Looking for expanded info on international scouting/complex

[MrDov]

The international complex might be the feature I'm most excited about at this point, so I'm hoping to get more info on it. I'm thinking Markus is the only person that can expand on the idea, though I'm hoping there was a thread or article I missed. But based on the initial press release it looks like the only control you have over the situation is hiring the scout, then deciding if/when to sign the prospects to minor league contracts. I was hoping for a bit more control in the feature.

In FIFA 12 (I think it was that year) they have a very similar feature, but it offers a bit more control. Basically you get 1-3 scouts and send them off to different international countries to scout young players for a period of time (a couple weeks to a month or two). At the end of the time scouting, they come back to you with a list of interesting players, and a basic scouting report on each one. At this point you decide which players to keep and which players to ignore. Then those you keep go into your club's youth academy until you decide they are ready for the big time. Now I'm not sure how well that set-up would transfer to OOTP, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

[tomwolf2008]

Hopefully the screenshots that are supposedly going to be up in two weeks show this feature

[olivertheorem]

Originally Posted by MrDov

But based on the initial press release it looks like the only control you have over the situation is hiring the scout, then deciding if/when to sign the prospects to minor league contracts. I was hoping for a bit more control in the feature.

My understanding is that it is almost exactly like how international finds are handled now, except that you don't have to stick a 16/17-yo in your minors and start his minor-league service clock. Instead, you stash him in the international complex and have until he's 20 to decide if you want to put him in your minors or not.

That said, it would be cool if the various international complexes were treated as a minor league of their own so they played games against each other, but I can see how that would be difficult to implement well at this stage.

[injury log]

I can comment a bit about this, but right now, no one knows yet exactly how Markus has implemented the international scouting stuff besides Markus himself! But you will definitely have control over which parts of the world you scout, and you'll need to make decisions about how to allocate your budget - hopefully more interesting than the decisions you need to make in OOTP13, where most people probably just scout everywhere good, since it's so useful. There's more to it than that obviously, but we'll all need to wait a while to find out just how much more.

The 'international complex' itself is, at least as I proposed it, just a separate minor league 'team' that doesn't play any games. At least for now it's not intended to emulate, say, the Dominican Summer League, as someone suggested/asked in another thread, though I suppose it could be expanded to that purpose in the future (doing that properly is apparently quite a bit of work, and while I know it's on the radar, I have no idea if there's a chance we see that in OOTP14). The reason for a new minor league 'international complex' roster is this: right now, if you're simming and find a hidden player, your sim first stops when your scout finds the player; then you have to click on the player profile, open up a contract negotiation, change the contract demand to a minor league contract, submit the offer, sim ahead, have your sim stop when the player says he likes your offer, sim ahead again, and finally have the sim stop when the player agrees to your offer. That's 3 sim interruptions and 10 mouse clicks, and I think every OOTP GM signs these players automatically, so it's all unnecessary. Instead, these players can just be signed automatically, and your scout can send you an email summary of the players he signed for you. The players can be dropped in the 'international complex' roster and you can decide at your convenience when to assign them to your real minors. So it's meant to make the entire international signing system more convenient for GMs.