Regional division distribution

[scythian12]

So I would like the 3rd and 4th divisions of Luxembourg (1. Division and 2. Division just to confuse you a bit) to simply have the teams from the north half of the country in the sub-division called Série 1 and from the south in Série 2 respectively. So far, so easy. I have set up the sub-division in the leagues accordingly, with the northern and southernmost cities in the country as their centre points, both in the parent division and in the child divisions as well under "Child compeition/regional limits". No matter what settings I use under "general", the game just puts the teams in any division it seems fit without any system.

There is one stage in the sub-divisions, which is the league phase, which actually pulls the teams from the division as stage 0, and a relegation stage, which is more involved. There is always cross-divisional relegation between adjacent league levels, the relegation stage always being in the higher level's stage collection. So relegation between 2nd-3rd level in the 2nd div, relegation between 3rd and 4th in the parent 3rd div and the relegation between 4th and 5th in the 4th div parent.

But all in all, I would expect the game to gather all teams with promtions and relegations finished at the end of the season, just make a neat cut in the middle, and assign the northern teams into the série 1 and southern ones into série 2. What do I overlook? Do I need to introduce an extra sorting stage in the parent competition maybe or something similar? Usually the game handles these situation without one as well...

 

 

[rusty217]

I think the issue is that the Competition needs to be set to 1. Divisioun - Serie 1 etc. instead. That's the competition you're telling the game to assign team to, and you want them assigned to the regional division, not the parent division.

The Regional Division section there should be blank. It's for teams with a Regional Division set in the database, not the regional division you want to assign them to. Even if you have set regional divisions for teams, personally I'd do that as a separate entry from the city boundary just to avoid any potential clashes. Although if you do use it then Competition and Regional Division should probably be the same (ie. you'd be telling it to assign teams with Serie 1 set in the database to Serie 1 etc.).

[scythian12]

Yep indeed, many thanks - SI's ways are mysterious and it is good when someone can lift the veil. Now can someone explain how every team south of Useldange (actually the half of série 1) in the screenshot end up in the Northern Division, but Colmar-Berg in the Southern one??? If you can't read it: Colmar-Berg gets a score of 2 for the Southern division, Useldange 38 for north...

 

 

Edited February 9 by scythian12

[RodTheCid]

I've worked on regional divisions before, I think I can shed some light on it.

The way I "control" that is by determine boundaries on the leagues I setup, in the sample below the region (Bajio) is in the center-west of Mexico, hence it does not need a West boundary.

 

FC Jeunesse Useldeng is located (according to SI) on Latitude 49.757ºN and Longitude 5.983ºE, so the game uses that to match it to the league where it is seeded, you just have to find the location (latitude/longitude) that marks the point of separation for the different regions, in the case of of the Leagues you're working, you will only need a location that would be the southern boundary for the North region and use the same as the north boundary for the South region, I use this website to find the coordinates that matches the format of the game

https://coordinates-converter.com/en/decimal/49.767000,5.983000?karte=OpenStreetMap&zoom=9

 

Hope this helps

[scythian12]

Cheers, I get what you mean, but I would like to use the centre point method as it is more surefire than setting up division boundaries, as the participants will evidently vary over the years and it should be dynamic. Of course, one can set up the boundaries with a bit of overlap for these cases, but the centre point should be very reliable - the game just needs to calculate the distances from those points to the individual stadia and then find the optimum of the function of the sum of all distances with the condition that the divisions need to be filled with a certain number of teams.

This is what the menus "Regional division scoring", "Regional divison coords" and "Regional Division calculation" tabs are for in the testing menu of the parent competition if you test the db in the editor. Unfortunately, they only appear for the last year of your sim. However, the contents of these menus are very enlightening for bug hunting purposes. So I was well confused then, why Colmar-Berg in my particular case was given a weighting by the program to put it into the Southern Division, when Hobscheid should have scored much more favourably to get into the Southern one, given it was the closest to Dudelange in the Northern Division. Yet it outscored Colmar-Berg 28-2 to be assigned to the North.

I have discovered many things that were wrong in the db which could lead to this behaviour

1) The amount of teams was set 14-16 for each of the league stages in the sub-divisions, which could (so I think) lead to the regional division distribution to do it for only 14 teams for one of the leagues and assign the last two teams at random essentially. Now I have changed this to 16 strictly for Div 1, and 14 for Div 2, which seems to have made a good impact on scoring

Now in the region coord menu, it still says for some unfathomable reason 14-16 teams for each division, but assignment works better

Although I am still at a loss to try to understand what the individual entries here mean and why it chooses the boundary cities it does for the region dividers...

Also not really understanding why there are two calculation tabs for a single season in there?

2) Some of the data in the db is plain wrong and needs to be fixed - Wilwerwiltz is up north and yet has the coordinates of being a Southern suburb of Luxembourg... Yet unexplicably correctly ends up in the Northern Div 2...

 

3) I have quite a bit of coordinates missing for stadia, I guess for those the program uses the city coordinates, but more prudency can lead to better results

So will have to see how it fares when it has more reliable data to work with

But there are some questions that remain - how are the "Regional Divison Calculation" and "Regional Divison Scoring" tabs related - they do not use the same data seemingly - see the example of Vianden

Also do observe how the values in "Regional Division Calculation" do not correlate with Latitude at all, which they should do... also should they for "Regional Division Scoring", it should be a nice decreasing column of numbers under "combined score" when sorting by latitude...

Edited February 11 by scythian12

[nasaiain]

I've tried to work out how it decides who to put where and to no avail.

One thing I did find is that the stadium co-ordinates are more important than the city co-ordinates, so always make sure that each stadium has co-ordinates set. There are a surprisingly large number in the database that are left blank, and an even more surprising number that are just wrong.

No matter how much you try, it will always get some teams in the wrong place.

 

[scythian12]

I have gotten ever so slightly closer to the explanation -

1) I was still missing the setup for the "number of teams" not only underneath the "Stage" settings in the Divisional settings, but also underneath "Required Teams" on the national tab, when done this eliminated the min/max teams on the Regional Division Coords screen in the testing setup.

2) I have set centre points well and truly far away, so this made the "Regional Divison Calculation" menu produce the results I was chasing I still do not get why the "Best region score" for the Southern teams is 0, but the scores the distance calculation produce now correctly correlate with the latitude of the teams

And now to the giant BUUUUT: in "Regional division scoring" some teams still get assigned to the wrong divison. You can see the combined score decreasing neatly with the teams sorted by latitude, but the teams that get assigned to the Northern division get a bonus of 20 to their "combined score" vs the Regional div calc, the teams in the South a malus of 20, so you see the scores producing jumps of 40 back and forth when a team is assigned to the "wrong" division

One thing that seems really repeatable across tests is the fact that the game REALLY likes to keep teams that have been in this divisional level the year previously in their previous group. In this example, Mensdorf for instance should be clearly going to the South, but get assigned to the North. (They are the 5th northernmost team for the Southern Division in the "RD Calc") edit: In the other direction Waldbillig is wrongfully assigned to the Southern division, as I assume all the slots in the North are taken (with Mensdorf taking Waldbillig's rightful spot)

Now I assume this menu underneath "Child Competition/Regional Limits --> General" should allow you to control this behaviour, e. g. previous season's divisional assignments not be influence the new one's. Still, none of the combination of allowing / disallowing any of the options here led to this behaviour. :-/

Sooo if anyone from the crowd or most likely SI who actually programmed up this bit, can anyone tell me what needs to be set where so that the "Regional Divsion Scoring" Completely resembles "Regional Division Calculation"? Pleeease

 

 

Edited February 12 by scythian12