dode74 wrote:Fluff-wise, TV is the value of the player. A player who has gained more rare (to that race/position) skills is more valuable than one who has not.
Which isn't inherently true - it's only true when the player manages to snag a powerful skill from the doubles categories... that skill is probably no more valuable to said player than to players who can take it on a normal roll, just more unusual. I'm not sure TV needs to reflect "unusual" skill placement, though I know this isn't something we disagree on.
dode74 wrote:What I am sayong, though, is that there are combinations of skills which give an advantage over an Action (not a roll) which happen to be cross-category, and teams which have natural access to those categories gain the advantage not only in access but in cost.
Yes, there are certainly combinations that require access to multiple lists, but not every combination of skill categories creates such combinations, and the component skills of these combinations are not less useful than their portion of the combination, even in absence of the other skills. They're really just stacking effects that apply to the same action, not things that come together to make an unreasonable effect that wouldn't exist without all the pieces of the combination.
Since not every combination of skill access categories results in the possibility of a combination... and not every player will benefit from every combination even if one can be made... it seems overkill to start taking EVERY player for having access to more than one normal skill category. I agree that linemen having multiple normal skill categories, without having a negatrait, tends to make those teams better long-term performers... it isn't a
necessary condition for good long-term performance, and it will be rough on teams that have poor lower TV performance, as it will cost them more to deal with teams that have linemen that start with skills from a category other than what they'd have cheap access to under your system. Lizardmen won't need to pay any more for their skills, for example, but they're quite a strong roster, even in later play.
dode74 wrote:Exactly. Those are the teams which seem to do best at higher TVs, so increasing their TVs for the same skillset will mean that either their opponents will get more inducements (mostly league and tournament play) or their opponents will get more skills (all play), thus giving their opponents better on-pitch value compared to what those teams have.
It's certainly one way to do it... though again, teams like Lizardmen and Skaven won't be held back at all, and they're also strong performers at high TV. The lower TV play will be even more dominated by teams that start with cross-category skills on their linemen (such as Dwarves and Amazons). I'm just not convinced that what you're suggesting will handle the issue it is meant to handle... and that it won't cause a lot more problems in the process.
dode74 wrote:That said, adjusting skill costs still doesn't address the issue that teams with natural access to multiple categories gain both a TV and an access advantage. Unless you either remove the TV tax for rolling a double, or add one for opening access, that advantage will remain in TV. Adjusting access will lead to some fairly homogeneous teams, imo, and I don't want to go down that route.
As I said, I would start by removing all TV taxation anyway... so no additional cost for doubles skills, certainly. While I certainly don't like the additional cost for doubles skills, I don't really think that the additional cost is what is what is causing performance issues at higher TVs... the inability to take those skills, except on doubles, seems a more likely culprit. If you want to add a tax on premium access, you might consider a more simple system which doesn't need to track "unlocks" and instead allows a player to take a doubles skill on a single roll by paying a TV premium, instead.
dode74 wrote:Amazons are, as I think you agree, a fairly poor team design even among those we have. Personally I think they are the team which could most do with a rewrite from the ground up. While I accept the basic premise of the statement above, I think that any criticism based on what Amazons would do is fairly weak. I would agree that there may be some short-term advantage for Dwarves and, to a lesser extent, CDs, but they will also gain at high TV, which is where they suffer and where I am aiming.
Well, low TV has to be a consideration too - you can't make changes to a game that includes both low and high TV play and say "I don't really care what it does to one of them"... especially since you need to survive low TV play to GET to high TV play. Certainly Amazons are a badly designed team, but unless we're ALSO going to change amazons, they'll be doing terrible things to everybody for a larger TV range if the other teams are being penalized for skilling up their players, while the amazons are chugging along happily as usual... at least in the TV range where most games are being played.
I'm not, of course, opposed to taking a hacksaw to the Amazon roster, either... though revising the cost of skills would probably handle that as well.
dode74 wrote:Without an extensive rewrite of the team and player costs such a wide costing bracket is not really feasible. Even extending to 30TV will give some teams (e.g. Dwarves & CDs) a low TV advantage.
I'm not sure I agree. While it would certainly benefit from updating player purchase costs to reflect the updated skill costs, I'm not sure it would be a necessary step for it to work, or to avoid a serious increase in low TV advantage to teams with the starting skills. Since skills that do NOT have significant and constant on-pitch advantage would cost LESS than 20 TV, the TV shift for teams at low TVs would depend on which skills they took... likewise, Dwarf and CD teams don't seem to benefit heavily from inducements either way... their TV progression/win% relationship seems to be "start strong at low TVs, then tank rather quickly at higher TVs" which suggests they're already based on those starting skills, and don't get much out of player progression or inducements.
Teams like Amazons would be paying quite a bit more to accomplish what they can already accomplish in a trivial fashion. Slap a 50 TV pricetag on Block and on Dodge, and I suspect you'd see the Amazons no longer dominating low TV play in the way it does now... since it'd quickly leave the low TV ranges if they had a full lineup of blodging linemen. Since the skill costs would affect everybody equally, the TV <--> Performance relationship would become sharper, and likely teams of similar TVs would move closer to one another in terms of performance at both low and high TV levels.
I agree that players that start with certain skills that they don't pay extra for, would benefit... but they also benefit under what you're proposing when they start with skills from anything but the first category they'd have normal cost access to. Starting skills are just a handy thing to have, and unless the purchase price of the player is adjusted to either reflect the updated skill costs in what I'm saying, or the unlock costs in what you're suggesting, that's just going to be a fact of life.
