Promotion/Relegation League Setup

[Iamnobody]

Hey all,

Has anyone tried a European Football Promotion/Relegation league setup? What are the pitfalls of it? I can imagine that the scheduling is the most difficult part of it all.

[dim13]

The scheduling is not difficult at all - but you must generate a new schedule right after moving the teams into new leagues. There is a 'Generate Schedule' button that will generate a new schedule. As a precaution, at the beginning of the very first year, export your schedule for each league. If there are any problems in the future and the 'Genrate Schedule' button gives you an error, you can use the 'Import Schedule' function to Import your schedule (that you exported). I think I ran into this problem once.

The "hardest" part is the initial set up. You'll want players in the draft and Free Agents to have lower ratings in the lower leagues. You'll have to set the modifiers for each League/Level.

I use Promotion/Relegation in my league. I have 10 Levels. Level 1 has 2-10 team divisions (bottom 2 play an exhibition game after the season to with loser relegated to Level 2). Levels 2-10 has 1-10 team division - winner plus wild card meet in playoffs for promotion and last place team relegated to next lower level. Level 10 10th place team is deleted and I create a brand new team into the league at Level 10, fill minor league level 'A' twice to create fairly bad players - so the new team will have a challenge.

The player creation modifiers I use are:
Level 1 - 1.000
Level 2 - 0.949
Level 3 - 0.894
Level 4 - 0.837
Level 5 - 0.775
Level 6 - 0.707
Level 7 - 0.632
Level 8 - 0.548
Level 9 - 0.447
Level 10 - 0.316

I found it best to leave League Totals at 1.000, instead of changing them. I changed them and the batting stats were way too low with pitchers dominating.

I think this is the perfect balance for my 10 Levels. Teams promoted usually finishes near the bottom the following year in the higher level, and relegated teams usually finish near the top in the lower level.

I also another league set up where level 1 is Major League baseball (30 teams) - bottom 2 teams in the NL and AL have a 1 game exhibition game during post season with loser relegated to Level 2.

I have finances/salaries turned off. I also have it set so free agents can not sign with a team from another league/level, and you can only trade with teams within your league.

To make it interesting for me, at the very beginning I started as GM of a team in Level 10, edited all of my players to have the absolute lowest ratings possible. Ran off a month and deleted all of the free agents in the league. So as of game date 5/1/07 I'm left with the absolute worst players in the lowest league with no free agents. My challenge is to get to Level 1 and win the championship. After the first month my team was 4-26.

[Iamnobody]

I think that makes sense. I'm going to try it out tonight in a small league and see what happens. I want to keep the financials in there and I'll just give each team a decreasing amount each year.

I have a couple more questions though:

1) If each division have a different number of teams in each league then I can't do a home and home as is traditional in the EPL, correct? Is there anyway I can guarantee a home and home for each team? How many games do you have each team play?

***Edit*** I may have just figured this out. Do you add one league and then add all the other leagues and just them the different player modifiers? ***done edit***

2) How do you deal with major league service time in the league?

3) Where is this 'generate schedule' button at?

[molarmite]

If you want to join a promotion/reglegation online league, come check out Global Baseball in my sig.