by supertyphoon » Fri Jan 27, 2012 8:57 am
What-If Sports baseball simulation can be very odd. It's possible to have a pitching staff or lineup composed almost entirely of the same player because they allow multiple seasons on your roster. For example, 1980 Pete Rose at 1B, 1965 Pete Rose at 2B, 1976 Pete Rose at 3B, 1971 Pete Rose in RF and 1974 Pete Rose in LF, all on the same team. Then maybe you'd have three seasons of John Smoltz in your rotation with Smoltz coming out of the bullpen to get the save. Weird.
1880-1890s workhorse pitchers are allowed to pitch the way they did in their day, thus a popular strategy was a 2-man rotation of Mickey Welch, Bob Carruthers, Hoss Radbourne or Pud Galvin to pitch about 750-800 innings apiece so you didn't have to spend anything on your other pitchers. Pitchers and hitters will fatigue and perform poorly as they approach their max innings or plate appearances, so you use them up then swap them out for someone else who's fresh.
Also, each team is guaranteed to get every player you want. There could be 5 or 10 of the more popular player years in a single league. Blatant copying of winning rosters was also a common practice. You could copy and paste an entire team from the record books section that won 110 games and use it for yourself, again and again.
You play 3 games per day, just like here but it's single games - one in the morning, another in the afternoon, and one at night.
Once I discovered SOM online in 2005 I stopped playing WifS and haven't regretted it, even though the cost was much less - around $10 per team.