Hi everyone,
First things first: I promised too much ːPEAKsobː. In this update, there will be no mechanic to get a job in a foreign country. There is more involved in doing that than I thought. But since the first step to this is done now, and other changes are ready, I decided to release those parts early.
This update's biggest change is the introduction of nationalities for single players. Coming with that is the name generation, which now creates fitting names for those nationalities. Originally, I wanted to keep the game "neutral" without countries and nationalities, but I realized that atmosphere and player binding were suffering with that:
This additional property will hopefully add to a better definition and better recognition of players. Generating "fitting" faces was an idea, but there is astonishingly little data, on which I can base that. So instead of just using clichés, I decided to postpone that idea for now.
New in the game are flags for the countries you will find in many places: in dropdowns, master league tables, and matches, for example:
In the image above, you can also see the match ticker being generated, although the match speed is "result only". That way, you can take a quick glance at who shot goals or who got injured, even if you are playing a season very quickly.
The league tables now also have received three new columns for wins/draws/losses (W/D/L). You can now see much better how your points have come to be:
Like all columns, they are sortable. A new feature is that the selected columns and their sorting order will be saved per user. That means: sorting of tables, sponsors, players, transfer market, as well as filters for the diary, statistics, and match ticker will stay as you want them to be.
You may notice in the screenshot above, the top scorers are now available for each league now. If you are interested in the best strikers in league 2 or even from Norway, set the league, and the scorer list will be updated accordingly (using the pink button in the upper left will expand the scorer section; as before, there you will also find the best scorers of all time and other stats).
The layout in the stats screen was updated as well, so the Master League and World Cup tables also contain W/D/L columns. Everything is a bit more compact:
Since players now have nationalities, the concept of having any player in your national team is a bit strange. I am a bit undecided, how to handle that, because I like the mechanic, that the limit for nominating players only depends on your reputation. But I added a new setting that only allows nominating players with the same nationality as the country of the national team:
Some older savegames may already contain mixed teams, so using the checkbox won't change any team! It only prevents nominating new players who don't fit.
Mentioning savegames: old savegames should continue to work. I tried to do some magic when loading them so they will use those new features. For example, if you have been playing with English teams, your players will get most likely the English nationality. Names won't get changed though! Your well known players still exist. Only when new players arrive (e.g. transfer market), they will be generated according to the new rules.
National teams and foreign leagues were adapted in the same way. If you played with your own custom teams or workshop teams, maybe nothing is adapted, because it may not be clear to which country the teams belong (that was not part of earlier team data). If players in your team were nominated to a national team before, you will see them in your team with their new nationality, though. You may have noticed, it is a bit more complex than it seems. Especially, if you want to keep the old savegames working. If you are about to notice anything strange, please let me know!
Other changes:
optimized player search for tooltips
winners of the Master League and Europe Cup will now participate in those events for the next year automatically
all player names are now put into external files (one per country), which you can use as a starting point for your own name lists. You can still use your own names using the settings, or you can mix them with the internal names. If you already have your own names and want to use them only for a special country, you may add a [COUNTRY] tag in your file (see the internal files as an example)
player tooltips were reworked
localization of country names
national players will be put into random league teams when you start a new game (also into foreign leagues)
player search now contains a field for the nationality
player nationality can be edited in the editor
That's it for now. I hope those changes will be enough to release them in a separate update. Have fun with it, and let me know what you think of it and where more work needs to be done.
As always, thanks to all who gave valuable feedback. Escpecially knubert for his detailed list, Ariel, and DoughnutDoney for his review (check out his YT, great retro content there!).
AI-Disclaimer: Creating the names for each country was facilitated using ChatGPT. The names were not generated per se, but used from several sources, and the AI helped with changing them into the right format for the game (would be a lot of copy & paste to do this manually...). Name sources used were websites like behindthename.com or geneanet.org.