Putting Nations and Cities Together

Now that you've had a description of how the files are laid out, how exactly do they work in the game? Let's walk through the creation of a league, and see how these files come into play:

Creating a New League

When you start up OOTP, the nations.txt and cities.txt files are loaded into the game's memory. Each time you create a new league, the league must be assigned a single League Nation. The list of nations available to choose from is based on the nations in your nations.txt file. So, if you have edited your nations.txt to include only twenty nations, there will be just twenty nations to choose from.

During league setup, the game randomly assigns cities to your teams. To do this, OOTP chooses cities from your cities.txt file, using only cities from the selected league nation. Generally speaking, the higher the level of the league, the larger the cities that will be chosen.

Note: After league creation, you can change the nation and city for a single team by going to the Team Options & Ballpark page. This allows you, for example, to create a league with teams in multiple nations, such as having one team from Canada in a U.S.-based league. However, the overall league will still be based in the U.S.

Generating Players

Okay, now you have a league based in a certain nation, with teams based in cities from that nation. Once you click on Start Game, OOTP needs to create players for your league or leagues. Each league has a 'Foreigner Percentage' (defined in the Player Options section of the Options page), that defines what percentage of players in a given league will come from nations other than the league nation.

Let's assume for a moment that you have set the Foreigner Percentage to 0%, and the League Nation is U.S.A.. When players are created for your league, each player is assigned an origin from one of the cities in your cities.txt file. However, only cities in the current league's League Nation will be used. So, if you have a league based in the U.S.A., all players would be from American cities. Players are more likely to be generated in cities with higher populations.

Naming Players

So now we have a pool of players for our 0% foreigner league, each with a city of origin. What shall we name these future Hall of Famers? That's where the names and nations files come back into play. In nations.txt, we defined which name sets should be used for players from that nation. OOTP assigns player names based on those settings. For example, by default, the U.S. is set to generate 73% U.S. names and 27% Hispanic names.

Note: Remember, at this point we are just defining names. We already know that 100% of our players are of American nationality. So, we're saying that 27% of our American players will have Hispanic names, not that 27% of our league will be players from Hispanic countries.

So there you have it; the game has now generated a full pool of players for our league and assigned them appropriate origins and names.

A Note about Leagues with Foreigners

If we had set the Foreigner Percentage to 20%, then 80% of the players would have come from the League Nation, and 20% would have come from random other nations. Nations with higher baseball levels have proportionally more players. A rough breakdown of the percentages is below:

Baseball Level	% of Foreigners
5 / Excellent	About 70%
4 / Good	About 15%
3 / Average	About 10%
2 / Fair	About 1/2 of 1%
1/ Poor	About 1/10 of 1%
0 / Nonexistent	0

This means that about 70% of foreign players generated will come from nations with a baseball level rating of excellent (5). About 15% will come from nations with a baseball level of good (4), and so forth. No players are generated from countries with a baseball level of nonexistent (0). Additionally, players from nations with higher baseball levels are more likely to be good players

Previous page: The Cities File
Next page: Editing Nation Flags