Location, Location, Location

As an addendum to my previously published Youth Academies Explained post, I've decided to publish a little bit of the research that I did when researching the viability of the different nations for youth academy placement in my gameworld, Völler. I'll also reveal the methods that I used when gathering this information so that you can, if you choose to, research the academy options in your own gameworld.

DON'T BUILD IN SWEDEN : AN EXAMPLE
As a simple example to demonstrate how I have performed the calculations for each nation, we will use the example of Sweden in gameworld Völler. Sweden is, by my numbers, one of the worst nations that one can build in at the moment and hopefully the following calculations will demonstrate why that is.

As a very simple metric, if we are looking to build in Sweden, we need to know how many other academies are already present in this nation and what kind of demands for youth players they are generating. In order to see this, we need to use the World pulldown on the top title bar and select Infrastructure. This will show us how many academies there are in each nation. You can see from the image below that in Sweden in GW Völler, I can calculate exactly how many new youth players they are demanding per season:


From examining the complete youth academy breakdown, the total number of youths demanded per season is easy to calculate:

total = [#5*]x16 + [#4.5*]x14 + [#4*]x12 + [#3.5*]x10 + [#3*]x8 + [#2.5*]x7 + [#2*]x6 + [#1.5*]x5 + [#1*]x4

total = 5x16 + 4x10 + 4x8 + 2x6 + 3x4
total = 176

So the total number of Swedish regens demanded each season is a whooping 176. Even without further investigation, you can probably guess just from this number that Sweden is not an attractive place to build a new Youth Academy. However, for the sake of this discussion, further exploration is needed - Sweden is an extreme example and it may often be the case that just looking at the total number of youths demanded doesn't give you a conclusive answer on what you can expect if you were to build in that nation.

While we know how many regens from Sweden youth academies are demanding, we don't yet know how many youths the system is "expecting" to create per season. This is a VERY important number in youth academy selection however - 99% of youths that are created beyond the expected number will be low potential garbage (1 star to 2 star potential range). So how do we arrive at this number?

One thing that has been mentioned explicitly by SI staff with regards to the youth generation system in FML is that the number of youths being generated by the system is representative of the gameworld database as a whole. This means that by totaling the number of Swedish players and dividing by some "magic factor" we can determine how many Swedish players the youth generation system "expects" to create in a given season.

In order to arrive at this number, I first totaled up the number of Swedish players in the database from ages 17-45. The reason I choose 17 instead of 16 is because I didn't want the academy products themselves to throw off the database numbers too greatly - over time changes to the database due to youth academy products can filter through to change the number of expected regens but I wanted to make sure that all of the dross that the academies were generating who would probably be retired in a couple seasons didn't pollute the actual DB numbers that I was gathering. I counted a total of 437 Swedish players in the DB. My choice of a "magic" factor was arrived at from a beta thread in which Ov stated the number of "expected" players in the beta gameworld - I attempted to more or less equalize the numbers I was seeing from Völler GW with the "expected" numbers that he presented in this thread. This led to a "magic factor" of 15. This number makes sense as it is roughly the career length for a player in FML (15-30 yrs old). Admittedly though, this is probably an inexact approximation for the actual number of youths generated so don't hold me to these numbers ;)

'Expected' Youths per season = max(# of DB players / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(437 / 15, 16)
'Expected' Youths per season = max(29, 16) = 29

This indicates that although the Swedish Youth Academies in Völler are demanding 176 regens, the system is only expecting to generate 29! This means that 84% of the Swedish youths generated by the FML YA system will be "filler" - low potential players that have no chance of making it on a senior side!!

It's worth pointing out that if there is at least 1 YA in a nation, the expected number of regens for that nation will NEVER be less than 16. This is what makes obscure nations a better choice than overpopulated nations in some instances - as touched on in my previous post.