[FleetWalker]

The fiasco that scrambled my league has soured me on the game considerably, but I spent like 200+ hours on this so I figured I would post some notes for anyone pursuing the same line of thinking. It may give someone a jump start. Also, no one I know IRL will appreciate any of this. Of course, a lot of this is really into the weeds, so maybe no one here with appreciate it either!

I really got into the World Cup this year, and it got me thinking about a world where baseball was approximately as popular worldwide as association football. The goal was to create a world where the distribution of players more approximately matched the distribution of world population taking into account the baseball quality of the nations involved. So BBQUAL 5 nations (in the aggregate) will produce more and better players than BBQUAL 4 nations (in the aggregate). Then, at the end of the day there could be a world cup that didn't necessarily involve the same 5 countries every time, but where the teams from higher BBQUAL nations still had an advantage. BBQUAL 1 nations are assumed not to exist in the sense of producing baseball players.

Aside #1: OOTP BBQUAL settings are little whimsical in places, but one the whole they seemed OK to me, so I just used them as is.

The obvious first problem is that there are only seven BBQUAL 5 nations, and two of them (Japan and the United States) absolutely dwarf the others. So as I've mentioned elsewhere, I wrote a Python script that (1) uses more current census data, and (2) allows me to break apart countries. I'm glossing over the data and programming issues here, I collected data so that each state and province accurate represents its ethnicity and has second nations (other states and provinces), etc... IT started out being fun.

I used this program to break Japan & United States into their first tier administrative units (prefectures and states). I also broke apart Canada, Mexico (because it dwarfs the other level 4 nations), and Russia (because it dwarfs the other level 2 nations, is actually part of two continents, and also screw them). I would have liked to break apart China (which swamps all the level 3 nations, and see Russia), but the first level administrative division aren't really self-governing units and (more importantly) none of them have cool flags. Russian "state" flags are cool.

Aside #2: You might think that not even having the nation of Japan exist in my world file would have saved me from the update o'doom, but Nope.

Finally, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I added a new BBQUAL 5 nation: Themyscira This nation uses the women's name file. It has a small population, so it only produces a handful of players, but I find it super cool to have women players show up in the game. I wish the game provided better support for female players.

So that was step one: Create world where the talent distribution was a less concentrated in a few nations at each level. Now there are three times as many "nations", almost all of them more or less similarly sized, and many of them have a chance to win a world cup.