RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

[Mamono Assault Force]

RJ's List of Teams:

Spoiler

Active: 12

1: Amazon
2: (Victorious) Chaos
3: Chaos Dwarf
4: (Victorious) Dark Elf
5: (Victorious) Dwarf
6: (Tied) Elf
7: (Victorious) Goblin
8: Halfling
9: High Elf
10: Human
11: (Eliminated) Khemri
12: Khorne Daemons
13: Lizardmen
14: Necromantic
15: (Victorious) Norse
16: Nurgle
17: Ogre
18: Orc
19: (Tied) Skaven
20: (Victorious) Undead
21: (Victorious) Underworld
22: Vampire
23: (Victorious) Wood Elf

Tass's List of Teams:

Spoiler

Active: 12

1: (Eliminated) Amazon
2: (Tied - FORFEIT) Chaos
3: (Tied) Chaos Dwarf
4: (Eliminated) Dark Elf
5: Dwarf
6: (Eliminated) Elf
7: Goblin
8: (Eliminated) Halfling
9: High Elf
10: (Eliminated) Human
11: Khemri
12: Khorne Daemons
13: Lizardmen
14: (Eliminated) Necromantic
15: Norse
16: (Victorious) Nurgle
17: (Eliminated) Ogre
18: Orc
19: Skaven
20: Undead
21: Underworld
22: (Eliminated) Vampire
23: Wood Elf

Bracket 1:

Left Team is RJ, Right team is Tassadar. Always.

Match 1:
Ultra Khemrines (Khemri) vs Tass's Rotters (Nurgle): 0-1
Victor: Tass Nurgle

Match 2:
Nudist Divers (Wood Elves) vs Hungry Bros (Necromantic): 2-1
Victor: RJ Wood Elves

Match 3:

You must be registered to see the links

Crazed Buttstabbers (Underworld) vs Little Failures (Halflings):
Victor:

Spoiler

2-0: Crazed Buttstabbers (Underworld)

Match 4:

You must be registered to see the links

The Shockers (Elf) vs. Sigvald's Smashers (Chaos):
Victor:

Spoiler

2-2: DRAW

Match 5:

You must be registered to see the links

Ace Mohawk Banditos (Dwarves) vs. The Slaughtermasters (Ogres)
Victor:

Spoiler

1-0: Ace Mohawk Banditos

Match 6:

You must be registered to see the links

Bluurgh Frozen Peas (Undead) vs. Griphon Guard (Human)
Victor:

Spoiler

2-1: Frozen Peas

Match 7:

You must be registered to see the links

Safe Word Banana (Dark Elf) vs. Kavika's Slaver Slayers (Amazons)
Victor:

Spoiler

3-1: Safe Word Banana (Dark Elf)

Match 8:

You must be registered to see the links

Smuk Feesh (Skaven) vs. Raging Roamers (Chaos Dwarves)
Victor:

Spoiler

1-1:

You must be registered to see the links

Match 9:

You must be registered to see the links

Da Dice Rolla's (Goblin) vs. Sucky Suckers (Vampires)
Victor:

Spoiler

2-1: Da Dice Rolla's

Match 10:

You must be registered to see the links

Rubrics (Chaos) vs. Disciples of Nala (Dark Elves)
Victor:

Spoiler

2-0: Rubrics

Match 11:
Crolian Male Strippers (Norse) vs. Dead Idiots (Elf)
Victor:

Spoiler

2-1: Crolian Male Strippers

Match 12:
Kaiju Aniki (Lizardmen) vs. Thisisalsowrong (Khorn Demons)
Victor: TBA

 

[xivvix]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

No color commentary?

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

We didn't record these ones. Neither of them were terribly interesting matches, sadly, but I guess we could stream them or throw them up on youtube or somesuch. The next one won't be all that interesting either though, since Halflings are fucking terrible to the point of being almost unplayable.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Blood Bowl in general is a game about terrible players being bad at football. IMO, they were interesting in some respect or another, mostly in that we got to see fantastic failures.

The Khemri vs. Nurgle match, I got to see undead who sport the regeneration skill, never ever use it while suffering many casualties. And then one of Tassadar's guys who happen to have regeneration ironically get the regeneration success. So I got to see what happens when someone regenerates while playing a regeneration heavy team, but it was on the other person's team.

The Wood Elf vs. Necromantic match was simply me trying to make desperate plays with my squishy elven team in order to stop Tass from scoring. I had wardancers jumping over his guys to try and reach the ball carrier in the back. They kept falling down and both were K.O'd, and because that was my only hope for a winning strategy, Tass scored while my linemen did all they could just to not die. Such is the folly of agility teams that I point out over and over. They have one strategy, and that is to score as fast as possible. One bad roll means the agility team spends the rest of the skirmish getting spanked as all their units are forced into combat that they can't win, and are forced to dodge over and over, with 1/3 chance of failure, and a TURNOVER if one fails. (And as a stronger team, you basically want to mark as many agility players as possible. If you force him to dodge 3 times, you have a very good chance at one of them falling over. Thusly you allow the agility team to kill themselves.)

The first half came and went. Tass scored, and I lost my MVP's. Then, the Wardancers woke up, meaning my chances of winning increased from 0%. With them, I was able to clear a path and quickly score, and when Tass had the ball, I was luckily able to have a wardancer leap (and not die) over his defensive line, and attack the ball carrier. The ball carrier thankfully was taken down, and dropped the ball. I was able to quickly grab the ball and score a second time, while the linemen tagged his bigger dudes, preventing them from easily attacking my ball carrier in the back. Then, I scored a second time. The rest of the match went with me barely holding off Tass long enough for the game to end. He was literally one turn away from tying the game.

I basically learned that the elves are all about making desperate plays. They have the agility to back up the dodging they will have to make, and the wood elves in particular have the wardancers to leap over dudes and desperately go for the ball carrier. If I did not make those desperate plays, I would have lost because Elves do not break cages. They do not win battles. They desperately score and hope they don't all die in order to score again.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Match 3: Crazed Buttstabbers (Underworld) vs. Little Failures (Halflings)

This match has been recorded by courtesy of Tass.

You must be registered to see the links

Or you can look at the original post to see who won if you just want to see that.

Also for future note, Tassadar needs to adjust his audio settings so the players (us) can be heard. Several times we were talking and the ogre&vampire announcers were talking over us.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Match 4 recording:

You must be registered to see the links

Match 4. Dear fucking god, Match 4. I was the Elves versus Tassadar's Chaos team of Chaos Warriors and goatmen. The elves proved themselves efficient at offense, as both times I had the ball, I was able to threaten Tass easily with the possibility of a goal. And I consistently got those goals, for the most part.

But then we touched back and why I hate the elves, as I had to defend. Dealing with combat in Blood Bowl is at it's worst with agility teams. For the most part, you do not want to be in the face of the enemy as an agility team. You are squishy, and you want to pick and choose your battles. The bruiser team's response is to get into your face again. What must you do then?

Dodge. You must dodge away. Dodging allows you to move out of the tackle zones of your enemy. For an agility 4 elf, you have a 1 in 3 chance of failing. But that's not really bad in blood bowl. Having a 1 in 3 chance at failure is actually pretty okay. But the issue is how much progress dodging like such gets you. The answer: it gets you nowhere. You dodge your guy away from his square and do not immediately cause him problems in any way. In fact, failure means that he basically gets a free knockdown on you with a chance at serious injury. It's always a serious risk, and the payoff is only worth it if you get the freed player into a far more advantageous position. Even then, it's still awful, as failing that roll means you suffer a TURNOVER (switch to enemy's turn.)

So, to summarize, being agility means you have the possible ability to score very quickly and toss the ball. But during defense, you are going to lose horribly to all the bigger, tougher, meaner, muscular mean that are going to be savagely raping your puny little elves, who can... Dodge away, and risk a turnover, with all your other puny little elves about to get punched, and go into a coma on the battlefield.

Next round is Dwarves versus Ogres.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Dwarves are the first team I've played that stand somewhere in the remote location of competent. I like them. They're good enough to hold off Ogres 1v1, and they take an epic diarrhea fueled fart on dodge. You know, that thing agility teams like to use. Unlike the usual fair, I feel like I can actually do things while playing them. It's a great feeling.

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Ogres are shit. Of the strength teams I've played, they are the weakest by far. They remind me of the lizardmen, but the lizardmen are better despite having mostly s4 guys rather than s5 because skinks are actually useful as support and can actually accomplish things.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

If by chance one of you were holding their breath over the (very soon) tag I made next to our next match, don't. Tass suddenly outed for no reason and is now inexplicably playing a different game without saying a word to me. So next game is delayed until another time.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

The recording for

You must be registered to see the links

at the link.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Match 6

From my observations, the Undead team is one of the best teams of undead to play as. With that being said, they carry an extra cost attributed to the fact that they all possess Regeneration as a skill. What Regeneration does can be summed up as nothing. It's a skill that has a 50% chance to allow an undead victim of a block to ignore a casualty roll when their armor fails them. What would make this skill far better would be if said undead victim was able to get up on your turn to continue helping out. Instead, they stand up and leave the pitch. This means that Regeneration at it's best only helps you in the long run of a Blood Bowl Career by keeping your guys alive on an unreliable basis. So, this long-term skill effectively means that your points spent towards winning the game effectively are likely to be far lower than what your opponent has spent on more reliable skills such as block, catch, pass, sure hands, etc. So undead will always be at a disadvantage due to this setup, until team values get higher and the difference of cost efficiency sees a decline.

It was hard to get a good idea of how good the humans were, because in our match, Tass did not use Ogres out of his newfound hatred for them. So, his team lacked a lot of muscle and he essentially ended up turning his human team into a shoddy agility team. Because that's what humans are without their ogre, I can only speculate how things would have gone down differently if he had an ogre on the field threatening me. I know for certain that strength 5 (Big Guys) are a presence on the pitch that you most often want to just go around and avoid fighting. This holds true even in a case where I have a Mummy Vs. his ogre. In a fair fight, it's a 1 die block on a mummy with no Block. So at the very least, it would make using my mummies awkward if played correctly. Otherise, he could have used his ogre to great effect by getting a lineman to assist, and get two dice on my mummy in order to gain ground.

Match 7

Amazons have blitzers, which are pretty good units. The rest are terrible.

Dark Elves are also pretty sub-par, but they have far more options than amazons, and the Witch Elf can potentially be very good at clearing a gap in the defense. Most of all though... The potential power of the Assassin is FUCKING INSANE against low armor teams. Amazons have it bad with 7 armor, and the Assassin has an ability called Stab, which allows him to immediately roll vs. his target's armor. With the Amazonian armor of 7, the Assassin has a 41.6% chance on a 2d6 to score an 8+, WITH ABSOLUTELY NO RISK OF PENALTY OR TURNOVER IF HE FAILS, AND THE AMOUNT OF TACKLE ZONES COVERING HIS TARGET MEANS NOTHING TO HIM.

This means that all the assassin needs to do is get adjacent to his target, and you have a good chance of STUNNING the low AV target, or better yet, KILLING THEM. Despite how much I hate Agility teams, the Assassin's insane power is not lost on me.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Man, RJ is racking up dem wins so far.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Yes, though many of the matchups have been in his favor.

Wood Elves vs Necromantic was a slightly even match, with some edge to wood elves for actually having a thing that they're good at. I was outplayed and outrolled.

Halflings are easily the worst team in the game that I've played so far, and there was absolutely no chance of them winning against an even remotely competent team simply because they have literally no defense and their offense is reliant on an extremely weak gimmick and dodging. Without the ability to guard their ball carrier reliably, they basically need to get really lucky in order to score.

Chaos vs Elves was an interesting match because they are both at least reasonably competent teams. That ended up being a tie, but if I hadn't gotten really shit rolls at the start as seems to happen most of the time I probably would have won.

Dwarves vs Ogres was a match weighted heavily in the dwarves favor, their strengths easily outdo the strength of the ogres, who aren't all that much better than halflings but have a somewhat more reliable line to work with. Dwarves negate the ogre's strength in a number of ways and can casually massacre snotlings, who are the ogre's ball carriers.

Humans vs Undead, as RJ said the undead are probably the best regeneration based team, and humans even with the ogre are basically a bad evasion team.

Dark Elves vs Amazons was the elves' game to lose. It was an agility team against an agility team, and Dark Elves are better at being agile and have a frenzy unit and the assassin to get my units out of the way of scoring. I actually didn't mind the amazons, for having low armor they are pretty survivable thanks to lots of Dodge and Block on their line troops, but their thrower's lack of Sure Hands made their offense pretty unreliable.

The next game should be interesting. Skaven are an agility team with one of the strength 5 guys with stupid that I maintain are not worth their cost, and chaos dwarves as far as I can tell are a mostly brick army who rely on smashing the opposing team down. If I can keep his team down and get to his runners fast before they can get past my line, I should have an advantage for once, but if I can't do that because dice I might have some trouble. It's actually an interesting game for once rather than a one sided one though, at least according to the units we're both playing.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

I expect to lose with most of the undead teams, and of course the halflings, unless the matchups give me a chance. I'm also going to be hard pressed for victory with the more gimmicky teams such as the Amazons and the Goblins. There are a lot of things that can go terribly bad with those two.

Tass is also right, to some degree. The Dwarves vs. Ogres matchup was strictly in my favor because the dwarves had very anti-big guy units. However, before I realized Tassadar excluded the ogre, I was rooting for the Humans to win vs. Undead. My defense as the Undead was pretty miserable, and the idea of an ogre pushing through my line and a catcher with dodge slipping through my fingers with dodge was a frightening one. That fear became far less pronounced when I saw that Tassadar decided to have no muscle what-so-ever. I stand by the notion that he made an absurd choice not to include an ogre, because I legitimately feared the very idea of it destroying my defense. The downside would be that he has a 1/6 chance of being useless (Very Stupid Rules). Otherwise, he'll be cleaning up shop.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

From the sound of it and judging by what I know of Blood Bowl, I'm inclined to agree that an ogre would have helped... I mean, if the team is bad at agility, at least having some muscle would give them a bit of an edge. No reason to discard a strong card to play, especially when others are shit.

As for Chaos Dwarves, there is not much finesse to them. They shit on dodgy teams as much as regular Dwarves and are basically a phalanx of muscle and armor that lives only to stomp shit. I once saw an Amazon vs CD team that ended with pretty much every single woman dragged off the pitch after being beaten to shit. Granted, the Amazon player was a newbie but holy shit, it was a massacre.

And Halflings are useless. Fucking little shits.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

The problem with the ogre is that it has a not insignificant chance to do absolutely nothing, and in doing so also lose its tackle zone. It's also an absurdly expensive unit, which made the choice between a somewhat reliable offense in the form of more dudes who could run up and score vs an unreliable defense that needs one turn to fail that d6 roll before RJ walks all of his men away from it, thus making it useless until the next time we lineup again.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

The Skaven are so fucking bad (and should feel worse). Their success is so critically dependent on the gutter runners making the distance. Failure means that they hand over the ball without contest.

For the record, my call was that the Chaos Dwarves would win. Their Offense is great, they can tear through defenses, and their Defense is above average as far as I've seen in comparison to other teams. Their Scoring game is Slightly Below average because they have no passing game and the best person to carry the ball is a 3 Agi Hobgoblin. Though once they do have the ball, they can better protect it, and Block on almost all their guys means it's hard to break through them. Their reliability had me struggling all game to do anything, on both offense and defense.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

Also, I think I know what to do with tied matches now.

Tied teams get a mark against them and are put into the Draw Bracket temporarily where they fight against a different team than before who also had a draw. Drawing again results in them being permanently being removed from the tournament. Winning allows them to come back as a competitor. So it'll allow teams to make a comeback from Loser Tier.

 

[Mamono Assault Force]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

I love the goblins. They are the definition of what Blood Bowl is about:

Incompetence,

Randomness,

And Dying.

Tass did not love the vampires.

 

[Tassadar]

Re: RJ&Tass's Blood Bowl Corner

I too like dem goblins. They have options, and a degree of reliability. That is by far the most irritating thing about blood bowl for me, that there is just a one in ten chance that one of my units will just... Sit there, accomplishing nothing. Not like in the process of trying to accomplish something, literally just "oh I don't want to do anything this turn!" Or, in the case of the vampires, I think I want to murder one of my own team mates this turn.