Blood Bowl: Apothecaries

I've been thinking a bit recently about how good the apothecary is in Blood Bowl, in particular when compared with the regeneration skill. The apothecary costs 50k in TV to keep on your roster, regeneration appears to cost either 20k or 30k per player, and you can't buy an apothecary if your team has regeneration (except vampires, anyway). The undead teams tend to have a couple of players (ghouls or rotters) without regeneration but you're probably looking at spending around 240k or so to outfit your team with regeneration. That's pretty much 5 times as much as the apothecary, so right away it looks like regeneration isn't going to be cost effective unless you're looking at making use of it more than 5 times as often as the apothecary.

What does the apothecary do for you? It can be used in one of 3 ways:

• When one of your guys suffers a serious injury you can use the apothecary to roll again on the casualty table. Then you get to choose which result to take. If you end up taking a 'badly hurt' result your guy can come back and play on the next drive. So 50% of the time you get your guy back with no injury, 17% of the time you still lose the guy for this game and the next game, 17% of the time he still suffers a  permanent injury, and 17% of the time he's straight up dead. Assuming most stat losses are essentially fatal and that you're using your apothecary on the first stat loss/death to a relevant guy you're looking at a useless apothecary 33% of the time.
• If an extremely relevant guy gets a 'badly hurt' result you can spend your apothecary to patch him up so he can play the next drive. I did this in my playoff game against Mike, because I wanted to win and couldn't see how I was going to score in overtime without my block/dodge/+MV/+AG runner. 
• If a guy suffers a KO result you can spend the apothecary to turn it into a stun. I guess at the start of a key drive this could be the right play on a super important dude? When you're ok with him missing a turn but not the whole drive?

How about regeneration? Well, it does nothing on the KO result but it works on every casualty you suffer. 50% of the time you don't take whatever the damage was and can come back for the next drive. 50% of the time it does nothing and you suffer whatever the consequences were. This means regeneration can't help in the KO case (but that case seems really small), is as good as an apothecary on every badly hurt casualty, and is almost as good for every serious injury. There is a 17% chance that an apothecary will just make your guy miss next game while regeneration lets you keep the permanent stat loss.

If you use your apothecary on a serious injury you're looking at a 67% chance to save your guy. Regeneration breaks even at about 5 times as often, so it would need to save 3.35 guys. It works half the time, so you would need to suffer 6.7 serious injuries per game to break even. That's just not going to happen. So when it comes to keeping your favourite player alive the apothecary is more efficient than regeneration would be. 

On the other hand, when it comes to keeping guys on the field, the apothecary is only going to keep .5 of a guy on the field per game. For regeneration to come out ahead TV wise you'd need to suffer 5 casualties of any kind. Looking at my past games on my human team that doesn't even seem that likely. Even with all the talk about 'killer' teams who stack up mighty blow/piling on/claw, I've only seen a team suffer more than 5 casualties 4 times in 34 games. Now, sometimes only your chumps get the badly hurts and you'd never apothecary them but you would regenerate them...

I used to complain a lot about regeneration, because it seemed to keep guys in play. But really, it doesn't actually get to come up very often. And you pay an awful lot to get access to it. I've also had a bad habit of holding onto my apothecary to save a serious injury. Now that I look at it more, and see that it often won't work, I think I'll be more proactive about using it on a badly hurt on a key guy so I can win more games!

Blood Bowl: Petty Cash

Earlier this week I played a game on FumBBL where my team was 80k above the opposing team in TV. This would have allowed my opponent to get a bloodwiser babe for 50k for the match, but the extra 30k was going to be wasted. He tossed in some extra cash he had lying around in order to get more stuff. I expected him to throw in 20k to round things off to an even 100k but he ended up throwing in a full 100k, which he then used for 2 bloodwiser babes and I got nothing from it. This surprised me for a few reasons. Why didn't he just put in 20k? Why didn't he spend the full 180k? Why didn't I also get to spend the 100k he threw in? Why did he throw away 100k in a pickup game? Clearly it was research time!

It turns out there's a single, simple explanation for most of those questions. Any petty cash you add to your team from your treasury before a match gets added immediately to your TV for the match. Only after both coaches get a chance to add petty cash are the new TVs compared with bonus inducement money given out for the difference.

So, for example, if my TV is 1800 and my opponent's is 1720 the difference is 80k and he'll get 80k worth of inducements if nothing happens. Should he throw in 20k in petty cash his TV will be 1740 and the difference will now be only 60k. He'll still end up with 80k to spend (60k for free and 20k from petty cash) but this has the same impact on the game and costs his team 20k in actual cash on hand. If he throws in a full 100k then his TV becomes 1820 and I actually get a free 20k from the difference. He gets the full 100k that he threw in.

The higher TV team can toss in some petty cash too, and that will directly give both players inducements. This is because adding to the bigger number will grow the gap between the two numbers by the same amount. This can still make sense (maybe you want a bribe to keep your Deathroller on the field) but it does give your opponent a bunch of free stuff as well.

Before doing this research I'd decided to fire my Deathroller, buy two linemen, and run at even TV with Mike. But now there are actually some more options worth considering...

- Keep the Deathroller, but toss in 100k in petty cash to get a bribe. This would give Mike 120k in inducements himself, which is probably 2 bloodwiser babes. This seems like a blowout for him, since I can't imagine I can get him below 11 people per drive given the size of his bench and how likely his guys will wake up from KO with 2 babes.
- Fire the Deathroller, buy nothing, and toss in 150k in petty cash. This would give Mike 10k in inducements so he gets nothing at all. I get a wizard. Wizards are awesome. If I was an elf team I'd look at a wizard as being worth a 2 point swing. (Knock down his ball carrier and score myself instead of him scoring.) As dwarves it's probably not quite as good, but I can definitely envision the game ending 1-0 if I have a wizard. Fry his ball carrier on his drive and just stand around the ball with a bunch of guard dudes until time runs out. Then score on my drive.
- Fire the Deathroller, buy a single guy, and toss in 80k in petty cash. This again gives Mike 10k in inducements so he gets nothing at all. I get a 13th body and 2 agility potions. Assuming at least one of them works I'd have a 4 agility sure hands dude and be in a pretty good way as far as getting an offense going I think.

Looking ahead, if I somehow manage to win this game against the killer Norse, my next game would be against a low TV Skaven team. My feeling is against Skaven that a Deathroller is a colossal waste of space, and that guys 13 and 14 are also bad. Is Skaven really going to take out multiple high armour dwarves? I think I'm thrilled if he's going to get into the brawl that allows that to happen! Chances are strong that the 13th and 14th guys never see the pitch at all, and only serve to give the Skaven team a wizard. Which, again, is likely a 2 point swing for fast team vs dwarves. So even if I decide to buy 2 dudes for the game against the Norse, I'm pretty sure I have to fire them immediately afterwards. (Unless maybe the Norse make a bunch of my guys miss next game?) Or maybe my TV will be so far ahead that Skaven are getting the wizard anyway and I can use the extra guys to foul his gutter runners and hope to win that way?

I'm going to have mull things over more before the game today (6pm, be there to spectate or be square) but I'm now leaning towards firing the Deathroller and chucking in 150k for a wizard. And hey, maybe Mike counters by firing some of his guys and we end up playing a wizardless game with small rosters. That's probably really good for dwarves, too!

Wheel of Chaos

The FumBBL admin team run a series of big tournaments that they call 'majors' for each of the different style of teams. There's one starting up next week (April 10 is the due date for entry) and it's open only to teams in the 'BlackBox' division. This is the blind matchmaking group and happens to be pretty much the only place I've played which is very convenient for me. The tournament this time around is the Wheel of Chaos, which is a crazy single elimination tournament broken down into 8 initial groups. Each coach can only send one team in, and they have to pick which of the groups they want to go through. So it feels like there's some opportunity for gaming the system by trying to find the softest point of entry. I wanted to take a look at last year's event to see how entry broke down to see if I could figure out if gaming entry would make sense in any way.

The first thing to look at is the way the groups are formed. There are 4 chaos gods, and you sign up by picking one of the gods. Then the admins roll dice for each of the gods. If they roll a 1 then the 4 highest TV teams for that god form a group. On a 2, 3, or 4 the 8 highest TV teams form a group. Otherwise the 16 highest TV teams form a group. This gets us 4 very highly rated groups. After doing that the next 16 highest TV teams for each god form a group, which gets us 4 more groups with highly rated teams that aren't the highest. Maybe these groups will have teams 5-20. Maybe they'll have teams 17-32!

Why do you care which group you enter? Well, if you win the whole thing (the winners of each of the 8 groups play down in a single elimination bracket) you get given a bonus mutation based on the god you chose to put on any player you want, and then either 1 or 2 extra random mutations which appear on someone at random. You get 1 mutation if you won a top rated group, and 2 if you came through the lower tier.

Getting to choose a specific mutation and put it on whoever you want is really, really powerful. It doesn't consume a level so it'll let a player get more skills than they otherwise could. On top of that most teams can't get mutations by leveling up so this is the one and only way to get one of these things on a team! So it feels like if a specific mutation is really good then lots of teams would want to enter via that god, and if one is terrible then maybe not as many people join up. How did last year work?

Khorne
- gave frenzy as the free skill (which isn't a mutation at all!)
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs ranged from 2410-1840
- lower bracket went from 1820-1480

Tzeentch
- gave extra arms
- rolled 8 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2420-1900
- lower bracket went from 1840-1190

Nurgle
- gave two heads
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2430-1810
- lower bracket went from 1730-1170, but only had 11 teams total (only 27 teams applied to Nurgle)

Slaneesh
- gave prehensile tail
- rolled 16 teams in the top bracket, TVs from 2410-1950
- lower bracket went from 1930-1770

Reading a forum thread about it from last year it seems that a lot of people intentionally picked the god with the worst reward which explains why prehensile tail (which is worthless for/against many teams) actually had 32 teams with 1770+ sign up while only 27 applied for the very useful (for dodgy teams) two heads.

As far as easier path to qualification, you either want to be in the top 4 or top 8 in a group that only admits 4 or 8 to the top bracket, or you likely want to slot into the bottom bracket. Either you want fewer games or more rewards at the end of the line. Getting stuck in a top 16 group is the worst of both worlds. Finding the soft spot and getting into a bottom bracket with fewer than 16 teams like Nurgle last year would be awesome.

But since the group sizes are determined randomly after you pick which one to join you can't really make logical decisions here. And since it sounds like people were gung-ho about joining the worst group looking for an easier time of things I don't know that you can even game the system that way either. It's great for one or two people to work on it, but when lots of people start doing it the gain falls off. I feel like the right plan is probably to just level up into the 1600-1800 range and pick the group with the reward I want. Possibly build a team to beat dodgy teams and pick the dodgy reward group to feed off them! (It looks like Nurgle last year had a high proportion of elves relative to the other groups.)

Last year the 8 teams that won their groups were...

Skaven - 1830TV, top bracket
Wood Elves - 1510TV, bottom bracket
Chaos Pact - 1870TV, bottom bracket
Nurgle - 2410TV, top bracket
Nurgle - 2110TV, top bracket
Chaos Dwarves - 1820TV, bottom bracket
Skaven - 1660TV, bottom bracket
Chaos - 2270TV, top bracket

It makes me sad that 7 of the 8 teams already had mutation access. Skaven ended up winning, and unfortunately no longer have the extra mutations on the team. A lineman won the random one, got very long legs, and got fired immediately. (It still adds 20k to TV and that one in particular would have no game effect.) A gutter runner got the bonus two heads, but he has since been killed.

Anyway... This year the bonuses are horns, extra arms, very long legs, and two heads. Horns are useful for pretty much everyone, except maybe chaos I guess since they start with horns on anyone apt to be blitzing anyway. Extra arms is awesome for anyone who wants to ever pick up the ball. Even bashy teams want some guy to pick up the ball! I guess elf teams really don't want it since they're already at 2+ to pick up the ball unless it's in a tackle zone. Very long legs is terrible. A wardancer without +AG wants it, but it's pretty sketchy on everyone else. I guess getting it opens up the option to take leap later. Two heads is great for anyone who dodges around, which is most finesse teams and even some bashy teams want one dodgy guy. It works well with break tackle, so high level strong guys are happy to get it too.

I really don't want very long legs, and I suspect it's going to see a lot of people trying to sneak into the smallest qualifier. My hope is that will backfire on them. My human team is up to 1800TV so I have a reasonable team to enter into probably any qualifier. Two heads was the smallest entry qualifier last time, will it stay small or will people hope to abuse the fact that it was small last time? My ogre really wants horns, extra arms, and two heads. Maybe in the spirit of chaos I'll roll a die to decide between those three! Weighted a bit towards two heads since it was small last time.

Marvel Heroes Beta

I just got an email inviting me to partake in the beta for a game called Marvel Heroes. A quick internet search turns up that this is an free to play action RPG (ala Diablo) using characters from the Marvel universe. So instead of being a wizard or a barbarian you can be Wolverine. It sounds like it'll use the League of Legends model where you pay money to unlock more characters, which is nice compared to a pay to win model.

That said, I don't want to play betas, and I've never really been a big comic fan so I don't feel terribly inclined to play the game. The beta key in the email doesn't seem to be linked to my email address or anything, so if anyone is actually interested in giving the game a try and wants a beta key, let me know and I'll forward you the email. First come, first served!

Blood Bowl: Fouling Odds

Fouling is a high risk/high reward action in Blood Bowl. You run over and kick someone on the ground in the head. If the ref notices what you're doing then your player gets ejected for the rest of the game. That's bad. But sometimes kicking someone in the head will take them out for the game, or maybe even kill them permanently. That's good. If the ref catches you it's a turnover. That's bad. You get to risk your worst player against their best player. That's good. The important questions to ask when determining if it's worth risking the bad for the good are how often you'll get kicked out, and how often you'll take the target out.

You get kicked out if you roll doubles on the 2d6 armour roll, or if you roll doubles on the 2d6 injury roll if you pierced armour. When you foul you do get +1 to the armour roll for every adjacent assist. This means you're looking at needing to roll anywhere from a 10 to a -1 on 2d6 in order to get to that second 2d6 roll. I made a nice little table...

	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Ejected	31%	31%	30%	29%	27%	25%	22%	20%	19%
Armour Pierced	100%	97%	92%	83%	72%	58%	42%	28%	17%
Knocked Out	42%	41%	38%	35%	30%	24%	17%	12%	7%
Casualtied	17%	16%	15%	14%	12%	10%	7%	5%	3%

Each column indicates the amount you need to roll on the 2d6 after taking assists and enemy armour into account.

So, for example, if you run up and foul someone who has 9 armour, and you have no assists at all, you're looking at a 19% chance that you get ejected yourself vs only a 7% chance of at least knocking the other guy out. The odds only swing in the fouler's favour at the 'roll a 6' mark. But sometimes just stunning an opponent is good enough (say there's a guy on the ground inside your ball carrier's cage, for example) and you have pretty good odds of doing that with just a small number of assists.

There are a couple of skills that can be used with fouling. Sneaky git means you don't get ejected unless you actually broke their armour regardless of the rolls. The table then becomes...

	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Ejected	31%	28%	27%	23%	21%	17%	14%	9%	7%
Armour Pierced	100%	97%	92%	83%	72%	58%	42%	28%	17%
Knocked Out	42%	41%	38%	35%	30%	24%	17%	12%	7%
Casualtied	17%	16%	15%	14%	12%	10%	7%	5%	3%

Someone with sneaky git looks to always have a good foul action regardless of assists or armour. There's still a chance they get kicked out after only stunning the enemy but that looks to be more than offset by the times you KO+ the enemy without getting ejected yourself. But at the left end of the table, when you get lots of assists, it doesn't really do much at all. Sneaky git only decreases the odds of the bad outcome, it doesn't increase the odds of the good outcome. The only reason I'd consider taking sneaky git is if you have really terrible players without general skill access. Like, say, halflings. You want to foul every single turn with the halflings and unless you can get a ton of assists it's probably a good thing to have a sneaky git doing the fouling for you. But on any sort of real player I can't imagine taking it.

The other fouling skill is dirty player. This gives you +1 to your armour roll, and then if you broke armour and didn't need the +1 you get +1 to the injury roll. This changes the table as follows...

	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Ejected	31%	31%	31%	30%	29%	27%	25%	22%	20%
Armour Pierced	100%	100%	97%	92%	83%	72%	58%	42%	28%
Knocked Out	58%	58%	56%	52%	47%	40%	31%	22%	14%
Casualtied	28%	27%	26%	25%	22%	19%	14%	10%	6%

Well... Dirty player sure seems good. Now the break even point is at needing to roll a 9, which is pretty much an unassisted foul on anyone with 8 or less armour. Get a few assists so that you only need to roll a 5 and you're looking at a KO+ more than half the time, and a casualty a quarter of the time. You'll get taken out yourself 30% of the time, which is a lot, but if you have a cheap lineman with only the dirty player skill this seems entirely reasonable. Trade in your 60k or 70k player for someone who may be worth 150k or more. That is a very solid investment. Heck, even my dwarf team could make very favourable trades with a 90k dirty player.

Ok, I'm convinced now. Deathroller is definitely getting cut for 2 regular dudes who are going to put the boots to the best players on the enemy team if it makes sense. Come here, Olaf...

Fired-roller

The playoffs are set to start in the Blood Bowl league and I managed the third seed in my group. This means I'm up against the second seed of the other group, Mike Turian's Norse team. I'm playing Dwarves, which means we both have block on pretty much the entire team and then a ton of other skills on top of that. My team is mostly guard as the add-ons, and Mike is more of a mix though he does have 4 guard of his own. He also has a guy with mighty blow and piling on which is scary. At least he doesn't have claw! His Yeti does, though, and also has mighty blow. It's a little worrisome.

As far as TV goes I'm currently sitting 20k above him, which would be no inducements of note. That's a pretty good spot to be, but my team still has an unskilled Deathroller. Norse seem like they may well have the potential to score quick and get the Deathroller off the field, but it's by no means guaranteed and that might be the way to win? On the other hand I feel like the claw and mighty blow is apt to take out a guy or two in the first half, so taking out a guy of my own means I'm going to be short handed in the second half. And if my games on FumBBL have been teaching me anything it's how much I hate actually blocking with a guy who has loner and doesn't have block. I think even if TV wasn't a thing I wouldn't want to keep him. Firing him does drop me down to 12 dudes, and that may be too few. What are my options?

I could spend the 140k of inducement money on things. Bloodwiser babes are awesome, but when my whole team has thick skull they aren't nearly as good. (Thick skull negates 56% of the KOs.) More likely I'd be running 3 agility potions. This play would be safe from the 'add treasury money to drug test' gambit because giving me any extra money at all gives me a wizard.

I could buy more dudes. Dwarves are really tough, so against a team like elves I think 12 guys may even be too many. But my game against Chaos to start the league saw many of guys get casualtied and I really worry the mighty blow and piling on and claw will work wonders against me. 70k per extra dude means I could either get 1 dude and an agility potion or 2 dudes. The advantage of 2 dudes is I can potentially foul the piling on guy without dropping too far down in dudes if I get kicked out. And it has the nice aesthetics in that it ties our two TVs up exactly. I think that's going to be my plan.

Lounge Day 2013 Games Played

Friday was Lounge Day which meant lots of games to play. In particular, these are the games I played...

DC Comics Deck Building Game x2
Tzol'kin the Mayan Calendar
Bridge (including back to back 5 spades doubled contracts making! I'll wait for my cheque in the mail, Byung!)
Quarriors x5
Tally Ho!

I heard a few people complaining this year about how the couches were worse than what we had back in the day. Playing games in couches on low tables was hurting people's backs, and it was hurting mine too. But I don't think it was the couches at all. Instead I think it's us getting old. My body can't handle all the bending over that playing on a coffee table entails now. Heck, one of the games I went and sat down cross legged on the floor in order to get the table at a quasi-reasonable height.

Also on the topic of being old... Actually seeing University age people is a shocking reminder of just how young they look, and by extension, just how old the people I do see on a regular basis are.

There were also too many kids around. Boo kids! Boo! People who have kids are old.

I ate out twice in Waterloo and don't seem to have gotten sick from either place. Yay! The server at Mel's knew about gluten allergies and knew enough to say the homefries weren't going to kill me. They weren't very good regardless, but they were still edible. The poor girl at Sunshine's, on the other hand, didn't seem to understand what the word 'wheat' meant. Or vegetable, for that matter. I'm not very comfortable talking to people in general so spending a couple minutes trying to explain what I wanted to eat was very taxing. Eventually I became convinced that the chicken fried rice probably wasn't made with soya sauce, and risked it. I asked for no vegetables, but when that got a blank stare I fell back to just no onions. I can pick around peas and carrots if I have to, but onion flavour is pervasive!

Lounge Day

I was going to make a Friday joke for Lounge Day this year, but then I did a quick search of my old posts and found I did just that last year. Man, Nick of 2012 was a witty guy. Or something...

At any rate, today is Lounge Day. A day full of board games in the math Comfy Lounge at the University of Waterloo. This is the 12th such iteration (always on 'Good Friday' every year) which means one thing: We're OOOOOOOOLD! Wow! Come on down and play some games, it'll be fun.

Remember... Byung is a cylon!