I have been looking forward to this year's World Boardgaming Championships more than I have in a long time. I've been obsessed with a game that came out last year, Star Wars Rebellion, and it got voted in to be a trial. It hits all of my buttons: a two player asymmetric card driven wargame with a fantastic theme. It's long, with small numbers of dice, but it has a lot of intricate details where player skill can make a huge difference. It's like Twilight Struggle, except I get to get in on the ground floor of strategy and tournament results.
They just released the event previews which explain the tournament format in detail. They're running continuous single elimination with adjudication after 3 hours and 45 minutes. That feels too short but maybe my games with Byung take longer than average because we're evenly matched and he's a tad slow. That said, there are plenty of people at WBC who are also slow... On the other hand, I was expecting to have to play 2 and a half full days if they were running 5 hour rounds, so that at least is potentially a welcome change.
Ending in an adjudication is a scary prospect though. How good is the GM at this game? The preview lists a bunch of things he'll look at to decide who wins, and they all make sense, but which things will get the edge in a close game? The proper side to bid on can change depending on how the GM rules in his adjudications and I have no way to access that information right now. This is a little frustrating and curbs my enthusiasm a little bit.
But that's not the worst part. The game comes with a 'first game setup' to help new players ease into the game. There are a _lot_ of great strategic decisions that happen in the initial setup and new players will have no idea how to make those decisions. The game definitely needs to ship with those rules. Unfortunately the default at WBC for every round is going to be using this initial setup. If both players agree they can play the real game, but the default is to play the initial setup.
Now, I think WBC brings in a wide spectrum of players with a wide variety of skills. I think it is important for games at WBC to have demos and to try to accommodate new players. But I also think it's important that a tournament work to test the skills of the players to the utmost. It's a spectrum, for sure, in terms of how much you want to encourage new players versus how much you want to fine tune the games for the experts. I've argued against Agricola using decks that didn't come in the box, for example. I've been against banning cards in Agricola because I think there's value in having people play the game they can buy in a store and not a modded version of it. But the experts don't want to lose to someone with a wood hut extension, and they won that fight. Maybe this is the same sort of thing? But Star Wars Rebellion ships with rules for setting up the game that aren't the initial setup, so I think it's in a different spot on the spectrum. Oh, and the rules for 'First Game Setup' explicitly state 'for future games, use the "Advanced Rules" on page 18'...
I think a fair compromise would be to default the first round to the base game (that's where the people learning the game at the demo are going to be playing anyway) and make the mulligan round and all future rounds default to the advanced game. If two newer players win the first round and meet in the second round and want to base game it up, let them, but forcing experienced players to play the base game just feels awful.
How bad is the initial setup in the base game? I've never played it, so I wanted to dig it out and see...
The advanced setup randomly assigns 3 of 5 systems to the rebels, and 5 of 7 systems to the empire. The base game assigns specific systems, and those systems seem to favour the empire. The rebels don't get to start in Mon Calamari, the empire gets loyalty in both Corellia and Mustafar. It's not an ideal start for the empire, but it isn't one of the disastrous ones either.
The unit mix for each side is the same in either setup, the difference is that they're preset in the base game and you get to make decisions that shape your future plans in the advanced game. The base game spreads out the empire units, which in my experience with the advanced game is a horrible plan. You don't have enough actions to move 6 different forces around, and the rebels have enough units to pick off 1/6th of your forces in any given spot. Spreading out just gives them more targets without really giving you more options.
On the other hand, the reason the empire needs to worry is the rebels are supposed to see the initial setup and then pick any space on the board to deploy their smaller force. You get to split between the rebel base and any system, and then the rebels get to take the first action in the game so they can attack the empire in any poorly defended spot. In the base game they force the rebels to split up their forces in a truly terrible manner, and they force them to be placed away from ANY of the 6 empire spaces.
How awful is the split? Well, my experience has shown that the rebels only really care about their fighters and their speeders. They start with 2 of each and you want to save them for a crucial time because they're very useful and hard to come by. The basic setup splits them down the middle with 1 x-wing, 1 y-wing, and 1 speeder in each of the two spots. You can't realistically get them back together to make use of them without wasting an action on turn 1. And that action will only consolidate them into the rebel base, not somewhere useful where they can do anything to harass the empire!
The worst part is they start those units in one of the 3 rebel systems, so the empire now has a single place to go in order to both remove rebels builds and to destroy rebel forces. There aren't many rebel units ever (they start with only 14 bits and probably build 4-6 every 2 turns), so having 8 of them start in a vulnerable, worthless space is terrible!
Our feeling is the rebels are the better side, but everything about the base game setup screams advantage for the empire.
Maybe there's some play in the base game that I'm missing? Maybe saving the time from doing an initial setup and by restricting opening strategies is worth playing a worse game? Maybe I'll calm down in time? But right now, after looking at the base setup, I am not really very keen on playing the game. and by extension, not nearly as excited about WBC as I was earlier in the week.
Showing posts with label Star Wars Rebellion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Wars Rebellion. Show all posts
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Monday, August 15, 2016
Star Wars Rebellion: Opposing Odds
I have become slightly obsessed with a board game that Adam taught me before WBC this year: Star Wars Rebellion. It's an asymmetric card driven 2 player wargame with a great theme. The game starts a little before the original Star Wars trilogy and goes through all three movies. One player is the rebel alliance which is trying to convince the galaxy to go into full on rebellion. The other player is the empire which is trying to find the hidden rebel base and eliminate them.
Even though the mechanics are basically the same for each side they play very differently which makes the game particularly interesting for me. Ostensibly the game is about the empire trying to find the rebel base so you'd think the rebels would have a game based on staying hidden, but that's really not the case. The length of the game depends on how many objectives the rebels can manage to achieve so really the rebels are trying to score as many objective points as they can while hoping the game mechanics keep their base safe. But then the empire could focus on denying objective points and just assume they'll stumble into the base eventually... But that probably means giving up on outproducing the rebels militarily, so then the rebels could just try to earn extra time with military actions...
As an aside, each game round you get to take one action per leader and generally speaking each side has the same number of leaders, and that number increases as the game gets longer. So on the first turn each side takes 4 actions but by turn 5 each side is taking 8 actions. Often you can spend a leader to try to counter the opponent's action instead of taking one of your own, but that's guaranteeing you lose an action to just have a chance of costing them an action. So unless the action you're giving up isn't very important or the odds are very good it just doesn't feel very good to do it.
One thing I found while playing as the rebels was there were two actions I wanted to take every single turn if I could. I always wanted to make an alliance with a region (which lets you produce units and is a criteria of many missions) and I always wanted to do some spy work to manipulate the objective deck. This lets you draw two cards and put one on top and one on the bottom, which accomplishes two things... It lets you end up with objectives you're likely to succeed at based on the current game state by burying hard ones and it lets you draw cards from the bottom of the deck. (The deck is pseudorandom in the sense that there are 3 tiers of 5 cards each, and the lower tier cards are just better.) But even though those actions seemed critical to my game plan regardless of the game state, my opponent would almost never contest them. And then when I finally played a game as the empire I kept finding other things to do instead of contesting those actions, even though I know how valuable those actions are for the other side.
This leaves me with a bit of an issue. Are all my actions as the empire equally valuable? Is my evaluation of how useful those two actions are for the rebels off? Are the odds of succeeding at an opposition really bad? Unless one of those three things are true I really need to change my empire strategy to put a premium on opposing those two actions.
I think it's pretty clear the first statement is false. All empire actions are not equally valuable. Each card can only be played once per turn, and each fleet can only be moved once per turn. Different actions will change in value based on the game state, so I'm not saying different actions are strictly superior or anything. But I am saying that on a given turn you will have an action that is worth less than another.
How about the odds of opposing an action? The way that works is all missions have an associated stat and each player rolls a die for each point their leaders have in that stat. So Chewbacca is really good at opposing a punching mission (he has 3 points in punching) but really bad at everything else (he has 0 points in the others). A die is worth 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, or 2 successes. The player who took the action needs more successes in order to have the action happen. Note that this means the opposer wins ties, and with small numbers of dice and small values on those dice, ties will actually happen pretty often. Andrew was saying he thought that meant even numbers of dice would be 60-40 but my intuition has that as being too favorable for the initial actor. Which means opposing would really be something worth considering! But let's work out the actual odds for differing numbers of dice...
Even though the mechanics are basically the same for each side they play very differently which makes the game particularly interesting for me. Ostensibly the game is about the empire trying to find the rebel base so you'd think the rebels would have a game based on staying hidden, but that's really not the case. The length of the game depends on how many objectives the rebels can manage to achieve so really the rebels are trying to score as many objective points as they can while hoping the game mechanics keep their base safe. But then the empire could focus on denying objective points and just assume they'll stumble into the base eventually... But that probably means giving up on outproducing the rebels militarily, so then the rebels could just try to earn extra time with military actions...
As an aside, each game round you get to take one action per leader and generally speaking each side has the same number of leaders, and that number increases as the game gets longer. So on the first turn each side takes 4 actions but by turn 5 each side is taking 8 actions. Often you can spend a leader to try to counter the opponent's action instead of taking one of your own, but that's guaranteeing you lose an action to just have a chance of costing them an action. So unless the action you're giving up isn't very important or the odds are very good it just doesn't feel very good to do it.
One thing I found while playing as the rebels was there were two actions I wanted to take every single turn if I could. I always wanted to make an alliance with a region (which lets you produce units and is a criteria of many missions) and I always wanted to do some spy work to manipulate the objective deck. This lets you draw two cards and put one on top and one on the bottom, which accomplishes two things... It lets you end up with objectives you're likely to succeed at based on the current game state by burying hard ones and it lets you draw cards from the bottom of the deck. (The deck is pseudorandom in the sense that there are 3 tiers of 5 cards each, and the lower tier cards are just better.) But even though those actions seemed critical to my game plan regardless of the game state, my opponent would almost never contest them. And then when I finally played a game as the empire I kept finding other things to do instead of contesting those actions, even though I know how valuable those actions are for the other side.
This leaves me with a bit of an issue. Are all my actions as the empire equally valuable? Is my evaluation of how useful those two actions are for the rebels off? Are the odds of succeeding at an opposition really bad? Unless one of those three things are true I really need to change my empire strategy to put a premium on opposing those two actions.
I think it's pretty clear the first statement is false. All empire actions are not equally valuable. Each card can only be played once per turn, and each fleet can only be moved once per turn. Different actions will change in value based on the game state, so I'm not saying different actions are strictly superior or anything. But I am saying that on a given turn you will have an action that is worth less than another.
How about the odds of opposing an action? The way that works is all missions have an associated stat and each player rolls a die for each point their leaders have in that stat. So Chewbacca is really good at opposing a punching mission (he has 3 points in punching) but really bad at everything else (he has 0 points in the others). A die is worth 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, or 2 successes. The player who took the action needs more successes in order to have the action happen. Note that this means the opposer wins ties, and with small numbers of dice and small values on those dice, ties will actually happen pretty often. Andrew was saying he thought that meant even numbers of dice would be 60-40 but my intuition has that as being too favorable for the initial actor. Which means opposing would really be something worth considering! But let's work out the actual odds for differing numbers of dice...
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
| 0 | 67% | 89% | 96% | 99% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 1 | 31% | 61% | 80% | 91% | 96% | 98% | 99% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 2 | 13% | 36% | 58% | 75% | 87% | 93% | 97% | 98% | 99% | 100% |
| 3 | 5% | 19% | 38% | 57% | 72% | 83% | 91% | 95% | 97% | 99% |
| 4 | 2% | 10% | 23% | 40% | 56% | 70% | 81% | 88% | 93% | 96% |
| 5 | 1% | 5% | 13% | 26% | 41% | 56% | 69% | 79% | 87% | 92% |
| 6 | 0% | 2% | 7% | 16% | 28% | 42% | 55% | 67% | 77% | 85% |
| 7 | 0% | 1% | 4% | 9% | 18% | 30% | 42% | 55% | 66% | 76% |
| 8 | 0% | 0% | 2% | 5% | 11% | 20% | 31% | 43% | 55% | 66% |
| 9 | 0% | 0% | 1% | 3% | 7% | 13% | 22% | 32% | 43% | 54% |
| 10 | 0% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 4% | 8% | 14% | 23% | 33% | 44% |
What we have here is a table with the number of dice being rolled by the initial actor across the top and the number of dice being rolled by the opposer down the left. Typically you'd be looking at numbers between 0 and 3 but occasionally there will be lots of leaders in one spot working on a single action (trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side, for example). It turns out Andrew's initial guess was actually pretty good, with a 60-40 split when you're rolling 4 against 4, but at lower numbers of dice it gets better for the opposer at even strength.
Throwing a leader in just to 'make them roll' (an unopposed action doesn't have to roll dice) feels like it doesn't make much sense at anything except maybe 1v0. In that 1v0 case you're basically getting a third of an action. Is your worst action that bad? I doubt it, but I guess it might be. But if you have a good leader back then going in 1v2 is 87% of an action. Is your worst action worth 87% of their action? Yeah, yeah, that seems pretty good. I like 1v3 and 2v3 also. So leaving a good symbol leader back feels like something I need to encorporate more into my game.
What about trying to capture a leader? The empire can lock a leader up with a card that requires only a single punch symbol to start up. Capturing a leader means they can't take actions again until they get saved and opens up some powerful torture related actions for the empire, so it's pretty powerful. It's non-trivial to rescue a leader, but even if the rebels have one of the 3 cards that do it and succeed in it on the next turn, you're looking at a 1v0 roll being 2/3rds of costing them 2 actions and 1/3rd of doing nothing. That's going to cost them more actions than the one you're spending, so a 1v0 roll actually feels pretty good. You don't want even dice numbers being rolled, but any positive number of dice is probably a good idea.
The last thing to consider is some of the cards get 2 guaranteed successes if the correct leader runs the action. How good is that in terms of the odds?
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | |
| 0 | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 1 | 94% | 98% | 99% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 2 | 71% | 86% | 94% | 97% | 99% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| 3 | 46% | 67% | 81% | 90% | 95% | 98% | 99% | 99% | 100% | 100% |
| 4 | 26% | 46% | 64% | 78% | 87% | 93% | 96% | 98% | 99% | 100% |
| 5 | 14% | 29% | 47% | 63% | 75% | 85% | 91% | 95% | 97% | 98% |
| 6 | 7% | 17% | 32% | 47% | 62% | 74% | 83% | 89% | 93% | 96% |
| 7 | 3% | 10% | 20% | 33% | 47% | 61% | 72% | 81% | 88% | 92% |
| 8 | 1% | 5% | 12% | 22% | 34% | 47% | 60% | 71% | 79% | 86% |
| 9 | 1% | 3% | 7% | 14% | 24% | 35% | 48% | 59% | 70% | 78% |
| 10 | 0% | 1% | 4% | 9% | 16% | 25% | 36% | 48% | 59% | 69% |
Opposing these cards is a lot worse. You need to roll 2 extra dice on opposition to barely get better than 50-50. Now, some of these character specific action cards are so powerful you may want to take your 31% chance at stopping them (10v10 with +2, like when the Emperor is trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side) but in general, getting 2 free successes is pretty absurd for the odds.
What does this all mean? I think I need to try opposing more actions!
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