Hey, I've been enjoying the game a lot, it's awesome and thanks for the work! I had a couple of suggestions that I think might not be too difficult to implement if you think it's worth doing that might improve the realism of the game, and also a couple of questions about a few of the mechanics.
1. How exactly do injuries for AI players work? Do they just retire for one tournament and that's it, or are they out for a while? If it doesn't already work like this, it might be interesting to make it so that they don't participate in tournaments for a few weeks to months after the injury or at least have a minor to major debuff to their stats for a while.
2. I've noticed the East Asian nations (Japan, China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan) seem to spawn players with very dark brown skin which is slightly immersion breaking (but makes sense for other Asian nations like India or in the Middle East), might it be worth making it so that the subgroup of East Asian nations can only spawn players with light skin?
3. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like AI player stats are randomized at the beginning of every year, based on their highest rank and age. I've seen a few situations where a player is very good for 1 year and then suddenly turns into crap the next year once the year rolls over (basically he's awesome in december and then sucks in january), and then he completely bombs out in the first or second round of every tournament he plays. I was thinking it might make a little more sense to make the improvement/decline more gradual over ~4-12 ticks throughout the year, for example every 3 months the player improves or declines by 25% of the original annual change?
4. For player character development, the optimal way to play the game seems to be to exclusively train and only go to big tournaments. Might it make sense for some of the player's attributes to increase a bit when he plays a tournament match, or at least for his abilities to decline less fast when he's playing a tournament as opposed to doing nothing? I think the way you've set it up so that you can only upgrade mental stats with experience is to partially emulate this, but it might be worth slightly improving a player's stats (or at least lessening the normal weekly decline) when he plays a match, similar to how you can train with a practice partner.
5. In regards to career retirement, it seems like players always retire at a fixed age (iirc it's 32 or 33, which is also changable in the settings). I was thinking it might be a better solution to have some kind of formula that determines a chance that a player retires depending on age and rank. For example, a player who is 38 but still top 10 in the world should probably have a less chance to retire than someone who is 26 but has never won a futures match, but still a higher chance to retire than someone who is 35 and still top 10 in the world. Just a hypothetical thought/example, but maybe you could set some ranges for rank and retirement and then set up a formula based on them, here's a very rough example:
Zero chance: Under age 21, Rank 1-10
Very low chance: Under age 24, Rank 11-50
Low chance: Under age 28, Rank 50-200
Medium chance: Under age 32, Rank 200-500
High chance: Under age 35, Rank 500-1000
Very high chance: Over age 35, Rank >1000
With the chance only increasing with higher age/lower rank, maybe using a formula that uses floor/ceiling for some of these values. This way players that are really good will play until they start declining results wise (won't retire when they're still number 1 or 2), and players who suck will retire even in their 20s to make space for newly generated players.
Again, not really sure how much development time these would take or if they're unrealistic, but just a couple of suggestions from my end. Thanks again for the game and being so responsive in the forums, I've had a blast so far!
Mana Games
Tennis Elbow Games & Dungeon Crawler game
