Cool, I will make time to watch them this weekend.
Cool, I will make time to watch them this weekend.
Lizards suck and Pansy sides can tear through anything with even moderate luck which really doesn’t help matters for you Squirrel but you are certainly going to be doing things wrong. Using inducements is a skill to learn but starting rookie teams in established leagues is another new skill in itself. As I said in the earlier conversation it requires a significantly different approach but until you identify what doesn’t work you can’t start to figure out the changes you need to make. Getting it wrong is the first step towards getting it right :)Originally Posted by squirrelfanatic
Case in point our resident Lizard expert plays them like a stunty team early on. Using a Skink heavy starting roster he keeps mobility rather than just having the 7 big lugs all partitioned out. He employs Saurus mercs with helpful skills for specific match ups; for example in your game yesterday that 80k on a skilled merc could have gone on Tackle to get value out of the DT skinks on your roster. He works hard getting quick skills on his rostered Sauruses building core role players – from memory I think he opens with the BT sweeper, wrackler and a killer – with the final three steadily being introduced as the team develops. In short he does it totally ‘wrong’ if you were talking about starting in a rookie environment. That is where internet BB groupthink causes most coaches to declare it is impossible to do. Standard rookie approaches only work with some teams but the internet community is locked onto the idea that the ‘rookie’ in rookie cookie cutter builds refers to your team level rather than your opposition.
I guess it depends on whether you want to build the team efficiently or win games, do you think?
Also - "lizards suck".
Did you mean that they struggle at low TV due to lacking skills?
Thanks for the match report Screwie. Fortunately, it looks like my next game is a bye so I'll have my blitzer back for the next competetive game!
Some people do suggest just sucking it up for a season with a typical rookie build but it is counterproductive imo and bloody boring too :)
They are arguably at their best in total rookie ball where no one can easily handle both the strength of the big guys and the speed and movement of the dodgy little gits. Strength quickly gets neutralised though. A highly developed lizard team is great on paper but in a well balanced league it very rarely makes it off paper. Claw, chainsaws, fouls and bog standard attrition are the bane of the team. They are just too reliant on a handful of players and like all the hybrid teams they’ve been badly squeezed by the never ending cycle of bash nerfs. They simply suck and badly need a boost or three to maintain genuine tier one status.
My handful-of-games rats did OK with an enough-to-buy-Morg TV gap in my last match against Screwie - but that was mostly because the armour and injury dice were rolling very much in my favour. (MNGing the krox with the first hit, for instance, or all those times my rats took a punch and yet didn't die). I suspect the next few games will see a horrible attrition rate and a broken team - but that would happen with an 1800TV team anyway, because rats.
So my advice to Squirrel would be to cross your fingers and hope for some lucky dice.
Also though, some more helpful advice would be to see if Jiiim can give you some replays of his Divisions matches - you should be able to pick up some useful lizard tips from his games (although the game he just played where he lost 5-1 to some ridiculous elves might not be the best choice to watch)
I would say that the great strength of lizards is how maneuverable their big guys are - break tackle sauri seem on paper at least to be just lovely - very quick with MV6 and hard to pin down since they dodge on a 2+. It's almost like a wood elf team with ST4 linemen.
I have no experience at all at playing as lizards though and it's just theorycrafting. I'm painfully aware that things which look bland on paper can be awesome on the pitch (like stand firm), and vice versa.
I would like to have some experience of playing against Lizards though, and on that score - Lowkey! Do you want to play my flings tonight! My wife is away tonight and tomorrow with the kids, so either day is ideal for me. If not then I'll try to arrange a Divisions match instead, can you let me know? Cheers.
From what i've read from a discussion about a guy who has a 2800TV+ Chaos side it appears there is a drop off in the value of inducements for most teams once you get past 500-600. Wizard/bribes/apo/rr are all useful but unless you're a team specifically designed for inducements things outside of those are mostly star players which with such a large TV gap between teams can be quite easily neutralised (hello Morg, meet my clawpombing chaos warrior).
This is obviously a generalisation but clearly some teams will struggle better with TV differences than others.
Thanks for your comment Zoraster, that's some food for thought.
This is the single most annoying problem I am facing as a rather new coach. It is tremendously difficult for me to figure out what I am doing wrong. Sure, practice makes perfect, but only if you realise what the errors are because this is what allows you to avoid them next time.
Right now, I am mostly reading up online sources about general tactics for the teams I play (I am also solely playing the game online, so that's a big drawback compared to playing table top where you can more easily discuss things with your opponent / group) and watch FUMBBL replays and commented youtube videos. Most of the time, I have to deduct the reasoning behind given decisions and moves. As you can imagine, this doesn't always work as good as I wish it would. So this is something for which I'm still looking for a good way to deal with.
Unfortunately, my bad performance also leads to the problem of an even slower progress of my players. Not winning matches is not such a big thing for me, as long as I either learn a valuable lesson (or two) from them and/or get a few SPPs on the pieces that need it the most. Getting next to no TDs and casualties (and two MVPs lost due to the use of mercenary players) means that my team isn't suited to beat my next opponent any better than the last. But I'll see how the next games turn out, maybe I can somehow manage to develop 2-3 specialist Sauruses to work with.
Playing Norse rather than Lizards but picked up nearly 800k of inducements against Jiiiiim's Maths Squad, definitely coming down in favour of the more active enhancements (star players, wizard etc.) - in the end had Morg, Eloquacious (which is what I will always call my wizard from now on, any time I get to use one), an extra reroll and a babe (because what else can you do with anything less than 100K?). All of which were useful, although not spectacularly so.
Was a good game this morning. I think Jiiiim was going to write it up rather than I, but I was moderately happy with how it worked out.
EDIT: Yes, yes, I know everyone on a Norse team gets Block as standard except the Ulfwereners and the Yhetis and that does set them apart from other rookie teams but honestly as soon as one or two members of the opposing team have Block that advantage vanishes very quickly. It does, however, give you a bit of an edge when you're using journeymen. And you will be using journeymen at some point, because Norse players seem to break on the 'p' of 'pow'.
Last edited by sketchseven; 23-08-2012 at 02:02 PM.
http://fumbbl.com/~Hitonagashi is the best lizard coach I've encountered so maybe look at some of his games.
I'm more competent than good, but I got lucky with some skill rolls - I'm able to field a frontline of strength five players, and gutterskink of course. Also, not had to face much in the way of claw. The one thing I would say is you really have to try to get skillpoints to the sauruses. Give them all your touchbacks and if you're on top, try a handoff, it's only a 5+ >_>
Skinks are interchangable, they have most of their mobility already
Last edited by Jiiiiim; 23-08-2012 at 02:02 PM.
I thought i was feeling a bit welsh...
Sure everblue i can fill that wife shapped hole for an hour or so, shall we say 8 tonight?
Wait, was it against you? No wonder I won!
Let's say 8.30 if that's ok?
I know him from Talkfantasyfootball and have watched a few of his games. Apparently, I'll have to watch some more. Thanks for the tips. Going up in TD is no option for me (or so it seems), touchbacks have been a rare occurrence for me, sadly.
Total bastard
sure Everblue no worries
Yes, I've played them in the Open ever since we switched over to Legendary edition. I'm culling any injured elves quite hard whenever I get cash for replacements and will probably keep that up by replacing one of my niggled players before next game. I've gone through a lot of line elves, catchers and a thrower but the blitzers have managed to keep healthy through it all.
As for advice: from memory, your biggest mistake was in not covering your skinks enough. When you've only got 3 fragile players who can handle the ball at all, you'd best keep them safe. Both of my blitzers are really at their best against stunties with Block/Tackle/Mighty Blow to take them out and Side Step/Diving Tackle to stay near them. When one of them gets next to your ballcarrier it's gonna be costly to get him away from there, so do your utmost not to let that happen. Granted that my ST4 elves probably still could have knocked a corner lose in a Saurus cage, but you rarely if ever even set one up, instead just trying to screen with Saurii from the front which my elves were mobile enough to run around and covering with skinks from behind which were just free shots for the blitzers.
Pfah, everybody knows that skinks are for throwing at the enemy until piles of their mangled bodies block the way forward.
(In an entirely unrelated note, I am running out of types of biscuit)
Got dwarflerised by Zoraster's dwarfy dwarf dwarf dwarfs today, a 2-0 dwarfering. I hate dwarfs.
It didn't help that I was failing all the rolls, starting from the turn two catch that should have been a touchdown, and going on from there.
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