Game Theory - Getting better at Malifaux

[Furycat]

I'm cross-posting this from my blog, which you can find at https://furycat.wordpress.com/ 

It's likely to be the first in quite a series looking at this topic, not all of which relate directly to Malifaux so I likely wont cross-post them all, but feel free to follow on my blog if they interest you!

So this will likely be the first in a series of posts on this topic; not just about Malifaux but about game theory in general, which is a subject I find fascinating and useful to study in my quest to be not just a better gamer, but more effective in life in general. I will preface this by saying that I am by no means the best Malifaux player, or indeed gamer in general. I would consider myself to be slightly above average, but improving, Writing articles about this sort of thing helps me reason through it in my own head and solidify my ideas, and while the more experienced among you will perhaps consider a lot of this fairly obvious, hopefully some of it might be of use to newer players.

So to start, lets consider a brand new Malifaux player. They come in all flavours, but a fairly common thing I see a lot of newer players doing (myself included when I was new to the game), is a heavy focus on trying to kill opposing models, and little to no regard for actually scoring points and winning the game. Later, as they gain experience, they might start to look a bit more at scoring those all important VP, but are still easily distracted from the task at hand. They start to study the abilities and actions on their various cards, and come up with some ways to combine them for powerful effects. Later still, they might develop some very complex and/or potent combinations and crush a few people with them. This I feel often leads to the ‘X, Y or Z is OP!’ sorts of arguments. Now granted, there undoubtedly exist some things in the game that ARE overpowered to some degree, perfect balance is pretty much an impossible task, but often the ‘OPness’ comes from lack of familiarity with the models and abilities in question, and a lack of understanding of what I feel are the truly important things in Malifaux.

What wins games of Malifaux isn’t the stats and abilities on a particular model, or the cool combinations of abilities and models you can devise, or even necessarily killing enemy models. What wins games of Malifaux is;

• Positioning
• Board control
• Good resource management

And of course, a solid focus on the objectives. As more experienced players are undoubtedly aware, it is entirely possible to win a game of Malifaux even having lost your entire crew, or without killing a single enemy model.

There are naturally other elements that play into this, but the three things listed above are I think the fundamental core of winning Malifaux games. There’s an awful lot that can be said about each of those subjects, and indeed they apply in various forms to all sorts of other games as well, which is what I will likely delve into in future blog posts. For just now though, I’ll quickly go through the three points listed above and explain what I mean by them.

Positioning

I would consider this to be one of the first important things to learn, in order to improve as a player. Things like knowing your crew/faction and what you can and can’t do within the rules will come naturally as you play more and more games, but focusing on learning good positional play is I believe one of the first things a new player should do, that will lead to a substantial improvement in their game. Positioning covers all sorts of things, such as understanding threat ranges for models, where you can and cannot get cover from ranged attacks, where the charge lanes are, and how you can block or otherwise deny them. It includes knowing where your models need to be in order to secure you VP, and where you need to position models to deny the enemy VP. Reading the cards of your crew will help learn things like charge and walk distances, melee ranges, shooting and casting ranges, and so on. All of these together combine to help build a sense of what a model can, and cannot do from any given location. The stats on your opponent’s models will affect this as well of course, and given how many factions and models there are you likely won’t know a lot of this information. The simple solution is, ask! Don’t be afraid to ask your opponent questions. “What’s that guy’s charge and melee range?”, “How far can Perdita shoot?”, “Does that model have any extra movement abilities?” Or indeed, simply ask for a quick look at the card. Also, remember you can pre-measure in Malifaux. I advise that you do so, frequently. It will help you build an understanding of how the models are influencing the field. I also highly recommend plastic measurement tools, marked for 1″, 2″, 3″ and 4″. They’re fantastic for getting a quick idea.

So as you play, focus on how positioning is affecting both your choices, and your opponents. As an example of positioning at work, I played a game vs a Reva crew at the UK nationals, who was intending to use Corpse Candles to deliver a Killjoy bomb. (If you aren’t familliar, Killjoy is a very murderous guy who starts the game buried, and may un-bury when a friendly model dies). By using my Hungering Darkness, I was able to block charge lanes and make the un-bury options unappealing. By carefully positioning my crew, and influencing where my opponent could position his models, I was able to keep Killjoy off the table until Turn 3, when he had only one option for a charge, into the model I wanted him to charge. I was able to kill him for no loss. This wasn’t done by stats on models, or fancy combinations. It was done though a willingness to expend a resource (A model), and good positioning.

Board Control

This is almost exactly what it sounds like; how you go about exerting control over various areas of the board. Control can mean all kinds of things, from flat out denying access to a position, blocking off line of sight, making certain areas highly unappealing for your opponent to move his models into, and so forth. It ties fairly closely into positioning, which is why I would generally suggest a new player focus on that first to get a solid basing in it as a fast way to improve skill, but you will likely be picking up elements of board control along the way. Board control is very important for almost all of the strategies and schemes, and thus very important for winning games. A good example of a strategy involving board control, is extraction, where the objective is to control the area of the board around the informant marker. If you can keep models in that area, you score VP. If you can deny that area to your opponent, you deny them VP. So how can you do this? Well, for a start you can make it physically impossible to put models in an area. A big solid unit on a 50mm base takes up a lot of space, in which your opponent simply cannot place a model. If you put it adjacent to some impassable terrain, you can block off access to larger areas. Taking this concept further, the model will likely have a melee range that extends around it. Enemy models entering this will be engaged, and cannot move past without taking disengaging strikes. If your 50mm model is also a very powerful melee model you have the added advantage that your opponent may not want to risk moving models close to it! If said model has a 3″ melee range (Say, Izamu), you can create a sphere a whopping 8″ across that your opponent may not want to move models into! Continuing this concept, many schemes and strategies call for performing various interact actions, which cannot be done while engaged. So Izamu there is creating a huge area in which such things simply cannot be done, by the vast majority of models.

Powerful ranged models can create similar areas along their sight lines, where your opponent will want to keep his models either out of line of sight, or else in cover to make them hard to hit. This can effectively reduce your opponent’s mobility in certain sections of the board. Taking things a step further, there are many models which can move opposing models against their will, using abilities such as lure, or various pushes. This again enables you to exert control on sections of the board, by forcibly moving enemy models away from it, allowing you unhindered access. Some models have abilities which allow you to place large blocking markers, which restrict line of sight and in some cases movement as well. These take the form of things like smoke clouds, ice pillars, walls of flame, or suddenly materialising forests. These all let you control sections of the board by preventing line of sight, or blocking off entire paths across the board, if well positioned in relation to terrain.

Resource Management

In virtually all games, you have various resources which you can use to influence the game, and Malifaux is no exception in this regard. In fact, it has quite a few! The main ones I think are relevant, are;

• Soulstones
• Cards in hand
• Cards in deck
• Activations
• Action points (AP)
• Models / Wounds
• Markers (Corpse, Scrap, Scheme)

Each of these exists in finite supply. Some can be replenished over the course of the game, others cannot. And in many cases you can trade one type of resource, for another. How well you manage these resources, and how well you can force your opponent to expend his, is probably what separates the very best Malifaux players from the rest of us. You will tend to find, watching a highly experienced Malifaux player, that they are very careful about when they do and do not commit resources. By contrast, newer players are often very careless with their resources. A good example of this might be a relatively unimportant minion, attacking an enemy model where nothing much is at stake. An inexperienced player might cheat heavily from their hand to ensure a hit and high damage. Overall though, the state of the game is largely unaffected. No VP have been scored, no resource has been denied to the enemy. Those cards did not need to be used, it would have been perfectly acceptable to simply miss, or do weak damage, and move on. Another example might be burning cards and soulstones desperately to keep a model alive, that has only a tiny chance of surviving, even with the resources being used. A good example of this might be a fully powered up Viktoria of Blood attacking a comparatively squishy Henchman. Sure, I could pour good cards from my hand into trying to force misses, and burn Soulstones to try and prevent damage. But very few things survive a fully powered up Viktoria to the face, and most likely all I’m doing is throwing good money after bad. Better to accept the loss, and save the resources for something else.

Learning when it is worth expending a resource, and when it is not is a huge part of being truly good at Malifaux in my opinion, as is attempting to drain your opponent’s resource faster than you are spending yours. A good example of what I mean, comes from the humble Katanaka Sniper. I like him for resource management for many reasons. For one, he’s an activation I can use early in my turn, without really committing anything, which is handy if I want activation control to force my opponent to commit models into a fight before I react. He’s also very efficient in terms of my hand. By focusing, and taking a shot at very long range (basically clear across the board), he gets an excellent ++ to attack flips, thanks to his innate + flip, and a single + flip to damage. This makes it quite likely he can land a shot, with a good chance of dealing moderate or even severe damage. With his access to critical strike, he can potentially deal as much as 6 damage without my having to commit any of my cards in hand. By contrast, my opponent is faced with a choice. Does he commit cards from his hand and/or soulstones to try and prevent damage from happening, or does he accept the loss of his resources of wounds or even possibly a model. By selecting a relatively weak, easy to kill model rather than a big tough model, ideally one which has not activated, I can potentially remove an activation / model. All for no real commitment of resource myself. Of course, he could still miss with bad flips, but by not throwing cards from my hand into the attack unless there’s a very high chance of payoff, I lose nothing.

There’s a huge amount more on the subject of resource management, I feel it’s probably the most complex of the three topics I’ve touched on here today and one I’m still very much learning myself, so expect me to go into more detail in future on these. Hopefully you’ve found this post at least somewhat useful!

[Myyrä]

And here I was expecting mathematical game theory...

[iamfanboy]

I like your post. It states the basics of good play a lot more succinctly than the article in Wyrd Magazine (which is on my mind, as I just finished marathon reading the entire series!) It's also from the POV of someone coming to grips with the rules, rather than someone who's buried in them enough to get articles published in an official magazine.

I'm in a position of trying to get Malifaux going at my local store, and I'm glad that I understand right from the start what you're getting at here: that the game is VP-driven, not kill-driven, and you have to be able to focus on that.

It's getting that idea across that I'm finding hard in some cases. Recent starter box game I played had me down to one model in the tagging buildings scenario, but I was up 4 VP because I kept tagging buildings with him while the other guy kept trying to kill my dudes.

I'll probably try to link your article to people who are having trouble gripping the basics.

[Furycat]

Thanks! Glad to hear that you found the post useful, and I hope it helps with getting a good Malifaux scene going at your local store. The focus on objectives for winning rather than just killing is definitely one of things that drew me to Malifaux, and focusing on how to score VP each turn rather than simply killing is important to victory. Of course, there's also the school of thought that says schemes and stats are a lot easier to score once you've slaughtered the opposing crew!

I'll hopefully get a follow on to this done some time this weekend.

[Franchute]

On 9/12/2016 at 4:28 AM, Myyrä said:

And here I was expecting mathematical game theory...

Definitely, it seems that you have an interest in economics! 

[Myyrä]

5 minutes ago, Franchute said:

Definitely, it seems that you have an interest in economics! 

Economics isn't real science. My interests are more in the fields of operations research and quantitative risk analysis.

[spooky_squirrel]

On 12/8/2016 at 11:28 PM, Myyrä said:

And here I was expecting mathematical game theory...

I was expecting some of the same. There's room to develop risk/reward and payout expectations though; especially differences in payout expectations when dealing with an experienced opponent versus an inexperienced one (affects the 'rational' and 'intelligent' assumptions of players). I'm curious how various elements would come into play with how many permutations exist (especially perfect information).

[Myyrä]

6 minutes ago, spooky_squirrel said:

I was expecting some of the same. There's room to develop risk/reward and payout expectations though; especially differences in payout expectations when dealing with an experienced opponent versus an inexperienced one (affects the 'rational' and 'intelligent' assumptions of players). I'm curious how various elements would come into play with how many permutations exist (especially perfect information).

Malifaux is a partially observable stochastic game. It gets pretty difficult when you try to solve something like that. Adversarial risk analysis could be used to solve some simpler situations that might arise, but solving a whole game or even a whole turn would have way too many uncertainties for the results to be useful at all.

[katadder]

On 10/12/2016 at 0:48 PM, Furycat said:

Thanks! Glad to hear that you found the post useful, and I hope it helps with getting a good Malifaux scene going at your local store. The focus on objectives for winning rather than just killing is definitely one of things that drew me to Malifaux, and focusing on how to score VP each turn rather than simply killing is important to victory. Of course, there's also the school of thought that says schemes and stats are a lot easier to score once you've slaughtered the opposing crew!

I'll hopefully get a follow on to this done some time this weekend.

I tend to be in that school it must be said

killing removes opponent resources anyway through removing AP and models, leaving them choices about how to use their remaining models to either try and score or counter attack. 

not that I am against scheme running (have had games where Levi only did scheme running) but I do like to kill stuff more

[bertmac]

Killing stuff is more fun. There is more of a social aspect as it actually involves your opponent.

Killing all your opponents models is a good way to control them too as long as you haven't taken schemes where you need to interact with them!