High FF

[High & Mighty]

Beyond the question of how much risk you think you can handle and play through from the KO rolls on a game by game basis, the question of the long-term effect of FF comes down to its role in winnings table.

Without all the evil math, look at the two direct determinants of your winnings on the table: 1) Gate and 2) Team Rating. All that matters is the level you are on (for example, level 3=TR126-150 or Gate=40-60k) and there is no reason for these levels to be the same so the next question is what is the dynamic moving you around the winnings table?

To move up a level in TR, you need to increase by 25 TR points while to move up in the Gate, you need to increase by 20k fans. The gate is FF so 20k fans is approximately 6 FF. So now the question is, what is the pace of movement in each direction and that is where it gets tricky because it depends on several factors outside of your control (like your opponent's FF) or unknown (whether you will win or lose). But you can look at two simple cases and what you find is a viscious cycle that leads you to bad places, but it takes longer with a higher FF.

Increase in various factors
(assumes for the moment--but will return to these)
1)no death;
2)everyone has the same FF as you (so we can make assumptions about the gate)
3) no winnings mod's based on the level of gate and TR

Case 1-Lose the game:
SPPs=+5 (MVP)=1 TR
Winnings=+3.5 TR
FF=0 (with no mod for winning, TD, CAS, it's simple 1/6 rule)
TOTAL TR INCREASE=4.5
TOTAL FF INCREASE=0

So in case 1, we find that your team rating is increasing while your fan factor is statistically staying the same over the course of a season so in the end, what is important in this case is what is happening as you move straight to the right in the winnings table, and the answer is negative modifiers. So no matter what level gate you are stuck at, you will stay there and have, on average, your winnings decrease by 10k every 6 games. You could argue that those negative modifers are going to decrease your rate of TR growth and that is true, but also don't forget that you had positive mods in the early TR stage so you were actually getting to the decreased earnings faster and then having that rate taper off.


So now the question is, how to get the FF increasing. Intuitively, any increase in your fan factor needs to be fueled by something. The problem is the things fueling your FF increase are fueling your TR increase at a faster rate, which is what is important in the end.


Case 2-Win the game
SPPs=+15 (MVP/2TD/2CAS)=3 TR
Winnings=+4.5 TR (because there is +1 for the win)
FF=2/3 (with +1 mod for winning, 2TD, 2CAS)
TOTAL TR INCREASE=~8
TOTAL FF INCREASE=2/3 (~2.3k fans)

In this case, you are moving up TR levels every 3 games. For gate, if you have been increasing at this rate and your opponent has had a steady ff, than you go up FF levels every 9 games. In the best case scenario, if your opponents have also been increasing at the 2/3 rate, you now move up FF levels every 4-5 games. So again, in the best case scenario, your TR is increasing faster than your FF, which means again you are moving to the right, although this time, you will be able to maintain higher winnings for a little longer because of increasing your Gate level. But once again, since you are moving to the right, what is important are the modifiers as you move in that direction and since they get smaller and go negative, you find yourself getting trapped at a particular level when the mods are taking away your money.

BUT...if those mods take away all your money, you lose that factor in your increasing TR and perhaps may be able to get back out once your FF has increased enough. Problem is if you look above, even if the mods are taking away all your money, your TR is still increasing by 3.5 each game (so a level each 7 games) --15 SPPs and a 1/2 prob of a FF increase because of the -1 mod over 10 that you have likely hit, while your FF is increasing by .5 (1.75k) each game (so a level every 11 games if your opponent's FF doesn't change or a level every 6 games if your opponent's goes up at the same rate).

Some interesting points that come out of this are that:

1) If you are trying for long-run growth potential of your team, you should only score 2 TDs and 2 Casualties each game. Those two benchmarks give you a FF advantage. Anything over that simply inflates your TR faster than your FF and gets you into your poverty trap even faster.

2) Above we looked at what happens to the gate in the two scenarios of your opponent's FF either increasing at the same rate or staying constant. But we assumed the fastest rate possible of FF growth for you above with one mod being wins. Since only one team can win, the overall gate is actually going to be lower, plus factor in the -1 mod for FF>10 and you can see in the long run even in Case 2 when you are winning everything, TR increases faster than FF.

3) League structure also plays an important role. If winners move on to play winners and losers move on to play losers in each round of your season, you actually get high growth (winning) teams playing against each other and extending their viability and growth(b/c ff is increasing for these teams), while the low growth (losing) teams are playing each other and getting stuck in the growth trap even sooner (b/c ff is decreasing/staying constant for these people).

4) Starting fan factor is largely unimportant in the rate of growth of the team, but it is important in determing from which level of the Gate you start from so essentially, the higher you start, the longer you can stay viable before you get stuck. Everyone will get stuck eventually, but you get an advantage that cannot be had during the season if you started with high fan factor.

5) You can beat the system if you and your opponent's fan factors increase every game (+7k fans per game) and your TR increases by no more than 8 (2TD/2Cas/1MVP/50k winnings) every game. If only one player's FF goes up every game (+3.5k per game), then you must restrict your TR growth to only +3.5 (2TD/2Cas/1MVP/5k winnings).

6) So if you want to grow forever, slow and steady wins the race. Get 14/15 player roster, which will bring your TR to about TR128 on a cash basis, with a couple extra rerolls in there, a TR of 150. At that point, spend all the money you have on wizards and freebooting and keep to the 2/2/1 SPP game and you can grow forever since you are moving south-east on the winnings table...BUT...if you start with too low a FF, you can not get to that TR 150 before the negative mods hit in. This also assumes you can win games with your roster which will likely have less skills than everyone else to start out with because they are all racking up the SPPs and getting more skills than you in the early going. If you don't win, it's all futile. If you roll poorly on the FF table, it's all futile. If you roll high on the winnings table, who cares since you are just blowing the money anyway.

7) Perhaps most interesting, you've got a coordination game. If every team in the league plays by these rules, all the teams can increase forever. But if you've got some teams racking up the players and SPPs early and dominating, they are going to destroy those teams playing for long-term growth in the early stages and those teams will never get going. Meanwhile the successful teams, the ones that went for early fast growth will get stuck but will have already destroyed the competition.

OK, that's more than enough.

[Deathwing]

Wow. Great post H & M!

[Mestari]

The difference in assessing the FF<->other stuff tradeoff lies in the fact that the effects of FF can be easily quantified.

When you roll that Pitch invasion and lose it, you'll instantly realise - this is because of me taking less FF. Simple. Or if you had high FF and won, you can say that you got the PI because of the high FF.

But the other side of the coin is harder to analyse - moreover, it usually doesn't have such highlights as the PI's are. Compare a human lineman to a blitzer for example - that one square of movement and block shift the odds to your favour. Only slightly, but it does it all the time. It becomes really hard to track the exact bonus you got from taking the low-FF route.

Therefore the benefits of high FF and the downfalls of low FF are easier to remember, and the contrary the other way round.

Hard to say which is better. Probably depends on the team and on what exactly would you trade the FF points for.

[Remco]

WOW! I'm simply baffled. I haven't seen such a well arguemented statement in a while. Finally somebody that thinks before he writes. My compliments, High & Mighty!

[Zombie]

Joshua, i've worked out the probabilities about a year ago, and you're wrong, you're just not going to catch up to a team that started higher. Not unless you're talking about 50-100 games or so (ballpark figure, but good approximation if i remember correctly).

The fact that FF helps on 4 kickoff events is not to be taken lightly either. And winning them also means the other team losing them, so it has double benefit.

[High & Mighty]

But the other side of the coin is harder to analyse - moreover, it usually doesn't have such highlights as the PI's are. Compare a human lineman to a blitzer for example - that one square of movement and block shift the odds to your favour. Only slightly, but it does it all the time. It becomes really hard to track the exact bonus you got from taking the low-FF route.

Hard to say which is better. Probably depends on the team and on what exactly would you trade the FF points for.

But you do know.

If you start with a better team but a lower FF and win, that low FF will degenerate into negative modifiers earlier and thus trap you with too little winnings to build up a sufficient roster of rerolls and players before the money is cut off.

If you start with less of a team but more fan factor, you NEED to win early AND don't rack up too many SPPs, this will get you the money you need to get to 14/15 players and 3-5 rerolls at which point you can blow your money on freebooting and wizards and at worst, maintain your income flow and at best, actually increase it over time.

So the question is not which starting roster gives you the best chance to win, but rather how do you win with a roster high in FF and deficient in some starting talent because starting low in FF only leads to no money (unless you beat the odds and increase your FF in each or many games).

Low FF is a road to no money even if you win early. High FF is a road to possible contant money IF YOU PLAY YOUR GAME RIGHT.

WOW! I'm simply baffled. I haven't seen such a well arguemented statement in a while. Finally somebody that thinks before he writes. My compliments, High & Mighty!

Wow. Great post H & M!

Thanks! I've really gotta get outside more, though...

[Coach Barry]

Indeed you are High and Mighty! Spectacular post!

[Joshua Dyal]

If I'm wrong, show me the numbers! H&M posted a very well-thought out post, but at the end of the day, it's just a subjective opinion.

Crunching numbers isn't my strong suit, but until I see some done, my opinion is no more wrong than the opposite viewpoint. I can't see much evidence of that so-called cash crunch that H&M mentions, as Fan Factor should continue to increase until it reaches the same level as the other teams in the league. True, if your FF is low relative to your TR then you will have a harder time coming up with cash, but since you spent more money on your team to begin with, you won't miss it as much as you're buying your players and rerolls and stuff. That analysis doesn't convince me (as eloquent as it is) that you don't end up in the exact same place.

[Thor]

Statistics or not, it took me one Pitch Invasion (severely crippling my team) and a few bad kick-offs to be converted to having a decent FF.

Great post H & M!

[Joshua Dyal]

Yeah, Thor, but if I recall, I wasn't able to even capitalize on that Pitch Invasion to turn it into a score, because it happened so late in the half. You also didn't lose anyone permanently from that either.

On the other hand, our next game we rolled up all new rosters, and I had a substantially smaller FF than you. You won get the ref and all it gave you was 2-3 stunned results. And I made the exact same amount of money as you.

I'm going to play this low FF roster for a little while to see how it plays out. I can understand the theory of the high FF, but I'm not convinced that it's nearly as important as theory makes it out to be.

[Balrog]

In the end it doesn't matter what statistics say. Do what you like, and if it works for you, great!

I've never started with an FF below 6, or less than 2 RR, but someone posted an Elf team that started with lots of positional players and 0 RR. And the more I think about it the more I like it, for Elves RR are only 100k, same as a Blitzer, so why not buy them after your team starts?

-Dave

[Deathwing]

Do let us know how it goes!

[Zombie]

If I'm wrong, show me the numbers! H&M posted a very well-thought out post, but at the end of the day, it's just a subjective opinion.

Crunching numbers isn't my strong suit, but until I see some done, my opinion is no more wrong than the opposite viewpoint.

If you want to see the numbers in the analysis i made a year ago that i was talking about, they can be found on Bloodbowl.net in the tactics section. See "Zombie's Discussion of the importance of a 9 Fan Factor in BB2k1".

[Darkson]

Get the Ref certainly helped me in one game. My DP managed 3 cas cos the ref wasn't looking, 1 badly Hurt, 1 Injury and 1 Death. This was in a league enviroment. I won 3-1, my FF(7) went up, his(3) went down and he earned a miserly 20k (TR were pretty close), meaning he went into his next match (a playoff were the loser went to the wooden spoon final) with only 10 players.

So yes, a high FF isn't the must important thing in the world, bu it sure can make life easier sometimes.

[dakkakhan]

If you buy Rerolls after team generation, they cost double, but will reduce your TR each time you buy one, thus potentially keeping you in a lower TR bracket and making you more money, No?

Just a thought.

Remember to roll a D6 for each player on the field to determine how many fans are killed. Let the blood flow baby! And laugh at your opponent when you spank him and he gets no money because of your low FF!