Thursday, February 14, 2013

Deathroller!

At the end of my week 3 Blood Bowl match against Randy I found myself with 200k in the bank. My team already has 4 rerolls and 12 players so I didn't have any pressing needs on which to spend money. But there is one thing I've always wanted to have for me time, despite not really having a good plan for how to use it: Deathroller! The Deathroller is 4/7/1/10 with loner, break tackle, dirty player, juggernaut, mighty blow, no hands, secret weapon, and stand firm! That is a lot of skills, and only three of them are negatives! And all for the low, low price of 160k.

Now, obviously having a 7 strength guy has to be good, but he seems like a tricky guy to use. Secret weapon means he only gets to play for one drive which I think means ideally I want to receive in the second half and play him then. The other option is to try to use him when I kick, because with break tackle and 7 strength he's actually really good at disrupting a cage. That feels dangerous because if they just score fast then I lose my 160k guy after like 2 turns. I feel like having him around is just letting my opponents induce up the equivalent of a wizard for no reason if he's only playing for 2 turns. Heck, even at 8 turns it still feels questionable. Awesome, but questionable.

Ideally I want him to play in the second half for fielding a full team reasons. If I play him and 10 dudes in the first half and two guys get injured then my second half will only have 10 guys left. If instead I play 11 normal dudes in the first half and two get injured then I'll have a full 11 guys for the second half. Also, it's possible to earn a bribe through kick-off results so I want as many kick-offs to happen as possible before fielding him. (A bribe can keep him from getting kicked out.)

One advantage to starting him in the first half if I'm receiving is having an extra mighty blow guy in play to push people around. Grinding out a first half with tons of casualties is my whole game plan and it feels like that has to work more often with the deathroller in play than not. He also has the awesome dirty player skill and fouls late in the first half will be more impactful than fouls late in the second half. (I don't really mind if he gets kicked out for fouling because he was going to get kicked out at the end of the drive anyway.)

The final issue is coming up with a name worthy of such a powerful unit. My team is named after bands/musicians and I tossed around a couple of death related ideas. Megadeth, perhaps? Or some sort of death metal band? Those had the problem that I don't really listen to those genres so they wouldn't really fit in with the rest of my team. I ended up going with Rammstein because a steam roller is kinda like a battering ram, industrial metal is kinda like death metal, and Josh got me hooked on Du Hast back in University.

I don't really know how it's going to work out, and I don't like having dudes without block on my team, but it just seemed too cool to leave off my team. Maybe after it costs me a couple games I'll fire him and regret the choice. But for now I'm really looking forward to throwing 3 die blocks on some thralls!

1 comment:

Sightless said...

Even my RSS feed haunts me! My poor thralls!