One of the nods to realism I am trying to be faithful to in the dynasty has to do with the scheduling. In 19th Century England there was a big taboo against public activity on Sundays. They weren't unique in that regard—here in the States, the National League didn't play Sunday ball in the 1880s, and when the American Association implemented it, it was highly controversial.
However, there's no simple in-game setting to implement in bulk specialized schedules to avoid Sundays, or play doubleheaders, or even play 100% day games, a circumstance that was set in stone in the 1800s. I needed all three of these to start with. So I had to make the adjustment manually myself.
There was NO way I was going to go in to make the adjustments manually, within the game, painstakingly, one by one, like a crazy man. Fortunately, it's easy to download the schedule, which has an lsdl file extension but is easily editable in Notepad. Seeing it, I realized I could build my own editor in Excel, using the =concatenate function. So I did.
This is what it looks like:
First thing I do is generate a fictional schedule for my league in the Schedule Editor (League Menu/League Setup/Editors/Edit League Schedule). Once I've done that, I select Schedule ... ^/Export to File, select a target folder, and Save, noting the name of the file and changing it if necessary. I then navigate to the target folder and open the lsdl file in Notepad.
In notepad, I copy the schedule part only and paste in into cell P5 on my Schedule Concatenate Template (I'm not so good at naming things elegantly). I then use Text-To-Columns delimiting the schedule on the quote mark (") which divides all the parts into their own separate column. All I really care about is what ends up in columns U and W, which are the away and home teams.
The part between columns H and K is the guts of my schedule. I copy what ends up in U and W to columns J and K. In column I is the game time. Since I must have all day games and the majority of times OOTP assigns shows up here as 1905 (7:05pm), I make my time changes in I. Column H is the day of the season, with your Opening Day representing 1.
In this case, I start my season on Monday, and play six days each week with Sundays off. So everyone is scheduled for day 1, then day 2, then day 3, and so on through day 6; then I skip to 8 and go through 13; then 15-20, 22-27, etc. IOW, I skip all the "touchdown' numbers because those are the Sundays. Since my days of the week and game times repeat throughout the season, it's easy enough to copy and paste all the way down or, easier still, use reference formulas.
The result appears in Column A. That's where I use the =concatenate formula to build the schedule for each game. The formula looks like this:
And you get something that looks exactly like the kind of game day schedule that the Game generates.
I copy this formula all the way down to the end, and I have my entire season schedule. I then copy every game in column A and paste it over the entire original schedule in the original .lsdl file, and I save it as a text file in the same folder under a slightly revised name.
Lastly, in OOTP, I select Schedule ... ^/Import from File, select the file I just revised, and yada yada yada, I have my new specialized schedule!
Once I get rolling in a stretch of seasons that are similar, such as the six year stretch of 90 game seasons for sixteen team leagues I have coming up, I can make this change from the Game's fictional schedule to my specialized schedule in under five minutes total. And here's an example of what it looks like, for the champion Aston Villa Villans for June of the upcoming 1893 season:
I'll make the Schedule Concatenate Template available here, for anyone who needs a way to quickly put together their own specialized schedules, but haven't figured out a way to do it themselves:
Schedule Concatenate Template.xls