Stunty Leeg

Another major tournament is set to launch on FumBBL later this week. This one is the Fighting Cockerel Classic, a tournament set up for teams using their made up stunty teams. Stunty teams in the real game are Halflings and Goblins which are both terrible, but fun. The problem with them in the real game is they're too weak, too squishy, and have no easy access to the general skills which make actually winning games possible. But they're cool, and fun, and there is certainly something to be said for watching Halflings die. Stunty Leeg teams are set up to maximize those weaknesses, but since every team suffers from them it shouldn't really impact winning games the way it does in the real game.

I hadn't played any games with these teams but I wanted to be able to enter the tournament so over the weekend I started a team up and played a few games. Not knowing how the games actually play out I didn't know which rosters were good or would fit my style of playing. I decided I wanted the ability to make a guy with block, tackle, and mighty blow. I found a team with a 4/3/1/10 dude who starts with mighty blow and stand firm and actually had access to general skills. And you could get two of them! The rest of the team is pretty smelly (the lineman is 6/1/3/6 with dodge, guard, and stunty) but I figured it was a reasonable place to start. 10 armour is insane! You only get your armour broken on an 11 or 12, so 1 in 12! Compare that to my 6 armour dudes who get their armour broken more than half the time!

I've played 7 games with 1 win, 2 losses, and 4 draws. I've had 4 guys die or retire so far, and 2 of them have been the expensive 10 armour dudes! It turns out some of the teams start with claw, or have easy access to mutations and get claw first. I hate claw so much. You're 5 times as likely to break armour on the 10 AV guy when you have claw. That's too large of a swing. 10 AV is a lot, and may well be too much, but the solution isn't to build such a huge swing into the game.

They've also changed the secret weapon rules for this division. Instead of always getting kicked out after a drive each weapon gets assigned a chance to get kicked out after a drive. I've got one guy who is pretty awesome (4/5/1/10 with a lot of crazy skills) but he gets kicked out 72% of the time. One game I got lucky and he got to play 4 drives. That was my win. (I did fail one of the three checks, but I had a bribe.) So while it's good that you can have a bunch of secret weapons and not lose your whole team after one drive it's also really swingy. Getting to keep my awesome guy for the whole game is a game changer.

I think way more than the normal game this game is higher variance. Not just with claw and secret weapon. When almost everyone on every team has dodge it's harder to knock someone over. And when everyone also had 5 or 6 AV and stunty getting knocked over tends to result in leaving the game permanently. So I think I need to just play to have fun, do crazy things, and kill some dudes. Maybe I should start a new team with that in mind, since I am just going to get annoyed when my 10 AV dudes get taken out by claw...