Super Bladesman’s English National League System Update: Taking FM10 to Level 10

Sean

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Super Bladesman’s English National League System Update: Taking FM10 to Level 10

Original Thread: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php?t=159082

Super Bladesman’s English National League System Update: Taking FM10 to Level 10

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Download

The FULL version, Build 041, can be downloaded from MediaFire or FileFront. Use this file if you want to run all additional leagues

The LITE version (only extends to Level 8, removes some L9/10 cups and L10 leagues, makes L9 inactive) can be downloaded from MediaFire or FileFront. Use this file if you only want to run to Level 8, and want to omit Levels 9 and 10.

Code:
Build 041 - Changelist
- Improved promotions/relegation paths for teams in divisions at the periphery in England
[I]   (particularly South West, North East and South East.)
   (Next up: South Midlands / Home Counties - will take a look for the next build).[/I]
- Fixed Squad Numbers Issue
- Changed all Level 10 clubs to Amateur status
- Increased Prize Money at Levels 7 to 10.  Should ease the financial burden a little at lower levels, though more may be needed.
- Changes to Sutton Coldfield Town's stadium name and capacity
- Changes to Coalville Town and Thurmaston Town's playing staff (transfers in/out)
- Began adding Awards.  Awards added for Level 7 leagues, and manager awards added for Level 8 leagues
  [I] (a big job, and work in progress[/I] :)[I])[/I]
- Enabled a Lite version of the file, extending only to Level 8 and removing some L9/10 cups.
  [I] (I may have missed some cups, so let me know of any issues.)[/I]
- Northern League western boundary moved from Penrith to Whitehaven

These changes are not saved game compatible; if you are using an older build of my file you'd need to restart for changes to take effect.
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Activation

You'll need to unzip the file to start off with.

1. Copy the file to the Sports Interactive\Football Manager 2010\editor data folder in your My Documents folder.
2. Load FM2010
3. Select ‘Preferences’ and go to the ‘Display/Sound’ tab. UNTICK use skin cache. TICK ‘Always Reload Skin on Confirm’
4. When completed, leave preferences and ‘Start A New Game’
5. In the dialog window that pops up, TICK the change box.
6. Select the file in the list, if not already.
7. Start a new game as normal, selecting the lowest level that you want to have active.

If you have any issues, make sure you've read the FAQ thread.

When starting a new game, it's recommended you tick 'Add key staff'. That way the players generated in the bottom tiers will be a mixture of ages, rather than all being 16 or so :)

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The Short Version

Manage any club from the top 10 levels in England. The initial release version adds:
-39 new league competitions
-75 new real-life England-based cup competitions, including the FA Vase.
-A revamped FA Cup, to include 6 qualifying rounds (which aren’t named correctly by the game… yet)
-207 new stadiums
-135 new cities
-879 new clubs (includes some already in the game, but with no nation set, some purely historical, and others not in playable divisions)

The speed is acceptable, on my rig at least. The download link is up top!

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The Long Version

It feels like a very long time since I started this project, and I should make clear right from the outset that while it’s functionally complete it is nowhere near finished. Taking on a project like this has been a real labour of love, and I am very happy with what I have produced. A good job, since I have poured dozens of hours into producing and testing this. From here on, the file will no doubt grow and expand beyond my initial dreams with the help of the FM community. Anyway – on to what I did, or didn’t do, why and why not. Some things I’ve been able to recreate very accurately, and some things I could not – either because I couldn’t find the information, or because of limitations in this first edition of the editor.

Some other database issues are fixed, based on threads in the Data Issues forum.

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League Competitions & Clubs


I’ve recreated the top 10 levels – 46 divisions in total. The top 7 levels are untouched, and left as created by SI.

Below that, four new levels of divisions have been added, which are levels 7, 8, 9 and 10 in this link. Levels 7 and 8 are pretty faithful recreations, as are Levels 9 and 10 where possible. The one deviation from reality is that I could not implement fully accurate promotion and relegation between these levels – in reality, the FA have a lot of issues to contend with here (grounds meeting specific criteria, etc) and so in real life to the outsider it can be quite a mess. For the file, I wanted something that was fairly realistic, but also in line with gameplay – I also had to make the numbers work. Getting the 16 Level 10 divisions to feed into 14 at Level 9 is not trivial! This was ‘solved’ by having three teams promoted from each level 10 division, and then having each 4th placed Level 10 playoff enter into a one-match playoff, with the 8 winners also gaining promotion. This gives a total of 56 teams going up, meaning each Level 9 division has 4 relegation places. This is my biggest deviation from reality, but was a necessary evil – if anyone can come up with a better solution, let me know!

Once we get to Level 11, it’s even worse. It’s not at all clear to the novice outsider what is and isn’t a Level 11 league – some are, and feed into other Level 11 leagues. I’ve entered many of the more likely ones, and have entered (very) basic info for the clubs in them.

Levels 9 and 10 have also had many clubs added, and where I’ve been able to find the info easily I have added:
-Club nickname
-Year founded
-Club kits
-Stadiums (with at least fairly generic capacities if I couldn’t easily find the right info).
-Basic finance information (to prevent the clubs being generated with massive debts, which was happening in some cases when left blank)
The key point in all of this is that every club in the top 10 levels should have a stadium; each of these stadia should be properly located in a ‘city’ with longitude and latitude set in the database. Leagues down to Level 10 all have geographic boundaries set in the editor, so the promotions and relegations should work in a realistic manner. I’m not a geographer, so some of the boundaries may not be perfect – also, I can only define a geographical box and so if a county is not perfectly rectangular… well, you get the picture. Long and short: the promotions and relegations work pretty darned well. You might get a team from Kent end up in the Surrey league (assuming Kent and Surrey are near each other!), but you won’t get a team from Cumbria or Birmingham ending up in the Kent league.

At Level 11 there are chuffing hundreds of clubs. I didn’t have time to add stadia (and cities) for all them – I had to draw the line somewhere, and hence I’ve not implemented relegation to Level 11. If Level 11 clubs got promoted, without proper stadia set they would be placed randomly into divisions. If you can live with that, it should be relatively straightforward to activate them yourself – as I say, I had to draw a line somewhere.

Prize Money
I’ve yet to add any prize money for the leagues I’ve added – I’ve not been able to find any info on what realistic prize money would be. To be honest, I’m not convinced there will be any for many of these leagues in real life!

Attendances
I’ve also left most of the attendances at the default figures. I’m not sure that the clubs would be financially viable in FM10 if I put in the correct figures – this is an area (along with prize money) where I need feedback from the community.

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Cup Competitions

I’ve been a follower of Mangotsfield United (Level 8) for many years, and one thing that struck me is that they take place in a significant number of cups, which presumably form a vital stream of revenue (bums on seats, beers in the clubhouse etc!).

To this end, I have added or edited the following xx cups:

The FA Vase
- features all clubs from Levels 9 and 10, and a random selection of Level 11 clubs. The round dates, prize money etc. should all be correct – however, there are a handful of reserve sides that play in Levels 9 and 10, and these will also feature in the FA Vase. There is no way round this at the moment - I could’ve added each club correctly, but of course the first promotion would’ve gone against eligibility criteria already. Again, a gameplay call I had to make.

The FA Cup
- I kept seeing people asking about the additional qualifying and preliminary rounds for the FA Cup, so I decided to have a go at editing it. This was not a trivial task, nor one I could absolutely nail to my satisfaction. Firstly, and most importantly I feel – there are the correct number of rounds now, which take place on the correct dates, and the clubs enter at the right stage winning the correct prize money. To achieve this, and to satisfy gameplay constraints, this new FA Cup features clubs from Levels 1 to 9. There would not be room to add all the Level 10 sides, nor time in the season to add more qualifiers. There IS room to add SOME Level 10 sides – so if you want to attempt this in your own game then go ahead! Finally – the FM10 editor currently only permits FOUR QUALIFYING ROUNDS… in the FA Cup there ought to be six. I have raised this with SI; in the meantime, you will have to make do with the real-life Third Qualifying Round being called the First Round; Premiership and Championship clubs enter in Round 5. This is ONLY an issue of names, and will hopefully be rectified – in the interim, I felt it was a sacrifice worth making. If it’s too problematic, I did this competition last and have the xml file from beforehand, i.e. with SI’s FA Cup still in – contact me if you want it. However, I won’t be offering any support for this file, and going on the edited FA Cup file (i.e. the one in the links above) will be the only one I make edits to.

Other cups
- County FA Cups: Most English counties have a local FA, and most of these run at least one County FA Cup for sides in their locality. I’ve added ALL of these where I could find information on them, AND where they mainly involved teams from the top two divisions, AND where said cup took place during the season. I used data from this season where possible and last season when not. Again, where possible, the match dates and times are correct.
- Level 6-8 cups: There are a number of cups for the Southern League, the Isthmian League and the Northern Premier League sides. These are all in. The biggest deviation from reality here was that I had to move the Northern Premier Chairman’s Cup to the start of the following season – it should take place between the Division 1 winners some time in April or May at the end of the season, but when I tried that the draw always picked the winners from the previous season (Durham and Retford) instead of this season’s winners.
- The added County Cups are not dynamic; i.e. it will usually be the same teams entered in these every season. The non-league League Cups should feature whatever teams are in the appropriate divisions/leagues.

Clearly, with so many cups the competition menu in FM10 now features scrolling! The cups are listed in game in a logical order – so the Premiership at the top and the county FA cups at the bottom. Where a county has two cups entered, the more senior one is listed first. I’ve also deactivated the Conference League Cup, which I don’t think is actually running any more.

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Reserve and Youth Leagues?

These haven’t been the focus for me, for three reasons: (i) I don’t find it very interesting, personally; (ii) I wanted to keep the speed up as much as possible – adding all these would only have slowed the game down; (iii) I wasn’t sure that the financial model in the game would cope with all the lowest league sides trying to run reserve leagues!

That said, the teams should have youth sides placed into the standard youth leagues. I suspect, though I’ve never checked, that at the start of the second season any human-controlled club will most likely get offered the choice to enter a reserve (or youth) side in competition…

Also, some non-league sides (Histon, King’s Lynn etc.) do enter reserve teams in playable divisions in Levels 9 and 10. These are included (and unfortunately also enter the FA Cup and FA Vase – I am only human, I’m afraid).

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Speed & Stability

If you’re still reading, well done! You’re clearly in this for the long haul. Fortunately, the file won’t make you suffer. I’ve tested this on my new rig: a Pentium D running at 2.8GHz, with 1 GB of RAM (two when I get my motherboard to recognise the second stick…). I selected only England, but all 10 levels (including all the additional cups), with a small database (15,000 players).

Anyway, I digress. It took me 2hrs 40mins to holiday through to May 31st, 2010. This compares quite favourably with the standard SI England league structure, which took around an hour and a half. Considering you’re adding so many leagues and cups, that’s a pretty acceptable performance hit. If you’re actually playing, I’m not sure how much you’d notice the difference. The biggest impacts on Game Speed will be the number of divisions etc running in full detail, and the database size.

This file has been run through until September 2012, i.e. three and a bit seasons, with no crashes.

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What you can do to help, and how to do it

I’m very receptive to implementing further changes and tweaking what is in the file. I am also keen to make this into *the* definitive England xml file. If you have anything to contribute, here’s how to do it. I’m sorry for making this so draconian and specific, but the file is really rather large, and I can foresee adding in all the extra stuff will be quite a task. Also, bear in mind that issues with the file may actually be representative of bugs or limitations in FM10.

*For general submissions/corrections etc:
Please email me at nonleaguenikATgmail.com (replace AT with @). I will need as many details as it is humanly possible to give!

*If you want to submit staff or players for addition to the file, probably the best thing to do is discuss it with me first. This is probably the most simple way to produce data that I can merge into the main file:

1. Load the FM10 editor
2. Load the database
3. Make your changes
4. Save the file.
5. Email it to me at nonleaguenikATgmail.com (replace AT with @). Please include evidence for the inclusions (i.e. a link to a squad list on a website etc.)

DON’T make these sort of edits to main file if you’re going to submit them to me, as it will be impossible for me to identify the code in the xml file and copy it over. If the players/staff are at a club which does not feature in the original SI database, just leave that blank, send me the custom xml and tell me the club (and what division they are in) and I will assign them manually.

Also - if you want more accurate data at this level, have you considered becoming a researcher for SI? This is the best route to getting data added tbh... ;)

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As more things come up, I will continue to update this post with further/improved information. This has been an epic project, and I hope you can all forgive me for my decisions when I’ve had to make calls for what makes the best gameplay (both in Season 1 and beyond). Enjoy, and any questions – fire away. I’ll be the one with the bleeding fingers sobbing quietly in the corner!

Nik

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Acknowledgements

A number of other people have already helped in the creation of this file, and I would like to warmly thank them and acknowledge their input: Scoham, KUBI, pompeyboyz, DanGLiverpool, crouchaldinho amongst many others (testing), chelsea_pumas (donated many of the competition histories), gw79 (NCE competitions)

Thanks to all involved at Sports Interactive for giving us the editor in the first place, and to anyone else who has made particular contributions or has given feedback.
 
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Ahh, I've started my game now, next time. Good share Sean.
 
I was wondering how many league's would get added. It's crazy, BSN/S players have pretty terrible stats as it is but if you are adding another 8 divisions below that then it will be the same level of players. If i go Raventown Athletic in the Susex Western League Division 2 i will still be able to beat Halifax,Kings Lynn etc.

Would still be fun if i got them to the Premiership in 25 seasons. Def going to look into it.
 
Go on Kris, I would love to see you post your results too.
 
So in this update I'm guessing we can play lower than the BSS/BSN? :D
 
Now this is why Sean won most helpful member. It's usually just him and Kris who post crazy stuff like this. Have you ever thought of working for SI Sean. It isn't that far fetched a scenario.
 
Yup you can now manage teams up to the 10th tier in English Football...

SS_2009-10-30_14-35-36.png
 
ive installed it and done all the steps but when i go to select lowest active league it still says blue square north/south.
 
Looks amazing Sean, especially so soon after release. I was thinking of doing something similar for the Irish leagues, which are about 10 times worse and 100 times more complicated than the English leagues once I get FM10
 
ive done all the steps but i get a jmxxl error saying Super Bladesman’s English National League System Update: Taking FM10 to Level 10
is there anything else to do
 
hats off to him, I was only gonna do upto level 9 and he's gone ever further, what a lad :)
Cheers for sharing this with us too sean
 
Here i was not far off with my fake Sussex league.
 
still cant get it to work get stuck on this bit
"5. In the dialog window that pops up, TICK the change box."
when i click new game only window that pops up is the "welcome to the new game wizard" so dont know where the change box bit is.
 
I will be using this update no doubt for my South Shields game, but my laptop is ****** cd drive not recognising the disc will have to get that sorted first gutted :(
 
DOwnloaded!

Starting with my local village team, Marske Utd F.C :)

Thanks

---------- Post added at 10:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:06 PM ----------

still cant get it to work get stuck on this bit
"5. In the dialog window that pops up, TICK the change box."
when i click new game only window that pops up is the "welcome to the new game wizard" so dont know where the change box bit is.

Make sure you have put the .XML file you extract, into My Documents>Sports Interactive>Football Manager 2010>Editor Data.

It should then pop up when you click new game, asking which database you want to use. Make sure "change" is ticked. Then select it on the next screen. :)
 
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