I’ve been running or co-running a fantasy hockey league for over 10 years (The DecHL).
We first started out with Apba Hockey (2.something later upgraded to the last official release of 3.0) which was a DOS based sim which had a lot of options but had a couple of serious drawbacks – contracts/salary were all done by hand and it was end of life.
After searching and researching for a while, FHL Sim was the way (only?) way to go. It had most of what we needed including contract/salary tracking and windows based interface and also the implied promise of continued support upgrades…. That last item, or lack there of, is what probably has most of us looking at STHS right now.
STHS Information
As soon as someone found and pointed me towards STHS, I immediately went and downloaded everything from the website plus read the FAQ and manual online. There is a lot of good information there (I know I have to go back and re-read a lot of it), it is CURRENT information (updates in the last week as oppose to 2 years ago!) an there is also a demo of the simulator. For someone on the bubble trying to decide if spending another $35 on a Simulator, the demo was a little limiting and though the forums seem to be very active, it is quite often in French which I really suck at! So I thought I’d write some of this up to hopefully help other potential buyers who cannot decide on the demo alone.
Little ‘gotchyas’ with the Migration
These are all items that I have come across in my testing that may help you to decide/set up/migrate to STHS
1. Migrating FHL league info to STHS. For me, this took a bit of playing to get to work the way I wanted it.
a. Using the Migration utility against the DRS file from my league, it brought over the default contract/salaries from the roster pack I was using (DVHL) as well it only transferred over the players that were currently assigned to a team in my league. My solution was to use the DFC 3rd party utility for FHL to export my DRS file to get all the players and also to export the ROS file to get all the current contract salaries. I merged the data from the two csv files and then moved/modified/created the rest of the columns that were expected by the Import function of STHS.
b. The import function does not support certain characters that were used in the DVHL roster pack, namely the () around the position of players used to differentiate between players who have the exact same name. So make sure you edit your csv file prior to doing the import
c. After doing the above I was able to import and use my league data correctly with a couple of caveats – the version of the ‘How to’ migrate pdf that I used had the positions values for RW and LW reversed. I posted that info on the support forums and Simon responded very quickly and that should be fixed now. When was the last time you got a response, let alone quick, from the FHL guys?
d. The import/conversion does NOT cover draft picks that had been dealt to other teams, you will need to go in and do this manually
e. Also, arena sizes do not flow across which is not surprising with the multi-tiered pricing STHS allows for.
2. To try and match similar results in key stats (shots, goals, penalties, money) I tried to run a bunch of full seasons to test different settings and ran into a couple of things:
a. When I first tried to fun a ‘Full Season’, it kept kicking out saying that a lot of teams did not have a full roster. Most teams in my league have 3 goalies, 2 on the pro and 1 on the farm team. With the default setting of Goalies fatiguing after 50 minutes of play, all of the goalies were getting exhausted quite quickly (especially with my schedule of trying to get 8 games a day to cover all 16 teams). I bumped the fatigue time to 60 minutes and that resolved that issue.
b. My next attempts at running a full season (80 games per team) resulted in ‘Out of Memory’ errors from the sim when doing the output as it approached the end of the season as well as trying to auto a lot of games in the playoffs. My solution was to run 25-50 games at a time and 10-25 or so for the playoffs, worked for me. Not sure what was causing the out of memory errors but whatever it was it caused FHLSim to fail as well if I had it open during the simulation/errors, so it is likely some shared resource. My over-clocked E6400 with 2gb of ram should not have an issue with memory, but who knows.
Settings
As mentioned above, I wanted to try and get results as close to we have in FHL for shots, goals, penalties and finances.
My FHL settings were:
• Shots 5/11
• Goals 6/11
• Finances 9/11
• Penalties 5/11
• Injuries 6/11
After playing a bit, I have the following setting ins STHS:
• Coach 50 (default)
• Fighting 30 (default)
• Finances 65 (may need a little more tweaking)
• Goals 43 (the default resulted in really low goals per team and a lot of SOs, but this was close to what our teams were doing this season)
• Injury 20 (default)
• Moral 15 (default)
• Penalties 50 (getting closer to the numbers we are putting up, more tweaking may be needed as well)
• Shots 38 (this is now right in line with the FHL numbers we are getting)
The Hockey Simulator
Compared to FHL, STHS is a lot more configurable and has many more options. From what I have seen the often debated OV rating in FHL is still in the STHS but does not have the effect it had in the FHL and it is a lot LOWER as well. Fans seem to come to the rink more when your team is winning and less when its losing unlike in the FHL where you can have a team that is winning like crazy and have no ‘star’ (ov80+) players so the fan support is low.
The sim allows for full farm teams with coaches and lines and generic ‘unknown’ players that will fill in where there is an empty roster spot.
There is a setting to allow forwards to play ALL forward positions which is nice if you are in an injury situation (see my wish list below)
The fit and finish of FHL sim is, at this time, better than that of the STHS. That being said, the STHS gui has almost any option you’d want and just because it is not quite a pretty as the FHL one is no reason to skip the STHS. With this being just a 1.0 release, the whole program can only get better, which is scary if are a FHL fan.
A couple of other things have stood out so far in my testing:
• There does not appear to be a way to import text based lines
• The sim is slow in comparison to FHL
Neither of which is show stopper for most leagues, who cares if the games take an extra 10 seconds to generate when playing a days games?
I personally love the Play by Play output even if I won’t read it all the time, it actually gives you the feel that something is really happening other than a random generator is picking numbers out of a hat!
The one thing I have not tried is running the program via the command line to execute ‘today’s games’. If this works the way it is said to, you really wont have to care if it is a bit slower as it will auto load the lines and generate the output with zero user action needed… put it all into a script – start sim, load lines, run games, export data, update your league webpage – all done with one click.
Another 'option' I have not played with much is the STHS client but some of the owners in my league have downloaded it and are playing with it and no real complaints as of yet, other than 'there is too much for me to do now' type things
Wish list
The ability to set multiple positions to players (Apba hockey had it). Instead of allowing all forwards to play all forward positions or only allow them to play one, being able to set 2 or 3 different positions in order of talent would be nice. There are forwards that only play wing (both L and R) or C and a wing or D and a wing etc. But this is just a wish and the setting to allow forwards to play any forward position is nice for leagues who want to go that way.
The ability to import text lines (or access to the expected formats to create such a utility)
Conclusions
STHS is a good step up from what FHLsim is and has many of the options that many people are waiting for in FHL-X which may never appear. If Simon can keep up on the development of the sim, and there is no reason to believe he won’t, I couldn’t ever suggest that someone should look at FHLsim when there is a far superior simulator available in the form of the STHS.
I highly recommend anyone take a look at this program, you will be glad that you did! Keep up the good work Simon.
Alec McMillan
Commissioner of the DecHL
http://dechl.alecor.mb.ca
