[Groundhog]

I mentioned that I was trying to make the influx of new talent each year as realistic as possible, and I've spent a couple of nights this week designing a system called 'Youth Settings'. These are a series of rules that determine the age ranges and probability of each age for incoming rookies, as well as the chance of a rookie having attended a USA college. If a generated rookie is determined to have attended college, a calculation is made based on his potential ('scouted' as opposed to 'actual') of how many years he attended college (weighted towards higher potential means less years), which will be used to determine his age instead of the range of ages mentioned earlier - so a higher rated player from the US is more likely to have spent 1 or 2 years at college and enter the league at a younger age than, say, a 3-star type player, who might be 22 or 23 as a rookie after graduation. As mentioned above, the quality of the college selected will be based on the player's scouted ability, too.

Right now I have setup 10 different categories of youth settings to cover the NBA (99.9% chance of college, to allow for the Mudiay/Jennings exceptions in theory - ie. they wouldn't actually play overseas for a year at this point, and would just be generated at 17 or 18 with 'None' for college), high level European nations (younger rookies, less chance of having attended college), mid-tier European nations (slightly higher chance of college), Latin America (above-average chance of college), etc. These are mapped out in a csv file with a reference number (or 'primary key'). I added an additional column to the csv containing all the countries information to point to the different youth settings.

It's working as expected, but further down the line I want to add more logic to it - ie. a one-star Nigerian rookie with 4 years college experience is probably not going to want to play professional basketball in Nigeria for peanuts. One way to handle this would be outside of the Youth Settings, making anyone with a college other than 'None' a lot less willing to sign in low salary leagues, or rather than just having a single % to determine how many rookies have college experience, weight it towards only the stronger players generated from that nation. I'm tabling it for now, but it's something I'll have to come back to when it comes time to think about free agency.