Better substitutions
Bubbles, 
DeveloperThis week we finished quite a substantial update to the way that our automatic substitution systems selects an appropriate player.
There are 4 different situations where the system automatically selects a replacement player:
- The moment a player is injured during a match, and you haven't set up your own substitution rule.
- Just before kick-off, if a player in the starting line-up is injured or suspended.
- When a player in the starting line-up leaves your club due to being sold or retiring.
- If your tactic is invalid, and we have to construct a whole new line-up for you.
In the past, the choice of substitute player was made on the basis of a rather simple evaluation, which was not always optimal. This has now been changed so that in all 4 cases, we use our new selection algorithm that takes into account the exact same things as the match simulator.
The new selection algorithm takes into account things like the player's stats in relation to the role he will fill on the pitch, his favoured position and his energy at the time of selection. This means that the system now always chooses the best suited replacement when one of your players go missing from the starting line-up.
Note, however: The selection will always pick players from the reserves that you have set up in your tactics first, even if they are not the best among all the players in your club. It is only in the event that no more reserves are left, that it will start picking substitutes from the rest of the players in your team.
We do this to ensure that you have control over which players you primarily want to be used as substitutes.
Bot clubs - now with names
We routinely insert bot clubs into the lower leagues. The purpose of bot clubs is to reserve a spot in the leagues which new Virtual Manager users can take over when they start the game.
Before we had bot clubs, new users would have to wait until the next season update before they could actually start playing matches.
Bot clubs have always had rather boring names, though, and for the brand new clubs in the lower leagues, the league tables have probably looked quite bleak. Therefore, we gave the bot clubs new names this week.
It was actually a pretty fun job, and it only took a single afternoon to do. We simply visited the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's website and grabbed a list of place names from the countries we have in the game. We selected up to 10,000 names from every country and wrote a simple algorithm that can take a random place name and use it as the basis for a club name.
Here are a few examples of leagues with lots of bot clubs. They look much nicer now that they are no longer filled up with clubs named "Bot 1234567":
If you click on a club, and it says "Has never been online" and there is no manager, that means it's a bot.
That's all for this week
Have a nice weekend, everybody!