How to set up an International Management game

Hi everyone, I've been playing for some years now so this is probably a stupid question, but I've never tried my hand at international management before so I hope you guys will humor me.

I'm thinking of starting a game as manager of an Asian international side - preferably minnows (I have a soft spot for Taiwan and the Philippines). But at the beginning, when I set up a game, some national sides don't show up as options to manage. My guess is that they are too low-ranked and don't have enough real players to fill the squads, but this is with all the default Asian leagues loaded and a large database! Is there any way (short of adding a database with extra leagues - and I'd rather not resort to that because I'm pants with editing) to get enough players to manage a smaller international team?

Also, why is it that some even lower-ranked teams (like the Solomon/Cook Islands) have a full complement of players to choose from and are playable while Asian teams like Taiwan/Philippines/certain middle-eastern countries aren't playable and full of greyed-out players? Any advice is welcome.

Other than adding leagues etc. through editing I don't think you will be able to manage certain nations until they have enough players.

As for your second question, I imagine it might have something do with licensing issues with certain leagues/nations.

You don't need to do the editing yourself. Check out the editors hideaway forum; you'll find all sorts of leagues that you can add to your database relatively easily.

I know how you feel too mate. For years, I was upset that the J-League and some of my favorite Japanese players were not in the game. When I got FM10, the first thing I did was look for a good J-League database and implemented it when I found a suitable one.

Good luck mate

I'm thinking of starting a game as manager of an Asian international side - preferably minnows (I have a soft spot for Taiwan and the Philippines). But at the beginning, when I set up a game, some national sides don't show up as options to manage. My guess is that they are too low-ranked and don't have enough real players to fill the squads, but this is with all the default Asian leagues loaded and a large database! Is there any way (short of adding a database with extra leagues - and I'd rather not resort to that because I'm pants with editing) to get enough players to manage a smaller international team?

There are custom game setup options. "All players from Asia" or whatever should do the trick.

If I plan to manage international sides, I add all capped players for every region. It seems to provide good balance without making the database too large.

I've never tried loading custom databases - that did the trick, thanks! One more question - if I'm managing an obscureish team with only default leagues loaded, will I have enough regens in the coming years to have a decent game going? And will I need to load other top leagues if I want the other national teams to have a realistic number of regens every year?

I guess what I'm asking is, if I'm playing a purely international game with a relatively obscure team, what leagues would ensure a decent experience (balanced national teams, good number of regens, etc.) without killing the computer?

Ok, ignore my last post - I somehow managed to load some custom leagues so the number of regens is probably not going to be an issue. One question I have though, is about the quality of regens. The problem with Asian club tournaments is that there are three tiers of continental competition and the clubs from smaller countries are stuck on the bottom tier low-rep continental competition with no actual way of qualifying for the better ones. This means that if I load a lowly-ranked country, teams from their league are probably not going to be able to gain too much reputation.

So my question is: what is the quality of regens pegged to? If my domestic league has crappy reputation but I somehow manage to get the national side to rise up the rankings, will the quality of regens from my country increase?