AI's Handling of Foreign Player Roster Limits during the Inaugural Draft
 

I'm running a Fictional Global League in OOTP 19 (Haven't upgraded to 20 yet). Basically there is a single team for every country in the world spread across 16 divisions. And there is a setting in the League Rules to limit the number of foreign players on a roster. I thought this would be a good setting to use because I thought it would be lame if the Russian team (for example) had zero Russian players on it. So I set it that every team must have at least 5 players of their nationality on the active roster at all times.

This was fun when I did the inaugural draft, because I had to keep a close eye on the good players from my country and make sure I grabbed them before other teams did. It added a cool new element of strategy to the inaugural draft which is already one of my favorite parts of the game.

However after examining some other teams rosters to see what local players they all picked up, I was disappointed to see that the AI didn't seem to account for this at all. Almost every single team I looked at, their local players were quite bad (almost all 1 star or less overall). After taking a closer look at how these players were acquired, they were almost all taken during rounds 21-25 of the inaugural draft. This tells me that the AI was just drafting normally until it hit the foreign player roster limit and then started drafting local players because they literally weren't allowed to put anyone else on their big league roster.

This is pretty disappointing to me because it gives me a pretty obvious advantage over the AI teams since I am not wasting 4-5 roster spots on players who absolutely don't belong in the Majors. Does anyone have any ideas on ways around this? Also can anyone confirm if this still happens in OOTP 20? If they've fixed it I would definitely pick it up and run my league there.

EDIT: Also realized that this gives yet another disadvantage to the AI because they stop drafting local players once they fill out the major league roster - they don't account for having local depth in the minors in case some of their local players get injured or perform badly. Bad players stay on the roster and injured ones are replaced by whatever crappy local free agents they can sign.

I like your settings. That is a nice added layer of challenge for sure. However, a VERY common draft strategy in Fantasy, Managerial sims, and the like is "Take the highest player available". My guess is the AI is set up that way. It will ALWAYS pick a 70/80 pitcher over a 50/80 CF even if that CF fills a particular rule requirement. I find it to be a decent draft strategy early, and that may be why you see other teams waiting until 21-25 to draft players falling under a requirement.

I agree, I use the same strategy. But at a certain point you HAVE to start filling your needs. Like, even if the best player available at each round happened to be a pitcher, you still need fielders.

Same logic here. You NEED players from your country. It's clearly inefficient to use your last 5 picks on those 5 local players, because you're choosing from such slim pickings by that point. When I did my draft, I had my local players spread out evenly throughout the 25 rounds, and I ended up with nobody under 2 stars overall, where as every AI team was stuck with multiple 1 star / .5 star players

Well you had a better draft strategy then! Let's see how it plays out in-season :)