BZ 3504 : Minor League Cities

[shefffred]

An irritating problem that OOTP has had, IMHO, since the beginning of minor league play back in 2006, has been the inability of the program to produce minor league systems without duplicates. Moreover, it 'visits' certain cities at all levels, constantly. If I see Chula Vista, Garland, Aurora, Newark, Glendale, Plano and Laredo once in a generated universe, I see them 3 or 4 times in the same or other levels.

These cities all have populations in the game of 200,000/250,000: the algorithm chooses these cities as possible teams in each level of minor league play, because the relative population parameters set by the game for possible teams is so narrow.

As an experiment, I took a database of 10,000 small cities, and equalized their population. Then, I generated a universe. Did more random choices occur? Interstingly, no. The program choose teams based on alphabetcal order rather than population. Ie, all Major League Teams were towns starting with the letters A through D, Minor League Teams E through M (with one or two later letters as 'throw ins'). Furthermore, many duplicates occurred again, which is remarkable since the pool of towns was so large. In fact, the same towns would duplicate themselves in other generated universes.

Would it be possible for Markus to widen the parameters, inorder to create more diverse universes? Ideally, it would be nice to control these parameters ourselves, but it might be a programming nightmare.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

[Tony M]

I've marked this as something for Markus to explain as to how it's working.

[Tony M]

Bz 3504