Foreigner Limits/AI questions with World Cup League

[jayharvill]

Sometime tomorrow afternoon , I plan on starting the following fictional universe using a promotion/relegation format

32 team "World Cup League"....I'll use the FIFA rankings to determine who would make a world cup if it happened right now...group them just like FIFA does

Then I will have other leagues that will serve as promotion leagues....for example, I'll have a UEFA League---the champion will be promoted to the next season's World Cup League, where the World Cup League UEFA member who has the worst record gets relegated

I'll also manually change the nations file to make it more soccer-like....examples: Brazil, Argentina will have a "5" ranking....whereas the Dominican Rep will have a "1"

I'm debating on finances...may turn them off

My questions are:
1)will this work? I'm assuming it will, no problem
2)if I set a limit of 10 foreigners per team, will the AI of a team(let's say France), go out and try to trade for French players? or will the AI simply promote a French AAA player and demote a foreigner to stay under the limit
3)any other suggestions for my league?

[darkcloud4579]

Yeah, it'll work.
I'd turn finances off if I were you.

You could set foreign limits. Don't have trades on and that'll solve the problem you're saying about trying to create players.

It seems -- in my tests -- that regens are indeed coming from their home countries, rather than the home country of the league as in the past.

The playoffs will work too. But you need to 1) do manual relegation, the game doesn't do it automatically still and 2) the playoffs need to be powers of 2 (2,4,8, 16, 32, 64) you can't have a bracket designed differently.

[jayharvill]

when is the best time to promote/relegate so the league's history isn't messed up?

I also assume the draft order will be messed up some...and will have to do that manually

[Dogzilla]

I've done promotion/relugation in my league for many seasons and it's worked great.

I edit league structure (promote/relegate) at the end of Winter Meetings, works fine.
Reimport or regenerate schedules each year, at the begininning of preseason (I do it Feb 1). This is important, I found this out the hard way my first year.
I use financials and it works great. I have a standard media contract for each league, which I change for the promoted/relegated teams right after I edit league structure. So, if a team gets promoted from 2nd tier to the 1st tier, I change their media contract manually from $15 mil to $25 mil...this gives them a fighting chance to stay up.
I tweak the draft to give promoted teams 1st/2nd pick in their new league, as a bonus for winning promotion. Relegated teams pick at the bottom of their new league.
I tweak the PCMs to make it so the better the top league(s) have higher quality draft picks.

All in all, I'm surprised how well the game handles a scenario it really wasn't designed to.

[jayharvill]

thanks for the advice

I'm really curious how the AI will handle my league concept