Creating regionalised groups for a competition.

[sporadicsmiles]

I am currently playing with the editor after a pretty long respite from doing so in terms of complicated league creations (a few years now).

I am playing around with some different league formats, to see what is possible in the editor these days. I have 24 teams, who will be split into 4 groups of 6 teams. There are 6 teams from Europe, 6 from Africa, 6 from Asia and 6 from N/S America. I would like these teams to be sorted into group automatically by continent. I do not really want to use manual sorting because I would like to play around with relegation from the competition. There are various things I have figured out how to do nicely. Getting teams to play specific games against different groups is pretty easy now. I have both group and a total league table. Most of this can be gleaned by looking at the rules of the USA.

The thing I cannot make work is the sorting of the groups. I have tried setting city limits (all four compass points) for the "group regions" panel. This did not work. I have included both "regionalise groups" and "ask compeititon for groups" in the "Rules" section (indeed the former seems to be mandatory). This does not work. I played around with the "chance" thing, but it had no obvious effect. I also tried to create some divisions which I could set as a regional division, and use the "regional division" option. Which still did not work. The sorting for groups is only happening by unique ID. The first group has the lowest 6 IDs, the second group the next 6, etc. 

The one work around I have found is to put the teams into separate competitions, get teams from these divisions, assign a seed, and then use the "use seeding as group index" option for valid group rules. This, however, will make it impossible to manage the teams, since they are not in an active division, even though they technically are.

Any ideas on how to do this? 

[wawsaki]

I think there is some options for continent on the valid group rules on the group configurations tab

[sporadicsmiles]

Most of the rules seem to be keeping teams from the same nation/continent apart, when I want to do is the opposite.

I am actually having trouble generally trying to make the groups listen to geographical rules in general. No matter how I try to regionalise groups, in the end the groups are decided by the unique ID.

[sporadicsmiles]

So what I have found is that I can order the teams just fine when I select them in stages - teams. If I use Get all teams from division => sort teams by longitude, for instance, the groups are determined by the order of the longitudes. Highest 6 longitudes in group A, etc.

The game is still ignoring the rules I have added for assigning teams to groups. Indeed, it does not seem to matter what I do with "group settings" => group regions (new). These rules are not followed when creating the groups. 

If I click on group regions (old), the panel just completely disappears. I begin to wonder if this is just entirely bugged. 

Indeed, even the "valid group rules" is being ignored. 

[wawsaki]

Maybe it is, i experienced the old group regions, disappearing too, it counts as a change but it doesn't do anything.
Like claasen said before, this year editor has a lots of bugs and the options don't seem to do what they're supposed to.

I even get validation errors when everything is fine, and it works in game.

[sporadicsmiles]

In the end I just hacked it and changed the longitude of cities to be the same if they should be in the same group. It is not pretty, but it works. 

I will drop a bug report at some point over the weekend.