I am curious as to what other games are out there that are comparable to Hardball Dynasty? I've played 52 seasons of this game and have never explored other games out there. In recent years it seems like the game has not been updated as frequently, and despite my attachment to my team, I'm interested in what the competition is to this product. Anybody try pennant wars?

I just resumed having a PW team, tried it once before. regular season plays out over 30 days, so moves faster. In their forums, users complain of a lot of bugs, looks like administration is a one-man show, but the users kind of act like they "know" him. They just assign you a team, so I don't know how you'd play with friends. There's no search feature in the forums either, so to learn about the game from veterans' comments you have to slog through every page.

It is less complex for sure, for instance, you can play about anybody at catcher. One interesting thing is that skill levels for attributes are just shown in increments of 5, and are distributed on a bell shaped curve. So, your 50 (middle of range) rated guy could be roughly 32nd percentile or he could be 68th for that skill.

Trial season is free!

Pennant wars doesn't hold a candle to HBD. Actually, I'm not sure there is a product on the market anywhere close to what WiS offers.

I'm just a few days into my trial team. Interface is a bit clunky for a new user on an iPhone. I do like that it's seems to be set up to compare the relative strength of owners with it's various divisions within the leagues, however that pushes it more towards a fantasy league format and not a baseball simulation.
HBD has gotten a little stale but with a few tweaks, I think it could get interesting again.

OOTP is probably the closest thing to HBD, but I still prefer HBD.

If HBD could incorporate a Slack-like experience for in-season world communication it would take the experience up another level.

wonder how many of the older HBD players use to play Strat-o-matic (the card based baseball game)

I played APBA. Pretty sure that's why I'm into this stuff.

Played Strat for several years. Tried a season of Pursue the Pennant. Think it was the table top version of what became OOTP

I used to play Strat, Pursue the Pennant/Dynasty and also Statis-Pro games.

Played Strat for years (face to face) and. Even the online version when it was through The Sporting News. It had its strengths and weaknesses. Biggest strength there was the amount of in game control you had (ie you could set certain players to steal more often and others to never) still wonder why this game engine works in absolutes for stealing instead of by each player. The draft process of ranking players was always a nightmare and ultimately took away your ability to shape your team the way you wanted though. Haven’t tried the newest versions though that account for real life current trends (not just based on last year’s statistics) though.

Posted by scoop015 on 7/23/2018 8:30:00 PM (view original):
Played Strat for years (face to face) and. Even the online version when it was through The Sporting News. It had its strengths and weaknesses. Biggest strength there was the amount of in game control you had (ie you could set certain players to steal more often and others to never) still wonder why this game engine works in absolutes for stealing instead of by each player. The draft process of ranking players was always a nightmare and ultimately took away your ability to shape your team the way you wanted though. Haven’t tried the newest versions though that account for real life current trends (not just based on last year’s statistics) though.

The reason WiS will never allow individual steal settings is because their SP/BR vs. AS/AA is out of whack.

The real SB studs are usually like 100+ with 1 or 2 CS. Even the above average guys put up sick SB% numbers.

The way they "balance" that flaw (so that team and world single season SB% stats are more in line with real life) is to disallow individual SB settings.

Otherwise you'd have every team setting only the guys that should run, running at an "aggressive" or "very aggressive" setting, and the slow guys at "never". The result would be the world, as a whole, would be putting up 90+% SB success rates.

One thing missing from HBD that is in Strat was the idea of a pitcher's Hold rating. That worked well to keep the guys with fantastic SB ratings from stealing at will on Catchers who were average or worse.
Typically lefty's are harder to run on but I've never really examined if that is built into the game or not.

Posted by damag on 7/23/2018 7:35:00 PM (view original):
I played APBA. Pretty sure that's why I'm into this stuff.

Same here.

I still play online Strat-o-Matic, although at this point I have limited it to a 12-team keeper league that plays 2 seasons/summer and keeps a 40-man roster in Excel for tracking drafts, prospects, etc. It's a really good guy to keep me interested in the current MLB season since the results this summer will make next summer's cards better. You can also plan to rebuild a bit better because players' cards are a bit inconsistent year-to-year with many outliers - so you can trade the best current year cards for a prospect to build around.

Pennant Wars has been pretty fun to get into and is worth checking out.

Baseball Mogul/OOTP (single player versions) are fun ways to sim several seasons in a night.

For an arcade baseball experience, I highly recommend Super Mega Baseball 2 on the PC/Xbox/PS4 - it's cartoony but the quality of play is realistic and the games move quickly - usually 10-15 minutes to play one - just like the NES/SNES days.