Play To Clinch Tennis Ep. 3 Playthrough

I made a few improvements to the tennis sim that are all just clerical or UI improvements. The national tournaments are now seeded where the Top 16 teams are placed regardless of division. i

The team tournament is now true-seeded: the bracket is never rearranged to keep same-conference teams in separate regions. This applies to the whole game — both genders, every division (D1/D2/D3/D4), and every seed line, with no conditional logic.

Previously the bracketer carried a large _PEN_SAME_CONF penalty and hill-climbed by swapping teams within a seed band to push same-conference teams apart (which could drop, e.g., a #5 overall into the #7 slot). That penalty — and all the conference plumbing that fed it — is removed.

I also added an archive for past singles/doubles national champions since previously, you could only see the past year's results and they got erased upon a new season. I did this because my last sim was taking over a Monmouth (IL) program that blew through D3 en route to a national title, but then everyone left and since I didn't direct them to new programs, I had a hard time tracking down where all the old players went.

Building a D1 program

I spent a lot of time waffling about what D1 program I wanted to players to and ultimately, decided to let the pre-season portal pass and do nothing. Now it's the Fall portal and I've figured it out, Monmouth has some solid replacements for their national title team from last year, but they lost in the first round of the fall NIT to Ithaca.

The players are too good for D3, so rather than have them slum it, I'm going to build a D3 portal upgrade squad at Illinois State or Wichita State. Monmouth won't be left empty handed, I'll find some low major D1 or D2 players and backfill them at the D3 level as well. The goal here is you're not going to win a national title at Illinois State (or Wichita State) but much like baseball and other sports have programs that just emphasize and spend in minor sports, it'd be an interesting storyline to see if you can do the same in this game by figuring out what the right formula is for building a winner in the D1 game. I know the what the game engine is optimized to do, but a lot of the "fog of war" and "player development" things that you'd normally control in a sim game are deliberately hidden in the tennis sim, and the rest is dice-roll dependant, so you really do have to get lucky and be effective at roster building, which is what I wanted.

The debate between Wichita State v Illiinois State is simple. Monmouth was in Illinois, so it makes sense to stay in the Midwest, but IRL, Wichita State is building a rad new tennis facility and it feels fun in storylne mode to essentially try to turn them into the modern fictional version of what their men's basketball program was for so long, a mid-major that everyone knew and respected for its consistency. Except, in my universe, I moved them back to the Missouri Valley Conference.

The other thought I had when I was manging the D3 teams was having more than one program to manage, because it lets you start to figure out how different ways of effective program management, not just lineup building, but seeing how much depth you need to do more than just win your conference. The other good thing about maybe controlling a few programs at a time, is I'd be able to create a very European-soccer style feeder situation where I can track players at various levels, stash them in D3/D4 programs, elevate them to D2 and D1 as needed. Right now, there's surplus D2 talent buried on D1 rosters because you'd rather "play D1" and wait for an injury than start on a D2 team. The drop is steep and experience isn't always comparable. It's even more stark contrast going down to D3 or D4 in my game, even if these players would have a lot of success and the talent is still good there it's not nearly at the same level.

From a storyline and development perspective, being able to see players actually play for 4 years and then cascade where needed is fascinating. One way I've fixed this, is I changed roster sizes with regard to walkons. In the past, D1 programs could overrecruit because again, players would rather be D1 than not, but I changed it so D1 programs only sign up to 8, and don't get walk-ons from leftover players, so there are fewer D1 roster spots coming out of the recruiting pool, forcing those players to other D1 schools OR to take lower division offers. Improves talent at the lower levels and then makes the portal more vibrant as those players cascade up, and lesser players shuffle down.

How random is the engine?

Right now, the talent disparities are based not just on ability, but a variety of dice rolls that happen based on how good your coach is at talent development, how you're feeling match to match, and other conditions behind the scenes. I did this purposefully, because tennis is one of those sports where it'd be easy for people to assume you'd just have the better players and win, but team tennis -- especially at the collegiate level -- is full of variables that can make the game a lot of fun to decipher.

So we're looking at what formulas work well besides "sign the best player" and overwhelm everyone. The best part of making your own game is finding ways to break it or having ideas defy your own imagnation. S that's what I'm after in this next runthrough.