Talk Fantasy Football

I don't have win/loss data, only average points per race:



Apologies for the commas as decimal, that's the version of Excel that I'm using.

Looks like Necromantic really are quite good when treated as a tier 1 team

Interesting, but obviously difficult to assess in isolation. For example, the good showing for HEs must have been influenced by them not spending a lot of time on the top tables - I don't remember seeing (or our team playing against) a single one. The team aspect means a good player on a weak team can still score lots of points.

Looks like Necromantic really are quite good when treated as a tier 1 team

Of course, as the best team in tier 2, they were always going to do well. Just as the weaker teams in tier 1 will relatively suffer in comparison as the gap is narrowed.

That is the odd thing about tiers - the gap between the top and bottom of tier 1 is probably much greater than the gap between the bottom of tier 1 and top of tier 2. Yet (for example) Skaven get no help versus Wood Elves.

Yeah, Undead would have fared better if I hadn't taken them. 333, 12 points and net TD -2 and CAS -2. Shocking performance from me.

Joemanji wrote:That is the odd thing about tiers - the gap between the top and bottom of tier 1 is probably much greater than the gap between the bottom of tier 1 and top of tier 2. Yet (for example) Skaven get no help versus Wood Elves.

it was a bad format/ruleset for Skaven
i was so surprized to see so many skaven coachs.

Joemanji wrote:Interesting, but obviously difficult to assess in isolation. For example, the good showing for HEs must have been influenced by them not spending a lot of time on the top tables - I don't remember seeing (or our team playing against) a single one. The team aspect means a good player on a weak team can still score lots of points.

You could also play on tables further down and just grasp wins against people like Pipey you mean?

I don't know why High Elves did so well. They might have benefited from playing less games at the top tables (Although Jonny_Kanone of SPIKE! Crusaders and Menzogna of The Holy Six each had a pretty tough slate). Funny_Valentine of Les Experts Lutèce came in second in the individual rankings, and with only 18 High Elf teams, he alone accounts for a good chunk of High Elf points - take away his performance, and the other High Elf teams averaged 12.29 points, which would put them right between Pro Elves and Amazons.

But I think this was also a very High Elf friendly tournament. High Elves have arguably the best stat lines of all elf teams, lacking only a few skills ... and this tournament gave them lots of skills, and potentially doubles every day if they wanted.

Anyway, if the goal of the ruleset was to encourage a diverse field and maybe give a boost to some of the less-used teams, I guess that was a success

Joemanji wrote: .....Skaven get no help versus Wood Elves.

From my experience in Italy, skaven don't need help versus Wood Elves.
Wood Elves need help against Italian Style Skaven (because they get butchered).

Any place has his own meta....

It was a 'for example' based on global win rates. Insert another match-up if it makes you happy. The point is that the gap between the global win rate of Wood Elves and Skaven is greater than that between Skaven and Necros (0.045 to 0.009). Yet Necro get a huge boost of skills in all 9 games and the lower tier one teams (including Skaven) do not. It is a more a generally pondering of why races are placed in their various tiers.

http://naf.talkfantasyfootball.org/lrb6.html

If we look at the break points or biggest gaps between win rates, then they come between Chaos & Halflings, Undead & Lizards, Goblins & Halflings and then Necros & High Elves. If we accept that we are not going to create two tiers within the Stunty class, our three tiers could easily look like this :

Tier 1 : Undead, Wood Elves
Tier 2 : Everything else.
Tier 3 : Goblins, Halflings, Ogres

Or, with four tiers (my personal preference) :

Tier 1 : Undead, Wood Elves
Tier 2 : Lizards, Dark Elves, Amazons, Chaos Dwarfs, Norse, Dwarves, Elves, Skaven, Necromantic
Tier 3 : High Elves, Orc, Khemri, Chaos Pact, Humans, Slann, Vampires, Nurgle, Chaos
Tier 4 : Goblins, Halflings, Ogres

Of course, these NAF numbers are now horribly skewed themselves by many tournament using tiers and bonus skills. But it is a vaguely interesting point I think - just how much better Wood Elves and Undead are than even the other tier one races. Also, Orcs / Humans again are anomalous I think because they are a team in the box and so more often used by rookies.

Joemanji wrote:
Tier 1 : Undead, Wood Elves
Tier 2 : Lizards, Dark Elves, Amazons, Chaos Dwarfs, Norse, Dwarves, Elves, Skaven, Necromantic
Tier 3 : High Elves, Orc, Khemri, Chaos Pact, Humans, Slann, Vampires, Nurgle, Chaos
Tier 4 : Goblins, Halflings, Ogres

These are very good Tiers.

Even if in each country (and with each ruleset) the game develops differently for this or that race.

If we are allowed to derail this to diskussing possible tier systems let me present this.

TIER 0 - Wood Elf, Lizardmen, Undead

TIER 1 - Amazon, Chaos Dwarf, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Norse, Skaven

TIER 2 - Elf, Necromantic, Orc

TIER 3 - High Elf, Human, Khemri

TIER 3.1 - Chaos Pact, Nurgle’s Rotters, Slann, Vampire

TIER 3.2 – Chaos. Underworld

TIER 3.S - Ogre, Goblin, Halfling

X skills +1 bonus skill per tier level.
This is the teir system i am toying around with since our spring tournament to narrow the races. To me it comes as close as possible to answer how many skills i would want extra to play an even game against an even coach with teams in other tier.
After tier 3 i stopped, i feel that there will be to many skilledup playes on a team to make it feel a tournament team, by then it is probobly better to move over to other methods of giving advantages rather than bonusskills.
I also think this system will be even better if Leader is banned, i believe it is a easaly removable skill giving the most advantage to races already best of their tier.

Yeah, it was really interesting in terms of "best of race" prizes, and we struggled with the wording as if you were playing woodies on a rubbish team you could do very well.

Rolex wrote:

Joemanji wrote: .....Skaven get no help versus Wood Elves.

From my experience in Italy, skaven don't need help versus Wood Elves.
Wood Elves need help against Italian Style Skaven (because they get butchered).

Any place has his own meta....

what is Italian Style Skaven? Double MB?

Bakunin wrote:

Rolex wrote:

Joemanji wrote: .....Skaven get no help versus Wood Elves.

From my experience in Italy, skaven don't need help versus Wood Elves.
Wood Elves need help against Italian Style Skaven (because they get butchered).

Any place has his own meta....

what is Italian Style Skaven? Double MB?

Double MB, Block on the Rat-Ogre if possible, Leader on the Thrower, SB on a gutter, 13 players (to faul like hell), APO, 1 RR + Leader.

But it is more than just a skillset. It is a strategy with well defined steps during the game.
Targeted at butchering low Av teams.

Farina is the one who invented it.

Interesting discussion about the tiers. If you wanted you could include double skills as a sub tier. So, for example, Tier 3.0 would get 3 additional skills of which 0 are allowed to be a double skill, whereas Tier 3.1 would get 3 additional skills of which 1 would be allowed to be a double skill. Something like:

TIER 0.0 - Wood Elf, Lizardmen, Undead
TIER 1.0 - Amazon, Chaos Dwarf, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Norse, Skaven
TIER 2.0 - Elf, Necromantic, Orc
TIER 3.0 - High Elf, Human, Khemri
TIER 3.1 - Chaos Pact, Underworld, Chaos
TIER 4.1 - Vampire, Slann, Nurgle
TIER 5.1 - Goblin, Halfling
TIER 5.2 - Ogre

speedingbullet wrote:Interesting discussion about the tiers. If you wanted you could include double skills as a sub tier. So, for example, Tier 3.0 would get 3 additional skills of which 0 are allowed to be a double skill, whereas Tier 3.1 would get 3 additional skills of which 1 would be allowed to be a double skill. Something like:

TIER 0.0 - Wood Elf, Lizardmen, Undead
TIER 1.0 - Amazon, Chaos Dwarf, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Norse, Skaven
TIER 2.0 - Elf, Necromantic, Orc
TIER 3.0 - High Elf, Human, Khemri
TIER 3.1 - Chaos Pact, Nurgle’s Rotters, Slann
TIER 4.1 - Chaos, Underworld, Vampire
TIER 5.1 - Goblin, Halfling
TIER 5.2 - Ogre

Please keep in mind that the numbers in this thread are ONLY from the World Cup. I am pretty sure that the World Cup ruleset affected those standings, and while there were a lot of games, there were few enough that a few good or bad coaches, an easy schedule, random chance, or other factors also comes into play.

Take Ogres for example - they look terrible in the World Cup stats, but a sizable portion of all Ogre players were not even trying to win games, but rather play for the Most Cas award.

The performance of Lizardmen also seems to be heavily affected by a tournament ruleset - they're great when Every Saurus and the Krox can get block, but they might not do as well with a limit on how many times you can take any one skill.

Also, the fact that we can't really agree on how many tiers there are is a sign that even talking about tiers is kind of meaningless - a truly tiered structure, graphed out, looks kind of like a staircase. You can say, this group of teams all perform similarly to each other, then there's a clear dropoff, then the next group, and so on. That really isn't the case with Blood Bowl teams, if you graph out team performance, it looks more like a gently falling slope - there are no real breaks where you can say, this is the end of a tier.