[cedwards]

Eddie here, with a bit of an odd question that will require some setup to explain.

Recently, in attempting to find new ways to spice up how I play and in part to experiment with interesting changes for a friend’s sim league, I discovered the countries’ “Quality Settings”, essentially the values that decide how good generated talent is from this specific country. I was intrigued and started messing with it. In the end, I decided every country with over a million people in its population (or 10 million in Asia and Africa) would receive the same attributes as the game gives to Switzerland, which I thought was a fairly stable country when it comes to producing hockey talent. To my utter delight, the sim started spitting out great players from all corners of the world, some genuinely generational in their talent level. Even more impressive was that this new generation was not at all taxing to my craptop I was running the experiment on.

Now, I immediately started thinking “well, if enough players from these teams develop, surely there’s gonna be enough talent for these countries to field a team!” But to my disappointment (and expectation), the game limits the teams to the handful represented in real life, and new teams required rinks to play in, so clearly there was a hard-locked limit to what countries can host teams.

So now, hooked as ever, I wondered “Well, if the game on its own is not gonna let me see these teams play, surely I could tweak some things to make it a reality.”.

So now I turn to y’all, and ask the more technologically-inclined members of the forum for their valued input at the possibility of creating the right conditions for these teams to sprout. Now, I enjoy breaking a game to its core, but I’m also doing this at the behest of a friend who is interested in the viability of a long-term save with this system, to perhaps make his own mini-gamemode out of it.

With that out of the way, the question is “What values does the game give to the IIHF teams that limit their ability to create their own national teams that can compete in events, and can they be edited in a way that the end result is at the very least stable, if not, can run reasonably and for a decent period of time?”

(If interested, I have some pictures of some drafts and a few notable players that were generated in testing, I am yet to test it on my rigged-up desktop to see if there really is something to this. Thanks for the help in advance!)