How do player tactics affect games?
General Tactics
Level of Play: The higher your level of play, the better your performance. Energy use increases greatly however.
Defensive Aggressiveness: More aggressive = more plays and more errors.
Hitting Tactics
Hitting Style: Basically affects how much uppercut you put into your swing. Elevate produces more home runs but a lot of fly ball outs as well, Line Drive is balanced and On The Ground tries to hit the ball somewhat flat.
Hitting Aim: Basically do you aim (horizontally) for the outfield gaps or for the corners.
Hitting Patience: How aggressive you are at the plate.
Sacrifice Bunt Frequency: How often you will sacrifice bunt. Note - this only affects actual bunt situations, like runner on 1st or 2nd with less than 2 outs. Pitchers get a bonus to bunting.
Bunt Hit Frequency: How often you will bunt for a hit.
Advanced Swing Frequency: Affects non-pitchers only, how frequently will you attempt an advanced swing if you see a pitch in your advanced swing zone?
Base Running Tactics
Leadoff Distance: How far (in feet) you will lead off a base. Higher numbers helps prevent double plays, improves stealing chances, etc, but also can result in more pickoffs.
Stealing: Affects how often you will attempt to steal bases.
Base Running: Affects how often you will attempt to take an extra base on a hit, or move tag up on a fly ball.
Pitcher-only tactics:
Headhunting:* How frequently you will attempt to Headhunt - basically, after a home run you might throw at a player's head. It can scare them and make them timid, but if you bean them it might tick off the whole rest of their team...
Throws: How often you throw to first to attempt a pickoff.
Slidestep: How frequently to use a slidestep with runners on base. Slidestep makes it harder to steal bases against you, but also hurts your control.
Pitching Style: Fairly self explanatory, but different pitchers will find success with different pitching styles.
Accept Catcher Signs: If you have a good catcher you will want to listen to them! If they are a rookie and you are a veteran, perhaps not?
Favor High/Low: Do you want your pitcher to favor higher or lower pitches?
Favor In/Out: Do you want your pitcher to favor inside or outside pitches?
Attempt to Avoid Walks:* How opposed to walks are you? A setting of "Never" on this tactic will mean you will pitch normally even if the count is 3-0, while higher settings mean you might adjust your tactics to avoid walking a batter.
- Please note that in no case will a pitching tactic force your pitcher to do something that will instantly lose a game, for example headhunting or not avoiding walks when the bases are loaded, tie game, bottom of the 9th. If you are in a situation where you HAVE to throw a strike or your team loses, you WILL attempt to throw a strike.
Pitcher advanced tactics:
The Advanced Pitching Crosstable may seem daunting at first but the defaults should prove sensible enough if you just leave it (until you learn new pitches). Going across the chart is strikes, and going down is balls. So the top-left corner is for a 0-0 count, the one below it is for a 1-0 count, the one below and to the right is for a 2-1 count, etc etc.
For each count you are able to decide how often you want to throw each of your known pitches. They are in ratios, so for example at a 0-0 count we have a default of 9:3:1:0:0:0*. This means a fastball will be thrown 9/13 times with a 0-0 count, or roughly 69.2% of the time. If you were to change the 9 for Fastballs to a 6, a fastball would then be thrown 6/10 times with a 0-0 count, or roughly 60% of the time.
You can choose to work out percentages if you wish, or you can simply "wing" it. Each one can be weighted 0-9. If you pick 0, it will NEVER be thrown in that situation. The only exception is that if you put 0 in all 6 for a certain count, it will default to throwing a fastball.
* You will only see as many columns as you know pitches.. so three initially and as many as six when you learn your three advanced pitches. The advanced pitches default to 0 (not thrown) so you will have to set their weights manually.