[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

While I would second this suggestion, there's one obvious problem with it: how do we get OOTP to understand what geographical regions are? How do we tell it which cities belong geographically with which?

The cities.txt file does contain the latitude and longitude for each entry; so perhaps that info can be used. But how?

One idea that comes to mind would be to create pre-designated geographical regions, and add a column to the cities.txt file for that purpose. Each region then gets its own number, starting with 1 for the first one and going from there, with no upper limit on the number of regions, and then cities are assigned the region number to which they belong. The advantage of this approach is if the user doesn't like the way the cities have been geographically grouped, they can easily change it by changing the region number of that city to that of another region. The drawback is someone is going to have to go through the exisiting cities.txt file and make the initial decisions on which cities go into which region, and given the huge number of cities in the file, that could be a daunting, time-consuming task.

But then again, this task could be made simpler by not having every nation having its cities assigned region numbers. It could be limited to the more likely baseball nations to be used in the game, such as the U.S., Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and/or by limiting it to the larger, more populous nations.

The task also could be made more manageable if a number of people were willing to volunteer to come up with a suggested geographical region grouping for a particular country, thereby spreading the workload around.

I've been thinking about this, and I think it could be done with the cities.txt thing. I don't think it wouldn't be that difficult to just compare longitude and latitude numbers, and base the associations on cities within a set distance. The only way this could potentially cause problems is for cities close to national borders (eg. Berwick upon Tweed on the England-Scotland border and Chester on the England-Wales border) because it wouldn't be unreasonable for Berwick to have an affiliated team that was technically in Scotland (Since the football team plays in the scottish league) and OOTP wouldn't recognise this.