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Originally Posted by dynaboyj
I continue to just absolutely love this series. This is a dream for any fan of in-depth customization and big worlds.
A couple setup questions:
1) How do you set up year-long tournaments like the Champions League/BA Cup? As recently as 21 or so I remember the setup for that kind of thing being nearly impossible, and having to do long postseason association tournaments instead. Is there a cleaner way to do this kind of thing now, or do you just have to schedule every game manually? The duality of the Champions League and the domestic league makes things really interesting.
2) Do games work on soccer or baseball schedules (i.e. are they once a week or nearly every day?) And do your starting pitchers have rotations, or is it just a goalkeeper analogue going out there every day?
Also just for fun: who are some of the best prospects in the world right now?
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Thanks for following along! I’m on mobile right now, so I can’t get too in depth on question 3, but I’ll hit the first two right now.
1) Setting up the tournaments is tough. For the Cup tournaments I basically just turned them into preseason tournaments. Because of the playoff nature and the way the game handles playoff series, trying to do it midweek would require so much real time adjustment that it would be an absolute chore. I wish I could import post-season schedules like you can do with regular season schedules but oh well.
The Champions League group stage is easier because those games follow a regular season schedule.
So using the schedule builder tool, I set my schedules up with a rough sketch of the season. So for example in the Prem, I set a 20 team, one sub league, one division, 114 game season. I tell it to start on a Saturday and then skip Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Then I have to go into the output txt file (or whatever it is) and manually adjust the days to fit the schedule and build gaps for the Champions League.
Then I do the same with the Champions League like an inverse of the previous process. I schedule 18 group games only on Tuesday and Wednesday and then adjust them to fit the gaps in the league schedules.
All of my leagues have a staggered start based on size, so the Europa League (2x 26 team sub leagues, 150 games) starts first in like early April, while Austria (10 teams? I can’t remember) starts in mid-July. I do this so every league and the Champions League group stage all end at the same time, the first week of November. That way the league calendars are clear and the Champions League knockout rounds can schedule organically.
In previous play tests I ran into scenarios where the Europa League playoffs clash with the knockout stage (e.g. Donetsk makes the knockout stage and also wins the Europa League North), so that takes some monitoring.
But I have the regular season schedules all set to conform to my set XML files and then make sure they start on time and align with the Champions League annually.
The initial schedule adjustment is tedious but can be done in Notepad++ pretty easily. And I have a pretty gnarly spreadsheet to make sure the dates line up correctly. I’ll post a screenshot of it later.
2) The schedule is closer to a baseball schedule because of my setup. Instead of playing each team twice, like in soccer, they play two 3-game series, home and away. So the use of pitchers is more like in real baseball. Teams generally have one rest day a week, except once the Champions League starts, teams that are in the tournament have a travel day on either side of their two game series while non-Champions League teams would have four days off.
3) I’ll post this later, but I don’t have 100% of my world as real soccer players. I created 50 real players plus 5 Americans from the FIFA 12 database and based their ratings on their FIFA ratings. Each year I’m going to bring in 10 more top players and one American as free agents and just see where they wind up. For example, Neymar was a free agent to start the year and he signed with a second tier Portuguese team, so who knows what that’s about.
I’ll post some more on game admin later and throw some prospects at you too.
Thanks for reading!