OOTP 15: First impressions

I completed my first season of OOTP 15 today. Some general thoughts:

— The new UI is very, very slick. The manager screen is a lot more useful now, giving you a concise synopsis of what needs to be done and how to do it.

— The quality of the sim seemed pretty reasonable. (The Reds beat the Mariners, incidentally, in the World Series.) Jason Kipnis was the best Indian, at a WAR of nearly 5, followed by Carlos Santana and a bunch of dreck. Pitching staff was pretty terrible.

— The draft takes a LOT longer now (there’s a lot of number crunching behind the scenes), but that could just be my PC. I will say that the draft’s talent is a bit more evenly spread — if you have the cash, you can get some top notch prospects late in the draft now.

— I had a couple of CTDs when trying to read a Player Performance Report, but I think that was an unrelated problem (my dictionary on my PC kept insisting I was reading Russian, when I was clearly not doing so.)

— I didn’t try out the 3D system, but there are apparently some issues that they’re working out with that.

— The two laggiest parts of the game are shopping players around and, worst of all, the “Team Position Ranking” report. The latter took almost two minutes for no really good reason.

— Apart from the UI, I noticed a couple of other minor changes. First, you can set player ratings based on the average major leaguer, not purely based on position. Second, they added a posting system, I think, but I haven’t tested it yet — I think you’d have to enable the Japanese Baseball League (which you can totally do, along with about a half dozen other international leagues), which I didn’t do. I’m sure there’s a lot more, of course.

— For a real challenge (and to make the game more fun), make sure you change the TV revenue setting to “based on market size”. Otherwise, every one gets the same contract.

— There’s a very minor glitch: when the build was compiled, the designer forgot to have the game automatically poll the OSA rankings on day one; if you click to disable and reenable scouting, it will do that for you without much hassle. Monday’s patch is supposed to fix that and a few other bugs.

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