A suggestion to improve racial variety in perpetual leagues

[dode74]

How about making it so that Piling On can only cause KO's?

Or no worse than BH? I assume you mean this should only apply when the PO is used on the cas roll.

[Jimmy Fantastic]

Well Smeborg and Dode, while team building has an effect on skewing the agility teams up a bit, it is spurious to claim that because of this Elves are not inherently better at winning.

Skilling a Bash team to purely beat Agile teams is going to make it quite weak to other bashers and ok vs Agile teams.
Skilling a Bash team to purely beat Bash teams is going to make it quite weak to Agile teams and ok vs bash teams.

Skilling an Agile team to purely beat Agile teams is going to make it quite strong vs Bash teams and strong vs Agile teams.
Skilling an Agile team to purely beat Bash teams is going to make it very strong vs Bash teams and ok vs Agile teams.

So even if the numbers of Agile/Bash teams were the same The Agility teams are always going to have the advantage in terms of getting the win.
This is the problem with the rules, Blodge SS and AG 4/5/6 are great no matter what team you are playing against, but historically Bash teams cannot have that duality.
Actually if there is a positive to come out of the killstack it's that generally teams play with less spammed guard and less spammed MB now actually making Chaos a more rounded team than they were before.

[dode74]

it is spurious to claim that because of this Elves are not inherently better at winning.

I didn't. Whether they are "inherently" better at winning I don't know - they certainly do better at it when down players, but then they play down players an awful lot due to their general inability to build effective killers and their relatively low AV. What I am saying is that high TV agi teams tend to show a high win% in B because they rarely play, and when they do they tend to play teams which are poorly skilled to counter them for the reasons already stated.

Your logic is somewhat dualistic though - you categorise either bash or agi when in fact the teams spread themselves across the spectrum of playstyles where the extremes are pure bash and pure agi. A team is only more or less agi/bashy than its next opponent, not in a category. Dark elves are a bashy elf team, for example, while undead are somewhere in the middle.

[DoubleSkulls]

it is spurious to claim that because of this Elves are not inherently better at winning

Do you think this is true even of traditional tabletop league formats? My experience there is the people often skill towards the coaches they are playing, rather than the races (e.g. the "best" coach has Elves, everyone takes more tackle )

[Jimmy Fantastic]

Dode, it was Smeborg who said that agility teams are not inherently better at winning but you agreed so I lumped you in together.
I class Agility teams as all the Elves plus Skaven. All the other teams don't have enough AG4 to be considered Agile teams and they can be countered more easily by tackle(which all bashers take anyway).
Lack of Tackle is not a problem, every Orc team should have at least 4 Tackle and most Chaos teams will be looking at 2 minimum.
Tackle doesn't negate AG 4+ and superior MA however.
Dwarfs are loaded with tackle and have an appaling record vs agile teams at high TV.
As I said I think the nature of the Box skews the stats of the agile teams slightly, but I have no doubt in my mind that agile teams are just better at winning games than all bash teams except low TV Amazons.

[Blammaham]

Try a fixed schedule! Tough in some communities but it works for us with a bash/finesse alternating regular season. Way more palatable to play elves if you know your not going to face 4 bash team in a row! S.

[Smurf]

Not sure what the answer is.

But bash teams tend to think they can grind their way to victory. They get used to it, they train for it and when the agile team zips by everything is all so wrong.

Blood Bowl a game of fantasy football.

Carrying the ball over the TD to score.

Maybe if the Bash teams did more scoring they may win more. Holding off, stalling is great until you find that the agile team has a 1TTD machine.

[Smurf]

What about the usuall method: Guard and more Guard.

WTF for, most bash teams have ST anyway.

Mighty blow on about 9 pieces tends to mess up stuff.
Stand firm on some to negate being pushed about.
I'd never write off tackle. After playing it against people and it being played against me, even for AG4, you can shape it to be a 3+ and suddenly die rolls are really important.

Of course ball handling is kept to a minimum, statistics say that you do not throw apart from short passes and hand off the ball. That's half the game shut down there.

IMO there's a culture of Blood Bowl is like this and people all play it like that and they forget that when you get your ass handed to you it's time to change the game plan.

[DoubleSkulls]

Not sure what the answer is.

Don't play TV matched perpetual leagues?

[swilhelm73]

Carrying the ball over the TD to score.

Maybe if the Bash teams did more scoring they may win more. Holding off, stalling is great until you find that the agile team has a 1TTD machine.

I have to disagree here. There are two aspects to football. Offense and Defense. Many coaches only think of the former and not the later, and lose because they cannot stop their opponent from scoring and controlling the clock.

While I run a conservative ball possession offense with the two teams I have in leagues now (Necro and Chaos), I focus much more on defense then offense, and I think that it has paid off in both cases.

[Smeborg]

Thanks, guys for all your most helpful comments. I have been sick so unable to comment for a couple of days. I am most interested in Doubleskulls' suggestion (to allow only one out of M-Blow, P-On, Claw to be used at one time - note that they still combine well enough on one player in the right circumstances). I have done some of the sums and will post on another thread when I am better - hopefully within a few days.

I am not trying to solve all the problems of the online leagues, such as playing culture and TV matching (these are easy to fix or manage in our own league). But I believe a simple rules fix can be found which will bring better balance of races playing, wider choice of development strategies and variety of tactics. In my experience these are all great for increased enjoyment of the hobby, and improved recruitment and retention of coaches.

My experience in tabletop leagues (and tournaments) is that a wide variety of races can win them, not just Agility teams. I see no good reason why this should not also be the case in perpetual leagues. A playing environment (ruleset and racial variety) where you have to develop and play your team to face all comers is the best version of BB, IMO.

All the best.

[juck101]

Guess a nerf is needed to PO and MB but I dont see that is such a big deal as so many sides can get it. Certainly a nerf to juggernaught I dont think is needed as its frankly not THAT great a skill.

Recently I only been playing online. My 35 game + dark elf league team has tried to spam fend but frankly never achieved it. I have 2 from about 30 skills. Fend is good but often so many other things to take limits its appeal.

Fend and juggernaught I dont think need any new roles. Just the combo of Mb, PO and maybe claw might need some down grade. Funny as when we increased PO it was a redudant skill and not seen very often. Now its better its more common and causing issues. Maybe just house rule PO back a step? Maybe just remove PO and have mb level 1 and mb level 2 - with +1 to either roll for mb, and +1 to av +1injury for Mb level 2. Is that so daft?

No chance I can do the maths but a more lrb take on PO might work

[swilhelm73]

Back in Edition 2 some skills came in levels, including MB - which went up to level 4. Of course I also remembered getting a player injured for something like 30 games.

It is amazing how much killing has been nerfed.

Oh, and if claw is nerfed, why would anyone take it?

Keep in mind it is only really useful against av9 plus and useless against AV7 or less...

[DoubleSkulls]

My suggestion doesn't actually nerf Claw per se, it nerfs the combination of the damaging skills. It's worth remembering that the CLPOMB player gets a casualty 26.7% of knockdowns at the moment (compared to about 7% chance with just claw). I haven't done the precise math on the stacking with PO yet , but on CLMB you lose 1/6 of your armour breaks, meaning the combo only gets you a cas on 11.5% of knockdowns instead of 14.35%. The reduction in impact gets even bigger with all 3, which is really the aim.

[Jimmy Fantastic]

However nerfing Claw makes Chaos a totally pointless sucky team.....