Hands-on: Nations

OK, that gives you an overview of how the whole system works. Let's go through a hands-on example, and add a new fictional nation called 'Markusonia' to our nations list. Markusonia will be a German- and English-speaking, baseball-crazy nation in the middle of the ocean near Australia.

1. Open nations.txt using a text editor.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the file and create a new row after the last row.
3. Enter the value 229 followed by a comma. We are assigning our new country an ID of 229, because it is the next unique number available. It could actually be any unique number that hasn't already been used in the file. Your new line looks like this so far:
   
   229,
4. Next, type the following: 'Markusonia,Markusonia,MKS,Markusonian,'. This is assigning our new country's long description, short description, abbreviation, and nationality. Make sure your abbreviation does not match an existing abbreviation. The easiest way to do this is to search the nations.txt file for the abbreviation you want to use and make sure it isn't already present. So far, your new line should look like this:
   
   229,Markusonia,Markusonia,MKS,Markusonian,
5. Next, type the following: '5,5,'. We are assigning Markusonia to the Oceania continent. We are also setting the baseball level to 5, because of course baseball talent is high in Markusonia. Your line now looks like this:
   
   229,Markusonia,Markusonia,MKS,Markusonian,5,5,
6. Next, type the following: '7,60,0,40,,,,'. This is saying that 60% of the player names in Markusonia should be taken from name set 7, German. The other 40% should be taken from name set 0, modern U.S. names. We are including four commas after the last value to represent the two sets of ethnicities that we are not using. Your line should now look like this:
   
   229,Markusonia,Markusonia,MKS,Markusonian,5,5,7,60,0,40,,,,
7. Save the file and quit the text editor. The next time you launch OOTP, Markusonia will now be an option in any nation drop-down:
   
   
   

Important Notes About Adding Nations

• Note, however, that Markusonia doesn't have any cities yet! If you're going to add nations, be sure to add cities so that the game can add teams or give players appropriate origins! See Hands-on: Cities for an example of adding cities.
• OOTP requires that at least two nations be in the nations.txt file. If you want to have only one nation, create a dummy nation with a baseball level of 0. This won't prevent it from displaying in-game, but no players will be generated from that location.
• Do not use commas within any of the fields in the file, such as in a place name.
• Do not put spaces between fields of information!

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Next page: Hands-on: Cities