The IPHL - a fantasy league idea

[JeffH]

Years ago, I used to play Bethesda's Hockey League Simulator 1 and 2 a lot. My very favorite idea was to take the then-current NHL lineups, which I knew even then were good (and can now see probably had more future Hall of Famers than any other era in the league's history to date, this being the very early 90s), and reduce them to just six teams. The basic idea was, what if the league had never expanded, yet the talent pool had been as deep as it actually was then?

It was loads of fun. My initial worry was that every game would be like the all-star game with ridiculous scores and no defense, but it wasn't like that at all. In fact, gritty two-way players who could shut down the high scorers lost much less of their value than the high scorers themselves did; you would at least seriously consider starting Joel Otto over Craig Janney on your third line, you needed the grit more than the scoring if your top two centers were, say, Gretzky and Hawerchuk.

Just for fun I named them after planets rather than cities - the Mercury Cougars, Venus Flytraps (later Venus Victorious), Earth Angels, Mars Maroons, Jupiter Titans and Saturn Storm. The Interplanetary Hockey League (IPHL), the backstory being that in the far future, with much of the solar system colonized, people played games between clones or perhaps ultra-detailed computer simulations of these legendary players of the distant past.

Anyway, with all that backstory out of the way my actual question is the obvious one; how, if at all, would one go about doing this in EHM? It seems like there's a lot of hard-coded stuff that would get in the way, on top of the obvious problems (i.e. hours and hours entering players into the DB editor). To wit, how would one go about setting up a new league and taking all the other teams and leagues, save perhaps a limited farm system, out of the picture? I don't see any obvious way to remove a single team, much less reconfigure the leagues en masse, and I saw a thread where someone was encountering seemingly insurmountable problems with a very similar project.

This was fairly easy - albeit time-consuming - in HLS but that's such ancient software I don't know if I could go back to it now, and I would definitely like at least some of the capabilities added by EHM. The more detailed player attributes, if nothing else. If the problems with doing this in EHM are insurmountable, what else is out there (FHL, perhaps?) that might be friendlier to this sort of fantasy league?

[Danny]

Not possible to change league structure or remove teams/leagues. You can only replace teams within a set league structure so you still end up with 30 franchises in the NHL. As far as I know you can't add new customized leagues either. For the moment I don't know of any viable way to achieve what you want.

[B. Stinson]

As Danny says, this type of thing isn't possible in EHM - too much is hard-coded, unfortunately.

A game that would be perfect for this, though, would be Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP 8 was just recently released as freeware, too). It has second-to-none league creation abilities. Of course, the only problem with it being that it's not hockey.

[Manimal]

The only way I see it is to take a playable league in the game and change the reputation in it. I think there are leagues with as low as eight teams in it. Then you would have to lower the reputatin of the other leagues, making yours the #1 league in the world(or rather, for you, universe) Affiliation systems might work, I haven't tried doing this kind of fantasy-databases much.
You would also have to accept the rules from that league you start with, which could be troublesome (for example import rules)