Play to Clinch Tennis Developer Playthrough #1
This was a fun runthrough because I actually had to do it and each time I got a week into it, I realized there were things that I needed to fix. Building the tennis game when I had the core pieces already extent and felt okay about the actual game model was interesting. For starters, it's a little too random right now. I think you can judge a game based on outcomes that feel unrealistic, but you need to simulate and observe dozens of games before making sense of really what's going on.
I've long had the idea of a team tennis sim. Obviously, I've written tons of dynasties in the old days including ones for FBCB. Built my own Python sim for college tennis and this is as much a playtest as much as it is me actually trying to see how to build different types of programs.
Unlike real life, I have pretty much every college in the country in this game spread across 4 divisions -- I added a 4th NCAA division by splitting D3 -- so there's a lot of chances for upsets, chaos and randomness. The other big change is that the D1 NCAA tournament is 96 teams instead of 64, 68 or 72. This is a relatively recent change, but with so many teams it made the most sense to me.
The first season will be Monmouth (IL) Fighting Scots, a D3 school that in this universe plays in the SLIAC. Like almost all the D3 programs, they're a low prestige program and academically middling. There are no scholarships in D3/4, but the top programs in those classifications do get a special "power" that lets them recruit like scholarships, it's meant to simulate that in real life, tennis is unusual that top tier players will often go D3 instead of D1 if they are good academic students since they're not going pro, they'd opt for the better degree, so the quality of D3 tennis at the top levels is at least as good as low-to-mid major depending on the years.
The basics
I don't play any matches -- the engine runs by itself -- and I can't control anything besides the lineup. I don't recruit either. There is a transfer portal, there are 3 portal opportunities. A pre-season portal, a fall portal after the fall tennis season (I'll explain later) and then an off-season transfer portal.
My goal with Monmouth this year is really to see what it takes talent wise to make a D3 program rise and to test the prestige bonuses that come from doing well. It means I'm going to use the portal to direct some better-than-average players to Monmouth (I'll make a plausible storyline out of it) because the goal is to see exactly how competitive the landscape of D3 is going to be and ultimately, how or if it benefits them.
After Season 1, we'll see if I stay here or find another program to manage and do similar things with.
There will be lots of things to explain.
Tennis has a rating system that works pretty well and it can tell you how good someone is -- basically -- with a decent level of precision. The real life version is called UTR, its proprietary. I made my own for the game it's called STR. UTR is 1-16.5 (16.5 is an elite tennis pro, 1 is an absolute novice)
Ignore the WTN we'll never use.
STR <-> UTR <-> WTN scale
How the game's 31-57 STR maps to real-world ratings
STR is the game's native 31-57 rating.
UTR is the upward-facing real-world comparison:
1.00 = beginner
16.50 = elite/pro-level
WTN runs the other way:
40.0 = beginner
1.0 = elite/pro-level
The endpoints line up exactly with the game's STR band. UTR and WTN are
separate proprietary systems, so the off-anchor values are approximate:
good enough for balancing, not a published conversion.
+-----+-------+------+
| STR | UTR | WTN |
+-----+-------+------+
| 31 | 1.00 | 40.0 |
| 32 | 1.60 | 38.5 |
| 33 | 2.19 | 37.0 |
| 34 | 2.79 | 35.5 |
| 35 | 3.38 | 34.0 |
| 36 | 3.98 | 32.5 |
| 37 | 4.58 | 31.0 |
| 38 | 5.17 | 29.5 |
| 39 | 5.77 | 28.0 |
| 40 | 6.37 | 26.5 |
| 41 | 6.96 | 25.0 |
| 42 | 7.56 | 23.5 |
| 43 | 8.15 | 22.0 |
| 44 | 8.75 | 20.5 |
| 45 | 9.35 | 19.0 |
| 46 | 9.94 | 17.5 |
| 47 | 10.54 | 16.0 |
| 48 | 11.13 | 14.5 |
| 49 | 11.73 | 13.0 |
| 50 | 12.33 | 11.5 |
| 51 | 12.92 | 10.0 |
| 52 | 13.52 | 8.5 |
| 53 | 14.12 | 7.0 |
| 54 | 14.71 | 5.5 |
| 55 | 15.31 | 4.0 |
| 56 | 15.90 | 2.5 |
| 57 | 16.50 | 1.0 |
+-----+-------+------+
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College Tennis Dual Match Fomrat Scoring
You get 1 point per match win. There are 6 singles matches -- in order by strength of player -- and then 3 doubles matches (usually played by the same singles players paired up), you get 1 point for doubles if your school wins 2/3 of them and then each singles is worth 1, so the total is 7 points per dual match.
All-Americans are in and next up is figuring out the D1 landscape and figuring out what D1 program we're going to bolster. Though Monmouth's roster isn't nearly as super-powered as before, so this will not be a "bring the whole squad with us" deal, they'll disperse and we'll maybe take the coach and the top tier.
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