Changing birthplaces over time in fictional leagues

[BPS]

Here's what you do to change birth places by editing the roster export file.

This allows you to fully control birth places in fictional leagues as time passes by by-passing the actual population data in the cities.txt file. For instance, a US league starting in the late 1800s would have players mostly born in the east of the US while over time the birth places shift westward. You can include this change in geographical distribution of birth places over time by changing the birth places of players at low levels of your league (even in the feeder league).

1. Game setup --> League setup --> Export rosters.

This gives you a comma-delimited file that you'll be editing.

2. Edit the resulting file. I use Excel.

The information for players on the roster includes the following:
...NationalityID, Nation, CityID, City...

To change the birthplace of a player you change NationalityID AND CityID. If you don't change NationalityID to the proper number you'll get the birthplace of "unknown" for that player. You DON'T need to change what appears as Nation or as City in this roster file. You can change them, but you don't need to.

The NationalityID is just that that appears in the nations.txt file. The US, for instance, is 206 (or whatever appears in your edited nations file). The CityID number appears nowhere but you can figure it out very simply: the first city appearing in the cities.txt file has CityID of 1. The second city appearing in the cities.txt file has CityID 2. You can figure out the rest. You just have to put a column of numbers at the beginning of the cities.txt file to figure out the CityID of the 80,000 or so cities that appear in the default cities.txt file.

If you change the cities appearing in cities.txt this might lead to a change in the CityID numbers for the cities. So you'll want to have a full cities.txt file from the very beginning of your game instead of adding them later on. Perhaps you can add them at the end of the file but, again, I'm not sure.

3. Save the file as a comma-delimited file. Import this file back into the game via (Game setup --> League setup) and the new birth places will appear.


Note: Many special characters (accents, etc) are messed up by Excel. I'm sure some setting would make everything okay but be warned.

I use census data to determine the probability that players are from different cities and create a lookup table in Excel (in conjunction wiith a random number) to give players birth places consistent with their year of birth. Right now I just have the data for players born around 1850-1860.

Below is a screen shot of part of the exported roster file as it appears in Excel. The first two lines have the full proper information. The third line-- that starts with 194--has been edited. NationalityID 194 is the Philippines and CityID 62383 is Palnab. You'll note in the file the Nationality and City name are wrong for this line. But this is okay...when the file is imported into the game it will bring the nation and city name into line with the NationalityID and CityID. If you subsequently export this file you'll see the proper nation and city listed in the exported file.