One Engine, Five Formats Policy & Terms

The same ball-by-ball contest runs underneath all of them. What a format sets is the frame around it: how long an innings lasts, how long the powerplay runs, when the death overs begin, how many overs a bowler may send down, and how hard scoring and wickets come. Set those differently and the same engine plays a genuinely different game, from the patient build of a 50-over innings to the all-out swing of a single over.

ODI. Fifty overs, a ten-over powerplay, death from over forty, ten wickets, a maximum of ten overs per bowler. The longest rhythm, where pacing and wickets in hand matter most.

T20 (single-player). Twenty overs, a six-over powerplay, death from over fifteen, four overs per bowler, wickets falling more often and a death phase where everyone slogs. This is the established live format that career mode and the leaderboards are built on.

T20 versus. The captaincy format for online play, and the solo rehearsal that stands in for it. The same shape as T20, but tuned against real IPL cricket so a match plays like the real thing and a wicket costs what it should.

BBL. The Big Bash franchise mode, sharing the same real-data tuning as versus.

Super over. One over, two wickets, no powerplay, scoring turned right up, because a super over is nothing but a slog from ball one.

It would be tidier to run one set of rules for everything, but that is exactly the trap the design avoids. Careers, challenges and leaderboards build up over months, so changing the balance of the established single-player game would move the goalposts under milestones people are already chasing. So the live game's feel is kept stable, and the newer, more finely tuned settings live in the online formats, where there is no long-running history to disturb.

Feel the difference across formats in the T20 Franchise Manager, the Big Bash and The Chase. How the phases shape a single innings is covered in how a T20 innings is modelled.