Same stage index different number of teams

[Bentfi]

TL;DR: When you set up stages for a competitions, two or more stages with same index(e.g. 2 Stage 0s) with different number of teams would result in the one having the highest number of teams the one that is loaded into the game, others being inactive.

 

I was using this "feature" back in FM23 editor and seeing it in the official(Without mods) league structure of Hong Kong, I thought I might share some of my experience working with it.

 

First, let me show you the official implementation of it. As you could see at the bottom right, I had not made any changes to this file(Even modifying the Basic Rules would show up here). Both in the middle and the left side, you could see there are 2 stage 0s and 1 of them have min max 12 teams.

 

I will explain more about how it works later, now lets see how I came to my conclusion above. For this example, I made tiny modifications to this cup structure, the 11 teams representation will give seeding 2 to its teams and the 12 teams representation will give seeding 3 to its teams.

 

For context, in 2023/24(It is represented as 2023 in the editor), Hong Kong Premier League only has 11 teams, it has 12 teams in the consecutive seasons.

 

Yikes! Why even when there are 11 teams(shown by the number of items), they still have 3 as their seeding?

 

This means that one thing is for sure, they are using the 12 teams representation and this means that min max 12 is not working here! If we changes into number of teams = 12, does it fix this problem?

 

Answer is no, but there is a workaround, I will talk about it later.

 

This means that it might load the bottom one first? We can check this by flipping the order.

 

Same stuff again, this means that perhaps it is not the order that matters, but the number of teams.

 

The workaround that I mentioned just now is by adding the requirement, minimum number of teams on the league you get your teams from(In this example I added it on the 12 teams representation only).

 

And it works!

 

I think I will show you an example of what this could achieve tomorrow, getting sleepy

[Bentfi]

TL;DR: This "feature" is best for league/cup that have variable number of teams and you cannot know the exact amount at the editor.

 

An example of this is a U18 league/cup structure I made in FM23,. This will get technical quick, so bear with me please.

 

There are 5 fixed U18 teams from lower leagues and all 12 U18 teams from top flight, the number of teams at the start is 5 + 12 = 17.

If any 1 of the 5 teams promotes to the top flight, since it is now one of the 12 teams, the fixed teams on the left become 4, so the amount of teams is 4 + 12 = 16;

if all 5 teams promote to top flight, 0 + 12 = 12.

 

So this league is practically variable from 12 - 17, yet you won't know how many teams that year in the editor, before all those years played out. Otherwise, you could just set up different number of teams version based on the year(If you don't understand this sentence, just skip it, it doesn't matter).

This makes it a perfect example for this "feature", so the way you do this is just copy and paste it 5 times, change the number of teams and the dates.

 

In reality, this league/cup is a lot more complicated, the first part is league, after that league splits into 2 leagues, after that, they all play in a cup(Not important).

League split is a lot easier than you might think, using qualification rules, you could specify the amount of teams to which stage index and it will automatically select the right one.

 

The (almost)whole league structure

It might look wonky, at least it worked perfectly for me.