Foreign Player Restrictions In Minor Leagues

[monkeystyxx]

I'm trying to set up a UK league, but running into a few problems with player restrictions in the minors.

What I'm trying to create is a league made up of representative teams from Celtic nations, in a Celtic League (which functionally is a division of one sub league).

I've got it set up as follows:

ML
Subleague 1:
Northern England Division x5 teams
Southern England Division x5 teams

Subleague 2
Celtic League x5 teams
Capital League (London teams) x5 teams

AAA
Division 1 x20 teams


Major League teams are allowed a max of 5 foreign players, based on team nationality (so Scots, Irish and English count as foreign to Welsh teams just as much as an American would).

The game is set up so that Default Player Origin is split:
33% English
16% Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish
Insignificant% other.

Same for Draft Pool Origin.

I've adjusted all of the relevant nations to have Average baseball program quality. In theory this means that there should be more English players than other nationalities, but all nations have an equal chance of having decent quality players. There'll be more good English players simply because there are more English players, but since there are far, far, far more English teams (only two teams from each Celtic nation including their AAA teams), this shouldn't matter.

Then there is one giant AAA 'reserve' league, one division of 20 teams with each team having one AAA affiliate (the Celtic affiliates come from the same nation as their ML team). In this league, foreigners are entirely banned, as I want the Celts to develop their own players, not English ones. This fails at the first hurdle, because teams draft whoever they want, regardless of nationality.

This is setting up a problem whereby:
-Major League team drafts whoever they want, regardless of nationality.
-Sends down to AAA.
-AAA club can't use most of them because they are foreigners, but don't release them either, so they just kinda sit there.
-Because they're contracted to the AAA club, they're never eligible for free agency, so never leave.
-Eventually the ML club runs out of home nation players due to free agency and trades, and I get the dreaded "illegal number of players (0)".




None of the AAA players in this screenshot are eligible to play for the team they're listed on here. None of them. They got drafted by the ML team and left to rot on a roster they can't play on. They also don't appear on the roster in any of the normal roster views for the team, and what's even weirder is that when I use the Clear Roster function in the editor, they don't disappear from this screen (all the English AAA teams' rosters get cleared though, so it is working). They're completely stuck there.

For example, there are currently 206 Welsh players in the world. 27 play legitimately in the major leagues (8 for the Cardiff Dragons, the lucky few too bad to be traded and too young for FA!), two are free agents because they went undrafted.

The other 170ish (maths bad) got drafted by teams and sent to their AAA affiliate, who they couldn't play for due to the restrictions, so they just kinda sit there, not on the roster but not OFF the roster either so nobody else can sign them.

Is there any way around this, or is this setup just never going to work?

It's kinda lame from an immersion point of view to turn the restrictions off in the majors and have most of the Celtic teams' rosters full of English players. I guess I could just turn the minor league restrictions off and have the celtic players develop wherever they get drafted, but even then there's no guarantee they'll be released in high enough quantities to solve the eventual shortage.

If there's a way to get it working properly then I'd like to do that first.

I guess the major, underlying problem is that teams will ignore nationality during drafts. Which arguably isn't even a bug. The real bug is that, having drafted ineligible players, they don't get released. Not even when I clear the rosters.

Update: Unrestricting the minors seems to have fixed things to a decent degree; the majors now work basically as intended. The Celtic teams are suffering a bit, as they have to go dumpster diving for a lot of their home nation talent, however it's a lot better than before.