While playing against people is a much better contest of skill I still really enjoy playing against AIs in Blood Bowl. AIs don't mind if I pause the game for half an hour. They will start the game whenever I want, and they never take time to figure stuff out while I sit there - it is Go, Go, Go! I like those things.
The thing is though after you play a team for awhile your Team Value gets enormous and you begin to have issues with having no money. Also if you are good at keeping your players alive you eventually face down the day when they will all get too old and retire en masse. It is possible to end up in a situation where a bunch of players retire and you struggle to even field a team because you can't make money because your team has such high value even though you don't have eleven players to put on the field.
I have played a little over 80 games with my Chaos team against a variety of AIs and I am approaching the point where player retirement is a real problem for me. I had five players who were all originals and who were marching towards retirement together so I had to put together a long term plan. The real problem with my team was that I had a player on the team who was specced to be good at picking up and carrying the ball. He had +1 Agility, Dodge, and Sure hands, which is the basic package you need to be a strong ball carrier. However, every time a player died and I had to replace them Mr. Ball Carrier ended up either riding the bench or trying to punch people badly because I needed the new replacement player to get all my touchdowns to earn experience. There is no point in having ball carrying skills if you aren't the one carrying the ball, so Mr. Ball Carrier got fired.
Firing a player with 170 XP who is almost going to collect his last skill is a strange thing. It is especially strange when the team consists of ten murder monsters and one ball carrier and you fire the ball carrier anyway.
Thing is, I can win games without a good ball carrier. I win by injuring the great majority of the enemy team and casually walking the ball into the end zone. Picking up the ball reliably and being hard to knock over simply doesn't help with my plan. Plus every additional knockdown or injury I inflict really helps both forward my plan and also keep my dudes safe. Opponents find it hard to hurt me when their team is all sitting in the injured box or facedown on the turf.
In this case the best defence is a good offence, and murdering my enemies is by far the easiest way to both score touchdowns and protect myself.
So my new team has only four of the original eleven monsters playing. It has 11 copies of Block, 11 copies of Mighty Blow, 11 copies of Claw. The basic murder package on every single player. 8 players have Guard to make it nearly impossible for the opponent to get decent blocks and 3 players have Piling On to pile up the injuries on key targets.
It is a silly game, this one. But I am enjoying it a great deal and thinking hard all the time about how to optimize my play so it is hard to criticize - what more is there to life than thinking about interesting puzzles and having a blast doing it?
(I know I know, Conan would say that there is "Crushing your enemies, driving them before you, and hearing the lamentations of the women." I do the first two things, but they didn't implement the cheerleaders weeping when the players on their team die, so lamentations will have to wait.)
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