Blood Bowl 2

Khalan · Sep 27, 2015

k^M_sl said:
Curious ya'lls thoughts on this - I tend to favor more bashy races (orc, dwarf) because comparatively it seems a bit smoother over all. I tried out an elf team to see how it played out with pass/running game instead and I want to like it, but it seems that in the time it takes you to score enough td's to even get block on half your team they are likely dead/injured. Same with the thrower, if I get 1 point per successful pass it would take quite a few games to even level one of those up.

For those of you that prefer that game, where do you fill in the gap in leveling players up vs. being a punching bag when blocks aren't reliable comparative to a team with block/tackle/guard?

With fast teams the key is to limit them to 1 block per turn, there blitz and also make sure you arent trying to go toe to toe in a bash off. Use your agi/speed to make presicion strikes and only put enough pressure that they want to score but not so much that they cant. High scoring games are in your favour. A good bashy team should win the game 1-0 or 2-1 against you. If your doing it right the final should be 3-2/4-3.

badlok · Sep 28, 2015

Iwazaru_sl said:
I never played the first version, so I do not have the attachment to the quirks and teams of the Chaos edition. Blood Bowl 2 is frustrating and infuriating in a way a game hasn't been in a good while. I'm having a blast despite it all. If someone starts up a league let me know. I'll pick one of the teams I haven't played yet and dive in.

I play with RL and i always play 1 game with them to teach them de basic of the game because it can be really frustrating but once you get it the game is really fun

Barab · Sep 28, 2015

Are crashed online matches still lost or do they get saved ? My biggest concerned was the disconnections during match or league play....it's the suck.

kaid · Sep 28, 2015

k^M_sl said:
Curious ya'lls thoughts on this - I tend to favor more bashy races (orc, dwarf) because comparatively it seems a bit smoother over all. I tried out an elf team to see how it played out with pass/running game instead and I want to like it, but it seems that in the time it takes you to score enough td's to even get block on half your team they are likely dead/injured. Same with the thrower, if I get 1 point per successful pass it would take quite a few games to even level one of those up.

For those of you that prefer that game, where do you fill in the gap in leveling players up vs. being a punching bag when blocks aren't reliable comparative to a team with block/tackle/guard?

With elf teams a lot of it is get as many people as possible out of tackle zones at the end of your turn. Basically everybody who is not smashing somebody in the face should take at least one step back and with their high agility baring nuffle being angry you should succeed most of the times. This highly limits how much damage even the bashiest team can inflict as they can only blitz once per turn.

Hatorade · Sep 28, 2015

kaid_sl said:
With elf teams a lot of it is get as many people as possible out of tackle zones at the end of your turn. Basically everybody who is not smashing somebody in the face should take at least one step back and with their high agility baring nuffle being angry you should succeed most of the times. This highly limits how much damage even the bashiest team can inflict as they can only blitz once per turn.

Even when doing that you still lose people, I won four to zero last game with wood elves but one dude still died and 3 others injured. Welcome to blood bowl.

kaid · Sep 28, 2015

Yup when playing a squishy team you just have to accept you are going to get some casualties. At least they auto fill your team to a certain level if you take to much damage. Also if you lose enough folks eventually you can ride the incentive train and get some real face smashers to even the odds a bit.

But if you are in a longer league there is something to be said for the bashier teams longevity.

kaid · Sep 28, 2015

Hatorade_sl said:
Even when doing that you still lose people, I won four to zero last game with wood elves but one dude still died and 3 others injured. Welcome to blood bowl.

Even with bashy teams though there are no guarantees in bloodbowl. I played a pickup league match with a bretonnian team against dwarves. My blitzers killed both of his troll slayers dead. It is one nice thing about skaven or chaos teams being able to pick up regeneration to have a chance to avoid the doom.

Phazael · Sep 28, 2015

You can use good positioning against average players (or the AI) to minimize the hurt. Also, don't do unnecessary blocks/fouls. The less you hit, the less you get hit back. Play the ball and get enough of a lead that you can soft defend and make the opponent spend all game driving one TD. Injuries are going to happen, just make sure it happens to the linemen.

Laura · Sep 28, 2015

Is it normal for Dark Elves to have 3-6 injured guys every match or am I playing this wrong?
I never had this problem in the first one.

Phazael · Sep 28, 2015

I wanted to add that I have been playing the game a bit (PS4 in the bedroom and its a good bedtime game) and have come to a point where the game is just not playable for me. I do like the AI on the whole, but the RNG cheating is so blatant and the length of time the AI spends on each turn is just plain ridiculous. There is not anything in the game that lets you log dice rolls, which becomes immediately obvious if you do it manually. I played five games yesterday and paused after every die roll for my team to note the result when it was a 1 or a skull, using a dark elf team for these games. Out of 313 dice rolls I made, nearly half (142) were ones/skulls. About halfway through this demoralizing exercise, I started keeping track of rerolls that duplicated the exact previous result (because three double skulls rerolled into double skulls in a row caught my attention) and found that these also had an absurdly high rate. I am not saying the game is cheating by design, but there is clearly something fucked up with their RNG in this game. I accept that bad rolls happen in bunches, but those games are so far off the reservation that it just adds to the aggravation. As in, I seriously just about through the controller through my TV after three turns of CPU sits for 2.5 minutes then rattles off all its moves with the clock frozen at 3 second, then I start with double skull block rerolled into double skull block for the five seconds of my turn. It might be a console related issue, but even so this game is really only worth getting for the console.

Erronius · Sep 28, 2015

It's probably way too early to tell that it's a global problem and not just some incredibly bad rolls in a vacuum.

It is weird that they say the AI is script and server driven, I hadn't seen that before.

The long wait on AI turns is just one thing amongst many that makes me want to hold off on buying it.

ronne · Sep 28, 2015

Is there no speedup/timeskip like there was in the first one? Grinding out games vs AI would be completely miserable without that =\

Iwazaru_sl · Sep 29, 2015

I started a Chaos team and after a few games I start getting bitched at for "yet another Chaos kill team." And more than a few insta concedes. My Orc team was more bashy then what I am now. What gives?

Hatorade · Sep 29, 2015

Iwazaru_sl said:
I started a Chaos team and after a few games I start getting bitched at for "yet another Chaos kill team." And more than a few insta concedes. My Orc team was more bashy then what I am now. What gives?

The community right now is shit to be honest, I have seen only one other person talking while playing the rest are completely silent or only bitch when they feel unlucky despite my efforts to be friendly.

Phazael · Sep 29, 2015

Well, chaos teams have a rep from the previous games for bee-lining for ClPoMb builds, which even their linemen can easily get. In table top, building a team like that tends to get you punched in the face and/or ejected from leagues, but in the anonymous online world people farm up those teams constantly. I don't even bother playing public leagues, because 99% of the time its either farmed up murder teams or rage quitters. This past year, even the structured leagues were getting like this, too. Basically people see Chaos and assume a CPOMB roster with artificially suppressed TV, so if they are playing the game legitimately why get their players murdered by that shit? This is especially the case at low TV, because it takes a little bit for the Elf and Human rosters to get Wrestle/Dodge on the linemen, so one game with a murder team (esp with the wonky dice RNG) can take several clean games to recover from. The problem gets tempered a bit when Zons and Norse are added to the metagame, since built in Block or Dodge at low TV shuts down those teams, but it looks like Cyanide is going to take a long ass time to do that.

Personally, I don't mind Chaos nearly as much as Dwarves. If I have dodge on a couple key guys, I can evade most of the bullshit at low and mid TV. Dwarves, however, get this giant wall of Guard/Block/Tackle in virtually no time at all, then every game degenerates into cage fests of 2d blocks where your skills mean dick. By the time you have the needed skills to deal with it, the Dwarves are already rocking lots of Stand Firm and POMB, all while still being lower TV than most other teams. Every time I have seen dwarves played in league format, the league usually tanks that season. So fucking boring and annoying to play with or against.....

Funkor · Sep 29, 2015

Iwazaru_sl said:
I started a Chaos team and after a few games I start getting bitched at for "yet another Chaos kill team." And more than a few insta concedes. My Orc team was more bashy then what I am now. What gives?

You can try joining one of the larger private leagues that have some moderation to police crap like instant forfeits. Mister Hadwick is a good one for the PC community that started in BB1, but if you're on console I don't know of any off the top of my head.

Djay · Sep 29, 2015

You can join GOBBLN (GOBBLN Forum Index page) if you're on PC. Just be warned that there are some really top-end players in that league, even in the "newbie" division. They're moving to BB2, so I won't be playing there until they go back to BB1 or BB2 gets fixed and drops in price to a level I feel comfortable supporting them at.

Erronius · Sep 29, 2015

Phazael_sl said:
Well, chaos teams have a rep from the previous games for bee-lining for ClPoMb builds, which even their linemen can easily get. In table top, building a team like that tends to get you punched in the face and/or ejected from leagues, but in the anonymous online world people farm up those teams constantly. I don't even bother playing public leagues, because 99% of the time its either farmed up murder teams or rage quitters. This past year, even the structured leagues were getting like this, too. Basically people see Chaos and assume a CPOMB roster with artificially suppressed TV, so if they are playing the game legitimately why get their players murdered by that shit? This is especially the case at low TV, because it takes a little bit for the Elf and Human rosters to get Wrestle/Dodge on the linemen, so one game with a murder team (esp with the wonky dice RNG) can take several clean games to recover from. The problem gets tempered a bit when Zons and Norse are added to the metagame, since built in Block or Dodge at low TV shuts down those teams, but it looks like Cyanide is going to take a long ass time to do that.

Personally, I don't mind Chaos nearly as much as Dwarves. If I have dodge on a couple key guys, I can evade most of the bullshit at low and mid TV. Dwarves, however, get this giant wall of Guard/Block/Tackle in virtually no time at all, then every game degenerates into cage fests of 2d blocks where your skills mean dick. By the time you have the needed skills to deal with it, the Dwarves are already rocking lots of Stand Firm and POMB, all while still being lower TV than most other teams. Every time I have seen dwarves played in league format, the league usually tanks that season. So fucking boring and annoying to play with or against.....

I do take Claw and MB, but I don't usually take PO. Personal preference I guess.

But I don't really know what people want you to do with Chaos, really. They have always felt like a team designed to murderball to some degree, and I can't really blame people for playing them that way. I probably play them that way to a large degree. If I wanted some namby-pamby passing team I would play Elves. But I also have played Chaos in pretty much every game system GW has ever made, largely because of that particular style of play and aesthetic.

I guess I wouldn't mind a league where Claw isn't allowed, for example, and maybe I'd take things like tentacles or PHT (off the top of my head) as something of a challenge. I still like Tent and PHT and take them on occasion. But IMHO Claw is just damn good against AV.

As to Iwazaru getting flak after a few games...WTF? Chaos isn't remotely a killteam after a few games. Christ almighty, I'd almost say that they're terrible w/o a lot of skills like Block to start off with.

Phazael · Sep 29, 2015

Well the thing is, chaos actually can make a descent all around roster. Most of the squad gets access to general skills and have solid stat lines, so you can build with a focus on moving the ball if you want to. Its just that no one does that, because griefing the fuck out of people by putting half of someone's roster in the injured box is what gets some people off. This is also why Chaos rosters are hated, because bashy chaos can actually hurt other bashy rosters, mostly due to claw and horns. Finesse teams don't usually give a shit about claw, because their AV is low to begin with. And while listening to a dwarf player complain about being out bashed is music to my ears, the anonymous nature of the game combined with the huge replacement costs for skill rosters really encourage bash and murder rosters, especially if you manipulate your TV.

Now I am not a strictly anti bash guy, but I prefer teams that generalize a bit and try to move the ball. You can make a competitive chaos roster that moves the ball, but has its Mino there to enforce the no bullshit policy. You can make elves that mosh it up by loading up on wrestle, tackle, and so on. But usually people in online build these rosters that heavily exploit one aspect, especially in open leagues where farm rosters plague the system. I personally like taking a roster and making it do the opposite thing, but that's just me.

Erronius · Sep 29, 2015

Phazael_sl said:
Now I am not a strictly anti bash guy, but I prefer teams that generalize a bit and try to move the ball. You can make a competitive chaos roster that moves the ball, but has its Mino there to enforce the no bullshit policy.

I guess it depends on what you envision when you say "moving the ball". If walking a cage down the field is ok, I guess I do that? I def wouldn't camp, but I don't want to take unnecessary risks either. If someone throws caution to the wind and attacks my cage, I'm a bit hesitant to have someone leave the cage to sprint off towards the endzone unless time is short. There's too many teams that are quick enough to pick off a loner, and caging kinda makes you commit to a certain type of playstyle, I guess. But when playing certain teams I kinda feel like caging is a necessity, otherwise someone will sprint in, strip ball and...well, GL with that.

If I'm playing against AI and I have a guy ready to score a few rounds before halftime, maybe I'll camp him at the endzone and keep bashing for a couple turns for SPP. I don't think I'd do that against a player, though. That's just a dick move.

I might skill a few beastman up with pass/kickoff/reception skills, but I really like having them with block/tackle and maybe a couple 'murder' beastmen to blitz with (in addition to Mino). CW though, after block/guard/MB maybe, I'll usually grab claw if I can because fuck it.

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