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.
Showing posts with label FumBBL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FumBBL. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
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!
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!
Friday, May 16, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, May 02, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, April 04, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, February 10, 2014
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.
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?
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.
Friday, January 24, 2014
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...
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...
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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!
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!
Friday, January 03, 2014
Blood Bowl: Draft Complete
Yesterday had the last pick of the NBFL and it's time to start cheesing up some abilities. I found out how they manage to make this happen. You play a bunch of games against a team full of snotlings and beat them up to earn lots of experience. As you level up you pick whatever skills you want on the drafted guys and at the end of the leveling games they get an admin to go in and edit all of the drafted players and set their skills to the drafted ones instead of what they have. On top of this each of your other players can farm up 6 experience as well (enough for 1 level) and you get whatever you happen to roll.
I'm playing chaos pact which is a team featuring 3 'big guys' who are super strong, hard to skill up, and randomly decide to take actions off. I get a couple of one shot dudes from other rosters (a dark elf so I have an agile dude, a goblin so I have a crazy dude, and a skaven so I have a fast dude) and the rest of the team is guys who can mutate and get strength skills on regular rolls. People often play this race without the big guys and use the easy mutations and strength skills to kill lots of people with the dreaded claw-piling_on-mighty_blow combo. Drafted players couldn't get mutations which meant I wasn't going to be able to draft anyone with the combo anyway and with every team getting infinite cash and some free stars it didn't seem like keeping my team rating low was going to accomplish a whole lot. So I decided my primary goal in the draft was going to be getting hard to earn skills on my big guys to make them more useful with a secondary goal of getting a bunch of my regular guys into a position to be good guard dudes. I like punching over and over and I really want to have a strength and guard advantage.
The first guy I got to draft was in the expansion draft and I took a basic block/guard guy as my troll. Trolls aren't very good at much beyond being a large man in one location and those two skills are pretty much the only two I need on him. Block is a doubles skill on a troll so it was good to pick it up in a draft. As an added bonus he's only 9 SPP away from his next level and if he rolls doubles on that one he can get a mutation. Like tentacles!
Off to the main draft where I got to pick 9th, 34th, and 41st. There were some really, really good guys at the top of the draft (the first overall pick was a +ST, +AG, sure hands, strip ball guy who turned into a dwarf runner) and thankfully no one took the guy I really had my eye on. A big guy with block, guard, tackle, and enough SPP to need only 2 more to level. I turned him into an ogre which is pretty fantastic for me. Block and tackle are both doubles only skills and guard is super important for my team plan. Being so close to level is really good as, again, a double will turn into tentacles or maybe claw. I turned him into an ogre instead of a minotaur because I thought I might draft a juggernaut minotaur and even if I didn't a minotaur with one free skill can just take juggernaut. Minotaur has horns and wild animal so he's a better option to be the blitzing big guy if I need to have one of those so he should hold off and get juggernaut I think.
By the time the 34th pick came around the other big guy with block had been taken and there wasn't much exciting left. No bonus strength, no bonus agility, and no big guy with doubles meant I didn't have any obvious choices left. There was a guy with bonus armour and two with bonus movement if I wanted those. Most of my team gets practically every skill on a regular roll but my linemen actually don't get agility skills so if I wanted to get something like dodge it would be easier to get it here than by drafting it. Ultimately I decided that I didn't really want to put my minotaur on the line of scrimmage, especially if he didn't get lucky and get block, so I need a 3rd tough guy for the line. The guy with bonus armour also happened to have dodge and wrestle so I went with him. I don't really like wrestle on a guy who expects to get guard next level but getting the 9th armour was important for me. My three divisional opponents are dwarves, orcs, and lizardmen and they can't get claw which makes bonus armour a reasonable play. (Also having all three opponents featuring 9 armour dudes means my own claw is going to be VERY tasty.) Added bonus? This guy is only 10 SPP from leveling again to get guard. 10 is pretty far for a guy without mighty blow, claw, or block but maybe he'll get some MVPs or something.
Pick 41 had even slimmer pickings. The minotaur option was still on the table (break tackle, movement, juggernaut) but he was 19 SPP from leveling again and I'm actually not a huge fan of break tackle on a loner. I decided I would probably rather have a shot at doubles with a fallback of guard or juggernaut than have one of my 3 big guys so far away from either block or guard. I ended up taking another lineman instead, this one with block, dodge, and tackle. He's also planning on being a hard to knock down guy with guard. And he's only 5 SPP from leveling! That's one MVP or a handful of skinks. He might also be my go to ball carrier until I really level up the elf. I could see taking extra arms on his level instead of guard for a ball carrier.
I'm pretty happy with the draft and I'm excited to see how this league plays out. It'll be nice to skip over the 'flat broke and unskilled' section of Blood Bowl for a change.
I'm playing chaos pact which is a team featuring 3 'big guys' who are super strong, hard to skill up, and randomly decide to take actions off. I get a couple of one shot dudes from other rosters (a dark elf so I have an agile dude, a goblin so I have a crazy dude, and a skaven so I have a fast dude) and the rest of the team is guys who can mutate and get strength skills on regular rolls. People often play this race without the big guys and use the easy mutations and strength skills to kill lots of people with the dreaded claw-piling_on-mighty_blow combo. Drafted players couldn't get mutations which meant I wasn't going to be able to draft anyone with the combo anyway and with every team getting infinite cash and some free stars it didn't seem like keeping my team rating low was going to accomplish a whole lot. So I decided my primary goal in the draft was going to be getting hard to earn skills on my big guys to make them more useful with a secondary goal of getting a bunch of my regular guys into a position to be good guard dudes. I like punching over and over and I really want to have a strength and guard advantage.
The first guy I got to draft was in the expansion draft and I took a basic block/guard guy as my troll. Trolls aren't very good at much beyond being a large man in one location and those two skills are pretty much the only two I need on him. Block is a doubles skill on a troll so it was good to pick it up in a draft. As an added bonus he's only 9 SPP away from his next level and if he rolls doubles on that one he can get a mutation. Like tentacles!
Off to the main draft where I got to pick 9th, 34th, and 41st. There were some really, really good guys at the top of the draft (the first overall pick was a +ST, +AG, sure hands, strip ball guy who turned into a dwarf runner) and thankfully no one took the guy I really had my eye on. A big guy with block, guard, tackle, and enough SPP to need only 2 more to level. I turned him into an ogre which is pretty fantastic for me. Block and tackle are both doubles only skills and guard is super important for my team plan. Being so close to level is really good as, again, a double will turn into tentacles or maybe claw. I turned him into an ogre instead of a minotaur because I thought I might draft a juggernaut minotaur and even if I didn't a minotaur with one free skill can just take juggernaut. Minotaur has horns and wild animal so he's a better option to be the blitzing big guy if I need to have one of those so he should hold off and get juggernaut I think.
By the time the 34th pick came around the other big guy with block had been taken and there wasn't much exciting left. No bonus strength, no bonus agility, and no big guy with doubles meant I didn't have any obvious choices left. There was a guy with bonus armour and two with bonus movement if I wanted those. Most of my team gets practically every skill on a regular roll but my linemen actually don't get agility skills so if I wanted to get something like dodge it would be easier to get it here than by drafting it. Ultimately I decided that I didn't really want to put my minotaur on the line of scrimmage, especially if he didn't get lucky and get block, so I need a 3rd tough guy for the line. The guy with bonus armour also happened to have dodge and wrestle so I went with him. I don't really like wrestle on a guy who expects to get guard next level but getting the 9th armour was important for me. My three divisional opponents are dwarves, orcs, and lizardmen and they can't get claw which makes bonus armour a reasonable play. (Also having all three opponents featuring 9 armour dudes means my own claw is going to be VERY tasty.) Added bonus? This guy is only 10 SPP from leveling again to get guard. 10 is pretty far for a guy without mighty blow, claw, or block but maybe he'll get some MVPs or something.
Pick 41 had even slimmer pickings. The minotaur option was still on the table (break tackle, movement, juggernaut) but he was 19 SPP from leveling again and I'm actually not a huge fan of break tackle on a loner. I decided I would probably rather have a shot at doubles with a fallback of guard or juggernaut than have one of my 3 big guys so far away from either block or guard. I ended up taking another lineman instead, this one with block, dodge, and tackle. He's also planning on being a hard to knock down guy with guard. And he's only 5 SPP from leveling! That's one MVP or a handful of skinks. He might also be my go to ball carrier until I really level up the elf. I could see taking extra arms on his level instead of guard for a ball carrier.
I'm pretty happy with the draft and I'm excited to see how this league plays out. It'll be nice to skip over the 'flat broke and unskilled' section of Blood Bowl for a change.
Friday, September 06, 2013
Revisiting Blood Bowl Clients
Six months ago I started using a second client for playing online Blood Bowl. I wrote a bit about the two clients (Cyanide and FumBBL) at the time but having now used them both for six months I wanted to go back over the differences between them. This may have been prompted by the two games of Blood Bowl I played yesterday, one on each client. In particular the game I played on the Cyanide client took more than three times as long to play as the one on FumBBL and featured several interface quirks/bugs that ranged from annoying to frustrating.
What does the Cyanide client have going for it? Pretty pictures. It has the coaches and teams for Sceadeau's league. And that's pretty much it. It does have a log file you can parse for stats which is nice, except it's bugged such that any roll of a 1 or a 6 doesn't give you the mod info so roughly a third of all the d6 stats are corrupted.
What does the FumBBL client have going for it? So many things I need to go to bullet form to list them all...
What does the Cyanide client have going for it? Pretty pictures. It has the coaches and teams for Sceadeau's league. And that's pretty much it. It does have a log file you can parse for stats which is nice, except it's bugged such that any roll of a 1 or a 6 doesn't give you the mod info so roughly a third of all the d6 stats are corrupted.
What does the FumBBL client have going for it? So many things I need to go to bullet form to list them all...
- Graceful recovery for disconnections. Several times over the course of the Cyanide league I had to log in and reset a match because one of the two players got disconnected in some way. The only options are to have the disconnected person forfeit (losing their cash, MVP, and any chance at winning or tieing the game) or restart the game from the very beginning. Both of these options are terrible. Someone in a dominant position could suddenly find themselves back at the start of the game. Robb had multiple injuries disappear when one of his games got reset. FumBBL just pauses the game where the disconnection happened and you can resume it right away, or the next day, or in a week.
- Speed. Pretty pictures come with pretty animations and those take time. A lot of time. I know I play with some slow players in the Cyanide league but I think the interface isn't doing them any favours. Cyanide also has a ruthless time out feature where if you go over 4 minutes your turn instantly ends. My playoff game yesterday had my opponent think for most of his 4 minutes and then run out of time just before he threw the final block of his turn, which happened to be on my ball carrier who has in range of the end zone on turn 8. I failed the dodge away so I didn't score, but I probably shouldn't have even had the chance to do so. On FumBBL you get a button to time someone out after their time expires but it isn't automatic. This also means if the doorbell rings or a baby wakes up or someone needs to run to the bathroom or something they aren't just screwed.
- Fewer bugs. FumBBL has a few bugs but not nearly as many or as common as the ones on Cyanide. FumBBL has never lined up invisible players for me in random positions. It has never kept me from subbing out my Deathroller. It has never let my opponent field 12 or more players. Neither client is really updated much, which pretty much means either client is stuck with their bugs and interface quirks. The only really bad bug I've run into on FumBBL is you can't induce positional players who are missing the current game.
- A better interface. One of the important design decisions when building a Blood Bowl client is deciding how to handle skill use. Practically every skill in the game is optional, so you need to decide if and how you're going to prompt the players to use these optional skills. FumBBL took the route of just defaulting almost every skill to the obvious choice and only prompting for things when the coder thinks you should be asked. You always use dodge, unless you're in danger of getting crowd surfed (or maybe even in a 1-turn touchdown situation?). I know it doesn't always prompt, but sometimes does. Cyanide decided to just default all skills to always use them, unless you go into an external option menu and then you can tell it which skills to prompt you for. And then it prompts you for those skills ALL THE TIME. I'd knock down one of Steve's guys yesterday and it would ask him if he wants to use claw. On the ground? That can't have any game effect. But I guess because I could have chosen attacker down I can see how it would end up coded that way. Badly, that is. Even worse is the way the stand firm skill is implemented. When you get pushed into someone with stand firm they should get to pick if they want to use it or not. If not then none of the pushing chain happens. If so it all does. On Cyanide you get prompted if you were the first guy pushed. If you're the second guy in the chain it doesn't prompt you. Instead it uses the decision made the last time that guy was pushed. Will a chain push work or not? WHO KNOWS! This is actually a big problem for my Cyanide team, since I'm playing dwarves with a bunch of frenzy and stand firm. I want to set up chain pushes to surf my opponent while being immune to the return chain pushes and it simply can't happen with this interface.
- Unit labeling. One of the neat features I only recently learned is you can hold shift and click on any player on either team and it will let you enter up to 5 characters as a label. So I can tag all of my opponent's units that have guard with a G, and anyone with an abnormal strength or agility with a number. Want to know who has a niggle so you can target them for free experience? Cyanide won't even tell you! FumBBL will let you find out just by clicking on them, or you can tag them with a $ so you don't even need to click around after the start of the game.
- Community. There are big tournaments with unique prizes run all the time on FumBBL, and I can find out about them pretty easily by just going to the list on the webpage. I couldn't tell you if Cyanide had any big events. I feel like no, but there's no way to get from the game to any sort of forum that I can find. I've had to Google search to find the forum to look for downtime info before, so I know it does exist, it just isn't easily accessible.
- View of the field. FumBBL shows you the entire field the entire time. Cyanide is trying to show off their pretty graphics so it does lots of zooming in and is set up so you need to scroll around the screen with interface elements in the way. I've definitely seen people end their turn accidentally when trying to click a guy standing behind the end turn button.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Stunty Success
I posted a couple weeks ago about starting to play stunty games of Blood Bowl. It's an even swingier version of Blood Bowl if that can be believed. On the one hand I hate the swinginess as it is, so stunty can be frustrating. On the other hand I do like seeing guys get killed and that happens more often in stunty. And before anyone starts complaining, I do like seeing my guys die too. As long as I get to kill some back. I don't like being solely on the receiving end, but I'm fine with death for all!
At the time of my post my team was 1-4-2 and I didn't think I had enough time to start a new team before the major stunty tournament started. My team is now 6-4-3. Maybe I've gotten better at playing the team? Maybe having block on my three strong dudes is really making a difference? Maybe I'm just getting luckier? Probably some of all three, really. Two of those games were just random pick up games before the Fighting Cockerel Classic qualifiers started but the other four were part of the event. It turned out to be an 80 team field, with 16 groups of 5 each playing round robin. Top team of each division advances to a single elimination bracket. People have a week for each round but my division was really gung ho and have finished all relevant games. My 3-1 record is good enough to advance. Woo!
My last game was against an opponent who's profile talks about how he has the record for highest coach rating in the history of the site, and how he doesn't view any tactic as 'too cheesy', and how there should be no whining. So I was rather surprised when he spent the entire game against me whining up a storm. I had some things go my way for sure, and definitely used a cheesy tactic of my own, but I'd think he should be above whining given his profile. Especially since some of the 'lucky' things that happened for me or against him were avoidable if he'd planned differently.
For one thing, I have a guy who throws bombs. Bombs knock down anyone they hit, and have a 50% chance of knocking down anyone around the explosion. Throw a bomb at someone and they get a chance to catch it and throw it themselves so generally it seems throwing it at people is a bad idea. So mostly I throw bombs beside people and hope the 50% shot it good enough. This opponent, however, had multiple guys with the 'no hands' skill which means they aren't allowed to catch balls. Or bombs. So I just throw my bombs at those guys with the guaranteed knock down and the 50% spill over. My very first bomb took out 5 people. Because he built a nice little clump of dudes beside a guy with no hands when he kicked off and I got to bomb them before he got a turn. Sure, I got lucky to hit all 4 of my 50% shots, but he probably shouldn't have been stacked so close together.
For another, many of his guys had blood lust which means when they start moving if he rolls a 1 he has to eat an ally or get removed from the pitch. He rolled about his fair share of 1s, but he just threw his blocks as normal with the expectation of eating a nearby ally after the block. A couple of times this worked for him, but a couple of times his block ended up knocking his own guy down. In one case he even used piling on to knock himself down after getting blood lust. All of these resulted in his guys leaving the field.
Now, maybe that is ok, because they'd come back at the next kickoff. But the cheesy thing I did was limit the number of kickoffs. I received in the first half and decided my goal wasn't to score, it was to keep him from scoring. I didn't want to score for a few reasons. I have 4 secret weapons on my team and only enough inducement money to get one bribe. My team had a bunch of miss next game injuries the previous game so my bench was short. Having to kick off on turn 8 would just mean rolling more secret weapon dice since I didn't have the bodies to bench them for that short drive. Also I'd gotten a key knockout on turn one (with the bomber) and didn't want to give that guy an extra chance to wake up. And with his bloodlusting I didn't want to let those guys back on either. So in the first half I delayed a bit then threw a hail mary pass the length of the field. I put a couple guys in the area to keep him busy, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't going to score. But by doing so I got him to focus on dealing with those dudes instead of the important guys (like the bomber) and was able to use my turns killing his squishy dudes instead of really trying to score.
The one KO check ended up working in his favour since his guys came back and mine didn't, but my awesome secret weapons didn't get kicked out either. He really had no answer for a 4/5/1/10 guy with Foul Appearance, Juggernaut, Dirty Player, Mighty Blow, No Hands, Frenzy, Block, Guard, and Break Tackle. Getting two full halves with that guy was pretty awesome. Especially in an environment that is so block light and has so many 2 strength dudes... He gets 6 dice when he attacks and succeeds on two of the faces. And when they get knocked down they tend to leave the game.
I don't know when the next section of the event will finally start since most of the qualifiers are no where near as close to done as mine is. But it's nice to advance in my first stunty event, with my first stunty team. Woo!
At the time of my post my team was 1-4-2 and I didn't think I had enough time to start a new team before the major stunty tournament started. My team is now 6-4-3. Maybe I've gotten better at playing the team? Maybe having block on my three strong dudes is really making a difference? Maybe I'm just getting luckier? Probably some of all three, really. Two of those games were just random pick up games before the Fighting Cockerel Classic qualifiers started but the other four were part of the event. It turned out to be an 80 team field, with 16 groups of 5 each playing round robin. Top team of each division advances to a single elimination bracket. People have a week for each round but my division was really gung ho and have finished all relevant games. My 3-1 record is good enough to advance. Woo!
My last game was against an opponent who's profile talks about how he has the record for highest coach rating in the history of the site, and how he doesn't view any tactic as 'too cheesy', and how there should be no whining. So I was rather surprised when he spent the entire game against me whining up a storm. I had some things go my way for sure, and definitely used a cheesy tactic of my own, but I'd think he should be above whining given his profile. Especially since some of the 'lucky' things that happened for me or against him were avoidable if he'd planned differently.
For one thing, I have a guy who throws bombs. Bombs knock down anyone they hit, and have a 50% chance of knocking down anyone around the explosion. Throw a bomb at someone and they get a chance to catch it and throw it themselves so generally it seems throwing it at people is a bad idea. So mostly I throw bombs beside people and hope the 50% shot it good enough. This opponent, however, had multiple guys with the 'no hands' skill which means they aren't allowed to catch balls. Or bombs. So I just throw my bombs at those guys with the guaranteed knock down and the 50% spill over. My very first bomb took out 5 people. Because he built a nice little clump of dudes beside a guy with no hands when he kicked off and I got to bomb them before he got a turn. Sure, I got lucky to hit all 4 of my 50% shots, but he probably shouldn't have been stacked so close together.
For another, many of his guys had blood lust which means when they start moving if he rolls a 1 he has to eat an ally or get removed from the pitch. He rolled about his fair share of 1s, but he just threw his blocks as normal with the expectation of eating a nearby ally after the block. A couple of times this worked for him, but a couple of times his block ended up knocking his own guy down. In one case he even used piling on to knock himself down after getting blood lust. All of these resulted in his guys leaving the field.
Now, maybe that is ok, because they'd come back at the next kickoff. But the cheesy thing I did was limit the number of kickoffs. I received in the first half and decided my goal wasn't to score, it was to keep him from scoring. I didn't want to score for a few reasons. I have 4 secret weapons on my team and only enough inducement money to get one bribe. My team had a bunch of miss next game injuries the previous game so my bench was short. Having to kick off on turn 8 would just mean rolling more secret weapon dice since I didn't have the bodies to bench them for that short drive. Also I'd gotten a key knockout on turn one (with the bomber) and didn't want to give that guy an extra chance to wake up. And with his bloodlusting I didn't want to let those guys back on either. So in the first half I delayed a bit then threw a hail mary pass the length of the field. I put a couple guys in the area to keep him busy, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't going to score. But by doing so I got him to focus on dealing with those dudes instead of the important guys (like the bomber) and was able to use my turns killing his squishy dudes instead of really trying to score.
The one KO check ended up working in his favour since his guys came back and mine didn't, but my awesome secret weapons didn't get kicked out either. He really had no answer for a 4/5/1/10 guy with Foul Appearance, Juggernaut, Dirty Player, Mighty Blow, No Hands, Frenzy, Block, Guard, and Break Tackle. Getting two full halves with that guy was pretty awesome. Especially in an environment that is so block light and has so many 2 strength dudes... He gets 6 dice when he attacks and succeeds on two of the faces. And when they get knocked down they tend to leave the game.
I don't know when the next section of the event will finally start since most of the qualifiers are no where near as close to done as mine is. But it's nice to advance in my first stunty event, with my first stunty team. Woo!
Monday, June 03, 2013
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...
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...
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Speedy Von Ogre!
One of the neat things about the FumBBL site is they track stats for every player that has played on any team in any of their divisions. I've mostly played a human team, and my big guy Ogre happened to get +MV on his first level and +AG on his second level. This seems pretty terrible, since it only makes him average on the human team in terms of movement and agility and he suffers from having loner and bonehead. But I thought it would be fun to try to score a bunch with an Ogre and see if I could top those leaderboards.
Turns out that really wasn't a very hard thing to do at all. It takes 10 touchdowns to get on the leaderboard and there hasn't been a single human Ogre to score 10 or more touchdowns. My Ogre is up to 8, so he's not there yet, but he's getting close. There are some other categories though, and Hulk X-90 is getting up there on all of them! Here's his position on the all-time blackbox leaderboards.
SPP - #6
Casualties - #13
MVPs - #16
Games Played - #23
Blocks Thrown - #13
Rushing Yards - #1
There are no Ogres on the top passing, scoring, fouling, intercepting, or passing yards lists. My Ogre does have 1 interception, but no fouls or passes at this point. I don't think he's ever going to try for a passing record. But I hope to live long enough to put up tons of touchdowns and rushing yards. Hulk X-90 will be immortalized forever! Assert!
Turns out that really wasn't a very hard thing to do at all. It takes 10 touchdowns to get on the leaderboard and there hasn't been a single human Ogre to score 10 or more touchdowns. My Ogre is up to 8, so he's not there yet, but he's getting close. There are some other categories though, and Hulk X-90 is getting up there on all of them! Here's his position on the all-time blackbox leaderboards.
SPP - #6
Casualties - #13
MVPs - #16
Games Played - #23
Blocks Thrown - #13
Rushing Yards - #1
There are no Ogres on the top passing, scoring, fouling, intercepting, or passing yards lists. My Ogre does have 1 interception, but no fouls or passes at this point. I don't think he's ever going to try for a passing record. But I hope to live long enough to put up tons of touchdowns and rushing yards. Hulk X-90 will be immortalized forever! Assert!
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Wheel of Chaos Draw
The FumBBL Wheel of Chaos draw happened today. I ended up signing up for the horns qualifier, despite it being the reward I wanted 3rd most. I assigned it one slot on a d6 and that's what I rolled. Go chaos!
I don't really have a good way to dig into things, but here's what things look like:
Very Long Legs - 8 people made the main event, 16 into the secondary one. It looks like 13 teams didn't get in, with the highest such team 1630 TV. 1950 was the lowest TV in the main event.
Two Heads - 16 teams in the main event, only 15 in the secondary one. Because they only got 31 signups. 1900 was the lowest TV in the main event.
Extra Arms - 8 teams in the main event, only 14 in the secondary one, so I guess this one only had 22 total teams sign up. 1720 TV is the lowest in the main event.
Horns - 16 in the main event, 16 in the secondary one. It doesn't look like anyone missed out, so either I can't read the webpage right or exactly 32 teams signed up. 1950 is the lowest TV in the main event.
It looks like most of the teams in every main event are either Nurgle or Chaos. I wonder if that's because the killer teams are actually really good, or if that's just what people play in the box.
It looks like the signups were 37, 32, 31, and 22. It looks like my guesses as to which team was the underentered one Duncan commented about yesterday were right. Extra Arms, the one mutation every team should want, didn't get nearly enough people. I would have made the main event cut there, even with only 8 teams getting in. I assumed more people would heed the post of the organizer warning that there was a really underentered event. But even if I didn't think that, the spirit of chaos would have demanded I roll dice!
At any rate, I am up against a 1900TV undead team. He has one guy with piling on and a very leveled mummy. He only has 3 guys with 3 agility. It feels like he's not really a good scoring team or a good killing team. The team has only won 43% of their non-draw games. My TV is 1830, and I will probably throw in 100k in order to get two bloodwiser babes. Now, 2 of my 4 best players died recently so I don't think I'm in a great way, but I hope to at least have some play. Better than playing one of the 2200TV Nurgle teams full of killers, anyway!
I don't really have a good way to dig into things, but here's what things look like:
Very Long Legs - 8 people made the main event, 16 into the secondary one. It looks like 13 teams didn't get in, with the highest such team 1630 TV. 1950 was the lowest TV in the main event.
Two Heads - 16 teams in the main event, only 15 in the secondary one. Because they only got 31 signups. 1900 was the lowest TV in the main event.
Extra Arms - 8 teams in the main event, only 14 in the secondary one, so I guess this one only had 22 total teams sign up. 1720 TV is the lowest in the main event.
Horns - 16 in the main event, 16 in the secondary one. It doesn't look like anyone missed out, so either I can't read the webpage right or exactly 32 teams signed up. 1950 is the lowest TV in the main event.
It looks like most of the teams in every main event are either Nurgle or Chaos. I wonder if that's because the killer teams are actually really good, or if that's just what people play in the box.
It looks like the signups were 37, 32, 31, and 22. It looks like my guesses as to which team was the underentered one Duncan commented about yesterday were right. Extra Arms, the one mutation every team should want, didn't get nearly enough people. I would have made the main event cut there, even with only 8 teams getting in. I assumed more people would heed the post of the organizer warning that there was a really underentered event. But even if I didn't think that, the spirit of chaos would have demanded I roll dice!
At any rate, I am up against a 1900TV undead team. He has one guy with piling on and a very leveled mummy. He only has 3 guys with 3 agility. It feels like he's not really a good scoring team or a good killing team. The team has only won 43% of their non-draw games. My TV is 1830, and I will probably throw in 100k in order to get two bloodwiser babes. Now, 2 of my 4 best players died recently so I don't think I'm in a great way, but I hope to at least have some play. Better than playing one of the 2200TV Nurgle teams full of killers, anyway!
Thursday, April 04, 2013
Wheel of Chaos
The FumBBL admin team run a series of big tournaments that they call 'majors' for each of the different style of teams. There's one starting up next week (April 10 is the due date for entry) and it's open only to teams in the 'BlackBox' division. This is the blind matchmaking group and happens to be pretty much the only place I've played which is very convenient for me. The tournament this time around is the Wheel of Chaos, which is a crazy single elimination tournament broken down into 8 initial groups. Each coach can only send one team in, and they have to pick which of the groups they want to go through. So it feels like there's some opportunity for gaming the system by trying to find the softest point of entry. I wanted to take a look at last year's event to see how entry broke down to see if I could figure out if gaming entry would make sense in any way.
The first thing to look at is the way the groups are formed. There are 4 chaos gods, and you sign up by picking one of the gods. Then the admins roll dice for each of the gods. If they roll a 1 then the 4 highest TV teams for that god form a group. On a 2, 3, or 4 the 8 highest TV teams form a group. Otherwise the 16 highest TV teams form a group. This gets us 4 very highly rated groups. After doing that the next 16 highest TV teams for each god form a group, which gets us 4 more groups with highly rated teams that aren't the highest. Maybe these groups will have teams 5-20. Maybe they'll have teams 17-32!
Why do you care which group you enter? Well, if you win the whole thing (the winners of each of the 8 groups play down in a single elimination bracket) you get given a bonus mutation based on the god you chose to put on any player you want, and then either 1 or 2 extra random mutations which appear on someone at random. You get 1 mutation if you won a top rated group, and 2 if you came through the lower tier.
Getting to choose a specific mutation and put it on whoever you want is really, really powerful. It doesn't consume a level so it'll let a player get more skills than they otherwise could. On top of that most teams can't get mutations by leveling up so this is the one and only way to get one of these things on a team! So it feels like if a specific mutation is really good then lots of teams would want to enter via that god, and if one is terrible then maybe not as many people join up. How did last year work?
Khorne
- gave frenzy as the free skill (which isn't a mutation at all!)
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs ranged from 2410-1840
- lower bracket went from 1820-1480
Tzeentch
- gave extra arms
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2420-1900
- lower bracket went from 1840-1190
Nurgle
- gave two heads
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2430-1810
- lower bracket went from 1730-1170, but only had 11 teams total (only 27 teams applied to Nurgle)
Slaneesh
- gave prehensile tail
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2410-1950
- lower bracket went from 1930-1770
Reading a forum thread about it from last year it seems that a lot of people intentionally picked the god with the worst reward which explains why prehensile tail (which is worthless for/against many teams) actually had 32 teams with 1770+ sign up while only 27 applied for the very useful (for dodgy teams) two heads.
As far as easier path to qualification, you either want to be in the top 4 or top 8 in a group that only admits 4 or 8 to the top bracket, or you likely want to slot into the bottom bracket. Either you want fewer games or more rewards at the end of the line. Getting stuck in a top 16 group is the worst of both worlds. Finding the soft spot and getting into a bottom bracket with fewer than 16 teams like Nurgle last year would be awesome.
But since the group sizes are determined randomly after you pick which one to join you can't really make logical decisions here. And since it sounds like people were gung-ho about joining the worst group looking for an easier time of things I don't know that you can even game the system that way either. It's great for one or two people to work on it, but when lots of people start doing it the gain falls off. I feel like the right plan is probably to just level up into the 1600-1800 range and pick the group with the reward I want. Possibly build a team to beat dodgy teams and pick the dodgy reward group to feed off them! (It looks like Nurgle last year had a high proportion of elves relative to the other groups.)
Last year the 8 teams that won their groups were...
Skaven - 1830TV, top bracket
Wood Elves - 1510TV, bottom bracket
Chaos Pact - 1870TV, bottom bracket
Nurgle - 2410TV, top bracket
Nurgle - 2110TV, top bracket
Chaos Dwarves - 1820TV, bottom bracket
Skaven - 1660TV, bottom bracket
Chaos - 2270TV, top bracket
It makes me sad that 7 of the 8 teams already had mutation access. Skaven ended up winning, and unfortunately no longer have the extra mutations on the team. A lineman won the random one, got very long legs, and got fired immediately. (It still adds 20k to TV and that one in particular would have no game effect.) A gutter runner got the bonus two heads, but he has since been killed.
Anyway... This year the bonuses are horns, extra arms, very long legs, and two heads. Horns are useful for pretty much everyone, except maybe chaos I guess since they start with horns on anyone apt to be blitzing anyway. Extra arms is awesome for anyone who wants to ever pick up the ball. Even bashy teams want some guy to pick up the ball! I guess elf teams really don't want it since they're already at 2+ to pick up the ball unless it's in a tackle zone. Very long legs is terrible. A wardancer without +AG wants it, but it's pretty sketchy on everyone else. I guess getting it opens up the option to take leap later. Two heads is great for anyone who dodges around, which is most finesse teams and even some bashy teams want one dodgy guy. It works well with break tackle, so high level strong guys are happy to get it too.
I really don't want very long legs, and I suspect it's going to see a lot of people trying to sneak into the smallest qualifier. My hope is that will backfire on them. My human team is up to 1800TV so I have a reasonable team to enter into probably any qualifier. Two heads was the smallest entry qualifier last time, will it stay small or will people hope to abuse the fact that it was small last time? My ogre really wants horns, extra arms, and two heads. Maybe in the spirit of chaos I'll roll a die to decide between those three! Weighted a bit towards two heads since it was small last time.
The first thing to look at is the way the groups are formed. There are 4 chaos gods, and you sign up by picking one of the gods. Then the admins roll dice for each of the gods. If they roll a 1 then the 4 highest TV teams for that god form a group. On a 2, 3, or 4 the 8 highest TV teams form a group. Otherwise the 16 highest TV teams form a group. This gets us 4 very highly rated groups. After doing that the next 16 highest TV teams for each god form a group, which gets us 4 more groups with highly rated teams that aren't the highest. Maybe these groups will have teams 5-20. Maybe they'll have teams 17-32!
Why do you care which group you enter? Well, if you win the whole thing (the winners of each of the 8 groups play down in a single elimination bracket) you get given a bonus mutation based on the god you chose to put on any player you want, and then either 1 or 2 extra random mutations which appear on someone at random. You get 1 mutation if you won a top rated group, and 2 if you came through the lower tier.
Getting to choose a specific mutation and put it on whoever you want is really, really powerful. It doesn't consume a level so it'll let a player get more skills than they otherwise could. On top of that most teams can't get mutations by leveling up so this is the one and only way to get one of these things on a team! So it feels like if a specific mutation is really good then lots of teams would want to enter via that god, and if one is terrible then maybe not as many people join up. How did last year work?
Khorne
- gave frenzy as the free skill (which isn't a mutation at all!)
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs ranged from 2410-1840
- lower bracket went from 1820-1480
Tzeentch
- gave extra arms
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2420-1900
- lower bracket went from 1840-1190
Nurgle
- gave two heads
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2430-1810
- lower bracket went from 1730-1170, but only had 11 teams total (only 27 teams applied to Nurgle)
Slaneesh
- gave prehensile tail
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2410-1950
- lower bracket went from 1930-1770
Reading a forum thread about it from last year it seems that a lot of people intentionally picked the god with the worst reward which explains why prehensile tail (which is worthless for/against many teams) actually had 32 teams with 1770+ sign up while only 27 applied for the very useful (for dodgy teams) two heads.
As far as easier path to qualification, you either want to be in the top 4 or top 8 in a group that only admits 4 or 8 to the top bracket, or you likely want to slot into the bottom bracket. Either you want fewer games or more rewards at the end of the line. Getting stuck in a top 16 group is the worst of both worlds. Finding the soft spot and getting into a bottom bracket with fewer than 16 teams like Nurgle last year would be awesome.
But since the group sizes are determined randomly after you pick which one to join you can't really make logical decisions here. And since it sounds like people were gung-ho about joining the worst group looking for an easier time of things I don't know that you can even game the system that way either. It's great for one or two people to work on it, but when lots of people start doing it the gain falls off. I feel like the right plan is probably to just level up into the 1600-1800 range and pick the group with the reward I want. Possibly build a team to beat dodgy teams and pick the dodgy reward group to feed off them! (It looks like Nurgle last year had a high proportion of elves relative to the other groups.)
Last year the 8 teams that won their groups were...
Skaven - 1830TV, top bracket
Wood Elves - 1510TV, bottom bracket
Chaos Pact - 1870TV, bottom bracket
Nurgle - 2410TV, top bracket
Nurgle - 2110TV, top bracket
Chaos Dwarves - 1820TV, bottom bracket
Skaven - 1660TV, bottom bracket
Chaos - 2270TV, top bracket
It makes me sad that 7 of the 8 teams already had mutation access. Skaven ended up winning, and unfortunately no longer have the extra mutations on the team. A lineman won the random one, got very long legs, and got fired immediately. (It still adds 20k to TV and that one in particular would have no game effect.) A gutter runner got the bonus two heads, but he has since been killed.
Anyway... This year the bonuses are horns, extra arms, very long legs, and two heads. Horns are useful for pretty much everyone, except maybe chaos I guess since they start with horns on anyone apt to be blitzing anyway. Extra arms is awesome for anyone who wants to ever pick up the ball. Even bashy teams want some guy to pick up the ball! I guess elf teams really don't want it since they're already at 2+ to pick up the ball unless it's in a tackle zone. Very long legs is terrible. A wardancer without +AG wants it, but it's pretty sketchy on everyone else. I guess getting it opens up the option to take leap later. Two heads is great for anyone who dodges around, which is most finesse teams and even some bashy teams want one dodgy guy. It works well with break tackle, so high level strong guys are happy to get it too.
I really don't want very long legs, and I suspect it's going to see a lot of people trying to sneak into the smallest qualifier. My hope is that will backfire on them. My human team is up to 1800TV so I have a reasonable team to enter into probably any qualifier. Two heads was the smallest entry qualifier last time, will it stay small or will people hope to abuse the fact that it was small last time? My ogre really wants horns, extra arms, and two heads. Maybe in the spirit of chaos I'll roll a die to decide between those three! Weighted a bit towards two heads since it was small last time.
Friday, March 22, 2013
FumBBL
Last week the Cyanide Blood Bowl client went on sale over Steam. I tried to get some of the old Comfy Prime Blood Bowlers to buy in, but didn't generate much interest. Duncan is still playing a lot of Blood Bowl, but he's playing with a different internet client. He doesn't want to switch, and would rather I go play over there. It reminds me a lot of the League of Legends vs DotA 2 conversations I have from time to time with people. Both are fine games, both get better when you can play with your friends instead of random dudes, and both require such a time investiture in learning/experience that switching games is non-trivial. My life would be better if Drew played LoL. His life would be better if I played DotA 2. But neither of us really want to make that switch. Or maybe it's like choosing an MMORPG. Way back in the day I preferred Final Fantasy XI, but all my friends played World of Warcraft. It was better to play the 'worse' game with my friends than the 'better' game with strangers.
But while those pairs of games had potentially significant differences which really prevent playing both at once, this is just two different clients for the same game, right? It should be feasible to play both? At the very least it felt like I should give FumBBL a try to see what it was like in order to compare the two. I did the same with DotA 2, after all!
I created an account, made a vampire team, and played three games this week. Certainly not enough games to really get intimately familiar with the system, but enough to get a feel for things. Here's what it feels like the differences are between the two:
Graphics - Cyanide has a pretty board with animated models for the players. FumBBL uses tiny gifs.
Speed - Coupled with those animations comes the time it takes to watch the players move around. FumBBL can speedwalk the moves. Robb and Lino were able to play about 5 turns in Cyanide in the time it took me to play 9 on FumBBL.
Sound - Cyanide has top notch sound effects. It has colour commentators with amusing, though limited, phrases. Going to get Big Moot sandwiches in the stands, ("Now way, but little elf beauties... Yeah!") things like that. FumBBL has very short, cheap sounds when people walk, get hit, and get hurt.
Rules - They both ostensibly use the latest edition of the official rules. Cyanide added in some extra inducements and didn't implement cards or many of the star players. FumBBL hasn't implemented most of the cards but didn't add anything else in to make up the gap. They both seem to be lacking a bit, but it is annoying in the Cyanide game to need to make sure people don't use the wizard multiple times.
Rules Mods - FumBBL has a bunch of different options you can turn on when making a game. Things to nerf the overpowered combo, or to buff fouling for example. It may only have one guy coding it, but it's a lot leaner so those little things can actually happen.
Bugs - I haven't run afoul of any FumBBL bugs yet, and when they exist I suspect they get fixed a lot faster than in Cyanide. Cyanide has a ton of bugs, some of them pretty brutal. Sometimes it makes one of your guys invisible when you're setting up before a kickoff, so you only get to position 10 dudes instead of 11. Then the invisible guy magically appears somewhere when you kick. I remember one game against Robb where one of his better guys got helpfully placed on the line of scrimmage for me to hit! Other times it will let you field 12 or more guys. It wouldn't let me sub out my Deathroller one game. Apparently there's a brutal bug with leap and blood lust where the movement overlay goes away if you fail the blood lust roll. (One reason I was happy to try vampires on FumBBL instead of on Cyanide!)
Movement Planning - Cyanide has a really nice feature where you can declare a blitz, tell it the path you want to take, and then see what type of hit you'll be making. Or you can tell it what move you'll take and then see what the pass odds are. It doesn't seem like FumBBL does that for you, which means you have to be better at planning your move before starting it on there than on Cyanide. On the other hand Cyanide'd system is bugged, and there's one case where it doesn't account for an assist when it should and lies in terms of your blitzing odds. (If you dodge away from a guy you were marking, but end up walking back in beside him to blitz another guy it thinks you're still marking that guy.)
Community - The FumBBL site has forums that seem reasonably populated. Maybe this is just an issue where there's no quick link in Cyanide to their forums so I don't get visibility to it. But it really seems like there's more discussion and events and stuff on FumBBL than on Cyanide. Now, a lot of those threads seem to be complaining about fouling, stalling, cherrypicking, min/maxxing, or claw+mighty blow+piling on...
Team Mobility - FumBBL forces you to choose what style team you're making and has no way to change it afterwards. So my vampire team was set up to play in their pick-up game matchmaking system. That's all it can do. I can't transfer them over to an on-going league later on. I can't play personally planned out games against someone else. If they want a match, it's going to be with a randomly generated opponent. Oh, and it's going to only start a game every 15 minutes. If I want to play a game at 8:01, tough luck. I have to wait until 8:15 to see if maybe I get an opponent. Cyanide lets you quit and join leagues at will (though many leagues only accept brand new teams) and the matchmaking happens on the fly. Of course I still need to have a willing opponent also trying to find a game at the same time.
Spectating - Both games allow you to spectate games in progress, but with different twists. Cyanide forces you to start watching the game at the beginning but has a fast forward button. FumBBL has you tag in live and watch as things happen. I much prefer getting to the live action right away, but once there the added graphics make spectating in the Cyanide game feel better. In FumBBL you do get to chat with the players and other spectators, though. It's also easier to find a game to watch. And you can replay games after the fact from the website while you need a copy of the replay to watch a Cyanide game later.
User Base - It's hard to tell but my gut feeling from trying to spectate games in both clients is that there are more games going on in Cyanide than in FumBBL. Now, the games also seem to take half the time, so there may actually be comparable numbers of games completed.
Major Events - FumBBL apparently puts on big tournaments with crazy prizes every now and then that seem pretty interesting. You're never going to get a Cyanide team to resurrect a dead dude, or give claw to a saurus!
*EDIT* Statistics - Cyanide provides a log after the game and someone wrote a nice parser that pulls out how you fared on the different types of rolls (d6, 2d6, blocking). I haven't found any such thing in FumBBL and it's really sad.
Both clients seem to do a pretty reasonable job of playing Blood Bowl, and both have upsides and downsides. I feel like the reduced playing time and the extra silly league modifications make FumBBL a little better for me, but I guess time will tell if that pans out. On the plus side I don't think the two games are mutually exclusive at all the way LoL and DotA2 are, so I see no reason why I shouldn't keep playing in Sceadeau's Cyanide league while also playing FumBBL. I don't know that I have a strong desire to level up a new Cyanide team anymore, but I'm pretty happy playing my adorable little dorfs. At least once I fire that stupid Deathroller...
But while those pairs of games had potentially significant differences which really prevent playing both at once, this is just two different clients for the same game, right? It should be feasible to play both? At the very least it felt like I should give FumBBL a try to see what it was like in order to compare the two. I did the same with DotA 2, after all!
I created an account, made a vampire team, and played three games this week. Certainly not enough games to really get intimately familiar with the system, but enough to get a feel for things. Here's what it feels like the differences are between the two:
Graphics - Cyanide has a pretty board with animated models for the players. FumBBL uses tiny gifs.
Speed - Coupled with those animations comes the time it takes to watch the players move around. FumBBL can speedwalk the moves. Robb and Lino were able to play about 5 turns in Cyanide in the time it took me to play 9 on FumBBL.
Sound - Cyanide has top notch sound effects. It has colour commentators with amusing, though limited, phrases. Going to get Big Moot sandwiches in the stands, ("Now way, but little elf beauties... Yeah!") things like that. FumBBL has very short, cheap sounds when people walk, get hit, and get hurt.
Rules - They both ostensibly use the latest edition of the official rules. Cyanide added in some extra inducements and didn't implement cards or many of the star players. FumBBL hasn't implemented most of the cards but didn't add anything else in to make up the gap. They both seem to be lacking a bit, but it is annoying in the Cyanide game to need to make sure people don't use the wizard multiple times.
Rules Mods - FumBBL has a bunch of different options you can turn on when making a game. Things to nerf the overpowered combo, or to buff fouling for example. It may only have one guy coding it, but it's a lot leaner so those little things can actually happen.
Bugs - I haven't run afoul of any FumBBL bugs yet, and when they exist I suspect they get fixed a lot faster than in Cyanide. Cyanide has a ton of bugs, some of them pretty brutal. Sometimes it makes one of your guys invisible when you're setting up before a kickoff, so you only get to position 10 dudes instead of 11. Then the invisible guy magically appears somewhere when you kick. I remember one game against Robb where one of his better guys got helpfully placed on the line of scrimmage for me to hit! Other times it will let you field 12 or more guys. It wouldn't let me sub out my Deathroller one game. Apparently there's a brutal bug with leap and blood lust where the movement overlay goes away if you fail the blood lust roll. (One reason I was happy to try vampires on FumBBL instead of on Cyanide!)
Movement Planning - Cyanide has a really nice feature where you can declare a blitz, tell it the path you want to take, and then see what type of hit you'll be making. Or you can tell it what move you'll take and then see what the pass odds are. It doesn't seem like FumBBL does that for you, which means you have to be better at planning your move before starting it on there than on Cyanide. On the other hand Cyanide'd system is bugged, and there's one case where it doesn't account for an assist when it should and lies in terms of your blitzing odds. (If you dodge away from a guy you were marking, but end up walking back in beside him to blitz another guy it thinks you're still marking that guy.)
Community - The FumBBL site has forums that seem reasonably populated. Maybe this is just an issue where there's no quick link in Cyanide to their forums so I don't get visibility to it. But it really seems like there's more discussion and events and stuff on FumBBL than on Cyanide. Now, a lot of those threads seem to be complaining about fouling, stalling, cherrypicking, min/maxxing, or claw+mighty blow+piling on...
Team Mobility - FumBBL forces you to choose what style team you're making and has no way to change it afterwards. So my vampire team was set up to play in their pick-up game matchmaking system. That's all it can do. I can't transfer them over to an on-going league later on. I can't play personally planned out games against someone else. If they want a match, it's going to be with a randomly generated opponent. Oh, and it's going to only start a game every 15 minutes. If I want to play a game at 8:01, tough luck. I have to wait until 8:15 to see if maybe I get an opponent. Cyanide lets you quit and join leagues at will (though many leagues only accept brand new teams) and the matchmaking happens on the fly. Of course I still need to have a willing opponent also trying to find a game at the same time.
Spectating - Both games allow you to spectate games in progress, but with different twists. Cyanide forces you to start watching the game at the beginning but has a fast forward button. FumBBL has you tag in live and watch as things happen. I much prefer getting to the live action right away, but once there the added graphics make spectating in the Cyanide game feel better. In FumBBL you do get to chat with the players and other spectators, though. It's also easier to find a game to watch. And you can replay games after the fact from the website while you need a copy of the replay to watch a Cyanide game later.
User Base - It's hard to tell but my gut feeling from trying to spectate games in both clients is that there are more games going on in Cyanide than in FumBBL. Now, the games also seem to take half the time, so there may actually be comparable numbers of games completed.
Major Events - FumBBL apparently puts on big tournaments with crazy prizes every now and then that seem pretty interesting. You're never going to get a Cyanide team to resurrect a dead dude, or give claw to a saurus!
*EDIT* Statistics - Cyanide provides a log after the game and someone wrote a nice parser that pulls out how you fared on the different types of rolls (d6, 2d6, blocking). I haven't found any such thing in FumBBL and it's really sad.
Both clients seem to do a pretty reasonable job of playing Blood Bowl, and both have upsides and downsides. I feel like the reduced playing time and the extra silly league modifications make FumBBL a little better for me, but I guess time will tell if that pans out. On the plus side I don't think the two games are mutually exclusive at all the way LoL and DotA2 are, so I see no reason why I shouldn't keep playing in Sceadeau's Cyanide league while also playing FumBBL. I don't know that I have a strong desire to level up a new Cyanide team anymore, but I'm pretty happy playing my adorable little dorfs. At least once I fire that stupid Deathroller...
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