In the last few months my main streaming game has become Blood Bowl. There's a decent computer implementation of the board game (which I have been playing off and on for 18 years) and it turns out I'm pretty good at it and people like to watch good but not perfect play. (It gives them a chance to spot better plays and feel smart!) One of the mechanics of that game is that each team gets assigned a random MVP after a game which is worth a bunch of experience to help level your players. One of my viewers from the pre-Blood Bowl days saw a discussion about the MVP and asked if I'd ever won MVP of the World Boardgaming Championships.
Now, he was being silly, as many Twitch chat people are, but the question has festered in my mind for months. There is an MVP of sorts at WBC. It is definitely not assigned at random, though. Every event at WBC awards points to the top 6 finishers based on size of the event. Sum up all of these laurels and whoever has the biggest number is the MVP. They actually have two such awards. Caesar is awarded to the person who earns the most laurels over a 12 month period, Consul is awarded to the person who earns the most laurels at WBC. They care more about Caesar because they want to encourage people to play in events outside of WBC (a bigger deal when they actually ran a second convention) but I don't much care for play by email tournaments of wargames so for me Consul is the interesting thing.
Looking at the totals needed to be Consul in the last 10 years we see 130, 129, 100, 151, 133, 133, 108, 128, 120, and 156. The most you can get from a single game is 60 and that's for winning one of the 11 biggest events. Available laurels peter off pretty quickly, with second place in a huge event being worth 36 and winning one of the next 12 biggest events being worth 50. Something like 3rd place in a 4 class event (24-53rd biggest events) is only worth 12 laurels. So to get Consul you're looking at needing to win 3 events, or maybe 2 with some other good finishes.
I did come close once, when I earned 99 laurels in 2008. I won a 6 event, won a 3 event, came 4th in a 2 event and 6th in a 3 event. That was good for 3rd place that year (and 16th for Caesar, to show how many points could be earned outside of WBC) with the winner having won 4 different events and an extra 4th place thrown in for fun. I also came 9th in 2012 where I had 2 1sts, a 2nd, and a 6th all in 3 events. That was good for 81 points where first had 133 with 3 wins, 2 seconds, a 4th, and a 6th.
So it's not outside of the realm of possibility that I could have a really good year and come out on top, but it's not actually very likely if I don't make some sort of change. In recent years I've been spending less and less time at WBC actually playing in tournaments or expecting to do well when I do. Moving to New Brunswick meant I both didn't play any games and cared more about hanging out with friends at WBC than playing in events. So while in previous years I may have done things like randomly played a heat of Tigris & Euphrates (in which I somehow came 2nd in 2010) to boost my laurels I wouldn't have done so the last couple years. Which did mean that last year was my first year in 10 where I didn't win a single plaque. I'd averaged 46 laurels per year for my first 9 years; last year I got 2. It felt a little bad. I should be better than that.
Now, I've been playing more games in the last year and in particular I'm hyped about my ability to play a new game for the first time in a long time. The format for Star Wars Rebellion sucks, which has dampened my enthusiasm, but I still have reasonable hopes of being able to win. So maybe I can just use that as my motivation for this year, but I want to think more on trying for Consul. At least think about how to best position oneself for doing so even if I don't end up actually doing it.
There are a couple of variables at work when trying to max out opportunities for laurels. Generally speaking the prize level of an event is based on the hours spent by all players on the event. So if an event takes longer it'll earn you more laurels but cost you more time. If an event has more players it'll earn you more laurels but the competition will be stiffer. These should all even out in the wash so that where you spend your time isn't terribly important... Winning one of those 11 6-prize events is a huge boost, but they should be a large time investment with a small chance of pulling it off.
Stone Age, for example, is one of the 6-prize events. It gets around 160-200 players, has 3 heats, and runs a quarterfinal. If you wanted to put in the best chance at winning the event you're probably looking at playing at least 5 games. (Either play all 3 heats to try to earn a bye through the quarterfinals or play 2 heats to get a win and then win the quarters and semis to make the finals.) So you'd be looking at investing 10 hours to get a smallish chance at the 60 laurels.
Stone Age is actually a fairly skill intensive game I think, and one I'm decent at, so I'd probably give myself a 40% chance at winning a 4-player semi and maybe a 30% chance at winning a 4-player final. So if I asserted I could get a bye I'd be looking at a 12% chance at getting 60 laurels for 10 hours. With some smaller payouts down the line too. Probably not a bad idea.
What might make it a bad idea is when those 10 hours take place. The scheduling game at WBC is not an easy one! The first heat of Stone Age conflicts with History of the World (one of the other 6-prize events) and the single elimination tournament for Innovation (an event I've won in the past). The second heat conflicts with Empire Builder (another 6-prize event), Castles of Burgundy, and Concordia. The third heat conflicts with the single elimination tournament for Star Wars Queen's Gambit (an event I've won in the past). The elimination rounds for Stone Age conflict with all kinds of other semis and finals since they start at 9am Saturday morning.
Which leads to one revelation... Find games that have no conflicts. If the thing that matters is spending time playing games (that you can play through to the finals) then playing games with no conflicts is a good plan. So things that start at 11pm and go past midnight aren't going to have any conflicts and are basically a freeroll. Play Slapshot because it doesn't cost you time you could be spending on a higher payoff event. *sigh*
Certainly one way to gain a big edge in terms of laurels earned is to play a game where you're much better than the average player. Back when Le Havre was an event at WBC I made the finals all 6 times. Even with a smaller prize level than Stone Age, that would be a much better play for me.
The flipside to that is avoid games where you're significantly worse than the average player. My chances of winning a semifinal of Agricola are likely to be in the single digits. They use extra cards that don't ship with the game and with which I have played exactly one game. If I'm trying to earn laurels I'm probably much better off playing Seven Wonders, Love Letter, Scythe, Ra!, and Las Vegas all in the time I'd have to spend playing 3 heats of Agricola. Then the next morning I could play San Juan instead of playing the Agricola semi.
Some events are basically random. If no one is better than average then you just need to understand the game enough to be average and show up. Someone has to win Can't Stop. Why not Zoidberg?
One other thing to consider is advancement conditions. Some events advance plenty of alternates or don't require you to even win a semifinal to make the final. (Top second in a semi has advanced in plenty of lesser attended games over the years.)
Then there's also the fact that prize levels are quantized. Around 50 of the events are going to be at the 2-prize level, but some of those games are going to have significantly more player-hours than others. The ones with fewer player-hours are likely to be more efficient uses of your time than the others. They may only be worth 20 laurels, but if it only takes a couple hours and there aren't many people to compete against, well, it could be a good idea.
I think if this is something I want to do the next step is to go through all the events and estimate the hours it would take to do well, and estimate the chances of actually doing well. Use this to identify a few events to focus on and then build a schedule filling in the gaps with other events that won't have elimination rounds that conflict with the core games.
Showing posts with label board games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label board games. Show all posts
Friday, June 16, 2017
Thursday, May 18, 2017
World Boardgaming Championships: Beginner Rules
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.
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.
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!
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Done With Blood Bowl?
Lately I've been finding myself getting more and more frustrated with playing Blood Bowl on FumBBL. Scheduling league games has always been a little tricky but lately it's felt a lot like pulling teeth. I mean, I'm at my computer for 16 hours a day and can play at any point in time when I'm awake. You'd think it would be easy to get the other person to pick a time and stick with it. But no, people won't pick a time. Or if they do they won't show up on time. And I have problems when I want to be asleep during the evenings because two of my three leagues use the evening as the primary time to play.
It's also getting pretty old having people complain about having to play me. Apparently I lucked into an overpowered race in my primary league or something, but there's no end of people complaining about it to me. It's one thing to have people complain about their dice when they've been significantly above expected value. It's another to have people not want to play me at all, and not being quiet about it. My opponent today was complaining about how skilled my bull centaurs are. I don't know what he wanted me to do about it? Retire my good players to make things more even?
I do think the league has an issue with teams spiraling out of control on the power curve compared to new teams. And as people leave the league new people have to come in with fresh teams. Fresh teams with no boost in power in any way. And often without a good choice of what team they can play because the league has weird racial restrictions. My first team in the league had to be a 7 AV team! Those Amazons got destroyed and that let me draft the race I wanted from the small pool of options the next time around. A Chaos Dwarf team had just quit, so that's what I went with. Anyway, the league has a salary cap to ostensibly keep powerful teams down but if anything it just serves to create obscene teams. I could cut down to 1430 TV pretty easily by fielding a team with one brutal killer, one awesome ball carrier, and rookies the rest of the way. That team would really ruin new teams! They wouldn't get large inducements and I'd skill up my blockers in a few games.
So maybe the people complaining really do just want my whole team to retire. There's really no other option to give new teams a good chance against my team regardless of what TV I'm forced to cut to.
Anyway... If most of the people in the league don't want to play with me, and if I'm getting annoyed by scheduling concerns, maybe I just shouldn't play anymore. This season is almost over so I'll stick it out to try to win a third championship in a row, but after that I think I'm done. There are plenty of other games for me to play, after all, that don't involve getting yelled at or screwing with my sleep schedule.
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.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Blood Bowl: Injury Decisions
My awesome Chaos Dwarf team has finally run into injury issues after two and a half seasons without taking much damage. And they all came in one game... It's almost like claw is problematic as my opponent this time was Chaos Pact. I suffered three permanent injuries and the apothecary's only suggestion was that we put poor Miss Peacock down instead of trying to deal with her bad hip. Thanks Doc.
So now I need to decide what to do with the three players who got hurt. There are six games left in the regular season and I currently have a commanding hold on my division. My team has 7 wins and 1 loss while second place in my division (the aforementioned Pact team) has 5 wins and 4 losses. I won both the games against them this season so he has to earn 5 more points over his last 5 games than I earn over my last 6 games. That's certainly possible, but it's not terribly likely. And even if he does, I may still be able to get a wildcard spot in the playoffs.
My goal with this team is to win the Superior Bowl. I like scoring, and I like hurting people, and I like leveling up my players... But all my decisions should ultimately be focused on the end goal. This team is the two time defending champions and going for the three-peat is key. So the question with the injured players has to be if they'll be more helpful in the playoffs in their crippled states, or if I'd be better off buying replacement players now and getting 6 games to level them up. (Scoring with a 4 movement, 2 agility player is not easy but I'm willing to try it. Especially since I can afford to absorb a loss or two along the way given my big lead in the division.)
There's also the fact I have a healing potion from a big site milestone and the league decided it was allowed to use them on players in the league. So I can always use it on one of these players as well if I want.
First up, Didit. He's a hobgoblin with guard and dodge. I like him because he's a mobile way to stick some guard where it's most needed on a critical turn. He was hoping to level again to get block and become a real pain... He was also serving as a bit of a blitz magnet. People really like to send their tackle/mighty blow guy after him even if it wasn't tactically sound at the time so I could use him as bait to get the defense going one way while the ball went another. On the downside with two doubles he costs 100k in team value for a 7AV guy without block. Anyway, he'd lost a movement in a previous game, and now he's lost an armour. The movement loss was annoying but not the end of the world. The armour loss is troubling. Now a guy with mighty blow only needs to roll a 6 on 2d6 to break his armour. He'd still make great bait, but he's even less likely to take a couple hits before he goes out, taking his 100k in TV with him. I'm pretty sure this one is a cut. I'll be sad to not have a 3 agility guy with guard anymore, but it's not really the end of the world.
The other two injuries came to a pair of identical blockers. Miss Peacock and Miss Scarlet have both rolled 4 normal skill rolls thus far and both picked up guard, mighty blow, stand firm, and grab. They're both really close to getting a 5th skill roll as well, with Peacock only needing 9 more SPP and Scarlet only needing 5 more. I'm a little sad to roll so many skills with all of them being normals, but the first three normal skills on a blocker are all awesome. Guard, mighty blow, and stand firm are all fantastic and they're especially potent when all of the blockers have them. I often get into situations where if the opponent has a block or two without a pow in it they lose control of the board and I get to bash them right out of it. Grab is not very good on paper, but it actually has worked out pretty well for me when I play against elves with a lot of sidestep. Having grab, even 2 copies of it, lets me peel off people marking key players without them just sidestepping around. Theoretically it also lets me set up crowd surfs (in theory my ball carrying bull and all my blockers have stand firm, so I can play on the sidelines) but mostly people just let me by to score if I set up that board state. Which is a good thing. And since I expect to face elves in the playoffs I like having access to grab. One of the injuries here was a movement loss, the other was an armour loss.
Losing a movement on someone with 4 base movement is actually pretty annoying. I had one of those last season (he was a salary cap casualty before this season) and he always had to lag behind the play. Having someone willing to just stand around and fight an enemy tough guy while the play moves away isn't such a bad thing, but it does power down the grab if the player can't get into a good position. Against a bashy team where the grab was irrelevant anyway she'll still do exactly what I need her to though, as guard and stand firm still do everything I want them to even with 3 movement. Go down to 2 and you can't stand up without rolling dice which is terrible, but at 3 you can just stand up as your turn if you get knocked down. And with stand firm they can't push you away without following up, so you get to stay in tackle zones. So I think the movement loss gets to stay on the team for now. I am slowly leveling up the blocker to replace the last movement cut and going down to too many unskilled blockers would leave my team in real trouble I think.
Losing an armour on someone who's job is mostly to stand around getting punched is a real problem. Someone with 8 AV is 60-70% more likely to be removed from the pitch on any given block (depending on if the opponent has mighty blow or not) compared to someone with 9 AV. On the other hand against people with claw it doesn't change things at all! My game is all about pushing my players beside the enemy players and daring them to roll dice. This works more often than not because all the stand firm on my team negates the pushes and having all my players be 9 AV with thick skull means they're pretty likely to be able to just stand up the next turn if they get knocked down. Then all the guard and mighty blow get to take over and I can crush the opponent! But having someone with only 8 AV gives my line a bigger potential point of failure. And the plan only really works when my whole team is around... Once I lose a couple of the good players I can no longer really surround the opponent and my whole plan falls apart. And if I can't win a bashing game with this team I can't win anything!
So keeping a player with 8 AV is bad for my plan, but so is bringing on a new player who doesn't have guard, mighty blow, or stand firm. The new guy either gets pushed away or put into multiple tackle zones and ignored. I know this for a fact, because I have that one new guy trying to level up and he's an afterthought in many games. I did score a touchdown with him to give him guard, making him a little more useful, but he's still easy to just push away. He's played 12 games so far and only earned 12 SPP, and he got an MVP which is a tad above expected since I normally run with 14 players. So a new blocker, in 6 games, will probably get one skill, but only one skill. Which is not the 3 skills really needed to fill a role in my team...
Maybe looking at my next 6 games will help? Khemri, Slann, Underworld, Skaven, Nurgle, Dwarf. Three of those are completely undeveloped teams which are new to the league. A 4th has been decimated and is down to 3 players with any skills. The Skaven team has some skills, including a guy with claw and a one turner, but it also has a whopping 4 players with niggling injuries just begging to get popped for SPP. The last team, Khemri, has a bunch of skills but only one tomb guardian with block.
This tells me I'm going to be giving up a lot of inducements in every game. There are plenty of opportunities to scoop up casualties and most of these teams will be unable to really win a punching war even if I drop a skilled blocker or two. And actually, my conference as a whole has one elf team in it total. They're leading their division right now so will probably make the playoffs, and they do have a couple of annoying players with side step... So am I building my team to beat that one team that I might not even face? I feel like maybe I should be. But there's also next season to think about, and both these guys are going to get cut for salary cap reasons then I would think. Getting one of them started leveling now is probably a reasonable thing to do.
Ok, I think I need to fire both of the players who picked up -AV and keep the one with -MV for now. And then try to use the last 6 games of the season to feed touchdowns to the new blocker if at all possible.
So now I need to decide what to do with the three players who got hurt. There are six games left in the regular season and I currently have a commanding hold on my division. My team has 7 wins and 1 loss while second place in my division (the aforementioned Pact team) has 5 wins and 4 losses. I won both the games against them this season so he has to earn 5 more points over his last 5 games than I earn over my last 6 games. That's certainly possible, but it's not terribly likely. And even if he does, I may still be able to get a wildcard spot in the playoffs.
My goal with this team is to win the Superior Bowl. I like scoring, and I like hurting people, and I like leveling up my players... But all my decisions should ultimately be focused on the end goal. This team is the two time defending champions and going for the three-peat is key. So the question with the injured players has to be if they'll be more helpful in the playoffs in their crippled states, or if I'd be better off buying replacement players now and getting 6 games to level them up. (Scoring with a 4 movement, 2 agility player is not easy but I'm willing to try it. Especially since I can afford to absorb a loss or two along the way given my big lead in the division.)
There's also the fact I have a healing potion from a big site milestone and the league decided it was allowed to use them on players in the league. So I can always use it on one of these players as well if I want.
First up, Didit. He's a hobgoblin with guard and dodge. I like him because he's a mobile way to stick some guard where it's most needed on a critical turn. He was hoping to level again to get block and become a real pain... He was also serving as a bit of a blitz magnet. People really like to send their tackle/mighty blow guy after him even if it wasn't tactically sound at the time so I could use him as bait to get the defense going one way while the ball went another. On the downside with two doubles he costs 100k in team value for a 7AV guy without block. Anyway, he'd lost a movement in a previous game, and now he's lost an armour. The movement loss was annoying but not the end of the world. The armour loss is troubling. Now a guy with mighty blow only needs to roll a 6 on 2d6 to break his armour. He'd still make great bait, but he's even less likely to take a couple hits before he goes out, taking his 100k in TV with him. I'm pretty sure this one is a cut. I'll be sad to not have a 3 agility guy with guard anymore, but it's not really the end of the world.
The other two injuries came to a pair of identical blockers. Miss Peacock and Miss Scarlet have both rolled 4 normal skill rolls thus far and both picked up guard, mighty blow, stand firm, and grab. They're both really close to getting a 5th skill roll as well, with Peacock only needing 9 more SPP and Scarlet only needing 5 more. I'm a little sad to roll so many skills with all of them being normals, but the first three normal skills on a blocker are all awesome. Guard, mighty blow, and stand firm are all fantastic and they're especially potent when all of the blockers have them. I often get into situations where if the opponent has a block or two without a pow in it they lose control of the board and I get to bash them right out of it. Grab is not very good on paper, but it actually has worked out pretty well for me when I play against elves with a lot of sidestep. Having grab, even 2 copies of it, lets me peel off people marking key players without them just sidestepping around. Theoretically it also lets me set up crowd surfs (in theory my ball carrying bull and all my blockers have stand firm, so I can play on the sidelines) but mostly people just let me by to score if I set up that board state. Which is a good thing. And since I expect to face elves in the playoffs I like having access to grab. One of the injuries here was a movement loss, the other was an armour loss.
Losing a movement on someone with 4 base movement is actually pretty annoying. I had one of those last season (he was a salary cap casualty before this season) and he always had to lag behind the play. Having someone willing to just stand around and fight an enemy tough guy while the play moves away isn't such a bad thing, but it does power down the grab if the player can't get into a good position. Against a bashy team where the grab was irrelevant anyway she'll still do exactly what I need her to though, as guard and stand firm still do everything I want them to even with 3 movement. Go down to 2 and you can't stand up without rolling dice which is terrible, but at 3 you can just stand up as your turn if you get knocked down. And with stand firm they can't push you away without following up, so you get to stay in tackle zones. So I think the movement loss gets to stay on the team for now. I am slowly leveling up the blocker to replace the last movement cut and going down to too many unskilled blockers would leave my team in real trouble I think.
Losing an armour on someone who's job is mostly to stand around getting punched is a real problem. Someone with 8 AV is 60-70% more likely to be removed from the pitch on any given block (depending on if the opponent has mighty blow or not) compared to someone with 9 AV. On the other hand against people with claw it doesn't change things at all! My game is all about pushing my players beside the enemy players and daring them to roll dice. This works more often than not because all the stand firm on my team negates the pushes and having all my players be 9 AV with thick skull means they're pretty likely to be able to just stand up the next turn if they get knocked down. Then all the guard and mighty blow get to take over and I can crush the opponent! But having someone with only 8 AV gives my line a bigger potential point of failure. And the plan only really works when my whole team is around... Once I lose a couple of the good players I can no longer really surround the opponent and my whole plan falls apart. And if I can't win a bashing game with this team I can't win anything!
So keeping a player with 8 AV is bad for my plan, but so is bringing on a new player who doesn't have guard, mighty blow, or stand firm. The new guy either gets pushed away or put into multiple tackle zones and ignored. I know this for a fact, because I have that one new guy trying to level up and he's an afterthought in many games. I did score a touchdown with him to give him guard, making him a little more useful, but he's still easy to just push away. He's played 12 games so far and only earned 12 SPP, and he got an MVP which is a tad above expected since I normally run with 14 players. So a new blocker, in 6 games, will probably get one skill, but only one skill. Which is not the 3 skills really needed to fill a role in my team...
Maybe looking at my next 6 games will help? Khemri, Slann, Underworld, Skaven, Nurgle, Dwarf. Three of those are completely undeveloped teams which are new to the league. A 4th has been decimated and is down to 3 players with any skills. The Skaven team has some skills, including a guy with claw and a one turner, but it also has a whopping 4 players with niggling injuries just begging to get popped for SPP. The last team, Khemri, has a bunch of skills but only one tomb guardian with block.
This tells me I'm going to be giving up a lot of inducements in every game. There are plenty of opportunities to scoop up casualties and most of these teams will be unable to really win a punching war even if I drop a skilled blocker or two. And actually, my conference as a whole has one elf team in it total. They're leading their division right now so will probably make the playoffs, and they do have a couple of annoying players with side step... So am I building my team to beat that one team that I might not even face? I feel like maybe I should be. But there's also next season to think about, and both these guys are going to get cut for salary cap reasons then I would think. Getting one of them started leveling now is probably a reasonable thing to do.
Ok, I think I need to fire both of the players who picked up -AV and keep the one with -MV for now. And then try to use the last 6 games of the season to feed touchdowns to the new blocker if at all possible.
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, September 30, 2014
Attacking The Leader
Back before WBC this year I spent a week in Pounder's basement and we played quite a few games with Robb who was also living there at the time. One of the games we played was Chicago Express, which is a relatively short economic train game. You start the game off by buying shares in different train companies and then you take actions to sell off more shares or to make the train companies improve themselves. The companies spend the money invested in the shares to get better and as they get better the shares become worth more. After a set number of actions all the companies pay out dividends which provide the players with more money to use buying new shares in the companies. Player money is only ever spent buying shares, is only ever earned through the dividends (there is one way to get a bonus dividend payout for a company when it gets to Chicago), and is the only thing that matters when it comes to winning the game.
In our game through a combination of not knowing the game so well and/or misplaying we let Pounder get into a very good position. He was the sole owner of two different train companies while Robb and I were stuck sharing a company. I think Robb and Pounder were sharing a 4th company and the 5th company had yet to appear on the board. Because the only thing that actually matters in the game is personal money and Pounder was set up to make the most money thanks to owning so many shares he was on the fast track to victory. His only downside was going to be that he had a limited number of actions to spend making companies better so he was going to be stuck earning base value for some of his shares while Robb and I could use our actions making a single company really good. We'd have to split the benefit but if we're able to use twice as many actions on making it better that's reasonable. We'd also be sure to get the 'connect to Chicago' bonus. Pounder was set up to win for sure, but if Robb and I worked together one of us might be able to take him down. Probably me since Robb had that extra share in the 4th company that surely wasn't going to get any better since Pounder had two other solo owned companies to work on, but maybe later turns would see shares sold of other companies that would change that fact.
Instead Robb decided that since I had nothing else to do with my actions I was going to be forced to make our company better and he'd stick the work on making it better solely on my shoulders and went off to make his company with Pounder better. This meant Pounder got the benefit from 1.5 improvement actions to Robb's 1 and my .5. Pounder ultimately won. We got into an argument over if Robb should have been working with me or not. My stance was Pounder was in a good way and would win if he got extra help from either of us in the early game. Economic games are often snowbally so you need to reign in the leader. Maybe not beat him up the whole game, but reign him in a little after he had such a good initial share phase and then reevaluate the board on the next turn and adjust. Both Robb and Pounder disagreed because they hate playing games where frontrunning is punished because it encourages smarmy actions to disguise if you're actually winning or not in order to trick the other players into reigning in someone else.
I can't say I disagree with that stance, because I hate when a game encourages you to sandbag. But I didn't think that argument actually countered my argument either. I think Chicago Express, as an economic game, is designed such that the individual players have to be constantly evaluating who will win if 'standard' actions are taken and then shifting off the standard actions to stop that from happening. You either do that or the first auction phase determines victory! Really I think it means Chicago Express is a game that we shouldn't be playing because we don't like to work in game states that it creates.
A similar situation came up in our one Civ V game which is nearing completion. It was a four player game where I was stuck on my own land mass, Matt was stuck on his own land mass, while Dave and Robb shared a third bigger land mass. Dave was a strong early game civ and was certainly the player between the four of us with the most knowledge of game mechanics at the start of the game. He very quickly eliminated Robb and started snowballing his strong early game position into a really dominating position. He became allies with most of the city states and then declared war on Matt and I which meant Dave had a stranglehold on votes at the council. He made way more science per turn than either of us. He even went so far as to switch which tech he was researching so that he didn't enter the renaissance era (which would give us spies) until he was able to get almost all of those techs one after the other. It was inconceivable that either Matt or I could win a diplomatic victory before him, or a science victory either. A culture victory was theoretically possibly but his large culture gain from getting so many wonders coupled with his declaring war on us (and therefore removing a lot of tourism multipliers) made that practically impossible.
This meant Matt and I were backed into a corner. There was no way either of us could hope to win without Dave losing his capital. Taking Dave out would open up a chance for one of us to win in any of the ways (including militarily) but if Dave didn't die neither of us could win. Even taking his capital alone probably wasn't going to be good enough since he still has a vote lead over Matt, his culture still exists to block my tourism, and his replacement capital could just start working on spaceship parts long before we'd be able to do so ourselves. Taking Dave's capital slows down his path to victory but our own paths probably require him to die completely unless we're going for a military victory. (Once either of us take his capital then anyone losing their capital would have the other one win.)
We both acknowledged this was the case and then set off to work together against Dave. Talking about how to vote at the council, trade routes, trading luxuries, research agreements... We didn't work together optimally (Matt built a constabulatory to slow down my spying on him and I researched the same techs as he did instead of diversifying for optimal spying for example) but we put in a pretty good showing of it. I don't know about Matt but I also made a lot of sacrifices as time was winding down to try to hurt Dave at the expense of my own board position going forward. (I sold all my research labs and public schools so I could afford to rush buy more units and pay upkeep on those I'd built. I also sold all of my subs once Dave was no longer in a position to build boats even though doing so means I've lost control of the sea against Matt in the short term.)
We ended up capturing Dave's capital the exact turn he was about to win the game by building the last space ship part. We knew we had this many turns and saved a bunch of suicidal bombing runs for the end just in case, but we did it. Dave was understandably annoyed at this, since he was the heavy favourite to win the game almost the whole way through but he was barely denied at the end. He asserts that I am going to win the game now (an assertion I agree with, for what it's worth) and that because of that fact Matt shouldn't have worked with me. Matt should have spent the final few turns before Dave was eliminating setting up a sneak attack on my capital so that if I pulled off the miracle on my own to stop Dave then Matt could have taken me out right away and won instead.
It goes back to the age old question of what should 3rd place do? Let 1st place win by standing aside? Work with 2nd place to make sure 1st doesn't win even if it means 2nd wins instead? For me I continue to assert that ganging up on 1st is often the right thing to do, especially early in a game or if the game has variable length. We're going to get at least an extra 6-10 turns out of this Civ game and it could go much longer than that. Matt has the fast track to a diplomatic victory once Dave is eliminated since he was getting 2 extra votes each failed UN meeting. My tourism win is going to come home before that can happen, I think. But it was obvious that neither Matt or I could win until Dave lost his capital and it was really tight on making that happen as it was. I don't think either of us could have afforded to divert much off of what we did or Dave would have won.
My big problem with the argument that Matt shouldn't help me because I'm a 'clear 2nd' is that it encourages me to sandbag my second place position in order to get Matt to help me. If 2nd and 3rd only work together when they each think they're the one in 2nd then you need to hurt yourself (and therefore help 1st) in order to keep up appearances. But I acknowledge that it's the same argument against ganging up on 1st. If Dave had sandbagged his own position then maybe he isn't such a clear 1st place and we don't work to stop him?
It's hard to say what should be done. Maybe we have the same problem with Civ V that we have with Chicago Express. Maybe it's a game that just fundamentally has a kingmaker problem. I strongly feel that if someone has a big lead they need to be held in check by the other people working against them in this sort of game. Otherwise a small early game edge is a guaranteed victory. I don't want to play a game where we concede to the person who builds the great library. On the other hand I also don't want to play a game where building the great library is a bad idea because it just gets you killed.
I do think Civ V has enough catch up mechanics going on that someone can get ahead without it being a guaranteed victory. But really all Matt and I did was making use of those mechanics to keep pace as much as we could with Dave and we're still ending up facing accusations of kingmaking. The winning odds in this game were probably something like 90%-9%-1%, but Matt and I only get our 1% and 9% chances to win if we go all in on working together. I guess the problem is if the winning odds in this game were actually 90%-10%-0% what is Matt supposed to do? If you're certain you can't win then you basically have to choose who does. Some people advocate for standing aside but I will always assert that not taking an action is an action itself. Games can have kingmaking positions in them and you can't just ignore them. Often I'll see people advocating for improving your position, which generally means 3rd beats up on 2nd and you kingmake for 1st instead. Oddly enough in this specific game Matt both improved his position and kingmade for 2nd since I'm pretty sure most people will look at the end state of this game and say Matt came 2nd if I end up winning. Sometimes people want you to improve your own score, which works way better in a Euro board game with victory points to earn than it does in a game like Civ V, but I guess there's a score number in that one and you can certainly work to make it bigger. Like by taking Dave's cities! (Though taking my cities might have been more score efficient since I sure haven't been defending myself at all!)
I donno. I think if you're against kingmaking game states you can work to avoid games that have them, especially games that have them as a core element like Chicago Express. I think Civ V is probably more on the side of having kingmaking game states than it is the side of avoiding them... So maybe it's not actually a game we want to play? I guess we probably need to have a few more games get closer to the end of the game to find out? I do think Civ V can get into game states where ganging up on the leader isn't good enough. I think Dave had guaranteed wins earlier in this game if he plays differently, for example if he built a lot of mid game boats he could have crushed me when I was way behind on tech. But with more experience we probably just become better at recognizing those game states and have to start collaborating earlier and earlier? Time will tell!
In our game through a combination of not knowing the game so well and/or misplaying we let Pounder get into a very good position. He was the sole owner of two different train companies while Robb and I were stuck sharing a company. I think Robb and Pounder were sharing a 4th company and the 5th company had yet to appear on the board. Because the only thing that actually matters in the game is personal money and Pounder was set up to make the most money thanks to owning so many shares he was on the fast track to victory. His only downside was going to be that he had a limited number of actions to spend making companies better so he was going to be stuck earning base value for some of his shares while Robb and I could use our actions making a single company really good. We'd have to split the benefit but if we're able to use twice as many actions on making it better that's reasonable. We'd also be sure to get the 'connect to Chicago' bonus. Pounder was set up to win for sure, but if Robb and I worked together one of us might be able to take him down. Probably me since Robb had that extra share in the 4th company that surely wasn't going to get any better since Pounder had two other solo owned companies to work on, but maybe later turns would see shares sold of other companies that would change that fact.
Instead Robb decided that since I had nothing else to do with my actions I was going to be forced to make our company better and he'd stick the work on making it better solely on my shoulders and went off to make his company with Pounder better. This meant Pounder got the benefit from 1.5 improvement actions to Robb's 1 and my .5. Pounder ultimately won. We got into an argument over if Robb should have been working with me or not. My stance was Pounder was in a good way and would win if he got extra help from either of us in the early game. Economic games are often snowbally so you need to reign in the leader. Maybe not beat him up the whole game, but reign him in a little after he had such a good initial share phase and then reevaluate the board on the next turn and adjust. Both Robb and Pounder disagreed because they hate playing games where frontrunning is punished because it encourages smarmy actions to disguise if you're actually winning or not in order to trick the other players into reigning in someone else.
I can't say I disagree with that stance, because I hate when a game encourages you to sandbag. But I didn't think that argument actually countered my argument either. I think Chicago Express, as an economic game, is designed such that the individual players have to be constantly evaluating who will win if 'standard' actions are taken and then shifting off the standard actions to stop that from happening. You either do that or the first auction phase determines victory! Really I think it means Chicago Express is a game that we shouldn't be playing because we don't like to work in game states that it creates.
A similar situation came up in our one Civ V game which is nearing completion. It was a four player game where I was stuck on my own land mass, Matt was stuck on his own land mass, while Dave and Robb shared a third bigger land mass. Dave was a strong early game civ and was certainly the player between the four of us with the most knowledge of game mechanics at the start of the game. He very quickly eliminated Robb and started snowballing his strong early game position into a really dominating position. He became allies with most of the city states and then declared war on Matt and I which meant Dave had a stranglehold on votes at the council. He made way more science per turn than either of us. He even went so far as to switch which tech he was researching so that he didn't enter the renaissance era (which would give us spies) until he was able to get almost all of those techs one after the other. It was inconceivable that either Matt or I could win a diplomatic victory before him, or a science victory either. A culture victory was theoretically possibly but his large culture gain from getting so many wonders coupled with his declaring war on us (and therefore removing a lot of tourism multipliers) made that practically impossible.
This meant Matt and I were backed into a corner. There was no way either of us could hope to win without Dave losing his capital. Taking Dave out would open up a chance for one of us to win in any of the ways (including militarily) but if Dave didn't die neither of us could win. Even taking his capital alone probably wasn't going to be good enough since he still has a vote lead over Matt, his culture still exists to block my tourism, and his replacement capital could just start working on spaceship parts long before we'd be able to do so ourselves. Taking Dave's capital slows down his path to victory but our own paths probably require him to die completely unless we're going for a military victory. (Once either of us take his capital then anyone losing their capital would have the other one win.)
We both acknowledged this was the case and then set off to work together against Dave. Talking about how to vote at the council, trade routes, trading luxuries, research agreements... We didn't work together optimally (Matt built a constabulatory to slow down my spying on him and I researched the same techs as he did instead of diversifying for optimal spying for example) but we put in a pretty good showing of it. I don't know about Matt but I also made a lot of sacrifices as time was winding down to try to hurt Dave at the expense of my own board position going forward. (I sold all my research labs and public schools so I could afford to rush buy more units and pay upkeep on those I'd built. I also sold all of my subs once Dave was no longer in a position to build boats even though doing so means I've lost control of the sea against Matt in the short term.)
We ended up capturing Dave's capital the exact turn he was about to win the game by building the last space ship part. We knew we had this many turns and saved a bunch of suicidal bombing runs for the end just in case, but we did it. Dave was understandably annoyed at this, since he was the heavy favourite to win the game almost the whole way through but he was barely denied at the end. He asserts that I am going to win the game now (an assertion I agree with, for what it's worth) and that because of that fact Matt shouldn't have worked with me. Matt should have spent the final few turns before Dave was eliminating setting up a sneak attack on my capital so that if I pulled off the miracle on my own to stop Dave then Matt could have taken me out right away and won instead.
It goes back to the age old question of what should 3rd place do? Let 1st place win by standing aside? Work with 2nd place to make sure 1st doesn't win even if it means 2nd wins instead? For me I continue to assert that ganging up on 1st is often the right thing to do, especially early in a game or if the game has variable length. We're going to get at least an extra 6-10 turns out of this Civ game and it could go much longer than that. Matt has the fast track to a diplomatic victory once Dave is eliminated since he was getting 2 extra votes each failed UN meeting. My tourism win is going to come home before that can happen, I think. But it was obvious that neither Matt or I could win until Dave lost his capital and it was really tight on making that happen as it was. I don't think either of us could have afforded to divert much off of what we did or Dave would have won.
My big problem with the argument that Matt shouldn't help me because I'm a 'clear 2nd' is that it encourages me to sandbag my second place position in order to get Matt to help me. If 2nd and 3rd only work together when they each think they're the one in 2nd then you need to hurt yourself (and therefore help 1st) in order to keep up appearances. But I acknowledge that it's the same argument against ganging up on 1st. If Dave had sandbagged his own position then maybe he isn't such a clear 1st place and we don't work to stop him?
It's hard to say what should be done. Maybe we have the same problem with Civ V that we have with Chicago Express. Maybe it's a game that just fundamentally has a kingmaker problem. I strongly feel that if someone has a big lead they need to be held in check by the other people working against them in this sort of game. Otherwise a small early game edge is a guaranteed victory. I don't want to play a game where we concede to the person who builds the great library. On the other hand I also don't want to play a game where building the great library is a bad idea because it just gets you killed.
I do think Civ V has enough catch up mechanics going on that someone can get ahead without it being a guaranteed victory. But really all Matt and I did was making use of those mechanics to keep pace as much as we could with Dave and we're still ending up facing accusations of kingmaking. The winning odds in this game were probably something like 90%-9%-1%, but Matt and I only get our 1% and 9% chances to win if we go all in on working together. I guess the problem is if the winning odds in this game were actually 90%-10%-0% what is Matt supposed to do? If you're certain you can't win then you basically have to choose who does. Some people advocate for standing aside but I will always assert that not taking an action is an action itself. Games can have kingmaking positions in them and you can't just ignore them. Often I'll see people advocating for improving your position, which generally means 3rd beats up on 2nd and you kingmake for 1st instead. Oddly enough in this specific game Matt both improved his position and kingmade for 2nd since I'm pretty sure most people will look at the end state of this game and say Matt came 2nd if I end up winning. Sometimes people want you to improve your own score, which works way better in a Euro board game with victory points to earn than it does in a game like Civ V, but I guess there's a score number in that one and you can certainly work to make it bigger. Like by taking Dave's cities! (Though taking my cities might have been more score efficient since I sure haven't been defending myself at all!)
I donno. I think if you're against kingmaking game states you can work to avoid games that have them, especially games that have them as a core element like Chicago Express. I think Civ V is probably more on the side of having kingmaking game states than it is the side of avoiding them... So maybe it's not actually a game we want to play? I guess we probably need to have a few more games get closer to the end of the game to find out? I do think Civ V can get into game states where ganging up on the leader isn't good enough. I think Dave had guaranteed wins earlier in this game if he plays differently, for example if he built a lot of mid game boats he could have crushed me when I was way behind on tech. But with more experience we probably just become better at recognizing those game states and have to start collaborating earlier and earlier? Time will tell!
Thursday, September 25, 2014
One Handed Board Games
I went out today to play board games with the hope that I could do so without using my right hand at all. I had to take a harsh veto stance against games that would require shuffling or drafting but with 14 people that didn't feel like such a big deal sine other people could play Dominion and I could play a different game instead. It ended up working great. Turns out I can play board games with my left hand a lot easier than I can type or use a mouse!
I ended up learning lots of new to me games. Amerigo, Enigma, Navegador, Istanbul, and Infarkt. 4 completely new, one I'd played once before. Navegador was a 5er this time so I didn't get to see about the 3er issue but I did manage to win without buying a single factory so going all colonies can't be too terrible!
I ended up learning lots of new to me games. Amerigo, Enigma, Navegador, Istanbul, and Infarkt. 4 completely new, one I'd played once before. Navegador was a 5er this time so I didn't get to see about the 3er issue but I did manage to win without buying a single factory so going all colonies can't be too terrible!
Friday, September 19, 2014
Navegador: 3er Issue?
Earlier this month my sleep schedule synched up properly to let me go play some board games at Sara's. I finally got a chance to learn Navegador which is a game played in an event at WBC. It's a game with the 'rondel' mechanic where the set of actions you can choose from this turn is based on what action you took last turn. The game we played was a 3 player game with 2 people learning but it felt really unbalanced and I've been trying to figure out if the game just doesn't work with 3 people or if we just missed something tactically that could have been done to balance things back out.
The core money making mechanic of the game is the market action which exists in 2 spots on the rondel. When you go to the market you have to choose buy or sell for each of 3 different goods in the game. If you choose to sell a good type then all of your colonies of that type pay out money. If you choose to buy a good type then all of your factories of that type pay out money. The amount of money is based on the position of those goods on the market and goes up and down as different amounts of those goods are sold and bought. Colonies are worth 20-60 for sugar, 30-70 for gold, and 40-80 for spice. Factories are worth 20-60 regardless of type.
It feels like what this means is you don't want both factories and colonies of the same type. You can buy or sell, not both, and even at the lowest value for gold you're getting 30 from a colony. Buy a sugar factory and even if it's also worth the lowest value you're getting 50 from both. 60 from a gold factory is better than 50, but only a little bit, and only in the edge case where gold and sugar are both set to be terrible for you.
It also feels like this means you want to be doing the opposite of the person before you. If they're buying gold and selling sugar then right after they go to the market the values will encourage selling gold and buying sugar. The first person to get a crack at that changed market is the person who plays immediately next.
We played our game based off of those two axioms. Patrick went first and explored gold. I went second and explored sugar. Sara went third and bought some boats. Patrick and I bought colonies of the appropriate types and now Sara had to choose where to go with her double movement action. Moving into sugar colonies immediately after a sugar colony player seems wrong because you'll never get a good sugar sell action and because sugar is worth 10 less across the board. Moving into gold on the other hand boxes me into gold factories (only I want to be the third person to buy gold colonies) and she set herself up to be the person who gets the good gold sell action after my gold buy action. No one varied from there with both Sara and Patrick getting gold colonies and sugar factories while I got sugar colonies and gold factories. (Spice colonies come into the game a lot later than gold and sugar do, so spice factories start off terrible, but Patrick's plan was to get the spice colonies as soon as he could.)
I ended up winning pretty handily because my market actions were always awesome. I consistently got maximum value from my colonies and factories while the other players sometimes got average value and sometimes got minimum value. Sara came second because she got most of the average value actions due to going right after me. Patrick came a distant third.
We tried to figure out some ways to shake things up, but they all seemed bad. Being the first to commit to a type of colony felt like it was going to set the table up to screw you since lefty was going to go the other way and righty was going to copy you. So maybe no one should ever buy a colony? Or push hard for spice?
One thing I've been mulling over is ignoring factories entirely. Could Patrick have gone for both sugar and gold colonies? Or could he have abandoned his gold colony and gone for both sugar and gold factories? I feel like throwing away your 30 bucks per market action from your first gold colony is probably wrong so double factories is bad. And cloning righty is bad. So you have to go for both colony types as the only viable course of action. But is it viable enough? No matter who you marketplace after you're going to get one average sale and one bad sale. You probably need to grab the cheap spice factory too and rake in a third bad sale? Or maybe you actually race for spice and go all three colonies?
In our game we all went a split of colonies and factories but the way scoring happens in the game you're actually encouraged to focus on one or the other. You get to take actions to score 1 point per colony or 1 per factory. Going all in on colonies means your point action is better? And then you can just skip the building action on the rondel (or use it strictly on shipyards or churches) and focus on just getting more and more colonies. Your market action is going to be worse than the other people at the table because you're duplicating parts of both other players and their market actions are going to be better because they each have an exclusive element, but maybe the trade of more efficient point actions for worse market actions is worth it? Certainly the way the game actually played out with giving one player both exclusive market actions was game losing so this can't be worse!
I do want to play this game again to see...
The core money making mechanic of the game is the market action which exists in 2 spots on the rondel. When you go to the market you have to choose buy or sell for each of 3 different goods in the game. If you choose to sell a good type then all of your colonies of that type pay out money. If you choose to buy a good type then all of your factories of that type pay out money. The amount of money is based on the position of those goods on the market and goes up and down as different amounts of those goods are sold and bought. Colonies are worth 20-60 for sugar, 30-70 for gold, and 40-80 for spice. Factories are worth 20-60 regardless of type.
It feels like what this means is you don't want both factories and colonies of the same type. You can buy or sell, not both, and even at the lowest value for gold you're getting 30 from a colony. Buy a sugar factory and even if it's also worth the lowest value you're getting 50 from both. 60 from a gold factory is better than 50, but only a little bit, and only in the edge case where gold and sugar are both set to be terrible for you.
It also feels like this means you want to be doing the opposite of the person before you. If they're buying gold and selling sugar then right after they go to the market the values will encourage selling gold and buying sugar. The first person to get a crack at that changed market is the person who plays immediately next.
We played our game based off of those two axioms. Patrick went first and explored gold. I went second and explored sugar. Sara went third and bought some boats. Patrick and I bought colonies of the appropriate types and now Sara had to choose where to go with her double movement action. Moving into sugar colonies immediately after a sugar colony player seems wrong because you'll never get a good sugar sell action and because sugar is worth 10 less across the board. Moving into gold on the other hand boxes me into gold factories (only I want to be the third person to buy gold colonies) and she set herself up to be the person who gets the good gold sell action after my gold buy action. No one varied from there with both Sara and Patrick getting gold colonies and sugar factories while I got sugar colonies and gold factories. (Spice colonies come into the game a lot later than gold and sugar do, so spice factories start off terrible, but Patrick's plan was to get the spice colonies as soon as he could.)
I ended up winning pretty handily because my market actions were always awesome. I consistently got maximum value from my colonies and factories while the other players sometimes got average value and sometimes got minimum value. Sara came second because she got most of the average value actions due to going right after me. Patrick came a distant third.
We tried to figure out some ways to shake things up, but they all seemed bad. Being the first to commit to a type of colony felt like it was going to set the table up to screw you since lefty was going to go the other way and righty was going to copy you. So maybe no one should ever buy a colony? Or push hard for spice?
One thing I've been mulling over is ignoring factories entirely. Could Patrick have gone for both sugar and gold colonies? Or could he have abandoned his gold colony and gone for both sugar and gold factories? I feel like throwing away your 30 bucks per market action from your first gold colony is probably wrong so double factories is bad. And cloning righty is bad. So you have to go for both colony types as the only viable course of action. But is it viable enough? No matter who you marketplace after you're going to get one average sale and one bad sale. You probably need to grab the cheap spice factory too and rake in a third bad sale? Or maybe you actually race for spice and go all three colonies?
In our game we all went a split of colonies and factories but the way scoring happens in the game you're actually encouraged to focus on one or the other. You get to take actions to score 1 point per colony or 1 per factory. Going all in on colonies means your point action is better? And then you can just skip the building action on the rondel (or use it strictly on shipyards or churches) and focus on just getting more and more colonies. Your market action is going to be worse than the other people at the table because you're duplicating parts of both other players and their market actions are going to be better because they each have an exclusive element, but maybe the trade of more efficient point actions for worse market actions is worth it? Certainly the way the game actually played out with giving one player both exclusive market actions was game losing so this can't be worse!
I do want to play this game again to see...
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