Blood Bowl: Fireball The Orcs!

I played a game of Blood Bowl yesterday as Lizards against an Orc team that set itself up on the opening kick-off with 8 orcs in a little box in the backfield. Getting 8 coin flips to get a mighty blow hit on an orc seemed too good to pass up, so I threw my wizard at him. It ended up knocking 3 guys over and removing none of them, and ultimately the game ended up as a draw where he barely scored and I likely win the game 87% of the time if I'd kept the wizard for the lightning bolt on the ball carrier. It got me thinking about if I got played on the kickoff... Did I get unlucky to not hurt anyone or are orcs just tough enough that it was strong play from him to bait me into using the fireball.

I decided to do a spreadsheet to figure out the numbers and then discovered Excel just straight up has a function that does it for me. Hello BINOMDIST, thank you very much. Here are the odds against any number of 9AV targets (columns) of getting any number of KO+ removals (rows).



So I was 55% to remove 0 orcs when I shot a fireball at 8 of them. Maybe this play would make sense if I was desperate to get lucky, but I didn't need that at all. I'm convinced the attrition fireball was a mistake, and I definitely got baited.

On the other hand, if 7AV elves were to make the same offer we'd get the following:



Now we're 75% to get rid of at least one and have pretty good chances of removing multiples. They're also better at recovering from the lightning bolt, so if an elf team were to give me that opportunity I would jump all over it.

Blood Bowl: How Bad is Stab?

A couple weeks ago I played against a Dark Elf opponent that was running two assassins on a relatively unleveled team. This means they chose to take the assassin over other positionals, which means they must have valued them pretty highly. Twitch chat was not very charitable to the skill level of my opponent, and the assassins actually accomplished basically nothing. They spent a lot of time intentionally standing beside my guys and then getting hit for it with their 7 armour, but that held up just fine.

It got me wondering... Should I have been able to just get free SPP for killing them? Should he have been able to hurt any of my guys first? Is conventional wisdom about how bad they are correct or should I be trying them out? Setting up with 2 of them on the line, making stabs, and then blocking away anyone who didn't get stabbed feels at least worth investigating. (My opponent tried this, but I was playing necro and the players he was stabbing had 9 armour and stand firm so blocking them away couldn't happen.) What are the odds here?

	Nothing	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	58%	24%	10%	7%
8 AV	72%	16%	7%	5%
9 AV	83%	10%	4%	3%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	3%	22%	44%	18%	8%	5%
8 AV	3%	22%	54%	12%	5%	3%
9 AV	3%	22%	63%	7%	3%	2%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	11%	33%	32%	14%	6%	4%
8 AV	11%	33%	40%	9%	4%	3%
9 AV	11%	33%	46%	5%	2%	2%

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	11%	58%	18%	7%	3%	2%
8 AV	11%	58%	22%	5%	2%	1%
9 AV	11%	58%	25%	3%	1%	1%

The first table is for stab against the 3 likely armour values the target is apt to have. The next one is the odds for a 2 die block with block against someone without block. The next one is the odds for a 2 die block without block against someone with block. The last one is the odds for a 2 die block without block against someone with both block and dodge.

The first thing to point out is that there is no downside to the stab. Throwing a block without block has an 11 percent chance of knocking yourself down. You can reroll it, of course, but burning up rerolls on opening line blocks feels really bad. Especially when the upside of throwing the block is only a 4% chance of removal!

Then there's the fact that even if you give up a 2 die block back after failing a stab they are only 13% to remove you back. If you're stabbing a 7 AV person that means the stabber has the advantage. Otherwise you're less likely to hurt them as you are to be hurt back, so you really need the followup block from a friend trying for a push to free you up. Hitting a flesh golem with an assassin is not a good play.

That all said... A 13% chance to be removed back is actually a really big deal. And that's assuming they don't have mighty blow, which, now that we mention it...

	TO	Push	Down	Stun	KO	Cas
7 AV	3%	22%	31%	20%	13%	11%
8 AV	3%	22%	44%	15%	9%	8%
9 AV	3%	22%	54%	10%	6%	5%

Now we're up to a 23% chance of being removed! Those are the sorts of numbers I'm talking about. Mighty blow really lets you murder the 7 AV dudes with no skills. No wonder my rats keep dying...

The next thing I notice is just how hard it is to hurt someone with block and dodge with a regular hit. Even with 7 armour you're only getting removed on 5% of hits. 5% of regular hits, anyway. Throw on tackle and mighty blow and things get a lot scarier. But it's not like a Dark Elf team is going to have many (or any) players with those skills. If we're trying to kill a gutter runner or a skink or something then maybe the assassin is the way to go. 17% instead of 5% is a pretty big change!


My feeling now after looking at things a little is that blitzing anyone except for a low armour dodgy dude is a mistake with an assassin. This means they have to start in contact on the start of your turn to get a hit off, which is very dangerous for a 7 armour dude with no defensive skills. Using them against enemies on the line feels pretty good though. Take a free armour roll, then hit them with a regular block to push them away (or knock them down) afterwards. If you knock them down beside the assassin then next turn they have to dodge away or give you another stab...

It also feels like they just aren't likely enough to knock anyone down to justify using them on the ball carrier if you have an actual ball removal player. Tackle, wrestle, strip ball... These are all better tools than the assassin. But those all require a lot of levels; the assassin comes straight out of the box with stab.

Another downside is the stab doesn't earn any experience, so the assassin is a removal tool that doesn't level through removals! Can you feed them touchdowns to level them up? All the players on a Dark Elf team want to level up through touchdowns, can you justify feeding the spp onto the assassin?

And really, that's what it comes down to... Assassins are expensive players on a team full of expensive players. They're pretty much the squishiest player in the game, too, since they have only 7 AV and no defensive skills. Even goblins, which have stunty, start with dodge, so they're harder to hurt. Harder to hurt for everyone but an assassin, anyway!


So I feel like I'd maybe want an assassin (or two!) against some specific teams but very much not against others.

Good: Skaven, High Elf, Brettonian, Wood Elf, Lizardman, Norse, Khemri
Ok: Human, Dark Elf, Undead, Chaos Dwarves
Bad: Orc, Dwarf, Chaos, Necromantic, Nurgle

Hmm... Looking at it there are actually 7 of 16 teams where I'd probably want an assassin and only really 5 where they'd be a real detriment. Of course on the champion ladder it turns out that the bottom group there contains a lot of the most played teams. Orcs are #1 by a large margin, with Chaos and Chaos Dwarves as the next two. Those 5 bad teams represent 40% of all games played and that really makes me question wanting to play assassins on the ladder.

But in a league? That's more tempting. Especially if the league enforces some kind of race parity like the NWFL league I played on FumBBL did.

Of course you could just be looking at having your expensive defenseless 7 AV player die in the first game...

Blood Bowl Puzzle

An interesting situation cropped up at the end of a recent Blood Bowl game, and I wanted to look into it in more detail while not being under a 3 minute timer to make all of my moves in a turn. In some senses it's a very straightforward position and in other senses there's a lot of things going on that need to be considered. I thought it might be interesting to provide the situation as a puzzle and let people decide what they would do and then go through all of the things to consider in another post.

The Blood Bowl 2 interface is pretty good for watching things live, but pretty sketchy for easily seeing things at a glance for people who aren't used to it, so I'll explain what's going on in this picture first.

This is turn 16 of a game where we're down 2-1. We're a brand new Necromantic team, dressed in pink, and we're playing against Dwarves. We have possession of the ball, in the hands of a werewolf who is 8 spaces from the endzone (indicated by the blue pillar of light). Werewolves have an 8/3/3/8 statline and their only relevant skill is frenzy. We don't have any rerolls and the only thing we care about is maximizing our odds of scoring a touchdown to tie the game. No other player on our team can reach the endzone and there aren't enough players on the field to set up any crazy chain push plays (I don't think, anyway!).

The other players we have access to are 2 flesh golems (4/4/2/9), 3 zombies (4/3/2/8), and a wight (6/3/3/8 block). Our second wight is lying on the ground beside the ball carrier but unfortunately he is stunned. There are not many dwarves left in play, but the ones that exist are in annoying positions. All dwarves have 3 strength and all of them have block except for the one hiding behind the flesh golem in the upper left hand corner. The remaining dwarves are marked one on the werewolf, one on the second flesh golem, and one on a zombie. We have 2 free zombies and a free wight, all a fair ways behind the play.

What is your plan for the turn?

Done With Blood Bowl?

Lately I've been finding myself getting more and more frustrated with playing Blood Bowl on FumBBL. Scheduling league games has always been a little tricky but lately it's felt a lot like pulling teeth. I mean, I'm at my computer for 16 hours a day and can play at any point in time when I'm awake. You'd think it would be easy to get the other person to pick a time and stick with it. But no, people won't pick a time. Or if they do they won't show up on time. And I have problems when I want to be asleep during the evenings because two of my three leagues use the evening as the primary time to play.

It's also getting pretty old having people complain about having to play me. Apparently I lucked into an overpowered race in my primary league or something, but there's no end of people complaining about it to me. It's one thing to have people complain about their dice when they've been significantly above expected value. It's another to have people not want to play me at all, and not being quiet about it. My opponent today was complaining about how skilled my bull centaurs are. I don't know what he wanted me to do about it? Retire my good players to make things more even?

I do think the league has an issue with teams spiraling out of control on the power curve compared to new teams. And as people leave the league new people have to come in with fresh teams. Fresh teams with no boost in power in any way. And often without a good choice of what team they can play because the league has weird racial restrictions. My first team in the league had to be a 7 AV team! Those Amazons got destroyed and that let me draft the race I wanted from the small pool of options the next time around. A Chaos Dwarf team had just quit, so that's what I went with. Anyway, the league has a salary cap to ostensibly keep powerful teams down but if anything it just serves to create obscene teams. I could cut down to 1430 TV pretty easily by fielding a team with one brutal killer, one awesome ball carrier, and rookies the rest of the way. That team would really ruin new teams! They wouldn't get large inducements and I'd skill up my blockers in a few games.

So maybe the people complaining really do just want my whole team to retire. There's really no other option to give new teams a good chance against my team regardless of what TV I'm forced to cut to.

Anyway... If most of the people in the league don't want to play with me, and if I'm getting annoyed by scheduling concerns, maybe I just shouldn't play anymore. This season is almost over so I'll stick it out to try to win a third championship in a row, but after that I think I'm done. There are plenty of other games for me to play, after all, that don't involve getting yelled at or screwing with my sleep schedule.

Blood Bowl: Injury Decisions

My awesome Chaos Dwarf team has finally run into injury issues after two and a half seasons without taking much damage. And they all came in one game... It's almost like claw is problematic as my opponent this time was Chaos Pact. I suffered three permanent injuries and the apothecary's only suggestion was that we put poor Miss Peacock down instead of trying to deal with her bad hip. Thanks Doc.

So now I need to decide what to do with the three players who got hurt. There are six games left in the regular season and I currently have a commanding hold on my division. My team has 7 wins and 1 loss while second place in my division (the aforementioned Pact team) has 5 wins and 4 losses. I won both the games against them this season so he has to earn 5 more points over his last 5 games than I earn over my last 6 games. That's certainly possible, but it's not terribly likely. And even if he does, I may still be able to get a wildcard spot in the playoffs.

My goal with this team is to win the Superior Bowl. I like scoring, and I like hurting people, and I like leveling up my players... But all my decisions should ultimately be focused on the end goal. This team is the two time defending champions and going for the three-peat is key. So the question with the injured players has to be if they'll be more helpful in the playoffs in their crippled states, or if I'd be better off buying replacement players now and getting 6 games to level them up. (Scoring with a 4 movement, 2 agility player is not easy but I'm willing to try it. Especially since I can afford to absorb a loss or two along the way given my big lead in the division.)

There's also the fact I have a healing potion from a big site milestone and the league decided it was allowed to use them on players in the league. So I can always use it on one of these players as well if I want.

First up, Didit. He's a hobgoblin with guard and dodge. I like him because he's a mobile way to stick some guard where it's most needed on a critical turn. He was hoping to level again to get block and become a real pain... He was also serving as a bit of a blitz magnet. People really like to send their tackle/mighty blow guy after him even if it wasn't tactically sound at the time so I could use him as bait to get the defense going one way while the ball went another. On the downside with two doubles he costs 100k in team value for a 7AV guy without block. Anyway, he'd lost a movement in a previous game, and now he's lost an armour. The movement loss was annoying but not the end of the world. The armour loss is troubling. Now a guy with mighty blow only needs to roll a 6 on 2d6 to break his armour. He'd still make great bait, but he's even less likely to take a couple hits before he goes out, taking his 100k in TV with him. I'm pretty sure this one is a cut. I'll be sad to not have a 3 agility guy with guard anymore, but it's not really the end of the world.

The other two injuries came to a pair of identical blockers. Miss Peacock and Miss Scarlet have both rolled 4 normal skill rolls thus far and both picked up guard, mighty blow, stand firm, and grab. They're both really close to getting a 5th skill roll as well, with Peacock only needing 9 more SPP and Scarlet only needing 5 more. I'm a little sad to roll so many skills with all of them being normals, but the first three normal skills on a blocker are all awesome. Guard, mighty blow, and stand firm are all fantastic and they're especially potent when all of the blockers have them. I often get into situations where if the opponent has a block or two without a pow in it they lose control of the board and I get to bash them right out of it. Grab is not very good on paper, but it actually has worked out pretty well for me when I play against elves with a lot of sidestep. Having grab, even 2 copies of it, lets me peel off people marking key players without them just sidestepping around. Theoretically it also lets me set up crowd surfs (in theory my ball carrying bull and all my blockers have stand firm, so I can play on the sidelines) but mostly people just let me by to score if I set up that board state. Which is a good thing. And since I expect to face elves in the playoffs I like having access to grab. One of the injuries here was a movement loss, the other was an armour loss.

Losing a movement on someone with 4 base movement is actually pretty annoying. I had one of those last season (he was a salary cap casualty before this season) and he always had to lag behind the play. Having someone willing to just stand around and fight an enemy tough guy while the play moves away isn't such a bad thing, but it does power down the grab if the player can't get into a good position. Against a bashy team where the grab was irrelevant anyway she'll still do exactly what I need her to though, as guard and stand firm still do everything I want them to even with 3 movement. Go down to 2 and you can't stand up without rolling dice which is terrible, but at 3 you can just stand up as your turn if you get knocked down. And with stand firm they can't push you away without following up, so you get to stay in tackle zones. So I think the movement loss gets to stay on the team for now. I am slowly leveling up the blocker to replace the last movement cut and going down to too many unskilled blockers would leave my team in real trouble I think.

Losing an armour on someone who's job is mostly to stand around getting punched is a real problem. Someone with 8 AV is 60-70% more likely to be removed from the pitch on any given block (depending on if the opponent has mighty blow or not) compared to someone with 9 AV. On the other hand against people with claw it doesn't change things at all! My game is all about pushing my players beside the enemy players and daring them to roll dice. This works more often than not because all the stand firm on my team negates the pushes and having all my players be 9 AV with thick skull means they're pretty likely to be able to just stand up the next turn if they get knocked down. Then all the guard and mighty blow get to take over and I can crush the opponent! But having someone with only 8 AV gives my line a bigger potential point of failure. And the plan only really works when my whole team is around... Once I lose a couple of the good players I can no longer really surround the opponent and my whole plan falls apart. And if I can't win a bashing game with this team I can't win anything!

So keeping a player with 8 AV is bad for my plan, but so is bringing on a new player who doesn't have guard, mighty blow, or stand firm. The new guy either gets pushed away or put into multiple tackle zones and ignored. I know this for a fact, because I have that one new guy trying to level up and he's an afterthought in many games. I did score a touchdown with him to give him guard, making him a little more useful, but he's still easy to just push away. He's played 12 games so far and only earned 12 SPP, and he got an MVP which is a tad above expected since I normally run with 14 players. So a new blocker, in 6 games, will probably get one skill, but only one skill. Which is not the 3 skills really needed to fill a role in my team...

Maybe looking at my next 6 games will help? Khemri, Slann, Underworld, Skaven, Nurgle, Dwarf. Three of those are completely undeveloped teams which are new to the league. A 4th has been decimated and is down to 3 players with any skills. The Skaven team has some skills, including a guy with claw and a one turner, but it also has a whopping 4 players with niggling injuries just begging to get popped for SPP. The last team, Khemri, has a bunch of skills but only one tomb guardian with block.

This tells me I'm going to be giving up a lot of inducements in every game. There are plenty of opportunities to scoop up casualties and most of these teams will be unable to really win a punching war even if I drop a skilled blocker or two. And actually, my conference as a whole has one elf team in it total. They're leading their division right now so will probably make the playoffs, and they do have a couple of annoying players with side step... So am I building my team to beat that one team that I might not even face? I feel like maybe I should be. But there's also next season to think about, and both these guys are going to get cut for salary cap reasons then I would think. Getting one of them started leveling now is probably a reasonable thing to do.

Ok, I think I need to fire both of the players who picked up -AV and keep the one with -MV for now. And then try to use the last 6 games of the season to feed touchdowns to the new blocker if at all possible.

Blood Bowl: Scheduling Frustrations

I've been enjoying Blood Bowl less and less in recent weeks. Not so much the games themselves... But what I haven't been liking is sitting around not playing Blood Bowl. Sometimes this is even my fault! Last week I made plans to play a game at 9pm. And then I sat around at my computer playing Heroes Clicker and forgetting to check the FumBBL tab from 8pm until 11pm. I idled my way through a game I wanted to play because it slipped my mind to check on it.

Now, FumBBL has a terrible UI for chatting which didn't help. I get notified through IRC if someone sends me a new private message on the website, and I get notified through IRC if someone mentions my name in an IRC channel. But if someone responds to an existing private message, say one where we planned on playing at 9pm, then I don't get notified. So my opponent showed up a little after 9pm, responded to the private message, and then just sat around for a couple hours waiting for me to reply. (Ok, eventually he gave up and ran some errands... He came back when I clued in that I'd missed the game and we were able to play at 11pm.) I feel bad that I made him sit around. But if he'd used IRC to check on me, or if the website itself was set up to notify me whenever I got any message, things would have been a lot better.

That instance beats some of the other ones I've run into, where my opponents will say they'll show up at 9pm and then never do. It's very frustrating. I'm in one league that purports to play a game every 10 days. I last played a game on August 19th. So pretty much 2 months without getting to play a game with my wrestling themed Orcs.

I'm also running into issues with my sleep schedule. Two of my leagues are set up with almost all NA players so most games take place in the evenings. Which is when I'm asleep right now. That's on me. If I could get my opponent to give me a firm time to show up I'd set an alarm, or I'd stay up one day to push forward... But he won't really communicate. It's all a vague 'let's play during the evenings' and then I suggest the next day and he doesn't get back to me until I've gone to bed and then I don't know if I should wake up or not. I'm betting we don't get this game in, and I'm betting it gets counted as my fault despite my being available for pretty much a 20 hour window every day if I have advance notice. I can't say I blame them if they go that way, since I'm asleep during prime time right now and that's my fault. But it makes me frustrated, and it makes me not really want to keep playing.

Blood Bowl: Salary Cap Cuts

The season for Duncan's Blood Bowl league ended last week. I wasn't forced to forfeit while at WBC and was able to play the finals shortly after getting back. I'd just leveled up my claw guy in the conference finals and was able to finally build a player with the dreaded kill combo of claw, mighty blow, and piling on. My opponent was orcs and the dreaded combo really came home for me. He got 4 casualties against a team with almost exclusively 9 and 10 armour. At one point I'd decided to play for overtime (my opponent had busted through and was guaranteed to score unless I went crazy so I decided to just kill more mans to make overtime easier) and my opponent scored instead of stalling. This gave me plenty of time to score for the win while up men and it went smoothly.

The salary cap for the next season is 1850 with an extra 100k in cash allowed. I have a skill to take and then my team will be at 2220. I do get some bonuses (30k for winning the preseason, 30k for winning my conference, 50k for winning the Superior Bowl) but I still need to cut 260k to fit in under the cap. There are 4 types of things I can cut...

Rerolls - I save 70 for every reroll I throw away. They cost 140k to buy back. I have 4, which most people think is too many longterm for a team. I run with a 2 agility ball carrier who doesn't have sure hands so I like having extra rerolls. Especially now that I have a full kill stack guy, I'm going to want to have the flexibility to reroll some early pushes in an attempt to get more early casualties. I should be able to rebuy one reroll pretty easily but it isn't without risk. I've been lucky to not suffer many injuries to key players... Earmarking all my early money for a reroll could backfire if I lose a blocker or a bull centaur. Those cost 130k or 70k to replace... Easy to do once if I carry 100k over, hard to do if I need to spend 140k on a reroll first.

Bull centaurs - I have 2 of these guys and they each have 5 skills. Firing one and rebuying him immediately (I have 790k on hand right now, so easy to do) will save the 100k or 120k I'm currently spending on their skills. Starting over gives me a chance to build better players... But I don't know that I can build better players. Stat increases would be pretty good... But what I have right now just works so well. One bull is built as a hitter with block, mighty blow, tackle, break tackle, and guard. The other is my ball carrier and elf annoyer with block, dodge, break tackle, stand firm, and diving tackle. They both do what I want them to do and it feels really bad to get rid of them if I can avoid it. I'd probably rather chance getting screwed on rerolls than firing one of these.

Chaos dwarf blockers - I have 6 of these guys and they all have 3 or 4 skills. Only one has rolled an interesting skill result, and that is claw guy who is clearly untouchable. The uninteresting skills for blockers are actually really good, at least the first few. Guard and mighty blow are crucial for the way I play and stand firm has been pretty solid. After that I'm stuck taking things like grab and dauntless and those aren't very exciting. To top it all off, I have a couple blockers with permanent injuries. The guy with dauntless is down an agility which doesn't matter much. One of the guys with grab is down a movement and that is actually a pretty big deal. Moving 3 instead of 4 has impacted my play a couple of times. So purging that injury along with getting rid of an unexciting grab feels pretty reasonable and saves 80k towards the cap. Tossing the less agile guy or one of the uninjured but 4 regular skill dudes is reasonable and saves 80k also. I don't know that I like the idea of having a lot of unskilled blockers though...

Hobgoblins - These guys are the filler on the team. I generally don't use them for anything and don't try to skill them. I am running with 14 players right now so I can straight up fire up to 3 of these guys without replacing them immediately to save their full value (and not just the value of their skills like with the other players since I would want an immediate rookie). I have 6 hobgoblins... Two of them have the same 3 skills. (Dirty player, wrestle, and kick.) One of these guys is down a movement and I actually skilled the second one with kick because I intended to cut the other one at the cap. That guy is worth a full 100k and is certainly out the window. Which makes me a little sad since he's been with the team the whole time and lead the league in fouls in his first season. I have one hobgoblin with guard and don't want to fire him since guard is a double roll and I like having a more mobile source of guard. One hobgoblin is my safety of sorts with wrestle and strip ball. I can keep him or leave him... He almost never does anything useful but I think he won me a playoff game this season and is a nice safety valve to have. And then I have 2 hobgoblins with no skills at all. They have a couple SPP on them so I'd like to keep them if I can, but they're an easy 40k cut if it comes to it.

I need to cut 260k, but if I cut more than that I can carry over extra money to next season. Extra money helps with buying replacement players if people die, and also with buying more hobgoblins to fill out my roster in case I drop down below 14 players during this culling.

I'm certainly throwing away the injured hobgoblin for 100k. After that I have to cut things I want, and a lot of them, to get an extra 160k. Pretty sure that means the movement reduced blocker needs to go. That saves 80k more, so I need just another 80k. Getting rid of a reroll still requires getting rid of something else so I think I'll keep those. Realistically there are three legitimate options for an extra 80k savings... I can toss another blocker (probably the agility reduced one), I can toss two more hobgoblins (play my first preseason game with 11 players but then buy a couple hobgoblins to go back up to 13), or I can toss the safety hobgoblin.

Winning the preseason this last season got me into a fairly soft division (even though I lost to the worst team in the league due to a ludicrous amount of bad luck I still like what happened) and it got me 30k towards the cap this time around. I'd like that cap boost again, so crippling myself for the preseason is not something I really want to do. But even then I'm not sure what would cripple me more in the short term... Only having 11 players, losing my safety valve, or going down to 4 skilled blockers...

I do feel like for the most part I like my skills, so I am leaning towards dropping down to 11 players. I'll have one dangerous game where I don't have a bench but then I can buy a couple players and still have some cash left over. It does put me in danger of suffering some injuries and running out of cash... But it won't be as dangerous as tossing a reroll because I don't necessarily need to buy extra hobbos, and I can buy them in small chunks of 40k instead of blowing a full 140k all at once. There is merit in the short term to run 12 players by ditching the wrestle/strip ball hobbo... Especially if I dedicate some of the preseason to skilling up some hobbos. If I fire down to 11 players I have to lose my 2 and 3 SPP hobbos, but if I fire the skilled guy those other two are pretty close to leveling up to partially replace the fired guy.

And actually... If I were to pick 2 skills to have on hobbos I'd actually want another dirty player, not a strip ball guy. I'd like to have a wrestle/strip ball guy for the playoffs again, but I've got 18 games to skill people up before I get there...

Ok, I'm sold. I'll get my 260k by cutting 100k from my crippled hobbo, 80k by replacing my crippled blocker, and 80k by cutting my strip ball hobbo. And I guess I'll take my pending skill as a second copy of grab to replace the grab off the crippled blocker. I did like having a bunch of grabs for some of the side step heavy teams I was facing in the playoffs and I do think it'll eventually let me surf some mans with all my stand firm.

FumBBL League Updates

I'm playing in three leagues on FumBBL that have recently hit a variety of milestones worth mentioning since the last time I posted about Blood Bowl. As a reminder I'm in a league where you draft players out of a different league and an admin helps you cheat those players onto your team. I'm in a league with a salary cap in an attempt to keep teams from getting too out of control. And I'm in a league where there's one copy of every race in the game.

The drafting league recently finished off the playoffs. I managed to make it all the way to the Super Bowl finals where I lost to a Skaven team with a truly ludicrous lineup of gutter runners including a guy who can score in one turn who also has a bonus agility for funsies. I actually managed to get to the second half tied 1-1 with me receiving which is a great place to be, but I was down to 9 players and my opponent still had 12. Having 12 is important because it meant the guy who moves 13 spaces didn't have to come on the field and I couldn't try to injure him before scoring. This meant the game was almost certainly going to be at best overtime for me. But then he took out 2 more of my players right away which meant I couldn't fully protect the ball and he made some lucky but not unreasonable rolls to steal it and score himself. On the plus side I had removed a lot of his players by this point including killing his +ST blitzer. He was down to 7 players, I was back up to 8, and I had 4 turns to tie it up. I also needed to take out the one turner and maybe I could force overtime. But then he crippled my best player and only remaining damage threat and I couldn't get a hold of the gutter runners. Oh, and he stole the ball and scored again. The end result was a 3-1 loss. Second place in my first season in the league is pretty good though! I got the 31st pick in the draft as a result and took a guy with block, +AV, and 27 SPP. So he's only 4 points from his next level where he can get guard and be a nice meat shield. I suspect people think I made a bad pick but since the divisions in this league are fixed I know I'm going to have 6 of my 14 games next season against Dwarves, Khemri, and Orcs. They're all going to be slugfests and none of them can get claw so stacking up extra armour feels good to me.

The cap league has reached the playoffs and I've managed to play ahead to the point where I know I'm in the Superior Bowl finals for the second year in a row but I don't know who my opponent is from 4 available options. The finals deadline is going to be during WBC which is tricky for me. I hope the other side of the bracket plays fast so I can schedule the finals ahead, or that my opponent can play early in the week. Hotel internet is very spotty at best and I don't know that I'd really want to skip a WBC game to play Blood Bowl. Forfeiting the finals would suck. But I got to this point with a forfeit win in the wildcard round, so I can't complain too much! My conference finals game featured two teams at 2170 TV. Considering the cap coming into this season was 1750 those are pretty big numbers. My team got that high mostly by continuing to get lucky with player survival. I've still only suffered one death and one retire level injury in 44 games! I am starting to accumulate random lesser injuries but it's nothing to worrying at this point. I'm not sure if my opponent was surviving well or just earning a ton of experience to replace injuries. I suspect the latter? He also appears to be very good at rolling levels on his team since his elf team isn't allowed to take strength skills except on doubles and he had 6 guys with guard and one with mighty blow. And one guy with a bonus strength and two with bonus agility. He opened that game with a blitz and scored quickly on my possession after my ball carrier rerolled a blitz into double skulls. He then stole the ball again on the next drive and things were looking very bleak. I was out of rerolls but then I started getting super lucky and managed to get the ball back after two go for its and a two die blitz which found a pow and KOed the elf with the ball. I then continued to get lucky to recover the ball and then make the 4+ 3+ pass to end the half with a touchdown. I'd only inflicted one casualty by this point despite being a really bashy team, but on the plus side my opponent had crippled one of his own guys and killed another with failed dodges. He still had 9 left to my 14 and the score was tied with me kicking to him. My way wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. Then my opponent rolled snake eyes on a hand-off and it all exploded on him. He'd left a lot of guys in contact when he tried the hand-off and I killed one of his best players with the first hit after that. (8/3/5/7 with leap/dodge/block/nerves of steel/catch) By the end of that turn I had the ball and it was 10v4 on the field. He continued to leave guys in contact to try to keep me from scoring and I killed one of his guard elves. He actually managed to get the ball when he was down to 2 elves and he did keep me from scoring at all which took the game to overtime. But overtime was a 4v10 with me receiving and with me having 2 rerolls to his 0. There was no miracle coming and I scored easily in 4 turns. I feel like his team with all the guard and only 7AV was probably really good at bashing finesse teams but he kept leaving low armour people in contact with my mighty blow high armour dwarves and he really suffered the consequences. His team value is down to 1580 for his next game so he probably won't have cap issues. Unless I suffer similar damage in the finals I will have to make some cuts, but those are decisions for another time. I did have a guy level in my last game and now my blocker with claw and mighty blow rolled a 6+4. So he can take a movement or an armour on top of a general or strength skill. I was planning on taking piling on but now need to think about taking the movement instead. I can piling on with his next level and it'll be a lot better when he can move 2 after standing up instead of just 1. 5 movement is also better range for a blitz and since he is claw guy he wants to be blitzing a lot.

In the highlander league I threw back my high elf team and got to start a new Orc team. I'd never played Orcs before, but since they're built with high armour and like to punch things they're right up my alley. I went 3-1 in the first half of the season, losing badly to Skaven but beating up Humans, Elves, and Dark Elves. I themed the team after wrestlers and my best player is Bret Hart, a blitzer with mighty blow and tackle. He's already scored up 2 kills!

FumBBL: Team Logos

I played my final regular season game in the NBFL earlier today. (That's the FumBBL Blood Bowl league where you get to draft players between season.) I won the game which put me at 8-3-3 and at worst second place in my conference. That means a bye in the playoffs! Woo! My team is starting to accumulate a lot of permanent injuries but I also managed to level up 3 of my more important players today which is pretty sweet.

My goblin rolled a normal skill and I gave him two heads to go with his big hand. Now he can dodge anywhere on a 2+ and pick up the ball on a 3+ regardless of who may be nearby. I actually used it to negate the rain in this game which is how he leveled up.

My main ball carrier (a dark elf with block, dodge, and foul appearance) rolled doubles and can now take whatever in the world he feels like. I don't have a clue what that should be. The doubles opens up the strength and passing categories but I should probably take sure hands or a mutation of some kind. Or maybe even boring tackle since he's normally hanging back on defense. It's not like my team needs to take mighty blow or guard on an elf since most of my team can get those on regular rolls. But in reality I haven't skilled up many other people and I only really have 2 big guys with guard right now. Maybe putting guard on a hard to hit guy makes sense...

My main safety also leveled up. He was one of my drafted guys and started the season as a block/dodge/tackle dude. I've since given him mighty blow. He has plenty of good options for a 5th skill... Frenzy to get extra shots at taking someone down. Horns to get a strength boost since he does a lot of my blitzing. Claw to do more damage! (Ideally he's hitting 'softer' targets since he's my only mobile tackle at the moment and tries to hit people with dodge... But especially in a draft league there are lots of heavily armoured dudes with dodge running around.) Piling on is a different damage option. I still really need more guard and this guy also is harder to knock down with his dodge so that's always an option. Oh, and he actually rolled a non-doubles 10 so he could also get movement or armour. Having my main blitzer be a little faster actually feels like a really useful thing. My team is also a bit on the slow side as it is (only one player with more than 6 movement) and this would put him up to 7 movement. I do like armour, especially since I can probably keep him away from enemies with both claw and tackle. And my division has no claw in it (the other 3 teams are orcs, lizardmen, and khemri) which makes armour that little bit better.

Realistically I'm going to wait and see who my opponent is in the conference semifinals and pick what I think will help me win the next game. Because I'm all about winning now at the expense of the future... (The Leafs should hire me as GM!) But probably I'll end up taking guard on the elf and movement on the marauder.

But what was really interesting about my game today is my opponent complimented me on my team logo before the game started. I had my sister make me a sweet looking swamp creature thing (my team is the Hacksonville Quagmires as a Blood Bowl spin on the Jacksonville Jaguars) that used the Jaguars logo as the head for the swamp thing. It's really awesome. I was in the process of telling the guy that my sister made it when he made a comment about how he didn't know you could go across the line of scrimmage with your logo. This confused me for a second because I just wanted a logo for the standings page of the league but then I remembered that league teams could actually have their logo show up on the field. So I turned that on and saw the following...

I think it's completely unintentional since I don't think I told her anything about dimensions or anything like that. It's entirely coincidental that the monster's hand is just barely reaching across the line of scrimmage as though it were going to crush the front line of the enemy team. Which makes it even more awesome! Possibly considered rude to have your logo go into the other team's side of the field but the way this one does it seems too good for me to want to change it.

Blood Bowl: Playing Elves

Back at the start of the year I joined a Blood Bowl league on FumBBL which runs under the interesting premise that every race in the game gets played by exactly one person. So they have 24 people playing 24 teams. They assign the teams randomly and between seasons you can keep your team or throw your race back into the pool and get a different race that someone else gave back. You have to start back over from scratch with a 1000TV.

I thought it was an interesting idea and I gave it a show, but I ended up not having much fun. I got assigned the 'High Elf' race which is a slower, tougher elf race. I went 6-0-3 on the season, making it to the league semifinals where I lost last night. That's a pretty reasonable success rate, and I do like the idea of a passing game in a fantasy football simulator game. But there were two big things that made the games not very fun for me overall.

The first is the way they throw new teams up against ludicrously experienced teams. My first round opponent had 37 games experience and a team value of 2060 compared to my 1000. I got more money to spend in inducements for that game than I got to build my team in the first place! I won that game, 1-0, solely on the basis of inducing Morg 'n Thorg. He earned the only SPP for my team in the game, and most of my guys just existed to get in the other team's way and get hurt while my inducements won me the game. One of the reasons I play RPG games is because I like leveling up dudes and seeing their numbers get bigger. Sometimes in Blood Bowl those dudes then get crippled or killed which can be annoying, but then you get to level more dudes up to take their place and it tends to work out ok. But in lopsided matches like this you rate to lose way more than you gain because your useful players tend to be induced ones that can't level up and one of the ways many people skill up their teams is to make them more deadly to yours.

The second is that the elf playstyle is good for winning many games but it's not good for winning specific games. By that I mean you end up having to roll a lot of d6s when you play elves. If you don't roll many 1s then you win even if you made some mistakes. If you roll lots of 1s then you lose even if you outplay your opponent. Roll a reasonable number of 1s and you can get a 'fair' game, but not really a game I like playing. The problem for me at least is rolling a 1 is a 'rare' occurrence so when it happens it feels bad. But it's not actually very rare at all, especially when you roll lots of d6s, so it is going to bite you reasonably often. I get that it happens, but it means that the games where I win by rolling lots of not-1s I tend to feel like I won because I was lucky. And the games where I lose because I can't stop rolling 1s (like the semifinal game) I walk away feeling bitter. I get that elves will lose games every now and then because they roll 1s, but I don't like it when that happens, so I don't like playing elves.

Elves also have the problem that you can't level them up to play an attrition game without getting very lucky. I didn't get very lucky as I leveled people up (only 1 doubles in 11 levels, and that on the worst player to give either guard or mighty blow) so my team couldn't really try to win any way except by being elves and rolling d6s. I won 6 of 9 games so that plan is actually a pretty good one, but being a good plan doesn't mean it's a fun plan.

My team actually didn't take much damage (2 deaths and no permanent injuries in 9 games, though a lot of that is spending inducement money on extra apothecaries) and it does have plenty of guys with block now and extra agility on both a thrower and a catcher so keeping the team around is very reasonable. If I want to play an agility based elf game and accept that I will lose every now and then to rolling lots of 1s, anyway. I don't think I want to do that though. So I guess the question is if I want to rejoin the league with another randomly assigned team or if I want to leave the league. Earlier I was pretty sure I was going to quit because the league admins were too lax with deadlines so some 2 week time periods lasted 5 weeks which was frustrating and I really didn't want to play 1000 vs 2060 TV again. But it sounds like other people were similarly bitter so they're cracking down on the time period durations and they're going to seed all new teams in divisions against each other as possible instead of the old plan of putting you into the division occupied by the last team of your race. (So I was in the top division because the old High Elf player was good.)

Wheel of Chaos Result

A month ago I posted that I was going to enter my human team into the Wheel of Chaos draw but that I needed to get some experience onto my rookie blitzer before I'd feel really good about playing. The team is a 'BlackBox' team which means you tell the system you want to play a game and it gives you an opponent from the other teams that also activated around that time. It tries to make 'fair' matchups, but 'fair' here is defined pretty loosely. BlackBox has a bit of a bad reputation going because of how many people build teams not to win football games but to just kill other people. I don't know how true that really is but the problem becomes that once people believe it to be true the only answers to fighting back are to go whole hog on avoiding conflict (be an elf team and just dodge away) or also build as a killing team and kill the opponents first.

So here you have my team, humans, that just had their killing guy die. My team is a ludicrously high team value for a human team in the box. I can't avoid conflict terribly well and I can no longer realistically fight back until I level up that new blitzer. But I could get lucky and play against an elf team, or I could get lucky and get paired way down (happened several times to me last time I was trying to level a player), or I could just get lucky in the games I got against killer teams. I didn't.

My first game was against a brutal dwarf team. Not that dwarf teams can be anything but killing machines. He got 9 casualty rolls off on my team, and only 2 of them were badly hurts. (Which should happen half the time... But I got unlucky.) Three deaths and a permanent injury. (One of the deaths was my apothecary trying to help and failing.) The really bad part was who died... I lost my current best blitzer and my best lineman, both of who had bonus agility and one of whom had my only remaining copy of tackle. I also had 3 more guys injured to miss the next game (my ogre and 2 more blitzers), so the next game was going to suck...

My second game was against the true scourge of the BlackBox. It was a team that was built to stay at a medium level and just kill people. It accomplishes this by firing anyone who skilled up except for a couple of players who roll doubles to get the killing stats. I did my best to avoid contact with those killers but they still killed two more guys (one of which was actually the apothecary again). This time it was a lineman built to take hits on the line. So his job was to die, but I would have liked him to do his job in a tournament game, not in a game where I was just trying to earn experience. Speaking of which, I only got 9 SPP in the entire game and they were all on the two players on my team that are good enough already.

My third game was against a nurgle team also build, unsurprisingly, just to kill people. This game featured a death (self inflicted, again, by the apothecary) and two retirement forcing permanent injuries. This time I lost my remaining skilled blitzer (who had bonus agility) and my kicker (who was the guy I'd last played games to level up).

Three games in, 6 players lost. Including my kicker, 3 of 5 agility players, and my tough guy.

I got frustrated and gave up. I'd built up my human team under a different matchmaking system and it no longer seemed like I could do it again. (Although if I'd gotten lucky with the apothecary instead of unlucky I probably keep 3 of those 6 guys and my way is not nearly as bad.) Certainly not in the short period of time before the tournament would start. Which, incidentally, I'd signed up for before I'd started playing games so I was stuck with playing them for a round. On the plus side my team still had a really good catcher and ogre. Maybe they could carry my team?

First round of the tournament I got a bye. Second round I was up against a lower value undead team. This was a team I was designed to crush! I have chumps to throw on his few slow killing dudes. I have the guard to beat up his linemen, or the agility to dodge away from them. I have a couple of fast dudes with tackle to take out his squishy ball carriers. Or rather, I should have had all of those things. Instead I had no copies of tackle left. Most of my agility was dead. My good tanky chump is gone. Almost all my guards are toast.

I got lucky early and was in a good way after the first half, but he got lucky with all his regeneration rolls and then I wasn't able to take down his ghouls even though he was forced to leave them wide open because I have no one with tackle.

So I lost the tournament in the second round, and my team is complete garbage now. On the plus side no one else died? But I suspect I'm just never going to play them again. My opponent suggested my best bet was going to be firing my two remaining agility players and rebuilding from scratch with a block ogre and entirely rookies. Maybe that would have the best chance of success but it doesn't sound fun, especially since I could easily get paired against a killer team while I have no skills at all to fight back.

Wheel of Chaos 2014

It's that time of year again... FumBBL's Wheel of Chaos is starting up and if I want to join in I need to figure out where I want to apply. I posted about it a couple times last year and ended up deciding to just roll a die to figure out which group to join since that seemed sufficiently chaotic. In retrospect there was a 'soft' group that didn't get enough people signed up to it, and it was the group I thought would be softest, so maybe I should be using some logic this year?

This year the mutation prizes are horns, disturbing presence, two heads, and tentacles. I only have one box team high enough to really join up, which is the same human team that lost in the first round last year. My TV is much higher though, up at 2010, and the team is a lot better since I'm not dragging around a +AG Ogre and instead have 5 real players with +AG. I joke that they're my half-elf team. The only downside is my killer died in my last game so I don't have anyone with mighty blow+piling on anymore. Probably I should play some games to level up the new blitzer and hope I don't lose too much in the process. But either way this team should be guaranteed a spot in whichever qualifier I want to join.

How do I feel about the rewards? Horns is still pretty sweet on a killer if I build a new one of those. Disturbing presence is complete trash. Two heads would be particularly good with my odd focus on bonus agility. Tentacles would be super fun, especially since my current Ogre is really set up for it with block, guard, and stand firm as his skills thus far. Tentacles on the surface feels like it wouldn't have many people really interested in it since most strong teams have mutation access anyway. Elves really have no use for tentacles so I'd expect them to go somewhere else. Two heads has been under represented both of the last two years and I sorta expect that to keep happening this year too.

So I guess I should figure out how I feel about playing against elves. If I get a killer back I think my elf game is pretty good. I have the bonus agility to fight their positioning game and can whittle their numbers down. I also have really good one turn touchdown possibilities with my catcher having an extra movement and an extra agility. On the other hand I have a lot of guard and can really run circles around the stupid bashy teams. So I feel like I don't really care one way or the other. If I really wanted to avoid elves I'd join the tentacles group. If I really wanted to play them I'd join the two heads group. But if I don't care... I should flip a coin!

Or maybe I really want to avoid Khemri? They seem like they really should be joining the tentacles group. I hate playing against Khemri in general, but this team actually seems well built to match up against them. I have dorky linemen to throw on the mummies and I have lots of agility to dodge the key guys away to make them move very slowly up field.

Ok, I've convinced myself. I went random last year and lost in the first round... This year I want tentacles. 

Blood Bowl: Preseason Goals

One of the FumBBL leagues I'm in runs a 4 week preseason before the 14 week regular season. The league has a salary cap which applies before the preseason so the preseason is a way to let teams build back up a little after potentially having made some brutal cuts. (There's one dark elf team currently running with 1 reroll!) They also build the divisions for the season based on the standings of the swiss preseason in a snake format. Last season my division had the 3, 14, 19, and 30th teams from the preseason standings for example.

I've been thinking about what I should be trying to accomplish in the preseason. My team doesn't have any glaring weaknesses from the salary cap but I do have a couple of no-skill players who could use a cheap level. I've been thinking about buying a minotaur to level him in the preseason but since I had to light most of my cash on fire doing so would risk not playing with some positionals if I actually start having people die. Should I be trying to win the preseason? Should I be trying to kill my opposition? Should I just be trying to keep my own guys alive and screw winning?

Last season I went the protect my own guys route by inducing extra apothecaries whenever I had inducement money to spend. The idea being that while I like winning I wanted to be able to win in the regular season and that meant keeping people alive as I built up the money and skills to have a reasonable team. Apothecaries are not very good at winning games, certainly not compared to picking up star players, but the star player can steal the MVP experience and the apothecary can save someone's career. Not guaranteed to, of course, but Blood Bowl is a game of small edges and those felt like good edges to pick up.

I still tried to win, of course, since scoring is worth experience and winning is worth extra money. I went 1-2-1 which seemed like a decent result and made me #14. I also tried to hurt people because that's how Blood Bowl works. My last preseason game included 6 serious injuries on my opponent which set him way, way back. But doing so wasn't really to my advantage, especially since so many of the injuries weren't even worth experience (failed leaps mostly)! I did get to play that team in the season but I wasn't one of the first couple who got to take real advantage of the damage I did. So while doing damage is fun it isn't really profitable for the season.

Winning does have a tangible benefit in a salary cap boost for the next season for the top three teams. I didn't think anything of that last season but ended up well over the cap due to the great luck I had avoiding injuries all season long. My team this season is already at the cap for next season so any cap bonuses I could pick up would seem to be pretty relevant.

How about division seeding? Is that relevant? Winning the preseason would mean getting into a division with the teams that came 16, 17, and 32nd. If everyone is playing all out to win then getting two games against the worst team and having no one in the top 15 sounds awesome! But maybe with new teams every season and the randomness of swiss pairings in a 32 team pod the seedings won't actually have much meaning? Well... What happened last season? Did the preseason standings have much predictive power towards the final standings?

I plugged the preseason ranking from last season into Excel along with the points earned during the season by those teams. The two sets of data were moderately negatively correlated with an r value of -.594. So certainly not a guarantee but it does seem like it would be a decent predictor. All the teams that had really bad regular seasons also had a bad preseason. It looks like the teams in the 12-21 range all did better than would be expected and the teams in the 5-11 range did worse. I wonder if that has anything to do with the snake factor? Or if this is just a really small sample size? I couldn't find the final standings from previous seasons because the images look to have been removed or something so I couldn't check for prior results. I tried replacing preseason ranking with preseason points (avoiding tiebreakers) and r became .527. It still shows that the preseason and the regular season are correlated, but not a super lot. It's almost like Blood Bowl teams can change significantly over time!

Anyway, it's a big enough thing that at least getting into the top 8 seems like it could be a good thing? And getting all the way to first is probably really good. I do want the cap bonus and I'm becoming convinced that division seeding is at least a little relevant. But I don't think going super crazy to win is going to make sense. I'm still going to save my apothecary for a serious injury I think. Or maybe I won't! I am a bit of a wild man...

I've already played one game this preseason and my opponent induced up a claw star player and used him to blitz almost every turn. It seemed like a good way to damage my team and a questionable way to skill up his own team. But he did get 14 SPP on the rest of his team so I guess it worked out pretty well. I don't think I would have taken the risk of 2 star players getting the MVP but he didn't get dinged. And I actually ended up permanently injuring one of them, so maybe having a bomber as a lightning rod made sense. I won 2-0, which is good for me, but I suffered a stat loss which is bad for me. Well, quasi-bad. Now one of my dwarves has only 1 agility. It probably won't matter and certainly isn't worth retiring a 28 SPP dude over but I wish it hadn't happened. Poor Mrs White.

NWFL Finals Results

I played the finals of Duncan's FumBBL Blood Bowl league earlier this week. I posted about my different options for how to prepare my team and ended up deciding to cut my dwarf who was missing the next game and to also cut the niggled hobgoblin since I was really worried she was going to just get taken out. I also threw in 150k to get a wizard. I figured my opponent and his likely 220k would be getting a wizard anyway and especially against Khemri adding a wizard on would be a big advantage. He ended up spending his 370k on a wizard and 2 bribes which had the potential to let him foul his way to a man advantage but it didn't end up mattering as he didn't have a single player ejected all game.

My opponent chose to receive the kick and the weather was very sunny. Not that either of our predominantly 2 agility teams were planning on passing the ball but it did mean desperation plays would be a little more desperate. The game started off on a bit of a sour note for my opponent. The opening kick-off roll was a thrown rock which killed his only tomb guardian with block. He did regenerate but it meant he lost a 5 strength dude for the opening drive. He then proceeded to throw some blocks with guys who didn't have block and burned a reroll and then rolled double skulls to end his turn after knocking down one person on each team. I then badly hurt a second tomb guardian on my turn, who didn't regenerate, and moved some guys into position to go steal the ball if he didn't deal with it.

His second turn opened with another reroll burned on a 3 die blitz that came up skull/skull/both down. He did pick up the ball though. I then badly hurt a skeleton who also chose not to regenerate. My opponent only had a 12 man roster so he was guaranteed to be down guys for the rest of the game. His next turn didn't accomplish a whole lot. I KOed a skeleton, made a very risky and probably wrong positional choice, and then got kicked out for fouling. My risky play was sticking 5 of my guys into a little box where they could be hit by a fireball. One of the 5 guys got kicked out so only 4 could get hit. Only problem is those were my 4 best guys. Both bulls, my 3 skill dwarf, and a 2 skill dwarf. It did put my opponent in a really bad position and I was likely going to get a shot at his ball carrier if he didn't use his wizard. As a team with a 2 agility ball carrier I actually want to get the wizard out of the way when I don't have the ball so it might have been the right play? In retrospect I think I probably could have baited out the wizard with a hobgoblin in the box instead of my second bull. He did use the fireball and it knocked over my beatdown bull and seriously hurt my 3 skill dwarf. Fireball does have to roll to hit and roll to break armour so it is only 5% to take each guy out. It is 81% that he doesn't KO or better any of my 4 guys when he takes this action so it is probably pretty good to make him do it? But it does give him an out to get back in the game when I'm already ahead so maybe it wasn't worth the risk? Anyway, I used my apothecary and he came home so Colonel Mustard was back in the game for the next drive.

He ran his ballcarrier down the field and it was looking like he was going to get to score if I didn't use my wizard. I ended up doing 2 go for its to get assists in the right spot so I could blitz off a marking tomb guardian. I had to reroll to make that work. Then my utility bull centaur was able to make a dodge and 3 go for its in order to stand beside the enemy ball carrier. He has stand firm, block, and dodge so it's pretty hard to move him away. My opponent ended up deciding to dodge with his 3 agility blitz-ra to get an assist and the blitz with the ball carrier who has tackle. Skull reroll push meant he was stuck still beside me. He could take the 2 agility dodge and score or he could stand there and hope things got better next turn. He decided to dodge away, rolled a 3, and stunned his guy.

All this play had been taking place on the sidelines so I took the opportunity to ignore the ball and push his tomb guardian and his 3 agility blitz-ra into the crowd. Both got KOed. I also badly hurt another skeleton, but he got better. His turn didn't do much since he only had 4 guys in play and one was stunned. I had 3 turns with the ball deep in my own territory so I started running a dwarf down field as a scoring option, moved a couple guys back to watch the ball, and tried to pick it up with my bull and a reroll. It failed. And the ball bounced to a reasonable spot for my opponent. He didn't have a reroll but he did have a play to roll 5+ 5+ 4+ 2+ 2+ and score, with a reroll on one of the 5+s. He tried, rolled a 2 on the first roll, and kicked the ball out of bounds where the crowd threw it to mid field. I ran my dwarf down field some more just in case and decided to foul his piling on guy while I had the chance. It didn't work, but I didn't get kicked out either. I then failed the pickup through reroll. He did nothing and I again tried the foul on the piling on guy. It again failed, but I still wasn't ejected, so I got to try my desperation play. The pickup and 3 go for its worked, but the hand off didn't, and that was the half.

My plan going in was to try to minimize the impact of regeneration by winning 1-0 so being tied 0-0 at the half after kicking off was just fine by me. He failed all 3 of his KO rolls so it was 7 on 11 for the second half with his 3 agility guy out, all his guard out, and 2 of his 5 strength guys out. I still had my wizard. I didn't see how I could lose. The kickoff table was perfect defense so he got to make my hits a little harder and the kickoff landed exactly in the end zone which was about as good a start as he could have hoped for. But then my bull centaur managed his pickup in the end zone and it was pretty much over from there. He did decide to keep dodging and going for it with his 1 agility tomb guardian to blitz my ball carrier and it kept working but he never got a pow to take my guy down. I stalled until turn 8 while hitting the few remaining guys he had left and scored. He went 1 for 6 on KO rolls for his turn 8 so he was down to just 3 guys and Khemri really can't one turn touchdown with 3 guys. To rub a little salt in the wound the kickoff result was another rock thrown which stunned one of his 3 guys. The dirty player who was undoubtedly going to try to get some revenge. His final action was to roll skull/both down on a tomb guardian block and fall over.

Everything went my way this game. Absolutely everything. I think I played it reasonably well and had a solid plan and I even think baiting out the wizard was probably a good move though I didn't think it through well enough at the time. But I could have played like an idiot and probably would have won the game anyway with the way things went for my opponent.

To make things even sweeter my main bull centaur, Mr Boddy, skilled up and rolled his 3rd set of doubles in 5 skills. I skipped the first one to get block but I actually took stand firm with his 4th skill because I was planning on rolling doubles again with his 5th and wanted to combo it with diving tackle. (I also wanted to be able to play more on the sidelines without getting surfed and the ability to not get pushed off of a marked target was actually pretty key this game.) So now he has block, dodge, break tackle, stand firm, and diving tackle. He's a beast! He should help out against elf teams that can make desperation scoring plays. I had two other people skill up and the whole thing brings my TV up to exactly 1850. As far as I can tell the salary cap for next season is 1750 and I get bonuses of +20 for winning my division, +30 for winning my conference, and +50 for winning the championship. So my cap is actually 1850... Exactly where I landed with no cuts needed! I did cut two guys before the finals, to be fair, but I still like how that worked out. I need to light 440k cash on fire but I'm otherwise good to go for next season. Maybe I'll eventually roll doubles on a dwarf and get claw...

NWFL Finals

Later today (10pm EST if you want to come watch) I'll be playing in the finals of the NWFL league on FumBBL. This is a league with a salary cap between seasons so I may well need to fire players after the game, especially if I lose the game since winning is worth a 50k bonus to the salary cap. Even if that wasn't true I want to win because I want to win! I'm up against the race I've always found hardest to plan around: Khemri. They have 4 guys with no in game negative and 5 strength which makes it very hard to just line up and punch. On the plus side the team is all slow and clumsy so they have difficulty actually winning the football game and I do have a bunch of heavily armoured dudes to stick in front of the big guys and slow them down.

As things currently stand, without cutting or buying anything, my TV is 1760 and his is 1560. We both have 12 players for the next game. He has 6 copies of mighty blow and one of piling on. He has a +MV throw-ra and a +AG blitz-ra so as far as Khemri teams go he's got a good plan for scoring. He only has 3 copies of guard, one of which is on a 7AV skeleton, and only two of his players have learned block. I'm pretty sure if I can get his big guys tied up with only 1 dwarf that I will really win the remaining 7 on 7 battle.

Getting that to happen is going to be tricky, especially since I only have 5 dwarves for this game since one of them is out with an injury. Not a permanent one, but he doesn't get to play this game. I also have a player who got a niggling injury two games ago and is certainly getting fired before next season if I have to make any cuts and probably even if I don't. A 7AV guy with a niggle doesn't get to last very long. So I'm trying to decide if I want to cut either of those guys. Cutting the dwarf costs my his 8 SPP and guard for next season but does get me a little closer to another chance at claw and it gives me a crucial 6th dwarf for the finals. Not having any skills won't hurt very much since his job is going to be stand beside a mummy and not die. I play pretty fast and loose with my hobgoblins, especially the ones with guard, so I suspect my opponent will be able to pile into her at the first opportunity. I could probably protect her, but why would I want to protect someone with guard? Guard is for standing beside people! I likely don't even need guard in this match since I'm not going to be hitting mummies and the rest of his team is flimsy. And I have 6 other copies of guard!

I could also buy more bodies to have a bigger bench, and I can throw in extra money to get some inducements of my own. A wizard is pure gold against Khemri in particular since they can have such a hard time picking up the ball. I don't mind getting a wizard to give him a wizard, and since he's already getting 200k in inducements he'll already have a wizard if he wants one! Wizards are pretty scary for me too, since I also run with a 2 agility ball carrier, but I don't see a way to deny him a wizard. I guess I probably want to steer clear of putting him up to 380k so he can't induce Ramtut?

I'm leaning towards firing Plum and Rose, rehiring them both as rookies (net +20TV) and getting the wizard. That'll give him 370k in inducement money which probably becomes a wizard, a chainsaw, and a bribe. If he gets either the chainsaw or the scimitar guy it puts my niggled person at even more danger so firing her and trading in block/guard for 50k in non-inducements is probably a really good plan. Alternatively 370k is exactly enough for him to get a wizard and a good 3 agility ball carrier which makes my wizard a little worse. Probably not enough worse, since I really like the threat of a wizard and I do have some guys who can move 9 spaces to take advantage? Maybe? I guess I can also throw away my 4th reroll to cut the inducements down by 70k, or not rehire the 13th player to cut them down by 40k. He does get second choice and can cut a similar number of skeletons if he really wants to.

I do find I use most of my rerolls, and I am planning on throwing -2d blocks on his mummies since they don't have block, so it's probably not a great idea to cut the 4th reroll. Eh, I have 5 hours to decide, maybe the right plan will come to me in that time!