State/Region based cups in USA

[Damnhuis14]

So I've decided to start on a rather ambitious project since I'm not very experienced in the advanced editing in the FM24 Editor. As a base I'm using a edited version of the USA Pyramid database by ccoresc1 (attached for reference). I've tried using that database, changing to advanced rules but that kind of messes up the whole file. So now my plan would be to use the USA Pyramid db + an additional State Championship db when loading in.

In short; I want to create State Championship/Cups besides the regular season for USA based teams. For reference, the USA Pyramid changes over 500 amateur teams to professional and puts the in a relegation/promotion pyramid. There's 6 levels in total with multiple conferences etc (check the attached file for reference). The file has a couple of national and division level cups as well. But I want to add another one; State level cups.

This means all teams from a respective state will compete in a knockout tournament for the prize. Since some states have a lot less pro clubs than others my idea would be to have qualifiers in the first half of the season for the bigger states like Florida, California and NY to narrow it down to 16 teams in the second half of the year that will compete in the State Finals.

And here's where I need help  Looking for experienced advanced editors to guide me in the right direction.

1. What would be the best way to set up region based cups? There's no filter in the teams part of setting up a competition that allows to add all teams based on region? Would hardpicking every single team that should be involved in the state cup be the only solution? In this case I'd need to somehow export all teams from the editor and sort them by state. The ingame export function doesn't really help since there's no field I can add in the club overview that adds the state...
2. How do I correctly set up qualifiers? Example would be California. There's a total of 80 Californian teams in the pyramid level. My idea would be to hard pick the top 12 currently. Then for the final 4 spots on the State finals I'd like to have a seperate tournament that happens in the first half of the season. This would have the 68 other Californian teams. The downside of this would be that potentially one of the 68 teams promotes a couple times, ends up in the MLS but still has to play qualifiers, although it might be one of the better teams.
3. Would it be possible to combine this advanced rules file with the USA Pyramid? I've done this before using international rules but that was in FM22. Would this still work?

It's a long shot but I'm hoping there might be someone who has experience with something like this or who has a better idea to approach this?

 

Much appreciated :)

American Regionalized Pyramid (v4.0).fmf

[Wolf_pd]

If the secondary competition hasn't been used yet, you can use that to set the state competition. It will help you select your teams.

[Damnhuis14]

Hey @Wolf_pd, thanks for the quick response.

 

I believe that would only work for league-like competitions correct? I'd prefer it to be a cup competition. It's a good alternative tho.

 

[Edit] I understand now! Thanks loads, this is exactly as I wanted it. Using the secondary divisions to create the regional groups I can then select these to create the cups  And the regional division will remain inactive.

Edited April 1 by Damnhuis14

[TOGandDanganronpa01]

I have a quick question for you! Do all competitions have an award?

[nielsoncp]

I was going to suggest the same thing - my US pyramid has regional cups, and I use secondary divisions to set it up. It really is the way to go, especially since you can't pick specific teams in the editor. 

[rusty217]

Are you doing this in basic or advanced rules? If it's advanced then:

1. I don't believe secondary divisions have to be "leagues". They're classed as leagues, but you should be able to just create them with cup stages rather than league stages instead if you wanted to. That said, there's another easy way to do it, like this:

Get Best Local Region Teams is pretty close to the bottom of the drop down list there. Luckily the US has all the states set as local regions already.

2. Really up to you. You could use any format you want. One way would perhaps be to have 2 separate cup stages with the second one allowing a variable number of teams. So you get the MLS teams and assign them as qualified directly for the 2nd stage. Could add a second instruction to just add the best teams in case there aren't enough MLS teams (use the max number of teams with seeding in overall list. Give both this instruction and the one to get MLS teams the same seeding and make sure the MLS one comes first, then eg. if you set it for 12 it will get all MLS teams and if there are below 12 it will fill it up to 12 using the best teams from lower leagues). Then when setting the stage up just use higher max teams than you're expecting, so if there are more than 12 MLS teams they can all skip straight to that stage and it just adds an extra round to account for having more than 16 teams with some teams getting a bye. Many default cups are setup in this way, so they'll automatically adjust for fewer teams. I've done it with regional German cups too so it can definitely be done in the editor.

Not sure if it'd work, but if you add Get MLS Teams to the Team Pool of the above Get Best Local Region Teams shown above that might be a way to just get MLS teams from that state to assign the top seeding to.

3. If you want to use both you'll have to. The game won't allow you to use multiple files for the same country. Personally I'd recommend doing the file completely by yourself though rather than trying to merge it with somebody else's work. Much easier to troubleshoot your own work than somebody else's.

[themodelcitizen]

"Get best local regions" is great but just needs every team to have a stadium set, in that region. Can be a pain for 80+ amateur teams without anything set there

[rusty217]

3 hours ago, themodelcitizen said:

"Get best local regions" is great but just needs every team to have a stadium set, in that region. Can be a pain for 80+ amateur teams without anything set there

Does it go off stadiums? I always assumed it went off the city the club was assigned to. The local region is attached directly to the club's database entry from that.

Still an issue in some places, I had to manually assign local regions/cities to a bunch of cities/teams in South Asia. But I think they're all done for the US already.

[themodelcitizen]

I believe it does, at least when I was fiddling with Russia and also the NISA cup in my US file. I think the Japanese mod-makers had a similar issue

[Fredrik]

18 hours ago, rusty217 said:

Does it go off stadiums? I always assumed it went off the city the club was assigned to. The local region is attached directly to the club's database entry from that.

Still an issue in some places, I had to manually assign local regions/cities to a bunch of cities/teams in South Asia. But I think they're all done for the US already.

I've created lower league pyramids in the US and it seems to me that the location of the stadium influence regionalisation of groups. 

It's not certain though. Some things just don't work and it seems multiple languages is one of them. US is set so most people speak Spanish which is obviously not true. Furthermore, it doesn't seem like newgens etc use the obvious naming convention and regional hotspots for such people. 

Then the problem of this thread doesn't seem to work in general. I am afraid the workaround with multiple cities doesn't work completely either but IMO if you  have "ethnic" or similar clubs it will do it. Besides, some of this is the problem that there are several layers of organization of a country. Not just what the game calls local region but metropolitan areas are often absent if a higher level exist. 

[Fredrik]

9 minutes ago, themodelcitizen said:

I believe it does, at least when I was fiddling with Russia and also the NISA cup in my US file. I think the Japanese mod-makers had a similar issue

As I just replied I also think so. Lots of lower level US clubs have a city set but no stadium. These teams move around if I create regional groups for lower leagues once I set the stadium correctly. 

[MichielVM]

On 02/04/2024 at 11:56, rusty217 said:

Are you doing this in basic or advanced rules? If it's advanced then:

1. I don't believe secondary divisions have to be "leagues". They're classed as leagues, but you should be able to just create them with cup stages rather than league stages instead if you wanted to. That said, there's another easy way to do it, like this:

Get Best Local Region Teams is pretty close to the bottom of the drop down list there. Luckily the US has all the states set as local regions already.

2. Really up to you. You could use any format you want. One way would perhaps be to have 2 separate cup stages with the second one allowing a variable number of teams. So you get the MLS teams and assign them as qualified directly for the 2nd stage. Could add a second instruction to just add the best teams in case there aren't enough MLS teams (use the max number of teams with seeding in overall list. Give both this instruction and the one to get MLS teams the same seeding and make sure the MLS one comes first, then eg. if you set it for 12 it will get all MLS teams and if there are below 12 it will fill it up to 12 using the best teams from lower leagues). Then when setting the stage up just use higher max teams than you're expecting, so if there are more than 12 MLS teams they can all skip straight to that stage and it just adds an extra round to account for having more than 16 teams with some teams getting a bye. Many default cups are setup in this way, so they'll automatically adjust for fewer teams. I've done it with regional German cups too so it can definitely be done in the editor.

Not sure if it'd work, but if you add Get MLS Teams to the Team Pool of the above Get Best Local Region Teams shown above that might be a way to just get MLS teams from that state to assign the top seeding to.

3. If you want to use both you'll have to. The game won't allow you to use multiple files for the same country. Personally I'd recommend doing the file completely by yourself though rather than trying to merge it with somebody else's work. Much easier to troubleshoot your own work than somebody else's.

Hi rusty,

Is this a way to set secondary divisions dynamically, based on region, after the game has started (can teams change secondary competition this way)? If so, I have some additional questions:

How does the game know not to set these divisions as the 'primary' division?

Could you also use extinct divisions in this way?

[rusty217]

15 hours ago, MichielVM said:

Hi rusty,

Is this a way to set secondary divisions dynamically, based on region, after the game has started (can teams change secondary competition this way)? If so, I have some additional questions:

How does the game know not to set these divisions as the 'primary' division?

Could you also use extinct divisions in this way?

Yes, you could set them up as regional divisions under a parent division in the same way you would regular divisions. So like the English National North/South that has 2 regional divisions based on geography. You could set it up like that and define how to set regional divisions, eg. north/south borders etc. The 1 issue with that is you may end up with too many teams from 1 region so they end up spilling over into other region's divisions, but if you want it to be dynamic that may be what you're looking for anyway.

They're run in a different way to primary divisions. The primary divisions are defined on the nations rules page, in tier order. Secondary divisions are essentially set up the same way as cup competitions.

Not sure what exactly you want to do with extinct divisions? But probably, yeah.

Edited April 20 by rusty217

[MichielVM]

Thanks!