A Note on Geographic Names
 

Since it's likely to come up in multiple places, I thought I should post an explanation here: we share a geographical database with OOTP Baseball, and it has some long-established standards that we have to adhere to.

Specifically, geographical names are supposed to be English-language and describe entities that exist right now. (Which isn't to say they always do that; Russia, for example, is a huge mess of inconsistency in that regard. I've found cities under names they haven't used since the 30s. We're working on fixing that kind of stuff.)

So you'll run across some things that don't look quite right at first glance, but are that way because of the aforementioned standards. Some examples:

-Old Toronto-area municipalities like North York and Scarborough that got swallowed by amalgamation in 1998 are all lumped under Toronto now.
-Similarly, the municipal reorganizations in Quebec in the early 2000's changed and eliminated a lot of familiar names. Chicoutimi is Saguenay, Hull and Aylmer are Gatineau, etc.
-People born in Port Arthur and Fort William prior to 1970 get Thunder Bay as their birthplace, despite it not technically existing at the time.
-Russians born in Soviet-era Leningrad get St. Petersburg as their birthplace, same with every other reverted Soviet placename.
-Rod Langway's birthplace, since someone's sure to point it out, is usually listed as "Maag, Taiwan." No such place, MAAG was actually the acronym for the Military Assistance Advisory Group, the US Army advisers in Taiwan. So his birthplace in the game is listed as Taipei.

One thing I did have to fudge a bit: ghost towns. Places that are now largely abandoned got a nominal population (5) so the database accepts them as valid. Not totally unrealistic, there are still a few people living near places like Cassiar or Sandon, B.C. The only totally phony one is Sokolče, Slovakia, Stan Mikita's hometown. It's now underwater after a dam was built nearby, so if you see a rookie with that as his birthplace...well, he was born on a boat, OK?

Regarding the United Kingdom, is it separated into England, Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland for this? So would someone born in Cardiff be listed as being from "Cardiff, Wales" and someone from Nottingham be "Nottingham, England"? Or will it be "Cardiff, UK" and "Nottingham, UK"?

Of course ideally it would show the county as well, but that isn't in OOTP (and my mod for it is progressing slowly...)

Cardiff, Wales and Nottingham, England.

Agreed about the counties, I'm not sure why it's not that way already - it's an odd exception to the usual format of the database.

If I recall properly, the files were adopted in OOTP 2006 and the database came from SI and FM. I am very hazy about the logic of the database structure, because I am not a soccer fan nor a FM player. I believe this is because Wales, Scotland,etc... have their own "national" leagues and teams. I've not done serious work on these files for about five years.

Could be, although my memory of the EHM database of that era (which was also taken from FM) is that only Canada and the US had states/provinces, not the extensive lists for each country that OOTP has. Even modern FM isn't quite as thorough as OOTP in that department.

As I say, I'm (rather slowly) working on a mod for OOTP13 to add the English counties. If it's ever finished the team are free to use it for any purpose.

Is San Francisco,CA available as a city? I added some teams from San Francisco but had to put them in Redwood City because San Francisco,CA wouldn't appear.

The city is in the database and I've been able to assign atleast players to be from that city.