Hamster's BOARD GAME SALE thread!

[NobBe Nobbs]

You're a fine man. I've been working on and off on a way to change team attack/defence ratings as they get promoted/relegated so that teams really do evolve over time. If I do get that balanced then I'll link you.

Actually, I'm already working on something similar. I've made a lot of changes to my game as it's gone along.

First one is that there are now six divisions, not four. I started out just replacing the bottom two teams in the Fourth with two new teams to represent relegation, then I realised I could easily add in more divisions and chucked in twelve more teams to the mix. I've also made "team sheets" for the new twelve as well - I took averages of the skills of the First, Second, Third and Fourth teams and continued that pattern. I think First averaged to about 106, Second to 96, Third to 87 and Fourth to 78, so I carried on like that and made Fifth average to 69 and Sixth to 60.

With the A/D ratings of existing teams, I simply swapped all of them around so the current #1 seed (Rome) got the ratings of the original #1 seed (Catalonia) and so on, so forth. That's also new, so there may be a better way of doing it or this might work just fine.

The skill gap between the Fourth and the Sixth was intended to be lower, so simming games against Fifth Division teams have their forwards at a skill of 6.5 and Sixth Division teams have 6 skill forwards.

I decided to cut the idea of having different skills for Home and Away games. I figure NPC teams already play slightly differently between home and away because it changes who gets their shots, and because I'm keeping all my team data in a bunch of spreadsheets, it made my life easier to only deal with one skillset.

Midfielders also get judged on goals and assists for form purposes, because it seemed mad to me that I could have a winger banging in a goal a game and losing form constantly because he wasn't getting assists off anybody.

Discipline's been tweaked slightly. A straight red is a three-game ban, a red from two yellows is a one-game ban and if a player hits three yellows in a season, that's another one-game ban. That's roundly on par with the way the real world does it, although it's obviously a harsher punishment because there's only 14 league games in this season.

The Cups have been changed. The Westwood Cup is designed to be a lower-level competition - teams from division 5 and 6 start in the first round, division 4 enters in round two, division 3 enters in round three and the top two divisions don't take part at all.

The FMA Cup has also been changed and it's now bigger and starting earlier - the 32 teams in divisions 3-6 take part in the first round in week 2, then the second round is between the survivors of that. Then division 2 enters in the third round, division 1 in the fourth and things progress as normal. I haven't actually tested that, that's something I've just come up with, but I'm quite interested to see how it plays out.

The divisional rankings are also significantly different. When writing this, I actually forgot that the world rankings are not, by default, split up by division - I think I added that in season 2 or something, but it's a simple fix. The Premier Division has the top 8 teams, 9-16 are in the Second and so on. If, say, #3-ranked Madrid gets relegated, they drop to #9 or #10 - if #16 Gelsenkirchen gets promoted, they jump to #8.

Promoted and relegated teams are in the bottom two slots of their new division, but when simming non-player divisions, I've been taking the four teams in each division who weren't promoted or relegated and simply rolling a d10 to decide where they land. The top seed of those four is on 1-4, the second on 5-7, the third on 8-9 and the fourth on 10 - whichever number comes up first, that team is judged to have finished third and so on.

It's made for a lot of movement in divisional rankings - aside from Riga, Eindhoven have dropped a total of 13 places in the six years I've been playing and Amsterdam have dropped 15 and are now in Division Five, while Glasgow have gone from 23 to 13 and Bremen went from Third Division also-rans to Premier Division runners-up.

I have other things kicking around in my head as well such as being able to assign tactics to your midfield specifically - a defensive mindset there would lead to your D* rating being the total of your defense plus 3/4s of your midfield total, while your A* rating would only get the remaining 1/4 of your midfield - but that's obviously going to be more advanced stuff. Maybe fodder for another module. Weather is another thing I'd like to add on, and I've got a few ideas about locker room politics to incorporate.

I'd like to tweak the transfer ages as well, because it seems like I'm getting a LOT of really talented, really young players and it doesn't make sense that teams would be selling them. The same goes for simming divisional matches because I've had a disproportionate amount of games ending 6-3 or 5-2, but there may not be a massive amount I can do about that. Possibly extend that to a d8 or a d10, so more games end 1-0/2-0/3-0.

I've also just noticed an entertaining mistake I made somewhere - Istanbul got relegated and I must have forgotten to add them to the list of teams for division 5 and 6, because they're not there. Oh well. Maybe they got kicked out of the league for fan behaviour. The UK is in the lead with 7 teams, followed by Spain (5), France (4), Italy and Germany (3). In total, 26 nations are now represented. Feel the diversity!