Regions as nations mod - working on update
 

Hey guys,

It has been a long time since I have posted. Between work and other things haven't had much time to enjoy OOTP. Finally had a chance to dust off the game before OOTP12 is released.

I am working on an update to the regions mod that I did a few years ago. The original mod took the United States and broke it up into regions. My goal is to have it ready soon after OOTP12 is released. Should be easy since I just pull the OOTP database files into Excel and use Excel funtions to look for the states in each region and Excel creates the new nation for me.

I do have a couple of ideas, and would like some input.

1) Should I add in states as nations also? This is actually simple to set up, it would just take some time since there are 50 states.

2) Are there any historical baseball regions that you would like to see? From a quick glance at the minor league history, I see New York-Pennsylvania, Ohio-Penn, a couple different Tri-States, Texas (which often includes teams from surrounding states), etc. I already created a Pacific Coast Region which is simply the Pacific States region excluding Alaska and Hawaii.

It would take some time to look at the minor league history to find all the possibilities, so it would make it easier if I know what regions would be typically used. It would also make the file much smaller if I exclude a, for example, Kansas-Missouri region since there is no interest in such a region.

3) There is also a second reason I would like to keep the files smaller. My next goal is to add world regions so I can add a Carribean League, Pacifc Rim League, South American League, etc. This may take me a while to do since the current Excel workbook only contains U.S. info.

Great to hear. I just completed a region mod for my personal use featuring 4 US regions and also Canada split into 3 regions. Let me know if my stuff would be helpful to you...

World regions I think would be great.

Hey,

Took a look at the new world default.xml file and breaking the U.S. and Canada into regions should be easy. Everything is well organized in the XML file.

The only issue is the city ID numbers which were added this year. In OOTP11, there weren't and city IDs so I was able to have multiple copies of cities in different regions in the same file (e.g Boston in US East, US North East and US New England). Having multiple levels of regions allowed me to merge regions as my leagues evolved. I'm guessing that the city IDs will cause me to have to limit my file to a single level of regions unless I create unique city IDs for each region.

Splitting the world into regions will take longer, but it's possible.

I'm noticing the regions at the end of the XML file... would that help at all?

Mark not sure if this matters to you or would help you but I have every single city in Illinois in its own cities file...I was going to start a Illinois Baseball Beer League and an IDOCBL with it at some point.

I would love to see a states as nations mod. I'm hoping to start some state specific leagues and this would be awesome!

Sorry, I didn't notice this thread until now or I would have responded sooner.

Markus is, in fact, implementing a system whereby the user may set up leagues within specific geographic regions. As spartacus007 pointed out, there are regions listed at the bottom of the world_default.xml file which will be used for this purpose.

As of right now, I'm not sure when this feature will be fully integrated into the game. It was supposed to be ready for the initial release of OOTP 12, but Markus apparently ran out of time. However, all indications are that this will be added in an upcoming patch. (I'll try to remember to post an update here once I receive confirmation on its status.)

Once this feature is in the game, you will be able to choose a national region comprised of multiple states within a single country, or an international region comprised of multiple nations or multiple states in more than one nation, in which to set up a league. All the teams that are automatically generated for your league will be based in cities within these pre-defined regions.

And as is the case with anything in the world_default.xml database, you may edit these regions or add your own regions. (You may even create a region that only includes a single state. :D)

Unfortunately, one thing you still won't be able to do is control the states where the players in your league come from. If you create a region for just the state of Florida, for instance, the home nation will still be the United States. Therefore, if you set the foreigner percentage to 0%, all of your players will come from cities throughout the US, not just Florida. So if you want to be able to ensure that all players come from a specific state, you'll have to use the old method of adding states as nations. :( (I will be pushing Markus to change this in an upcoming version, however, so don't lose hope. ;))

My recommendation for anyone working on states-as-nations or regions-as-nations mods would be to hold off for a few weeks to see what the plan is for the league regions feature. Otherwise, you may be putting time and effort into a project that isn't even necessary. :)

Doesn't the new xml world default used for OOTP 12 make that states as nations mod obsolete?

Muzumba,

Thanks for the info.

I had already decided to hold off until after the first patch since there was an issue with the populations in the xml file. I didn't want to put a whole lot of work into making the mod and have the XML change after the first patch.

It sounds like that the only thing that won't be immediately implemented is limiting players to just the region where the team is located.

Creating the regions as separate nations is actually easy. The only tough part is the population issue. The work around involves making sure the poplation of the nation equals the populations of the its cities.

Since I am primarily creating this mod for a league idea that I have, I will wait until after the first couple of patches and see if the regionality additions do what I am looking for.

Try State Nations. 8 teams per state. 126 games per season. Top 3 make playoffs. Each state champ makes association playoffs.