goalie at a time, so it doesn't make much sense to sign 2 (or more!) to big contracts.
Previously this was somewhat of a problem, because AI roster moves were made by looking at how good a player was, regardless of the current roster. (Okay, that's not quite true, there was some ad hoc code to make it not do completely crazy things, but it didn't work that well.)
As an example, I simmed 100 seasons in Football GM to see how often a top 10 QB in the league spent a season as a backup. That happened for 77 seasons before this update. But after this update, it happened for only 18 seasons. That's a pretty decent improvement, I think.
But how does it work?
Two new league settings: "Age of Draft Prospects" and "Force Retire at Age"
If you've been keeping a close eye on the changelog you may have noticed some work done by @domini7. The new features described in this post are his magnum opus. Thanks @domini7, I love you! If anyone else wants to get involved, head over to GitHub.
Today there are two new league settings available in all leagues.
Age of Draft Prospects: Allows you to change the age of generated draft prospects.
Force Retire at Age: Allows you to set a maximum age limit for your league.
Both of these options are available to be edited at Tools > Settings in God Mode, but you might be better off editing the draftAges and forceRetireAge settings in a league file so that they apply for randomly generated players in new leageus. (At some point I will make it possible to edit these before league creation from the UI!)
You may think something like, "hey, this will let me simulate a college or high school league!" Well, ages are part of that, and this does help. But there's still a lot of other differences between pro and college sports, so that's not really what this is about. It's really about letting you do whatever weird shit you want to do. Seniors league? Sure. Dystopian future where babies are raised to play basketball? Why not. Have fun.
How does it work?
Draft order now matches the NFL/NHL in Football GM and ZenGM Hockey
As the maker of basketball, football, and hockey simulation video games, sometimes I get amused by all the silly little differences between the major American pro sports leagues. Maybe they need some kind of meta-commissioner to iron out all those differences. If duty calls, I would gladly do my part to help!
I'm writing this today because I just rewrote my draft order code.
For a long time, there have been options about how to handle the draft lottery. Those still exist. But what I'm talking about here are all the other draft order rules. Previously they were all implemented like the NBA, but now Football GM behaves like the NFL and ZenGM Hockey behaves like the NHL. (Basketball GM should be unaffected, barring bugs.)
What exactly is this new behavior? Behold, my hopefully comprehensive list of silly little draft order differences across American pro sports leagues:
More draft lottery types
Part of the fun of using real rosters back to 1956 is watching league rules change over time. Historically, the draft lottery sure changed a lot. And today, Basketball GM just got much better support for historical draft lotteries.
You can switch your league to any of these new draft types in the God Mode settings, or if you're playing a historical league the draft type will automatically change over time.
Draft lottery updates
Today I made a few changes to the draft lottery.
First, it now uses the same method the NBA will be using for the 2019 NBA draft. However there is an option in God Mode to switch it back to the old lottery method, or to disable the lottery entirely.
There is also now better support for non-standard league configurations. In the past, the lottery was always 14 teams, which is the number of non-playoff teams in a default league. But for leagues with different numbers of teams or different playoff lengths, you would then either get playoff teams in the lottery or non-playoff teams missing the lottery. Now it will adjust the number of lottery teams so it is always equal to the number of non-playoff teams.
Live draft lottery
You can now view the draft lottery live, as it happens! The lottery behaves the same as it always has, just like the NBA draft lottery, so this doesn't change gameplay at all. But it can be very dramatic to watch the lottery unfold before your eyes.