Thursday, July 20, 2017

Squish the elves, again

I finished the second week of my new Blood Bowl league and it was shockingly similar to the first.  I played against a Dark Elf team for the second week in a row, won 2-1 for the second week in a row, and injured three elves for the second week in a row.  The injuries this week were less punitive because none of the elves died or took permanent penalties but all three are skipping next week's game to recover, same as last week.

I have had an easy ride of it so far.  Dark Elves are a good match for me, especially in the early going.  They rely on their Dodge ability heavily, and since Dwarves get to cancel Dodge at low cost the elves have a rough time of it.  This opponent in particular had a ton of Dodge on his team and it was not particularly helpful.  My next few matches are going to be rougher, I am sure of that.

One thing I have that nobody else in the league has (that I know of) is an upgraded stadium and an enhancement.  There are lots of enhancements available, though each team can only get one of them.  They are symmetrical in theory, but that doesn't quite work out in practice.  For example you can get soft turf that makes people less likely to get hurt if they fall down by running too far, or both sides can get a wizard.

The two enhancements that were most interesting to me were the ones that grant both sides a Bribe during the match and the one that reduces the cost of Star Players by 50,000.  Note that you have to be playing in your home stadium for the enhancement to matter so you only get the benefit half the time; this will be important.

Dwarves have a really powerful unit called a Deathroller.  It is the strongest unit in the game and is a total wrecking ball when it is on the field, but it gets sent off by the ref after the drive when it is on the field.  You can use a Bribe to try to get the ref to ignore the Deathroller once, but the Bribe only works 83% of the time.  A lot of people seemed to think that the Bribe enhancement combined with a Deathroller on the team would be really good but I don't think it works out that way.  The problem is that the combination of only playing in your stadium half the time and the 17% failure rate means that the Deathroller gets sent off 58% of the time anyway.

Also in many cases you field the Deathroller and use the Bribe, but the opponent has one turn left before halftime and the Deathroller ends up on the field and gets kicked out again immediately.  You can fix this by having lots of dwarves on the bench so you make sure the Deathroller doesn't *have* to be put on the field, but then you have a ton of Team Value devoted to dwarves on the bench, which sucks.  I think the consensus is that the Deathroller costs too much and you would be better off with more skills on your other dwarves than an unreliable trick like the Deathroller.

Dwarves are also in a uniquely good position to use the Star Player cost reduction.  Most Star Players cost 300,000 or more gold to hire, and they are generally badly statted and overcosted.  Reducing their cost by 50,000 is irrelevant; nobody wants them anyway.  However, dwarves have a Star Player called Berik Farblast who only costs 60,000.  He is good at picking up and throwing the ball, but this isn't especially useful as I don't want him to get the touchdowns because he will leave the team at the end of the game and the experience will be wasted.  Berik's abilities really are generally bad and I would never pay 60,000 for him, especially because he has a secret weapon and gets sent off at the end of a drive just like the Deathroller.

But I would pay 10,000 for him!  At 10,000 Berik is a steal.  Not because you use him to play the ball, but because he can foul.  The problem with fouling normally is that you often lose the player you are fouling with to the ref.  Berik is getting sent off anyway and cost almost nothing to hire so I lose very little when he exits the game.  I can run him around and foul like crazy and I don't care if he gets sent off.  He is also useful as a speed bump.  Dwarves are tough but I still don't want them to die.  If there is someone really scary then Berik can just stand next to them and get punched.  If he dies, I don't care.  If he lives to get punched again, then my 10,000 value loser is tying up 100,000+ worth of enemy.

Really, the point of Berik is not his unique abilities but just that he is a dude.  A dude that can stand places and step on necks.  It turns out that a dude like that is really useful if they are cheap enough.

And to give Berik credit, he does have some cool stuff.  If I desperately need a long pass gambit he is actually really good at that.  If I need to throw the ball to the other end of the pitch to keep my opponents from scoring, Berik has the Hail Mary Pass ability, which I would never actually select, but which could come up.

I will only buy Berik when I am playing at home and have the 50,000 cost reduction so half of the time I will just be a normal dwarf team.  The other half of the time I will have a cute little benefit that makes my team just a little better.  The best part about this plan is that I can play completely normally if I want to - I don't really commit anything, and it will never help my opponent.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Eternal destruction

While playing against people is a much better contest of skill I still really enjoy playing against AIs in Blood Bowl.  AIs don't mind if I pause the game for half an hour.  They will start the game whenever I want, and they never take time to figure stuff out while I sit there - it is Go, Go, Go!  I like those things.

The thing is though after you play a team for awhile your Team Value gets enormous and you begin to have issues with having no money.  Also if you are good at keeping your players alive you eventually face down the day when they will all get too old and retire en masse.  It is possible to end up in a situation where a bunch of players retire and you struggle to even field a team because you can't make money because your team has such high value even though you don't have eleven players to put on the field.

I have played a little over 80 games with my Chaos team against a variety of AIs and I am approaching the point where player retirement is a real problem for me.  I had five players who were all originals and who were marching towards retirement together so I had to put together a long term plan.  The real problem with my team was that I had a player on the team who was specced to be good at picking up and carrying the ball.  He had +1 Agility, Dodge, and Sure hands, which is the basic package you need to be a strong ball carrier.  However, every time a player died and I had to replace them Mr. Ball Carrier ended up either riding the bench or trying to punch people badly because I needed the new replacement player to get all my touchdowns to earn experience.  There is no point in having ball carrying skills if you aren't the one carrying the ball, so Mr. Ball Carrier got fired.

Firing a player with 170 XP who is almost going to collect his last skill is a strange thing.  It is especially strange when the team consists of ten murder monsters and one ball carrier and you fire the ball carrier anyway.

Thing is, I can win games without a good ball carrier.  I win by injuring the great majority of the enemy team and casually walking the ball into the end zone.  Picking up the ball reliably and being hard to knock over simply doesn't help with my plan.  Plus every additional knockdown or injury I inflict really helps both forward my plan and also keep my dudes safe.  Opponents find it hard to hurt me when their team is all sitting in the injured box or facedown on the turf.

In this case the best defence is a good offence, and murdering my enemies is by far the easiest way to both score touchdowns and protect myself.

So my new team has only four of the original eleven monsters playing.  It has 11 copies of Block, 11 copies of Mighty Blow, 11 copies of Claw.  The basic murder package on every single player.  8 players have Guard to make it nearly impossible for the opponent to get decent blocks and 3 players have Piling On to pile up the injuries on key targets.

It is a silly game, this one.  But I am enjoying it a great deal and thinking hard all the time about how to optimize my play so it is hard to criticize - what more is there to life than thinking about interesting puzzles and having a blast doing it?

(I know I know, Conan would say that there is "Crushing your enemies, driving them before you, and hearing the lamentations of the women."  I do the first two things, but they didn't implement the cheerleaders weeping when the players on their team die, so lamentations will have to wait.)

A foul move

Last night my new Blood Bowl league got started.  It was a bit rocky because several people ditched at the last minute so it seems that we have one dummy team that will just concede to everyone who plays against it.  That is something of an advantage for the teams in that half of the league as they will get some extra cash and rest, but long run it isn't a big deal, and I am glad to have someone running the league who will just step up and make it work rather than engaging in a pointless pursuit of perfection.

I got a started off with what I think is a good matchup for my dwarves - Dark Elves.  We are early on in development so most teams only have a half dozen skillups and I have Block on my entire team as well as 3 copies of Guard and 2 of Mighty Blow.  That makes it basically impossible for the elves to fight my dwarves because if they stand toe to toe I will destroy them, and if they try to dodge everywhere I have just enough Tackle to counter their Dodge.  Dark Elves don't have enough speed to be able to dance circles around me, and their dodging isn't reliable, so they are really stuck.

My opponent also only had 10 dudes on his team so he had a journeyman join him.  On my first turn I killed the journeyman, so his 30 seconds of fame really was about 30 seconds.  "Hey Mom, guess what?  I am going to play for a real football team!  Watch me go!"

Crunch, splat, dead.  One can only imagine the Dark Elf parents weeping over their child's mutilated body.  Of course the 70,000 gold he got paid to play for 30 seconds will probably console them because if I recall the Warhammer universe correctly that would be enough for them to live in opulence for their entire lives.

I logged a pair of other career ending injuries on actual team members and won the game handily, 2-1.  What basically happened is that my opponent tried to block me but burned through rerolls when he rolled 2s.  When my opponent tried to dodge away he burned rerolls when he rolled 1s.  This was fine for a couple turns, then he ran out of rerolls and his elves spent a lot of time on the ground with angry dwarves standing over them, taunting them to get back up.  This is the standard dwarf plan against elves, I think, and it worked well.

My opponent managed to buy a new player at the end of the game but still has two other players missing their next game to heal up so he will only be fielding nine players next game.  That is a rough spot to be in.  His next opponent is pleased that I left him so beat up, but I had an option to make it even worse and I declined it and I am not sure what the right choice is.

In the closing rounds of the game I was passing the ball from one dwarf to the other trying to earn experience and bashing whatever elves I could catch to get experience from hurting them.  Obviously I should try to get as much experience as possible, no one doubts that.  However, once I was assured of the victory I could have fouled an elf or two on the ground to try to inflict some extra pain on my opponent.  It wouldn't change my victory and it wouldn't get me more experience but it might make opponent's team worse if I could inflict extra injuries.

So do I want to kick an opponent when they are down?

If I end up playing off against this opponent in the semifinals the answer is yes, I should hurt them.  However, a team that isn't even fielding a full roster and has one of their best players with serious injuries on them isn't looking like a big threat.  If I bash them even more I am probably just making it easier for the next few teams to beat them up, and I want all the games that I am not involved in to be tight slugfests where lots of injuries are handed out.  I certainly can't play them again for a long time, so any injuries I inflict now are unlikely to be helpful by the time we face each other again.

However, all of that assumes a lot.  Maybe my opponent will go on a tear through the league and I should do all the damage I can whenever I can.  I know that if I could hand out random injuries to teams throughout the league I would do that... heck, I would even do that if my team was included because I have tons of money and healthy dwarves so I can buy new ones if I need to.  Other people can't because they are squishy and broke.

The last thing to consider is the social factor.  Maybe me not stomping on my opponent's elves at the end of the game will convince him to do the same later.  It won't buy me any other form of mercy, certainly, but maybe avoiding a mutual destruction pact surrounding last turn fouls is a worthwhile thing.  If the league is full of murderous bastards then I may have wasted my chance, but if people mostly play nice then I don't want to be the one person everybody guns for.  I am actually pretty happy to be in a foul heavy league though because of my current situation of having money and healthy dudes... and of course dwarves are tough and generally don't break even when you step on them.

In any case I wasn't sure if I should foul on the last turn so I just didn't and pressed End Turn.  The game was great for me as I suffered no losses, got 17 experience, and won the game.  No need to push it, was my thinking in the moment.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

More blood, and more bowling

I finished my 7 games on the open ladder to get ready for my new Blood Bowl league.  I previously wrote about my first 3 games in which I was conceded to twice and then tied with an unpleasant jackass who spent the last three turns of the game whining at and insulting me.  The open ladder seemed pretty bleak.

I logged 4 more games since then and things picked up considerably.  I got another 1-1 draw against a Chaos team and was pretty happy with that result.  Then I played a game against a Human team that I beat 2-0, and won a super tight game against a Chaos Dwarf team 1-0.  All three of those teams were 200-300 Team Value ahead of me, which made me feel really good about my skill.  Being able to collect a number of wins and a couple of draws against teams consistently much more powerful than myself says I know what I am doing.

Just as importantly all of these opponents were pleasant.  At worst they said hi at the beginning and gg at the end, and nobody fussed about anything with more than a /sigh.  A great change from my earlier rounds, for sure.  I don't mind being sociable or being silent, either is fine, but it is irritating to put up with abuse and complaining.

My last game was in the middle between my toxic first 3 games and my happy next 3 games.  I was playing my Dwarves vs. Undead and got lucky off the bat by injuring my opponent's Mummy, their best unit.  I quickly took control of the game, injuring another one of their players and setting up my touchdown.  My opponent grumbled about the unfairness of the dice and I can't argue that; I got luckier.  However, my opponent definitely tilted some after losing their Mummy and made some poor plays that set me up to continue my dominance.  I injured another player of theirs, got a TD, and they conceded.  It was a perfectly reasonable concession - they were only fielding 8 players to my 10, and I was up 1-0.  Their chances were not good.

Part of Blood Bowl, like many dice games, is keeping yourself regulated when things go badly.  My opponent in the last game basically gave up after having their best player taken out and while they were certainly not favoured to win it doesn't make sense to pack it in that early.  In my game prior to that I led off by rolling 1,1,1,1 and my attacker fell down.  Then my opponent immediately injured my best player.  It was a disastrous start but I held it together, got lucky on two specific attempts by my opponent to knock over my ball carrier, and won 1-0.

The lesson is that you lose all the games you give up on, and only most of the games where you are at a disadvantage.

Much like the rest of humanity the open ladder has some people who are impulsive and rude as well as some people that are perfectly pleasant.  It also is largely comprised of people that aren't that great at board games.

I am ready to fight some people who are really good at board games though, and also people who hopefully won't pack it in when they seem at a disadvantage.  Dwarf smash!