Corvidius wrote:
Does that better explain what I meant?
It does thanks, although I would always fire a -St player anyway regardless of skills. But i do see you your point.
plasmoid wrote: Apoth was nerfed to compensate to increase loss of players - which was decreased by weakened fouling and removal of ageing.
Also, it was part of improving the TV-system (and handicap system). The old apoth was sooo much better than it's 50K price tag.
Thanks plamoids. This was what I suspected then. The apo nerf doesn't bother me at all. I think it is a very good way of making up for the removal of ageing and the decreased effect of fouling, but I do wonder why Regen didn't get a similar nerf. Maybe 5 and 6 regen works - send to reserves box and a roll of 4 regen works but the player goes to the KO box would have been a good idea. Or something along those lines anyway.
Wylder wrote:
My local league plays sort-of-fixed league schedules that head to the semi-finals after about 10 games played. With only 10 games to get through, agile teams have a fairly good chance of making it to the playoffs without getting destroyed. Meanwhile, bash teams have a fairly good chance of eliminating some of their rivals. It creates a relatively even playing field.
That isn't a long enough season to see what this discussion is about really. I play in a similar length TT league and thankfully it is too short to see the CPOMB teams completely dominate. CPOMB teams or Hyperbash teams as they are getting called now usually take between 30 and 40 games to achieve the peak of their power and this is where the problems start to occur. Because in a truely perpetual league (I'm not talking about MM or Black Box here) these teams will be able to maintain a high TV consistently, while no other teams can achieve that for anywhere near the same length of time.
Here are some quotes from Galak and JJ about perpetual leagues and how the new rules make them a lot more balanced and achievable in comparison with LRB4 and earlier editions-
Jervis Johnson wrote:
The version you are now reading is the PBBL (Perpetual Blood Bowl League)
edition
The single most important thing I needed to sort out with the league rules
was the problem of the ‘part-time’ coach. Anybody who has played in a
Blood Bowl league before will understand this problem. When the league
starts up you get loads of enthusiastic coaches all clamouring to take
part. After half a dozen games, however, quite a few of the coaches will
have started missing games, or have dropped out of the league
altogether, especially if their team isn’t doing very well... The way that I
tried to get round this problem was by creating an ‘open’ league format.
This places the emphasis on arranging matches and playing games
firmly on the shoulders of the coaches themselves. In this way
enthusiastic coaches can play as many games as they like, or rather, as
many games as they can find opponents to play against. Meanwhile, less
enthusiastic coaches can play fewer games, as and when they like.
This system worked well in the 3rd edition rules, with one very important
exception: teams just kept getting better and better if they played
matches, and if they played enough matches there was simply no way
for a starting team to compete against them. This was not what I had
intended to happen at all; the league rules were there to provide
continuity between games, not to allow coaches to create ‘super-teams’
that couldn’t be beaten unless an opponent had racked up enough
matches.
This problem came about because the handicapping system I’d built into
the 3rd edition rules didn’t give enough help to the underdog. In the years
following the release of 3rd edition a number of increasingly complex
‘patches’ were applied to the game rules to try and deal with the
problem, but none of them really worked as well as I hoped, and they
added a lot of complexity to the game. In the end I became frustrated
with the whole thing and decided to go back to the drawing board and
start again with a new handicap system. After a few wrong turns this
resulted in an early version of the rules for Inducements that you will find
in the new League rules, and the associated rules that increase the value
of a player as they learn more skills. These two things are a lot simpler
than what we had before, and make it much more straight-forward to
balance a match between two teams of differing experience. They also
mean that the Blood Bowl league rules have finally achieved the design
goals I set for them back in 1993 (well, better late than never!)
Some comments from Tom Anders:
http://www.cyanide-studio.com/forumBB/v ... 39#p398639
GalakStarScraper wrote:
Jervis Johnson's definition of a "perpetual" league was one where player could come and go, stick with teams they love or start new ones in the midst of seasoned teams and the league kept running just fine. The idea of his for prepetual Blood Bowl was for a league that never had to be restarted in order to work. 3rd edition didn't work that way ... you had to restart the league from scratch every couple seasons or new teams spent forever developing because they would be slaughtered. This fact was pretty true all the way through LRB 4.0. LRB 5.0 was Jervis introducing the perpetual league concept where a league would never need to be restarted in order to work.
That's what that word meant in relationship to Blood Bowl.
So in Jervis's mind ... perpetual to him meant a league that constantly had teams retiring and new ones starting as player interest changed or new players joined and that was not a problem.
Tom
http://www.cyanide-studio.com/forumBB/v ... 63#p398663
GalakStarScraper wrote:
Yes it was the intention that if a player never wanted to retire his team that would be okay. That's why the attritrion rules pack the improved punch they do with CRP, why the apothecary is worse and why Spiralling Expenses are there. All 3 are meant to help the game trim down a higher TV team.
http://www.cyanide-studio.com/forumBB/v ... 17#p165017
GalakStarScraper wrote::
My thoughts on this. FUMBBL has proven without a doubt to me that perpetual Blood Bowl can work. IF Cyanide would program in ALL the inducements (including all the Star Players (they can leave out the Special Play Cards though)) and the rest of the 21 teams and make sure that you have a way to only have games played through non-cherry picking and non-I'll get my friends to help me cheat methods ... then it would be readily appartant that this game does work with teams playing for as many games as they want. FUMBBL has teams that have played THOUSANDS of games. And LRB 5.0/6.0 takes what FUMBBL had and made it even more balanced.
Yes at some point Blood Bowl becomes about team management over team growth ... but that is delibrate and meant to be a part of the game. Allowing continuous growth is broken and reaches the boring point that dode74 mentions.
Before you try to suggest that this games needs changed ... can you use that energy to actually work to get the whole game available first.
Seriously ... I spent thousands of hours over the last 5 years re-writing the rulebook. The BBRC had the help of some great people doing it. I believe without question that what Doubleskulls and I present to you in LRB 6.0 is the most balanced rulebook Blood Bowl has ever had. It doesn't need more ... its that good and I know its that good. However ... too many are judging this game on just a fraction of its rules as implemented by Cyanide. Before we start looking for wierd features in Blitz mode ... let's give everyone a chance to play the actual game firs.t
Galak
Now sadly this is where things start to fall down. While the rules are a definate imporvement on LRB4 for a great deal of things - journeymen, removed ageing, change to niggles, inducements are better than handicaps and Av9 teams (Orcs and Dwarves) no longer dominate the perpetual league environment like they once did. There are similar problems as before -
Now in truely perpetual leagues the only teams that can maintain a very high TV will be the hyperbash teams. Chaos and Nurlge. So instead of Dwarf and Orc we have two new monster teams. The reason no other teams can maintain this TV for such prolonged periods of time is because when they play CPOMB teams, regardless of whether they win or lose, their TV takes a pounding and they usually suffer a number of stat drops, niggles or kills.
This causes major problems for new teams joining in these leagues because none of the inducements can make up for this killer combo when it is on a handfull of players while their other players have support skills like guard etc... New teams entering into this situation will take a long long long time to reach a TV where they finally start being competative again.
Elf teams can often win these games if they are within a TV of 300 ish because they can cope with being reduced to 5 or 6 players each half and the wizard makes getting the ball and running away a lot easier than it would be without. But other bash teams without the CPOMB combo within a 300TV range do not stand much of a chance and their team will likely get slaughtered in the process. Teams like Orcs or Khemri etc... do not have the ability to dodge away from CPOMB players with any reliability and will almost always be caught up in a war of attrition which only the CPOMB teams can win.
Maybe a star player on each team that can help defend against such skills would have be a good edition. Someone who has all the anti CPOMB skills. Dodge, Wrestle, Thick Skull and Fend. At the moment the star players that are meant to damage these players in a perpetual league environment are the secret weapon players. None of them pose any real threat though and with one or two turns of protecting your killers against them you wil almost always be able to get a blitz or block against a secret weapon player and take him out the game. The possible exception to this is the Ball and Chain players who are amazing but randomised movement makes them hit and miss.
Other inducments that are meant to help beat these teams -
Bribes - Means you can foul every chance you get. In theory it is a nice idea. But since fouling has been nerfed so badly you cannot reliably foul a player now. Also PO is so good because it apparently comes with a down side, which is - it leaves your player prone. Meaning in theory good coaches will be able to exploit the extra space left by leaving a player on the floor. However to foul effectively you need to commit so many players to surrounding the prone player that it will leave a huge amount of space for your opponent to exploit. Making it easier for him/her to score. Bringing back the +1 to av for a foul would go someway in helping this.
Master Chef - Very expensive and can only take a set amount of re-rolls and with only 50% chance of this happening per roll it is not really money well spent and even if you reduce a CPOMB team to 1 re-roll they will nto be affected because they can easily get 3 dice blocks off every single turn so the risk of failure is minimal.
Wizards- amazing inducement and one that can cetainly win a game for any fast teams that can exploit a loose ball. However it will not help stop the CPOMB teams TV increasing or stop them destroying your team.
Finally the balance between bash and finesse is probably just the same as it was in LRB4, not better or worse. However the Stunty teams (Ogre, Halfling, Underworld and Goblin) have been hit really hard by PO so hard that these teams now have little to no chance in a perpetual league environment. Goblins possibly do because their myriad of secret weapons and two big guys can inflict some serious damage every so often but a lot of luck is needed. Then there comes the versatile teams, or tier 2 teams. Humans, Norse, Zons, Orcs, Lizardmen etc.... These teams can no longer compete at all when playing a higly developed CPOMB team, they may get the occasional lucky win, but if they are playing a hyper bash team who is being handled by a very good coach then they don't stand a chance.
So in conclusion it feels like very little has changed between the rule sets in regards to how teams perform in a perputual league environement, the only difference now is there are slighly less teams that can be truely competative at a high TV.
By my guess I would say 10 in LRB6 and 13 in LRB4
LRB6 - Elf, High Elf, Wood Elf, Dark Elf, Skaven, Chaos, Necromantic Nurgle maybe Dwarf and CD too
LRB4 - High Elf, Wood Elf, Dark Elf, Skaven, Chaos, Dwarf, Chaos Dwarf, Orc, Khermi, Ogres, Lizardmen, Undead and maybe Elf too.
P.S. Galak has very kindly taken his to work with Double skulls and suggested a number of rules he would like to see play tested, including some changes to the rosters and pricing. I hope we can see these play tested on fumbbl in the next few years to see how they woudl effect the game.
Over and out.