Think I'm done.

One option to “fix” dwarfs would be to bring back the positional limits from the original game. If you have a total of 0-4 blockers, 0-4 blitzers, 0-2 throwers, 0-4 catchers, 0-2 big guys and 0-2 special on top of the normal racial limits that imposes some real hard choices on teams. Even though they are technically linemen I’d count longbeards as blockers and then make slayers special and runners throwers.

That way teams can’t have a team filled with blitzers or big guys. In fact I’d go further and limit the number of positionals the secondary team can take and make the tertiary team just be a single player type so instead of Norse it would be 0-2 Norse werewolves or similar. Ideally teams should be more like existing mixed team such as Chaos pact or underworld rather than an all stars team. Back in lrb3 these were tried I think and dropped for being horribly broken and not that interesting.

Personally the lack of AI isn’t an issue for me, I’d rather hotseat against myself as the AI would be so useless it wouldn’t be worth taking on. At least if you play against yourself you can guarantee your opponent will play as well or badly as you wish.

What is putting me off at the moment is the bland samey teams and mish-mashed rules that reward dull turtling play. Once some more teams come out I will see how things are working and then may get the game during a sale. Fixing the sudden death rules is a big issue, at the very least it should be a draw if no one scores and I’d deny both teams any cash or MVP’s.

I guess somebody will mutter "fanboy" under his/her breath upon reading this, but the game is on the whole not dull. Not at all. The zany randomness of things does liven things up, as does the fact that pushing people into traps happens way more often than dudes getting crowdsurfed in standard BB. Pits = fun, that's a basic fact of the universe.

The viability of turtling tactics is, as has been said countless times, very dungeon-dependent. This is something that's being corrected gradually.

The old limits on positionals in Jervis's written rules must have elicited a perplexed "WTF?" on the part of Cyanide, unfortunately. However, if one plays mostly in the low to mid-TV range the lack of restrictions hardly matters, because the goodies are prohibitive and the attrition rate is quite high. It's an advantage, in fact, because it gives more options early on. In my particular case, the vast majority of games I've played are in that range, because I'm a serial "resetter" of teams (and accounts...)

So yeah, being a naysayer is cool and everything but folks are missing out.

(@spubbba)

I totally agree with your first paragraph. I'm not sure why they didn't do this in the first place, unless it's just because it was easier to throw the full rosters together than to do a bit of thinking about positional numbers. The game would be soooo much better with those restrictions in place.

I think you go a bit too far in the second bit, though. You're essentially taking away some of the interesting decision-making that you set up earlier. It seems that finding the right levels of variation and balance is the trick.

Any debate may be beside the point, though, as Cyanide haven't given any indication that they recognize the game's issues. I would love to have just a little bit of feedback from them about our complaints and concerns.

A few random remarks:

-None of the three extant rosters is an All-Star team in the style of older editions of BB. Meaning that no team combines Strength and Agility without penalties. To wit:

Light is merely a Dorf roster with some added cheap fodder and some Norse strength. Flings have agility access but they remain awful players, on the BB pitch and in the dungeons;
Rainbow is an agility team with but a smidgen of Strength;
Bright is a Human team "gone all bashy" with the secondary races. In so doing it achieves that goal that has proved so elusive in standard BB: getting a Human-based roster that doesn't suck. That's because Humans in standard BB are a half-arsed bashy team that is supposed to be "hybrid" because of its crappy catchers.

-The only rosters that will presumably combine the best features of Strength and Agility will be Amber (Dark Elves-Orcs-Skaven) and Dark (Undead-Dark Elves-Trolls?). It's fairly likely they'll be very strong rosters. Amethyst and Celestial should be seen as agility teams. Golden is going to be pure bash, at least as bashy as Orcs or Chaos Dwarves (the primary and secondary race, respectively) taken in isolation.

-People are complaining about bashing. They also do it in standard BB, of course. At any rate, fiddling with the rosters is not going to do much to mitigate the prevalence of bash. A hypothetical Grey team that had Humans as the main race and imposed (unrealistically) strong restrictions on the use of Human blitzers, Chaos Warriors and Ogres would still allow at the absolute least 2 human blitzers + 6 goats, i.e. plenty of Strength spam. Obviously, you can't have a team with Dwarves as the main race that treats blockers as a something other than linos. Which is to say...

...as long as you have teams in standard BB that spam strength (and mutation!) skills on "lineman" players those skills will be spammed in DB, too.

-In standard BB, bashers are the most popular teams and Elves/Skaven the ones with the highest win% across all TV-ranges. This is baseless speculation, but I suspect that once we have all the Colleges the bashy ones will also be the most used and the "hybrids" Amber and Dark the winningest. Not that different from the goings-on in the BB mothership.

BTW...

One option to “fix” dwarfs would be to bring back the positional limits from the original game. If you have a total of 0-4 blockers, 0-4 blitzers, 0-2 throwers, 0-4 catchers, 0-2 big guys and 0-2 special on top of the normal racial limits that imposes some real hard choices on teams. Even though they are technically linemen I’d count longbeards as blockers and then make slayers special and runners throwers.

In the case of the Bright roster, this would allow the use of 4 human blitzers, 4 Dwarf blockers, 2 Slayers and 2 big guys, one at least. In the case of Light, and always assuming one could get away with having longbeards treated as positionals, you could get 2 Dwarf blitzers, 4 longbeards, 2 Slayers and, say, a berserker and a Yhetee, maybe a Treeman too or the Deathroller if it doesn't get nerfed. That's more than enough strength spam in both cases to make the complaints continue unabated, in a game in which one starts by deploying six players in the dungeon.

If you think there's too much strength in standard BB, and many do seem to think that, there'll be too much strength for your taste in the dungeons. Simple as that.

the reasons agility teams win in BB is because they can usually score in 2 turns (some skaven teams can score in 1) whereas the bash teams generally take a min of 3 turns more likely 4 or more.
this is because the agile teams have space to use that speed and can also throw the long bomb (had an elf thrower that could throw longbombs on 2+).
in DB this isnt possible. every map has choke points that the bash teams can hold so that even spped 4 isnt a problem. also the longest pass is the short pass so cant even throw it that far even if you do manage to get a player in the back half.

i think the best team in DB will be the grey team. CPOMB is the ultimate bash and will deal even with dwarves. they will be slower starting out due to lack of skills but once thats overcome there will be no stopping chaos.

Yeah some good points about the difficulties of doing mixed teams.

There is a careful balancing act between making the teams different enough from each other whilst having a coherent playstyle and trying to avoid some teams being vastly superior to others.

My preferred solution would be to do away with using existing BB teams altogether and make 10 brand new teams with positions taken from a variety of races. I think the primary team should be the mainstay but some sort of limits need to be made on the secondary team. Whilst the tertiary team should just be a couple of interesting players, ideally big guys stunties or cool stuff.

So, bearing in mind the limits I mentioned in my last post (and on reflection I think I made a mistake and either blockers or blitzers are 0-2). I would make the Bright team as follows.

Human linemen – 0-16
Human blitzers – 0-4
Human throwers – 0-2
Human catchers – 0-2
Ogres – 0-2
Maximum of 6 dwarfs
Dwarf Blockers – 0-4
Dwarf Blitzers – 0-1
Dwarfs slayers – 0-1
Dwarf runners – 0-1
Deathroller – 0-1 (maybe, still unsure if it should be banned or not)
Maximum of 2 norse players
Norse werewolves – 0-2
Norse Yhetis – 0-2

Some of these may need some tweaking but I think the Underworld team are an ideal model with the gutters and Rat Ogre missing from the skaven options. If you allowed the goblins to still have secret weapons and made the warpstone troll 0-2 then I think that would be an interesting and characterful dungeonbowl team.

@katadder:
That's way too defeatist. Agility teams can and do often win if the maps are not mindless rubbish. It's early days and the number of matches is accordingly too low, but the ladder seems to hint that it's possible for Rainbow teams to have excellent records and make it to the top ten, even if bash does predominate.

As for passing, the experts recommend the use of the walls for added hilarity. No, really. It's kind of a "Hail Mary Pass" ("the ball travels 2D6 squares in the direction indicated", the rules say) that can catch the slower teams on the wrong foot.

Anyway, edit the worst maps (you know which ones, devs), add a gazillion of the best community-created ones, nerf that pesky Deathroller already, add new teams, and agility becomes way more viable.

Yes, Grey/Chaos will become quite popular, in all likelihood. I mean, go figure. But to say there'll be no stopping them is theorybowl, sorry. Light and Bright will be stronger up into higher TV ranges than is the case with their closest equivalents in standard BB (because the multi-racial rosters give more options to Dwarves and Humans respectively,adding in particular a claw piece to their teams). Golden will be an absolute monster of a team. And while I don't expect pure agility teams to be at the very top of the so-called "Tier 1" of teams as is the case in standard BB, wait till you see the mixed wonders Amber and Dark in action to say that pure bash is dominant, let alone unbeatable.

Last but not least, bash is way more fun and interesting in Dungeonbowl than in standard BB, where the situation is quite appalling (as in, of the strength skills only Guard and the MB+PO combo truly matter, with extra claw if you have access to it). Well, apart from the fact that the Deathroller needs nerfing. Stand Firm, Grab, Juggernaut are *huge* in the dungeons. We may even see Break Tackle become fairly popular. Of course, this again assumes the use of interesting maps (with pitzzzzz!)

@ Spubbbba: Now that would be the way to go, ideally. Dedicated multi-racial DB rosters that don't refer to pre-existing BB teams.

I agree agility teams can do ok, at least in the early stages, my rainbow team are at 7 and 6 wins to losses, but now every team they face is the guard, mightyblow type of dwarves. as you can guess most my wins were early games where I could actually bash back, STR3 on STR3 works ok. now with guard on everything this makes it almost impossible. and with nowhere else to go the only way to win is get a lucky teleport to an unguarded pad.

as for passing. throwing the ball off a wall down the dungeon is ok if you have someone who can go get it, but that means getting past the double road block of dwarves/chaos warriors and you can only leap once per turn.

I agree golden will be pretty bad, STR4 black orcs, and added dwarf. this is something dwarves may struggle with apart from they have the deathroller to break up the opposition.
Amber I dont think add too much other than obviously the STR4 black orcs again, which is once more pandering to bash.
dark I am looking forward to as some STR5 mummies and trolls backed up by high agility DE is going to be nasty.

the above 3 teams will do ok as its improvement on their bashing but as DB is 95% bashing then the CPOMB grey team should eventually always come out tops (plus they can get mutatted beast ball handlers to do all the agility stuff)

you get chess as standard on PCs with better AI than cyanide can put out.

Scientists (you know, the TRUE ones, just researching and with no need to make a living from a product) are trying to develop an AI for Chess since decades - and the rules are much less complex (you can write them down on a single page, if you want).

So, only because there are some algorythms out there for chess, that stomp nearly every human player in the ground doesnt mean, its easy to write a AI for a turn-based game.

the above 3 teams will do ok as its improvement on their bashing but as DB is 95% bashing then the CPOMB grey team should eventually always come out tops (plus they can get mutatted beast ball handlers to do all the agility stuff)

CPOMB will be much less of an issue (in regard of winning games), since you can bring the players back more likely and there is no way a bash-team can go for a 2:1 grind. Often, Chaos is only able to win (at higher tv), because there are simply not enough players left for the opponent to defend. Since both teams start with the same number, players can come back more and it only goes to 1 td, CPOMB will be much less of an issue in DB. Also a team with much CPOMBers will miss the other essential skills like guard, SF, juggernaut, grab.

I cant see grey beeing a top team in DB (beside from bringing the attrition up).

Edit: Thinking of it - a Minotaur with tentacles would be the only player capable of stopping all that leap-rainbows...