Version 1.71 is out. The star of this update is the draft. What used to be a single day is now a whole year of tracking prospects, sizing them up, and winning them over. We've also added a face creator so you can build a player's portrait yourself.

Prospects show up a year early

• Prospects no longer appear out of nowhere on draft day. Their names and backgrounds are visible a year in advance. Each one comes from high school, college, or the corporate/independent ranks, and you can follow them across seasons
• Flag anyone who interests you to your watch list and compare them on a dedicated tab
• Prospects carry a reputation. Highly rated players draw more competing bids; unknowns can be bargains

The more you scout, the sharper the read

• A prospect's ratings are shown as your scouts' read on them. The less you've seen a player, the wider the margin on that read
• Tournament scouting covers a whole class in one trip; a private workout takes a long look at one player. The more you scout, the smaller the margin of error on the ratings you see
• Send your scouts out and you may turn up a player nobody else knows about

Win them over in interviews — or get turned down

• Prospects have preferences. Some have clubs they want to join, clubs they would rather avoid, and some intend to go the corporate route instead
• Interviews let you make your club's case. Six per month, up to three with any one player. Who you spend them on is your call
• A player you draft can refuse to sign. Those who turn you down may resurface as prospects later, by a different route

Draft night — bids, contested picks, lotteries

• Round one is a sealed bid. When clubs bid on the same player it goes to a lottery, and losers move on to a re-bid
• From round two on, the draft board fills in round by round, so you can see at a glance who went where
• It runs straight through to the developmental draft and finishes with a summary
• You can skip the presentation at any point

Build a player’s face yourself

• Click a player's portrait to open the face creator. Pick the parts and build the face you want
• What you make is saved and stays that player's face from then on
• As always, an image you supply yourself takes priority, and images bundled with a MOD are still used as-is

Other improvements

• Added a "hit frequency" setting with five levels, adjusting how often hits other than home runs fall in
• Revised relief pitcher workload: taking the mound now drains stamina more than before, so back-to-back outings and overuse show up in the numbers
• Player detail is easier to use — jump straight to the previous or next player with ◀▶, and the screen now fills the display
• Season-by-season stats now show the league (tier) and salary for that year
• Titles now show how many years running and how many times in total
• Tidied up the post-game news headlines

Bug fixes

• Fixed stadiums added in the editor having no left-center/right-center distance set, which made fly balls to those gaps turn into home runs far too often. Existing data is corrected on load
• Fixed newly added teams sometimes not showing their cap emblem
• Fixed checkboxes being the same colour as the background and effectively invisible
• Reviewed how the losing pitcher is recorded across pitching changes

Thank you as always for your reports and requests. More to come.