Fictional Football Dynasty (Cities Skylines/FM16)

[Young Drachma]

I created a separate dynasty for this rather than using my omnibus thread of Cities Skylines shots mostly so that if you're viewing it ,you don't have to wait for all of the photos to load before looking at the newest stuff.

The long and short is, I wanted to build on a smaller city map and grow it over time (though nothing to the size of my previous places you've seen..) and through building, I got the FM16 itch so decided to create a league for the city-state and rename the place as if it were a country.

Unlike my normal deal, this country is in North America, not Europe. It's called Grenesia for no specific reason other than I spent way too much time obsessing over the name before stumbling onto that and liking it, even if it sounds too close to Grenada. Oh well.

The country has 256k people so far, which is double what we had when I first started building. The capital is Alara (AH-LAIR-UH) and the largest city by far.

The real challenges at the moment are dealing with growth and also increasing traffic. The Alara metro doubled when the city annexed the nearest town and the whole city is basically built against a major road, so it makes it hard to really figure out which way to build to ease traffic when the entire country is basically a series of mountains and hills.


There are only TWO bus lines in the entire city, people stopped taking the buses when traffic got bad and I haven't quite figured out how I want to solve it yet and I've vowed against a Metro system, pretending it'd be too expensive to attempt.

STOVES ROCK


This is the newest town -- Stoves Rock. It's pretty far from Alara, but people mostly commute out to get jobs in the nearby suburbs, again only by driving. It's also home to the judiciary, so the town has attracted a good mix of professionals, as well as folks looking to get out of the expensive urban core.

[Young Drachma]

I'm working on figuring out a way to direct truck traffic away from Highway Number 1, which is the road that goes through Alara and when I look at the traffic jams, it's a lot of trucks more than anything, so I'm trying to figure out how to build a road that'll get the trucks leaving town to take the bypass highway rather than going straight through town, even if it means the route is less than roundabound.



The road is less congested than it was in the suburbs due to me making some roads a one-way and opening up another bypass to the highway going north out of the country entirely.

Downtown Alara get slammed though thanks to trucks. I could have trucks avoid the city limits, but the highway going through Alara is the ONLY main road in and out of town, so there's no real choice. I'll need to create an alternate route somehow.

[Young Drachma]

The football pyramid in Grenesia has five divisions:

Premier Division (12 teams)
Division of Honor (12 teams)
1st Division (12 teams)
2nd Division (25 teams)
Select League (20 teams)

The Select League is mostly full of reserve teams with two exceptions, so teams cannot be promoted out of that league into the regular pyramid.

Elsewhere, the top two teams in each division are promoted/relegated into the division below/above it. Except in the 2nd division, where there's a playoff among the the 3rd-6th place team for a spot in the 1st division. (where 3 teams are relegated instead of 2)

The league has very little money flowing through it and the overall quality isn't great, but I haven't spent much time yet attempting to see what one could do to boost that.

There are a bunch of Cups throughout the season too, including a Super League that I devised with teams from minor countries all over the world and Brazil's lower leagues. But we'll get to that later.

Here's the latest results/champs from the Premier Division. It's largely dominated by two teams.

[Young Drachma]

I've made a few tweaks to this since the last posting, including adding more teams to the various divisions and simming more ahead. I had to move Grenesia (now called Tenessa, but the people are still Grenesians. Don't ask) to the Caribbbean to replace St. Lucia, because it was getting impossible to get them into the World Cup qualifying without a lot of changes to the DB that weren't working and alternate files.

It's still a minnow of a country, though in time, this isn't Neloxia redux. I actually have Neloxia active in this file, too.

I've added a bunch of active countries now, so things should start to evolve more.

[Young Drachma]

I solved the specific problem of only one way to leave town, at least. There's a new highway (I'm calling it Highway 102) that has two-way traffic through the mountains. This way, traffic only passing through or leaving town don't have to travel through the sole thoroughfare to get out of town, they can use 102 as a bypass to avoid Alara's city limits altogether.

The road reminds me of driving in parts of Colorado and Wyoming.







Here's a nighttime aerial view of Walnut Park, the core suburb of the Alara area looking east.

[Young Drachma]

I'm going to create a personal file of my FM16 version of their local soccer league, by increasing prestige so that it works better for me faster. The dynamic prestige in FM doesn't work so great, so no matter how much money gets injected into the league, it stays way too low for where it ought to be. Which isn't really where I want things. I do like the league being "lower level" at first and then rising up, but...anyway.

Here's an introduction to the core/dominant teams:

Unlike Neloxia, the Grenesian teams play all over the country and few have a true home stadium. This means allegiances are somewhat porous or at least, shift. In my existing sim, the league has largely been dominated by three teams -- Atlantic Legacy, Defense Force and Spring Universe.



2008 was the last time someone other than one of those three teams won a Premier division title.



Atlantic Legacy are nicknamed The Room Service, because they serve you on the field.

The premier division has 18 teams

[Young Drachma]

Right now there are six divisions:

Premier
Division of Honour
1st Division
2nd Division
3rd Division
Select League.

I'm about to create a 7th division comprised of amateur teams that reflect the cities inside my Cities Skylines save. I'm going to make that league not promotable, but I'd like them to be good enough to send players to the bigger leagues and perhaps make some noise during the FA Cup despite always being amateur clubs, etc.

We'll see how long that lasts, though.

[Young Drachma]

So I kept running into this error where the league wouldn't sim past 2018/19 when I made some edits to the file, specifically adding two more leagues to the lower level. I just did another resim, but this time, I set it up where I used a custom World Cup file (that creates a World Championship that the whole world participates in) and it seems to work now. So I can't decide what was causing the problem. So I'm going to have to sim again, this time without the custom world cup and see if it's just the lower leagues that were giving me trouble.

[Young Drachma]

I ran another sim this time without a custom World Cup and with the playoffs in the main league turned off AND without the 7th and 8th divisions (they're not inactive, but still play in the FA Cup) and it seems to be simming past 2018-19, so....I guess I finally solved it?

[Young Drachma]

Finally got a version of this file that works, apparently there are custom files that don't play so nicely with it, but so long as I stick largely to the in-game leagues and the Grenesian league doesn't go all the way down to its lowest levels, it works.

This alternate file has Tenessa as a country on the rise (a la Neloxia, tbh..) but because they don't have to suffer through the gaunlet that is European qualifying, they seemed to get better a lot faster than Neloxia ever seems to when I do custom sims.

(FYI: I have a Neloxia file loaded in this same save, so it's interesting to contrast them.)

I'm going to start playing in 2030 (I have a LONG plane ride tomorrow, so I'll be able to dive in more, I think.)

[Young Drachma]

I might do a thing where I try to affiliate every Grenesian club with a Neloxian team so there are some semi-parallels. I'll need to figure that out though, as I haven't yet. Unlike Neloxia where things are a bit balanced at the top, Tenessa has pretty much three dominant teams and nobody else that gets anywhere.

Makes for a better (and worse) story, but will be interesting to delve into.

[Young Drachma]

I'm going to go through the various teams in the Grenesian League which is extremely top heavy for some reason, there are no teams outside of the Big 2 that are able to somehow move the dominant teams out of their perch.

[Young Drachma]

The Grenesian Premier League is really dominated by three teams and really just two teams that alternate winning titles.

Pizza Together has won 19 league titles ALL of them coming since 2016. In fact, since 2016 the team has NEVER finished outside of the Top 3. They're a powerhouse club.

The second best team in the league is Spring Universe, a resort that has finished lower than third only twice since 2015-16 and both of those times came in the first few years of the sim. Despite their success, they've only won the league title three times. They've been runner up 11 times and 3rd place 13 times.

Another elite club that hasn't really had much to show for their money is Atlantic Legacy who claimed their lone league title in 2032 and have 4 runner up finishes and 5 third place finishes in their history. They've won the FA Cup 3 times, though.

The original dominant club in the league was Defence Force, the military's team that has won 14 titles in league history dating back to 2000. They've won 7 FA Cups and 3 Super League titles (the Super League is a tournament played in Tenessa that features a bunch of teams from around the world.) Their last title came in 2027-28, but during that decade, they won six of the league titles, but haven't been able to win one since with Spring Universe and Pizza Together becoming the dominant two teams in the league.

The only other teams to finish in the Top 3 since 2020-21 are Alzate EE, a Grenesian club that's affiliated with Neloxian superclub Alzate Capital, but they have a yo-yo history that saw them spend some time in the Division of Honour, the 2nd division in Tenessa.

Grind House, a coffee shop sponsored club had its first-ever 3rd place finish in recent memory in 2041-42 and look to be on the rise.

[Young Drachma]

I found some guy's idea for a dynasty on reddit:

What If... The league winner had to release their squad. - Sonnorcteer

His basic premise was that juventus kept winning the Serie A, so his idea was to:

So what’s actually happening? Well, in short, when a team wins the league, I’ll use the in-game editor to remove every player above £1m value, or with 10+ appearances in the league in the winning season. I considered doing the whole squad, but there’s way too many players and I have to do them individually. Still, with the important squad members gone, that should be enough to hurt any team.

I'm going to do this in my Grenesian league (once i can get the game to load again) because I'd like to see if we can inject a bit of randomness into the results. I've tried boosting the $ of the lower teams and yet, the top teams remain Spring Universe, Pizza Together and Defence Force to a lesser extent.

[Young Drachma]

The Vestriasian Elite League is relatively top heavy, with a few clubs dominating the playoff race every year over the past 20 seasons. We'll explore the league a bit and give you a sense of the different teams and what their story is.

The nice thing about this league is, there's no promotion and relegation, so you can get invested knowing these are the 16 teams you'll deal with year in and year out around the league. There has been a bit of a shift at the time in recent years, though. Here's the breakdown of all sixteen clubs.


THE BOTTOM FEEDERS

EASTERN SUBURBS, WESTERN SUBURBS
The two worst teams in the league by far. Eastern actually has one top 10 finish in their history (2033-34) and Western has finished as high as 8th, but neither has a playoff appearance to their name. Part of this is about the teams being located in non-power centers of Vestrian football and the other part is they are just largely hot garbage.


RIGBY UNITED
Another bottom feeder is Rigby United. A team that plays in the actual city limits, they're a forgotten club that has NEVER finished higher than double digits in their history. Their highest finish in club history is a 10th place finish in 2019-20. They're also the worst drawing club in the league -- their record high for attendance is 1,044 and so most people believe if this league had promotion/relegation this would be the team to go down first and foremost.

Nobody cares about them, they have no real fan base outside of their shareholders who are fans.

PILLSBROOK UNITED
The Yellow and Black have never won the league title, but they did win a Champions League title in 2021 and have been runner up twice during the early years of the tournament (2015, 2016). Recent times have been hard though, they've only made the playoffs once in the past 16 years.

PLAYHOUSE DISTRICT
The Actors don't do a great job of acting like winners. They've NEVER made a playoff appearance. In fact, their best league finish in club history was a 10th place finish three seasons ago. So if you're looking for a team to grow with, pick these guys -- no one else will.

THE MIDDLE CLASS

MESSIER CITY
The former most dominant team in Vestriasia has not fared as well in the modern era. All five of their playoff appearances came before 2019. If you want a team that might someday get it together or if you want a storied history to cheer about, pick the Blues.


BAY SLOPE OLYMPIC
A team of former Greek expats, Olympic have never won the league playoff title, but have two Oceania Champions League titles to their credit and a third runner up appearance. They've also won the City Cup (FA Cup) once. They've made the playoffs 8 times, 5 of those came in the last 7 seasons so they're a team on the upswing.

MEDICINE CABINET (DOCS)
Docs are a club that have a large fan base but don't have the success to match what they're doing on the field. They've only made the playoffs twice in their history, most recently two seasons ago when they were league runner-up ('35). They've also won a FA Cup (2018) so if you're looking to root for a team that where you won't be the only one in the stands supporting them.


OLD SETTLEMENT
Affiliated for a team with Real Madrid, the Old Timers were once the toast of the league. In recent years, they've fallen on hard times finishing near the bottom of the league over the past decade almost annually. Despite their bonafides, their playoff bark was bigger than their bite, winning the Elite League only once (2029) but have a finalist appearance in the Champions League (2026) to their credit as well. They have won two FA City Cups (2026, 2029) as well.

THE HEIRS
This was a team that I thought would dominate the league and instead, they've fallen just outside of the money the past few years. They have won the O-League 4 times (most recently in '23) but haven't won a league title since 2013 before the current iteration of the Elite League existed. A fun team in the past with a relatively storied past, but I'm not sure where they are headed. Maybe you can join on their bandwagon and decide to see along with their fans?


UPSTARTS

RED BULL NORTH END
Just like in Germany, Austria (and okay nobody cares about NY Red Bulls), the Red Bulls of Vestriasia are hated by every fan base except their own. The North Enders are among the storied clubs in the league, winning 4 league titles, 5 Champions League titles and are a near lock each year for the playoffs. They've also finished 5th at the Club World Championship twice ('29, '36) something only bested by one Vestrian team.

Since 2015-16, they've missed the post-season just 5 times. So if you're looking for a consistent team to root for, even if the rest of the league's fans will NEVER root for your team, pick the Red Wings (as they're sometimes called.)


MERCHANT FARMERS MARKET (MFM)
The Market Boys have one three league titles ('27, '32, '36) and a Champions League semi-final appearance in '35 to their credit. They won a FA City Cup in '21, too. They have a HUGE fan base of metropolitan folks who don't really enjoy watching football, but like the game for the atmosphere. Maybe that'll appeal to you, rich people need a football team too.

IRONWOOD
Ironwood are an urban team for the workers. In the same way that people who have money and live in the city love MFM, people who get their hands dirty love Ironwood. They're a team that's always competitive. They have 2 league titles (19, 20) to their credit, have won the Champions League three times ('20, '30, '32) and are the Vestrian team with the best Club World Championship finish ever, placing 3rd in the 2020 Club World Cup.

INVADERS EAST SIDE
Another city club that makes perennial playoff appearances, but unlike the others, they have a small but mighty fan base. Invaders have won 4 league titles ('21, '26, '34, '35) but have yet to crack through the O-League, placing 2nd twice.


THE TRULY ELITE

YANKEE DOODLES
The Yanks are - you guessed it -- an expat team of former Americans who moved to Vestriasia and took up football of all things. They draw extremely well and for years were not very good, but in recent years, they've become of the power clubs in Vestrian football. They've won 4 Oceania Champions League titles and have claimed 5 Elite League playoff titles all since 2022.

GOVERNESS
A team that spent the first few seasons trying to find its footing, is now the class of the league. Governess have only missed the playoffs three times in the last 14 seasons. While they've only won one league playoff title, they've finished as the runner up a whopping six times. They've also won when it mattered most, winning 4 Champions League titles and finishing as runner up twice in that tournament.

[Young Drachma]

[Young Drachma]

Here's the world rankings in October 2058.



Vestriasia is 47th