How the dynamics of a sports simulation game works?

Question

I would like to create a baseball simulation game.

Are these sports management games based on luck? A management game entirely based on luck is not fair, but it cannot be too predictable either. How does the logic behind these games work?

Answer 1

It's all about probability and statistics. You set the chance of something happening based on some attributes you assign, and then the random factor comes in during play to make things less predictable and more fun. Generally you get a load of statistics from some external source, encode them into your game's database, and write a system that compares random numbers to these statistics to generate results that approximate the real-life observations that the stats were based on.

Oversimplified example: say your game has Babe Ruth who hits a home run 8.5% of the time, and some lesser guy who hits one 4% of the time. These are the attributes you test against. So for each pitch you simulate, pick a random number between 0 and 100%. If it's less than or equal to the attribute, the batter scores a home run, if it's greater than the attribute, they don't. After a few pitches you'll start to see Babe Ruth's quality show relative to the other guy as he will tend to hit over twice as many home runs.

In reality you'd have more than 1 attribute for this, depending on the kind of pitching for example. And the other player might get to choose which relief pitchers to use to try and exploit weaknesses in the batter's abilities. So the gameplay comes from the interplay between these various attributes, with you trying to maximise the chance that the attribute tests work in your favour.

PS. Apologies for any mistakes regarding baseball: I'm English so can't be expected to understand these things. ;)

Answer 2

As you have already figured out, the core component of such games is the match simulation engine. As Spence said so, you want that simulation to "look right" rather than to "be right".

I worked on a rugby game simulation some time ago and there's an approach that works quite well. Your match is a finite state machine. Each game phase is a state, has an outcome which translates to a phase transition or changes in game state (score, replacements, ...). Add in a event/listener system to handle things that are not strictly related to the structure of the game you're simulating and you have a good structure (everytime something happens in your simulation, a foul for instance, fire an event; the listeners can be a comment-generation system or an AI responsible for teams' strategies).

You can start with a rough simulation engine that handles things at a team level using an average of your players' stats and then move on to something more detailed that's simulating things at a player level. I think that kind of iterative approach suits a game simulation very well because you want it to look right, and as soon as an element looks right you can stop iterating on it and work on another part of your system.

Random is of course part of the game because as you said so, you don't want games to be too predictable. A very simple thing to do is to have virtual dice rolls against a player and team statistics when they are performing a particular action (throwing the ball for instance).

Edit: I make the assumption that we're talking about management games like Hattrick, where you're managing a roster and simulating game results rather than 2D/3D graphical simulations.