Some Tweaks to Regions (with images)

[BBGiovanni]

I spent some time going through the US regions lately designing a new setup, and I noticed a few minor changes that I think would be helpful and maybe make regions a more useful tool in general. I realize that the .xml file can be edited to change or add regions, but that's a lot of work to fix a feature that I don't think has changed much since it was introduced years ago.

First, there is only one way to set up leagues so that the whole US is covered, split into 5 regions: Far West, Great Plains, Midwest, Southeast, Northeast. Like so:




That's not the worst thing in the world, but it makes some (I think) obvious uses difficult or impossible. In many cases, someone dividing the US would want Texas to be a part of the south. And splitting the nation into five pieces means that setting up different leagues in each region to cover the whole country requires at least 5 leagues. I've often wanted to make an association or independent leagues or feeders or whatever that cover the whole country, but had to artificially break them per the above.

I think the more obvious way is to break the country into quarters, as many sports leagues and all sorts of other organizations have done. I don't think anyone in the US thinks North Dakota and Texas belong in the same region of anything, and several states are sprinkled into regions that make them awkward to use (Texas and Arkansas appear in "Delta", for example, and several of the southern states like Virginia and Kentucky are hard to fit in multiple-region setups given where they are placed). And, reasonable minds might differ about Missouri, West Virginia, and other states, but in general most people in the US have a decent idea what states are in the "South" or the "West".





In the most obvious example, a 32 team setup of 4 8 team leagues could be placed one per region. Or, 4 feeder leagues covering the whole country, or minor leagues in regions matching their parent leagues, and so on.


If these are added, it would also be nice if they're tagged somehow in the game so users can readily understand which 4 regions to pick to cover the whole nation. There's no way to currently pick the 5 regions on the map at the top unless you puzzle through the descriptors. There's a sticky thread in the Mods forum, and I added that map to it so people looking for that info will easily come across it.


The good news is: two of these regions are already in the game! "Far West" and "Northeast" are the same on both those maps above. You'd only need two new regions to fill in rather than the three current ones (or better yet in addition).


OK, second suggestion: Add a couple of smaller regions so that the US can be broken into 8 or so separate regions. Again, the smaller default regions don't fit together to cover the whole country. The closest I could come is this...




The existing regions above would take some tinkering; this is what a multiple small region setup could look like:





So, some tinkering with the existing ones or adding a couple new ones would make that a reality. Again, minor or feeder leagues could more easily be attached to logical regions to cover the whole country. It also could be useful for tournament play and feeders because it splits the major real sources of players into separate regions: TX. CA, NY, FL.


Finally, no map here but the current regions don't allow easily tacking in the "US Territories": Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands. Having this group as a standalone region would enable leagues, minors, feeders, etc. drawing players only from these regions.



Similarly, there's no inclusion of the "Freely Associated States": Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. They should probably be included in the same groups that "Territories" currently are, and again a standalone "region" for them would be handy. It should also appeal to whatever completists obsess about these things, I've literally learned about new nations from OOTP versions, I'm always impressed at the attention to those details



If anyone's actually read this far, I really think that these changes would make regions more useful to other players and (especially the 4- and 8-region setups) easier to understand for people since they're more closely related to reality. I'd also like to think this wouldn't take much work since it's just recoding the .xml file. So I hope it makes it on a punchlist for v.22!