So, a day has passed since the last current thinking blog. I've been very keenly following the response I've gotten to the plan and am happy to see so much positivity in general.
One thing that stood out to me, and which is absolutely a fair criticism of the proposed setup is that with 20 games per season and a 1.3M cap, there's simply no effect to winning games because 20*20k = 400k baseline for just completing, which is 100k beyond the 1.3M cap.
I've had a think about this, together with talking to a few key people about it in more detail and have an updated version of how it could work.
To not bury the new revision at the bottom of the post, this is the updated proposal:
- 15 games per season.
- Re-drafting budget of 1,000k + 10k per game + 10k per win + 5k per tie + team treasury
- Re-drafting hard cap of 1,350k
This is a slight deviation of what's in the rule book. I don't do this lightly, so here's the "why" of it:
The way the system is written in the rule book seems to be based on leagues which have on the order of 10 coaches, separated into two "divisions" for league play. This puts them at 4 games or so per season, plus the play-off (up to 2 games as written). It is also essentially designed to let these teams maintain 1-2 key players with a skill or two to the next season but not more than that.
I can't really predict how TV through skills will be in the new system. There's simply too many changes for that. However, I am fairly certain that the amount of gold given out as winnings will be increased (from a rough average of 40k to roughly 70k). This will have a big impact on treasuries at the end of the season, and remember that treasury is maintained through the re-drafting.
Now, the intent of the proposed settings is to maintain the rough 1.3M re-drafting budget, but at the same time make it worth fighting for wins during the season. To do that, some kind of budget "spread" is necessary. At the 1.3M level, 100k of spread seemed like a reasonable rough guideline, but cutting the less successful teams all the way down to 120k seemed rough, so I figured 1.25 to 1.35M as a guide. In order to achieve this without cutting the season length down "too low" (subjective opinion here), the budget for games and winning needed to be cut down. Instead of 20k per game, 20k per win, 10k per tie, simply halving it ended up at a reasonable place. Basically, instead of halving the season length, I halved the budget gained to maintain the longer season.
So, what does this mean in practise?
Team A, coached by a newcomer to Blood Bowl who's getting absolutely dominated in 15 games in a row:
1,000k (base) + 150k (games) + treasury
This is 1,150k plus at least the 70k treasury from the last game, so reasonably close to 1,250k.
Even at complete worst 1,150k the team is looking at more or less restarting with a 150k boost to buy another player to fill out the ranks, or switch two linemen into positionals.
Team B, an average coach who wins half their games:
1,000k (base) + 150k (games) + 75k (wins) + treasury
This is 1,225k plus the 70k treasury for roughly 1.3M.
Team C, a veteran coach who knows all the tricks and wins all 15 games:
1,000k (base) + 150k (games) + 150k (wins) + treasury
This is 1,300k plus 250k treasury (because who needs to buy more things anyway?). Gets capped to 1,350k for re-drafting.
What this also means is that if you have a great streak of games, you can splurge the treasury a bit during your season whereas an unlucky start will perhaps make it beneficial to save up a bit of gold for the re-drafting. Essentially, it puts a bit of a strategic element into cross-season team management which seems good to me.
As always, though, please keep up the feedback in the
forum thread. Please, however, don't argue the same points over and over again. I am reading all posts and considering your suggestions. Some, like this one, I will respond to. Others, I won't. Not because I didn't read, but because I simply don't think the suggestion is something I want to explore at this time.