Starting from scratch in the database

[zombie relic]

Hi,

As part of a worldbuilding project I'm working on, I wanted to create and simulate sports history in an alternate history scenario. To do so, I wanted to essentially build a new league system in several countries, with regen players, with none of the existing leagues, clubs, or players.

Is there any way for me to accomplish this outside of deleting every single player/competition/club/stadium/etc? It takes an ungodly amount of time to delete these things, I've tried leaving the editor running for hours removing players and it doesn't really make much progress.

Any advice on how to accomplish this would be appreciated. 

 

Alternatively, if I have to keep existing clubs/players/etc in the database, is there a way to load my custom leagues such that nothing other than my custom content is loaded?

[Wolf_pd]

As the world building specialist around here

Depends on what you have in mind.

Deleting is probably still the way to go. Best way to do this is by doing it in not too big batches, 5000 max, but very important do not save during deleting.

[zombie relic]

Damn, okay. I was planning to remove clubs, competitions, players, and stadiums at the very least. Any reason we can't save at all during deleting? Can I save afterwards?

[forameuss]

I've deleted all players previously in an attempt to get a true made-up database for players, rather than just renaming the existing ones.  I think from memory it led to some weird balancing issues, but it wasn't too bad.  Obviously those kinds of issues don't really matter if you're creating a completely new system.

Unfortunately I don't think there's really a way around the performance issues.  I do think that the 24 editor is a lot better with bulk operations than 23 was.  It used to take near 10 minutes to bulk edit around 50k objects, now it's a hell of a lot quicker.  Not sure whether deletes take longer, not something I've tried yet.  

One thing that might cause issues with that is any hard-coding that SI have done in the background.  There's a lot of sticking-plaster stuff to get all the functions in the game working, and a lot of them are probably going to assume that certain objects are present.  It might be smarter than that, but I'd be wary.  Unfortunately for us, I think this kind of stuff will come under the "unrealistic input = unrealistic output" situation where SI are concerned

[zombie relic]

Makes sense. I figure stuff like countries are going to be very hardcoded, especially with the scouting coverage view.

 

Is there a preferred order to delete things? I did try to delete from a fresh database and deleting players took quite a bit of time. But granted I tried to delete a very large batch, so that may be why.

[Wolf_pd]

On 15/11/2023 at 00:19, zombie relic said:

Damn, okay. I was planning to remove clubs, competitions, players, and stadiums at the very least. Any reason we can't save at all during deleting? Can I save afterwards?

Reason why you shouldn't save during deleting is because it makes the process much much slower. You can save afterwards, but during deleting slows you down immensely.

I usually for a max of 5K in players, which I did for FM23 and 22 during some testing.

[zombie relic]

Mild necro, I've (finally) managed to clear out the database. I've edited an old nation to hold my fantasy league and created my competition + clubs. In the club interface, I select my nation. When I go to add nation rules, I select the same nation, but I do not see any competition information and rules to edit. Trying to convert to advanced rules gives me a "Needs 1 division" error message. I've tried also assigning my new competition to existing nations - e.g. Germany - and the competition is not there either. Trying to debug what's wrong - is there a field I've missed in the nation editor itself? I had done this similar project in the FM21 editor before, but hadn't run into similar issues.

 

[zombie relic]

Then again, I'm realizing I don't need to necessarily make my changes in the _empty_ database, since I'm only adding things, I can just add them to a fresh database, and the changes will be applied when I load both files in game, correct?

 

[zombie relic]

Okay, so I've made a test competition which works fine. Probably it seems like I've deleted something crucial though, I get consistent crashes when the game ticks to Nov 1. This also happened when I ran just the empty database with no clubs or competitions in it. I suspected initially that it may have been trying to call up nonexistent players to national teams, but  I see that international matches have been played long before the crash (albeit with no players). I also considered it might have to do with world rankings or something, but I also saw those change before the crash.

 

So, seeing as deleting everything might not have worked, how can I load my set of 5 leagues and prevent other teams from interfering? e.g. I don't want say, Man City to come in and poach youngsters from these clubs. I could try setting a global transfer ban on every club in the world w/ batch edit, maybe?

[Wolf_pd]

6 hours ago, zombie relic said:

Then again, I'm realizing I don't need to necessarily make my changes in the _empty_ database, since I'm only adding things, I can just add them to a fresh database, and the changes will be applied when I load both files in game, correct?

This is correct. And for working in the database setting up a second database next to your delete_file will massively improve the editor's performance.

 

5 hours ago, zombie relic said:

Okay, so I've made a test competition which works fine. Probably it seems like I've deleted something crucial though, I get consistent crashes when the game ticks to Nov 1. This also happened when I ran just the empty database with no clubs or competitions in it. I suspected initially that it may have been trying to call up nonexistent players to national teams, but  I see that international matches have been played long before the crash (albeit with no players). I also considered it might have to do with world rankings or something, but I also saw those change before the crash.

So, seeing as deleting everything might not have worked, how can I load my set of 5 leagues and prevent other teams from interfering? e.g. I don't want say, Man City to come in and poach youngsters from these clubs. I could try setting a global transfer ban on every club in the world w/ batch edit, maybe?

How big is your delete file?

When I started on the Iron Curtain I deleted the international competition, but left a few competitions because I thought they were needed for basic competition running, like things like friendlies and such.

[zombie relic]

Makes sense. I deleted everything from the competitions tab, probably had to leave a few things in there.

 

I've set a global transfer ban for every team not in my custom league to prevent interference. What I'm finding now is that these teams don't generate regens of any quality, so I tried to max out all the facilities, reputation of competition, nation, and club, and also reduce the reputation of every single club/competition in the database. But what I find is that despite having maxed out reputation, a. the regens still suck - they're slightly better, but they don't go above 130 PA, and b. the club reputation and competition reputation declines rapidly over time. I suspect this is due to lack of continental competition but not fully sure. 

[Wolf_pd]

The 130PA is a sort of cutoff point that has been implemented, higher values are only there for existing teams.

Which also means that a pure scratch build 'super team' or Super League will give some problems.

[zombie relic]

oh wow, i had no idea. I think in FM21 i ran a similar database, and the teams then could generate good players. Is this a new thing?

[zombie relic]

is there a thread or something I can read about this limitation? feels weird to have this sort of restriction in the game

[Wolf_pd]

The restriction has been in the game for several years. I think I have seen it mentioned at least in FM21.

[forameuss]

Devil's advocate though, if every player in the database gets capped at 130PA, doesn't 130 become the new 200?  Obviously players won't look quite as good attributes wise, but it becomes just a different scale.  Or is there more to it because there are things tied to the ability like reputation etc?

[Wolf_pd]

11 hours ago, forameuss said:

Devil's advocate though, if every player in the database gets capped at 130PA, doesn't 130 become the new 200?  Obviously players won't look quite as good attributes wise, but it becomes just a different scale.  Or is there more to it because there are things tied to the ability like reputation etc?

It would a sort of great equaliser.

[zombie relic]

I realized I'd just misconfigured some reputation, hence youth players were by and large crap. 

One other thing i've noticed - my new competition starts with 200 reputation and every club starts with max. I also lowered the reputation of every other competition and club to 0 to see if that would have an effect. But so far I see that after about 40 years, the reputation of the competition has decayed to about 20/200 and clubs have decayed to about 2 stars from 5. How can I ensure the reputation of these clubs remains consistent?

[Brakenclaw]

Here is a Fm21 Empty Database 

Try to have as much leagues loaded as possible and watch your world start to grow with backstories and rivalries... My favorite story is Hibernaian suddenly becoming insane in 2033 with an upstart coach and homegrown academy players and winning it all. The next year all their players got poached... Loved following that 2033 Hibernian team.

Empty Database [21.3].fmf