The Economy of Blood Bowl

[High & Mighty]

With team management becoming a more and more important part of Bloodbowl, this begs the question what exactly does a coach need to do to develop the team they want. Some things are somewhat beyond your control and not easily quantified, such as skill development. But fortunately, skill's only roll in team development come in the form of helping you score and win. So the more skills you have (and the more skills you have relative to your competition) the more SPPs you'd expect your team to accumulate and hopefully, more wins. Exactly how many more...any estimate will be nothing more than a guess.

But this now leads one to wonder, what do we know? How much will starting with a FF of 1 rather than 9 cost me? How fast will my FF grow? Will my winnings at some point cut off or at what rate do I need to retire players to keep my winnings coming? Growing out of a discussion on the merits of high ff here a few weeks ago, below is a link to an excel file I created to help answer these and other questions by showing how a team will grow over time based upon the choices and assumptions you make:

http://www.geocities.com/ttocont/Excel/index2.html


It is all based upon the idea that a team's development is governed by four things, fan factor, team rating, gate, and winnings. And overall, what a team is trying maximize (other than just wins) are their per game winnings in the future. That is, a team wants to make sure that 6/10/20 games from now, they will still be making not only sufficient money to cover any unexpected deaths or needed retirements, but to hopefully have money left to spend on freebooting wizards and star players for key games.

For those wishing to punish themselves, we do know how to calculate each of these four fundamental parts:

Total Fan Factor=Starting FF + FF gained/lost over time
TR=SUM(Players, Rerolls, Coaches)+SPPs/5+FF+Cash
Gate=Your FF*d6 + Opponents FF*d6
Winnings=d6 + (1 if you win) + winnings table modifier

Looking at these, we can see that they are interrelated, which is a good sign that we can subsititute things and simplify the problem. For example, the winnings table modifier is simply a function of your team rating and the gate, the gate is a function of you and your opponents fan factor, and fan factor is just a function of what you start with and how well you play (win%, percent of games with 2+TDs or Cas, etc.).

I can provide more detail to anyone who wants to know how I dealt with a specific part, but if you take a look at the file, let me know what you think. It started as something small to just look at long-term trends, but as I fiddled more and more, I thought of other ways to bring the short-term management aspects into the development.

And in case you couldn't tell, yes I'm color-blind so I was never any good in art class so you can suffer with the obnoxious colors chosen in the file because they look just fine to me.

[Mestari]

This looks really good, and I don't mean the colours.
As soon as I've mentally recovered from todays exams, I'll examine the spreadsheet closer...

[Anthony_TBBF]

That is friggin' cool! Very interesting stuff...

[Skummy]

I really like this concept, but I have a question. A team's health is largely dependant on the number of skills it has, in my mind. In my experience, TRR's directly result in getting you more SPP's. Did you account for something like this in your team development? If I was *forced* to pick between a high FF and high TRR's which would be better for a team, long term?

[High & Mighty]

I really like this concept, but I have a question. A team's health is largely dependant on the number of skills it has, in my mind. In my experience, TRR's directly result in getting you more SPP's. Did you account for something like this in your team development? If I was *forced* to pick between a high FF and high TRR's which would be better for a team, long term?

I tried to avoid anything too "wishy-washy" and stick just to the facts. Besides, there were enough variables in there already. But while there may not be a definite relationship between team health and SPPs/rerolls, you obviously expect that as a team develops and people get block and dodge, for example, you're going to have less deaths.

This is why I allowed average player turnover to change as the game progressed. You can decide that before game 30, for example, players will die at a rate of one player every 5 games, but after that, players will die at a rate of 1 every 8 games. I also allowed the SPPs to vary based upon what you enter so up to game X, you expect to gain Y SPPs per game and after game X, you expect to gain Z SPPs per game.

It's just a much more subjective decision and one that could be debated but there is no definite equation so it left it up to each person to decide. For example, maybe you're an orc team in a league with 10 other elf teams. In that case, you're not going to expect the same player death rate as one elf team in a league with 10 orc teams.

So to answer your question, yes it is represented but it is left to your judgement what kind of turnover you would expect and what kind of win percentage you will have and how quickly you will gain SPPs since these are all based on relative coaching strengths, league composition, etc, but no definite equations.

You could obviously construct some relationship there, but there is no noncontroversial equation to represent it such as your team rating is calculated as adding X, Y, and Z.


The one thing I would like to add to the calculations is the ability to change your luck with the fan factor rolls the same way you can change your luck with winnings and gate rolls, but I haven't been able to figure out how to represent that change statistically, so if anyone has some insight, I'd be much appreciative. Long-run a d6 is going to average 3.5, but you just get on those cold streaks now and again. But how much does FF increase per game if you are averaging 3, for example? My attempts have only killed alot of trees.

[neoliminal]

That's a very interesting spreadsheet and it illustrates what I've been saying about the winnings table. We need to take better control over it, IMO. It looks like teams are maxing out around 300 TR. I'd like to see the top end a little lower.

[GalakStarscraper]

Is anyone else running into this or is it just my machine?

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http://www.geocities.com/ttocont/Excel/index2.html

Galak

[GalakStarscraper]

That's a very interesting spreadsheet and it illustrates what I've been saying about the winnings table. We need to take better control over it, IMO. It looks like teams are maxing out around 300 TR. I'd like to see the top end a little lower.

However Neo, I think if an EXP system is adopted as is being kicked around that by the time you start reaching TR 300, you are going to be doing some SERIOUS player turnover yourself to handle the aging effects.

I think if you move to the EXP system your concern about TR 300 goes way down.

Galak

[High & Mighty]

Galak. I emailed a copy to you. Maybe Geocities is being stingy.

That's a very interesting spreadsheet and it illustrates what I've been saying about the winnings table. We need to take better control over it, IMO. It looks like teams are maxing out around 300 TR. I'd like to see the top end a little lower.

But a sustainable upper end of TR is actually getting capped by your FF development. If you have the file as downloaded and change just the win percentage, and games with 2+ TDs and Cas percentages to .5, you will find that fan factor caps out at 20.

Essentially you aren't getting enough modifiers on your fan factor from wins, TDs and Cas, to compensate for the negative modifiers (-2) for FF>10, so now your TR is capping out in the 260 to 280 range because you have 10 less fan factor (thus 10 less TR) and less per game revenue. It's kind of intuitive but a better coach can afford to run a team with a higher TR, while a lesser coach can only run a team with less TR. May not be good from a balance perspective, but that's the way it works.


Also, regarding starting fan factor, since that is what started this:

A team winning 70 percent of their games, and scoring 2+ TDs and 2+ casualties in 70 percent of their games, will take 29 games to reach a FF of 10 if they start at 1, while the same team starting with 9 FF requires only 2 games.

But after 29 games, the team that started with 9 FF will have reached a FF of 13/14 (while the coach that started with 1 will be at 10). So I guess it's a value judgement as to whether you consider that significant enough to warrant the higher starting FF. But through trial and error, you can find that it does take a really long time to catch up no matter what. Even if you start with FF=1 and win 75% of your games, you will get to FF=4/5 after 10 games whereas the coach starting with 9 and winning just 50% of their games is at FF=10/11.

[Marcus]

I'd like to add at this point a thankyou to High and Mighty for contributing to the sum of all knowledge of Bloodbowl.

[Relborn]

Nice sarcasm on your part Marcus ... really nececessary ?

[GalakStarscraper]

Nice sarcasm on your part Marcus ... really nececessary ?

Uhhhhh ... I don't think Marcus was being sarcastic at all ... I think he was honestly thanking H&M ... I'm working on posting the sheet to my site, darn thing is huge though.

Galak

[tchatter]

Wow.

Thats all I can say is Wow.

That is an amazing spreadsheet... and after about two hours of messing with it, I am still amazed...

GREAT JOB!!

[Relborn]

Ooops - Than I misunderstood something - sorry Marcus

Thanks for clearing that up Galak ...

[Darkson]

The trouble of on-line communication. I know i've inadvertently rubbed a few people up the wrong way both here and on the GW forums.

Maybe we should have a sarcasm emoticon here as well as the rest.