It's been a few weeks since I last updated about my attempt to make a blended computer version of baseball, cricket & pesäpallo. I've done a lot of testing, and the biggest change is going from one inning to a possible two innings.
Possible? Yes, here's how.
The game was just lacking drama when I'd look at box scores. The home team or team that batted second simply had to try to score to the target amount of runs. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. It lacked the panache of what makes baseball exciting, so i started thinking about how to add some of that back. Conversely, the best part of baseball is also all of the breaks you can have to get snacks and food or whatever. Having your team batting for hours means cutting into that and missing some of the action, so having any way to add a bit of drama while also saving the best for last was my goal.
Enter Seconds inning. After the 21st out, a team can declare Seconds and essentially bank up to 6 outs to use in a Seconds inning. You cannot "forfeit" runs, you must use all 27 unless you're the 2nd batting team and you outscore the opposing team before using them up. When Seconds is declared, it means the declaring team gets a chance to answer after the bottom half of the inning is completed.
The home team decides whether to bat first or defer, there's no coin toss. After the bottom of the inning, that team also can declare Seconds and save its own up-to-six-outs and then we head to the final inning for a bit of drama.
This has made the game a lot more fun, naturally. One other big change is extra innings are still called SUPER INNINGS, but instead of using Finnish baseball's superinning format -- which to be honest, I only implemented out of speed -- the super innings in O27 are now just like normal 3 out per inning halves, which continue until someone scores. (I'd imagine IRL that some leagues would opt for regular season ties, too. But I haven't built them into the sim, yet.)
A lot of the changes were under the hood, but I've also been squashing bugs. What I'm interested in now are looking at the environments for ways to essentially stretch the boundaries of the game engine. The game mostly make sense to me, because I've had this idea for a long time, but also because baseball is just easier for me to visualize than football when I was building the Viperball sim.