[arod23]

Unlike 6.5, v2006, does not include free agents in an inaugural draft. That is, only players already assigned to teams become part of the draft pool after "releasing all". I also noticed that, sometimes, the draft pool would not even contain all of those players, as if it limited the size of the pool. While my learning was specific to the random debut database, this applies to any league wishing to do an inaugural draft.

I was working on the random debut historical database last night. While I was running some test imports, I learned a few things about the inaugural draft. Since players are all jumbled, the first year requires an inaugural draft and drafts for all subsequent years. That is, players cannot be assigned to their original teams (primarily because the teams the players played for may not exist).

As a first run, I imported about 500 players into year one. About half of these players landed on rosters and the other half were free agents (not assigned to teams). Under the transaction screen, half were listed under show all players and half were listed under free agents. Clicking on Release all players and hold inaugural draft yields a draft list that only includes those who were assigned to teams, thus leaving out all the free agents listed. Of course, this is not what most people want. Most of us would like to draft from the entire pool of available players.

To enable the inaugural draft to include ALL players available, you can do the following:

1) Start a historical league, do NOT check "hold inaugural draft" in the setup screen, import real rookies should be checked and hold amateur draft should be checked (so in subsequent years players are not assigned to a team), other settings are up to you
2) After start game, checking the transactions screen, you should see players listed under free agents and under show all players (you should make a note of how many are listed in each)
3) Now go back to setup and change settings so AI can make all roster moves and run all teams.
4) Sim one or two days, which should be to Jan 3rd or 4th. The AI should sign all available free agents.
5) Check transactions screen and all free agents should have been signed to a team and show all players now should include every player that loaded (the total should match the sum from earlier or you can check the database info screen for the total number of players imported)
6) Now, go back to setup and click release all players and hold inaugural draft.
7) The draft pool should now contain all players
8) Change AI settings back to human control or whatever mix you want moving forward
9) Clear service years and stats if you want
10) Hold draft

And by the way, a new random debut database based on the current version of v.2.1 Arod/Garlon 2006 DB should be available this week. (The one currently available for download is based on last year's efforts).