Undead v Necro

[swilhelm73]

But Necro have to be mobile against bash, because they don't have the muscle to get stuck in.

Well, from my experience you indeed don't have the overall muscle, but if you position your pieces well, you can bring more muscle to bare at the critical point. With 4 pieces with dodge (generally second skill on WWs) with move of 7/8, you can easily catchup with Orcs/Chaos/Dwarves if they break through, and you are strong enough to make them pay if they just try to move into contact.

Many coaches don't have the patience to move forward slowly with their bash teams against Necros and the FGs can stymie that too.

Of course if your WWs/Ghouls get tied down it is much simpler for them to sprint up field.

This, interestingly, is where the FGs come into their own as they should be deployed to keep your WWs (especially) free to blitz your target of choice.

This is an area, IMO, where Necros shine over Undead. If you break through the UN line you face Ghouls - which yes, might have wrackle. But if you break through the Necro line you've face frenzy/claw.

I often play for the 2-1 win via clock management and get a 2-0 win because the opposing coach decides he has to make a break for it too early in his offense.

[mattgslater]

I'm a big fan of capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes, or even baiting opponents into mistakes, but I'm not a fan on gaming around the opponent screwing up. A patient Orc or Chaos offence will crack a line of Zombies like a can of sardines, and Stand Firm is less cool when you don't have the personnel to offer it proper support.

[swilhelm73]

I'm a big fan of capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes, or even baiting opponents into mistakes, but I'm not a fan on gaming around the opponent screwing up. A patient Orc or Chaos offence will crack a line of Zombies like a can of sardines, and Stand Firm is less cool when you don't have the personnel to offer it proper support.

BB generally comes down to who makes the fewest mistakes. Persuading the opposition to pursue a riskier strategy against you is something I try to focus on...or as someone put it, "The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself."

[mattgslater]

I'm a big fan of capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes, or even baiting opponents into mistakes, but I'm not a fan on gaming around the opponent screwing up. A patient Orc or Chaos offence will crack a line of Zombies like a can of sardines, and Stand Firm is less cool when you don't have the personnel to offer it proper support.

BB generally comes down to who makes the fewest mistakes. Persuading the opposition to pursue a riskier strategy against you is something I try to focus on...or as someone put it, "The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself."

Like I said, baiting is fine. Dilemmas are great, misdirection a vital tool. But you can't build all your plans on the premise that it's going to work. When you run into a heavy team that won't fall for your tricks, that doesn't step out of position, the "smokescreen effect" of all those Zeds and Golems tends to go up in smoke.

[Piousman]

I don't know about that.

My experience is that if the Bash team remains in position, the Golems +Zeds have at least 1-2 turns to entangle themselves with the opposition's formation, and with the Golem + Wight Guard you can then counterattack with the WWs.

Or at least that is the way it has worked for me so far (though to be fair, this season I induced Will Chaney pretty much every game so far, and 2x WWs , with one S4 does change the equations a tiny bit.

- Piousman

[Hitonagashi]

I'm a big fan of capitalizing on your opponent's mistakes, or even baiting opponents into mistakes, but I'm not a fan on gaming around the opponent screwing up. A patient Orc or Chaos offence will crack a line of Zombies like a can of sardines, and Stand Firm is less cool when you don't have the personnel to offer it proper support.

BB generally comes down to who makes the fewest mistakes. Persuading the opposition to pursue a riskier strategy against you is something I try to focus on...or as someone put it, "The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself."

When I was a kid, I played tournament chess. I'm also a fan of introspection, so I often looked back.

One thing I noticed was that in the bottom tournament bracket (the casual players), the primary tactic was to try and avoid making a mistake while making obvious threats to your opponent. You then relied on the fact that he would mess up first. Once players passed a certain point (100ish BCF, probably works out around 1500-1600 ELO), they realised that to win, you couldn't rely on your opponent being an idiot.

Instead, you have to craft your strategy of attack and match it against your opponents strategy of defense. Even if both went flawlessly to plan, the person who had the better plan won.

That's what I find when I play coaches approximately rated over 160 on FUMBBL(I don't play enough RL bloodbowl to compare and contrast). You tend to end up with a battle over position, where the overall plan is the most important thing. Below 150 CR, you almost always have the game decided by a temporary bonehead on behalf of one of the coaches.

Some games are won by luck, but the majority are won by positional play.

[mattgslater]

I agree to an extent. The analogy is sort of an incomplete one, though. BB is a lot more complex than Chess, in that it works many different gamer skills at once. The positioning skills that are so critical in Chess are just one factor in BB. Odds management is another factor: there's a strong relationship between space and odds, in that good space management leads to free assists and fewer dodges, but a coach who's willing to take risks for optimal positioning will sometimes skewer himself. Also, BB is asymmetric, in that usually the two sides bring very different resources to the table. Often, one or more viable strategies are suggested just by the basic setup: if it's Pro Elves vs. Orcs, the elves are going to try to open the game up and the greenies are going to try to corral the elves, even if both coaches are novices. Ditto if two similar teams start and one gets crippled right away.

Also, BB has several different timescales, and it's much harder to think too far ahead in the short-run. You can think action-to-action and drive-to-drive pretty easily, because your opponent has no say in the first (or rather, he's already made his say), and the second is about the 16-turn clock, and the next level of skill beyond that is thinking into your opponent's turn. Beyond your opponent's next turn and your turn after that, at the level of the action, that's where it really starts getting tricky. I'm certainly not there. Every time I move my turn counter, I've got ≤22 each of my own and my opponent's actions to think about and a reference to the clock and what's possible in future turns, and that's all I need to know. And even then, I have to retool my plan virtually every turn, even though each turn I was considering the previous one.

Then there's the mental flowcharts: "if A blocks X and pows, then B moves. If A blocks X and pushes, then B blocks X." This means that C only moves up 3 squares, not 5, and prioritizes D over E." You get that in Chess, but it happens on a different scale: one "opponent moves" for every action. In BB, you get a set of decisions after most non-turnover blocks, and the risk of a turnover on every roll, and then an opponent's turn, with a lot more decisions for him to make (plus all the little flowcharts going through his head).