[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Maybe you should do an experiment thread on this. It looks good

Cheers for the help too

Wish I had but too far into it now, going to do a few more runs of it then start the challenge, won't spam this thread anymore ha.

For the record, Kuwait and El Salvador both failed to make it out the group stage, getting one point each but both deserved more. El Salvador matched Brazil and if they hadn't of given two stupid penalties away they could have got something from the game. They also led twice against Switzerland but against saw defeat from a needless penalty. I think the level of difficulty is about right, after all the regens are only 27 at most (its 2018) so some have yet to reach their peak. Plus if the AI can qualify then I'm sure us tactical geniuses can get all the way to the final.

Just running a test on how smaller nations fair compared to the ones in the last test...

Might be a month till I put the experiment up though as I'm off to Australia for a couple weeks at the beginning of April

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Jamaica

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 163/193

Starting XI (10th value): 111/157

Depth (50th value): 72/130

No. of Regens: 159

Based Abroad: 12

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (Lost in playoff final, cruelly losing 4-3 on agg to Columbia)

2014 - Did not Qualify (5th in third phase qual group, 3 points off a playoff spot)

2018 - Did not Qualify (3rd in second phase qual group)

North America Gold Cup: (no qualifiers)

2009 - 3rd in group stage

2011 - 3rd in group stage

2013 - Semi Final (lost 1-0 to USA)

2015 - Quarter Final

2017 - Quarter Final (knocked out by Mexico for the second time running)

There is a decent amount of quality coming through, encouraging results in the Gold cup and they narrowly missed out on a World Cup place. It is interesting to see that "good (15)" facilities can produce such high quality players (PA 193) meaning that there is a chance all smaller nations can develop a wonder kid at some point over the years. It is noticeable that there is a lack of players reaching their potential, probably because they struggle to find a club away from Jamaica.

New Zealand

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 148/193

Starting XI (10th value): 134/163

Depth (50th value): 84/140

No. of Regens: 156

Based Abroad: 25

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (Lost in playoff final to Iran)

2014 - Qualified (Finished 4th in group, without a win)

2018 - Did not Qualify (Lost in playoff final to Kuwait)

OCE Nations Cup: (no qualifiers)

2010 - Winners

2012 - Winners

2014 - Winners

2016 - Winners

2018 - Winners

The lack of sucess from the national team has often been pinpointed to the poor domestic league in New Zealand. Improving the facilities has increased the potential talent massively, attracting interest from clubs all over Europe. They still really struggled on the big stage, winning the OCE Cup couldn't really be called an achievement as their previous rivals Australia now play in Asia so the finals were contested against Tahiti and Vanuatu.

El Salvador

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 175/183

Starting XI (10th value): 135/170

Depth (50th value): 108/148

No. of Regens: 166

Based Abroad: 22

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (An unlucky draw against Mexico in the First Phase 2nd Rnd saw them eliminated)

2014 - Qualified (4th in group, nil pwa)

2018 - Qualified (3rd in main qual group, Finals to be contested)

North America Gold Cup: (no qualifiers)

2009 - Semi Final (lost to USA 2-0)

2011 - Semi Final (lost to Mexico 1-0)

2013 - Quarter Final (lost to Jamaica 1-0)

2015 - Semi Final (lost to Mexico 2-0)

2017 - Quarter Final (knocked out by USA 2-1)

El Salvador have been the suprise package of this experiment and have given the most hope that a small nation can improve way beyond their expectations. Three players now make the first team in the Premier League, with many others dotted around Europe. Some great performances in the Gold Cup, it will be interesting to see how they do in this world cup as another whitewash could mean changes need to be made.

Before making any conclusions I am going to go watch the World Cup to see how Kuwait and El Salvador get on.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

After holidaying overnight it got to the year 2018, just before the 2018 world cup, the 10 highest reputation teams were set to have youth and training facilities of 15.

Here are the results for all six teams:

Montenegro

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 174/179

Starting XI (10th value): 137/168

Depth (50th value): 110/147

No. of Regens: 226

Based Abroad: 37

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (3rd in quals - 10 points)

2014 - Did not Qualify (4th in quals- 15 points)

2018 - Did not Qualify (4th in quals - 11 points, 5 team group)

European Championship:

2012 - Did not Qualify (5th in quals - 13 points - 7 team group)

2016 - Did not Qualify (3rd in quals - 10 points - 5 team group)

Slight improvement, on the verge of sneaking a qualifying spot on a couple of occassions. Lots of youngsters coming through with potential.

Benin

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 134/152

Starting XI (10th value): 66/133

Depth (50th value): n/a

No. of Regens: 49

Based Abroad: 1

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (2nd in 3rd qual group phase - 9 points) Note: tournament had already begun before game

2014 - Did not Qualify (4th, last in the qual group in 3rd phase - 1 point)

2018 - Did not Qualify (3rd in the 3rd qual group phase - 7 points)

African Nations:

2010 - Qualified (4th in Group D - 1 point)

2012 - Did not Qualify (2nd in qual group by head-to-head record)

2014 - Did not Qualify (2nd in qual group - 13 points)

2016 - Did not Qualify (2nd in qual group - 13 points)

2018 - Qualified (3rd in Group C - 1 point)

There has been a distinct lack of regens coming through and that must amount to the lack of progress. The reason may be that I am only running the English Premier League as running an experiment with Guinea-Bissau before brought more talent through the youth academies.

Kuwait

Star Player (Max CA/PA): 151/180

Starting XI (10th value): 137/159

Depth (50th value): 104/141

No. of Regens: 103

Based Abroad: 21

World Cup:

2010 - Did not Qualify (already eliminated)

2014 - Did not Qualify (Lost in the final playoff to New Zealand 4-2 on agg [2-2 away in the first leg])

2018 - Qualified (Sweet revenge for Kuwait, beating New Zealand in the playoff final 6-4 on agg to reach the World Cup!)

Asian Cup:

2011 - Qualified (3rd in group - 3 points)

2015 - Qualified (4th in group - 2 points)

2019 - Qualified (to be played)

It will be interesting to see how Kuwait fair in the World Cup, they have shown real progress in getting there and some of their players play all over the world at clubs including Nice, Heerenveen, Braga, AZ and LA Galaxy.

Jamaica, New Zealand and El Salvador to follow...

PS. I didn't intend to write this much, should of done a thread really but I don't intend to carry it on after this, hopefully I can start a challenge....

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

I've set up the following nations with youth and training facilities to 15 (note slight increase from previous standard):

Montenegro

Benin

Kuwait

Jamaica

New Zealand

El Salvador

These are the highest reputation teams of each region outside the top 100 (except Montenegro, but I didn't want to test Iceland again). All additional players have been added for each nation and I will holiday the game overnight (hopefully 10 years game time) to see what standard players they have produced and whether they have made much progress in major tournaments. It should provide some very useful info in setting up my 'Small nation World Cup challenge'.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

Awards:

Top Scorer - 25

Best Player - 20

Goal of the Tournament - 20 for 1st, 10 for 2nd & 5 for 3rd

Best Goalkeeper - 15

Dream Team (Per player) - 2

Dream Team (All of them) - 50

I would give more for getting a player in the dream team, its a big achievement and realistically you won't get all of them in the same squad.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

A good few years? Obviously it would be easier to do with nations that have a national league but the league isn't playable. Similar to San Marino really. Although they do have a club in a playable league

Also, any thoughts for my idea? I'd really like to get it going but I do need to complete the points table.

I know, thats why the facilities plus possibly other factors need to be edited to give small nations a fighting chance to have the chance in future years of developing a squad with a reasonable amount of quality.

This is a good idea Aedsler, i was messing about in the editor on my save, and gave Pakistan all brilliaant youngsters, still waiting to play a game though.

However to take a small nation without editing would be more or less impossible, e.g. can you even consider what it would take for Fiji to win the WC?

I think your idea of a challenge is quite good, it would get easier down the years though as you'd of had complete control of the squad for a while and if done correctly you could leave aside a range of top quality players to qualify for the finals. Having said that it will take a good manager to get the balance right, having a good enough team to qualify for the World Cup and to have a completely different squad to win it with, sounds fun and challenging. Points systems fine, just like fantasy football.

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Just another mention of my experiment, I've had a bit more optimism from running it a bit longer, my goalkeeper who was at Corinthians and Chicago who then was unattached for six months has finally found a club, he's back in the MLS with New York and playing regularly and now valued at 110k. Also playing my hot prospect (176 PA) attacking left winger regularly in the national team from the age of 16 managed to attract interest from Spain, signing for Sevilla Athletico (B Team) and is now valued at 575k. There are still far too many premature retirements for my liking though, it would be helpful to know whether changing the league (can you do this?) or club reputation will increase the chances of an overseas transfer, it might also be worth putting one or two state of the art or better standard facilities in place to increase the chance of 'stand out' players over the years. Again, any comments would be appreciated.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

This is where I need further assistant in developing this experiment so I can create my World Cup challenge, next I will be using Lebanon in the Asian Region but changes will be have to be made to increase chance of a realistic long term World Cup goal.

Discussion points:

1. What changes will increase the likelyhood of players being transfered abroad (ie. Reputation)?

2. Is the current standard of regens coming through sufficient for a World Cup challenge or are better facilities needed?

3. Can clubs outside the playable leagues ever produce a high quality team?

4. Will editing a database (albeit very minor and easily explainable) be too complicated to get people taking up the challenge?

5. Some nations are unmanagable at the start, when can they become manageable (this will also be tested in the next AI Experiment)?

Any other comments would be appreciated.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

I decided to test what facilities generated which players (ie. looking at State of the Art all the way to Minimal) and without giving all the detail I arrived that "good" facilities (Youth = 14 and Training = 14) were ideal for generating medium to good potential players. I then ran another experiment with Guinea-Bissau, assigning these facilities to all 10 clubs in the nation and looked to see what effect it had on the national team over time.

Note regens only

As you can see the nations clubs generated a good array of potential talent, but increasing the standard of facilities was not enough to increase the players current abilities any more than the Icelandic regens, they were slightly less if anything. Only two players made it abroad, one which had the highest CA (108) but a PA of 144, the other had a CA/PA of 99/158, they went to Corinthians/Chicago and Tauro (Panama) respectively. It seems if the players are going to reach their potential they need to be playing regularly abroad, but even with the potential some factors like reputation hinder the chance of a dream move happening.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

So what standard to the team have to be at to reach the World Cup? Here is a look at the top clubs in Europe as well as some outsiders:

Note Depth value is set to 50th player as national pool much larger than annual group of regens

Now I know when I read threads with a bunch of numbers like that I generally skim read it, but to summarise the aim of the AI experiment should be to increase a nations facilities so that it should create regens somewhere in between the values of the outsider and top nations (at the very most - it should take years of pateince and persistance to find that golden era of a national team). It needs to be a difficult challenge, you might not think the "outsider nations" shown above are capable of winning a world cup but cast your eyes back to 2004 and Greece lifted the European Championship at odds as high as 150/1.

[Challenges / Sign-Ups / Holiday Games ideas thread.]

I came up with an idea of a challenge when looking at MadWoodsters International Challenge and Azeryk's CSE Hall of Fame. In the hall of fame you have Dafuge's Challenge for English leagues, Gundo's and JoseRR's for European, Razer82's for South American and Rancer890's for Asian/African, but noticeably there is no small International team to big national team challenge and that is because of one reason, it is pretty much impossible. The smaller nations simply do not have the squad or the infrastructure in place to produce quality players for the future.

So that got me thinking "What would it take to take a small nation to World Cup glory?"

I've been doing a bit of AI experiment just to get things on the road, starting in the Iceland as they would be considered one of the more advanced nations outside the top 100 rankings (with typical facilities of the top Icelandic clubs being Youth = 10 and Training = 10). I monitored how regens developed over time using the teams standard facilities, I would run the league as normal and each year note down the maximum CA and PA (star player), 10th highest CA and PA(starting XI) and the 25th highest CA and PA (depth value).

Below are the regens and the progress they made over a five year period:

Iceland Standard Facilities

2011 Regens (initital)

Star Player (Max): 94/179

Starting XI (10th): 68/141

Depth (25th): 54/118

2011 Regens (2012)

Star Player: 94/179 (-)

Starting XI: 72/141 (+3)

Depth: 56/118 (+2)

2011 Regens (2013)

Star Player: 96/179 (+2)

Starting XI: 76/141 (+4)

Depth: 59/114 (+3)

2011 Regens (2014)

Star Player: 100/179 (+4)

Starting XI: 80/141 (+4)

Depth: 63/112 (+4)

2011 Regens (2015)

Star Player: 106/179 (+6)

Starting XI: 82/141 (+2)

Depth: 64/112 (+4)

Note highest CA and PA values may not necessarily be from the same player

Summary

I did this for 5 groups of youngsters, all with more than 200 players in each youth group and rather than overloading you with information the results were pretty consistant. The average increase in ability per year was 3.17 CA, even with some of the potential talent in the Icelandic youth ranks, it seems they will never have the facilities or standard of competition available to reach it and therefore the Iceland national team will struggle to improve. It is worth noting that the player with PA179 was the highest attained during the tests. It is also interesting to see that even some of the most gifted youngsters retire at an early age because they don't make it in the game, sometimes even struggling to find a team in the Icelandic lower league, 79.1% of the youngesters in the group of youths shown above had retired within 5 years, none ever got to play abroad.