American Premier League (Beta Release)

Am I doing something wrong? Downloaded it, put it in the editor folder. Select original game mode, trying to select game start date, I can't select USA, it only shows Brazil? Really hoping to get this going. Thanks. 

Update- Nevermind, got it to work. Thank you again, loving it so far.

Yeah, there's a known bug in FM24 where game start date gets greyed out in some circumstances, it's not something I can fix, it will have to come from SI. (so unironically, sort it out SI! 😀slightly_smiling_face:

Let me know how it goes, and thanks for trying it! I'd like to get as many people as possible testing it, to let me know what needs polishing and tweaking, before I upload a non-beta version here and in the Steam Workshop.

Looks promising!  I noticed in the MLS there are no reserve teams, and the “2” teams are still there?  I know they are hardcoded but add them to a lower league and lock them out of promotion?  Not sure but it looks good.  I like the promotion set up, dividing the league in the second half and the payouts are good.  

You are a God. Tried once this MLS system, went crazy. So thanks for this. The North American League sounds great… maybe I will add them to my regular set up when your files seems foul proof :-)

Thanks Basil and Pappy. I'll look at adding the Canadian teams from their national league. And Pappy, I'm going to look at a APL next division or something similar.

Update: This is what's going into the 0.8 update.

Canadian Premier League Teams added, they will start in American League 1. This necessitates a change to a 41 game season, with in-season split (I hate using it so often, but with these amount of teams, it's either a league split or regional divisions, and I'm not sure how to do regional leagues with promotion easily, so I'm going to stick with that for now. They are also added to the US Leagues Cup (soon to be renamed the North American Leagues Cup). Note, this means that Canada will NOT be a playable league when using this mod as it has no teams once we move the teams into AL1

American Developmental League: A closed 27team league, featuring all the 2nd teams from MLS. I figure the Reserve/U21 leagues will cover the rest. The American Developmental League will feature a 26 game regular season, with 16 teams playing two legged playoffs to determine a champion (rather then split the leagues here, since there's no promotion or relegation, I decided to give teams a bit of a challenge, as they will have to play up to 8 more games to determine champions

What I want to do hopefully before full release:

Figure out how to make a new version of the CONCACAF Champions Cup/Champions League.  Would gladly accept suggestions and advice on how to do that.

Starting to look at bumping up the finances for American Championship, American League One teams to give them more of a fighting chance.

Do these teams still play in concaf champions league and leagues cup?

Hi Wesley: It's on the to do list. I'm doing research on how to do this because I'd basically have to tear them all down and rebuild them. But I'm looking into it.

You may have missed including the player and manager awards for the respective leagues.

Thanks. Add that for 0.8 or 0.9, it will be in full release.

Update evening 8 November:

I've managed to get all awards set up (for APL, ACC, and AL1), the Canadian teams into AL1, I'm also looking into how to build the continental cup but running into issues (it's something I haven't done before, and the videos I've watched are showing things I can't do with my editor. I think it's because I built the league first, but can't figure out how to do the continental cups. Still working on it.

I am running tests overnight to make sure nothing got broken in my meddling (and started up a development branch so if I screw up, I don't lose the base file), and will update this when I have a bit more progress.

Note: I have updated the file to a 0.8 release. You will need to start a new game to get the changes so far. As I said above, if I can tweak finances, and get the continental competitions set up, we'll move to a 1.0 release timeline.

This is awesome! Thank you for the (continuing) hard work. Look forward to this maturing into something really great 🙂

No problem, mr_dubb. Still haven't figured out how to do the continental cups. I have a request in at SI forums.

If all goes well, we will move to a full release at the beginning of next week. Thanks to the help of other modders, I've discovered the bug that was stopping me from having continental cups.. apparently MLS and the Canadian Premier League have to be viable leagues with 24+ and 8 teams respectively. I think I have the problem licked, but running more tests.

Great news. We ran multiple tests on this, running through 2046/51, and it looks to be stable with the continental cups. Still a bit top heavy (in that MLS teams, no matter how badly mismanaged will never drop down to AL1), but that's pretty minor, and can be worked on going forward.

Since we brought the Canadian Premier League Teams into the USA Pyramid, we filled the existing CPL with 8 very low level teams in Canada just to fulfill requirements to enable continental competitions . You can enable it, but it might not be that much fun to play in with such low level teams

As such, I've created a 1.0 Release candidate, and updated it here (the mirror link in the original post is good for the release candidate as well)

How do you fix the USA start date?  It was grayed out. 

Just ignore it, or set it to another nation (like Canada). You can't set a league start date without going into advanced rules. Royal pain in the ass

Two things: One, you'll likely not have the main concacaf competition in 2023 with a start game from USA's blank start date. It will feed in after the first season. And secondly, the game seems to be hardcoded to call the league Major League Soccer, even if you change its name in the editor. As I need to use that division to make concacaf competitions appear, it's frustrating, but what can you do?

I appreciate the work and understand about the date.  

An issue I ran into in my first season, I took over a Toronto FC squad that was in 16th place when the league split. They were in the lower part all season long but the moment the season ended Toronto was moved up to 4th place and into the playoffs. It's like the split worked for the regular season but by the time the playoffs start the league split no longer works. Essentially it rearranges all the teams based on their points regardless of the split.

I'll look into that, it hasn't been an issue in any of my saves previously, but I will check

Just ran a test and it didn't happen, but that may be a very niche case where a team is in 16th or lower to start and ends up into the top six. I've attached a screen shot to show what I tested

final bit of news from the weekend: If you're running the Real Name Fix, it will originally show MLS because of the Real Name fix, but after a save and reload it will use the proper name.

That's what the table looked like all year but then it changed the day after the season and before the playoff draw. I'll keep an eye out and see if it happens again for me.

Here's the final table for that season. It should look similar to your test one as the worse teams in the top half should have less points than the best teams in the bottom half.

Thanks. I ran a test to 2059, and it didn't happen to me. I think it's a combination of factors:

A) A large amount of games remaining when we split (teams will play 14 more games), and such a large league. So if the middle of the road teams are bunched up, a team in 16th or thereabouts could conceivably win enough games against lesser opposition that they would finish 6th via points, which is what the playoff pulling code would look at. Something on SI's side, as this is a super niche edited league only thing (Most leagues split with only five-six games left), but I think the only way to “fix” it is to have the split occur lower, so relegation half teams would play less games.

I may have to reconsider the split if this happens too often, but I think it's going to be so rare that it's just something I have to deal with.

One thing I'm looking into before releasing the full version is generating enough FA to fill all the teams. Hoping there's a script or a way to do so in the editor (Random names, positions, ages, nationalities, the lot)

Got a bug that has caused me to lose access/control of my U21 and ATL2 team while I was assigning staff responibilities and hiring new staff on day 1… Anyone encountered this before? 

*Whelp the oldest trick in the book aka turning it off and on again fixed it lol