D_acolyte

I often go in gun blazing but I also have to keep some 1 and 2 in my hand to avoid injures. This means it am taxing another reasons in a different way to make sure models continue to perform. The group I was in did a campaign and then a 2 day, 5 game tournament at the end where you played with your arsenal and every game was like a campaign game and you could buy at the beginning of each day. It was fun and I bought models to use in first game of day two just so I could save my powerful models for the last game.

Well something finally got caught in my mind and now it will become a post. How efficient a model is always debatable and there are multiple forms of efficiencies. I will be talking about a few of them, as well as a lot of gremlins….. I will defining how I am looking at each one as I go through this, feel free to disagree with my definitions but this is needed so that this can be understood how I see them. All of these are enemy faction independent, the enemy does not factor in to this overview except in a general idea. This is also not as thought out as some of my other posts. Ap efficiency: this is simply the amount of Ap you have can spend to do as you wish. This includes things such as being reckless, charging as 1 actions or extra action types such as nimble. The thing about Ap efficiencies is that you can trade it for deck in the form of focus or defensives. Some examples are most non character pigs, any reckless model (most are gremlins) and Barbaros. You might wonder why I have Barbaros, well that because a large amount of the time when I do have fast just moving so in many ways fast and nimble work much the same to me. Yes, I know with fast you can do anything so it is better but by how much: take the number of time you have an extra general ap and then subtract the number of times it was not used to do the action of interest and then you do one minus (dived used in that action by extra general ap). For me and nimble it is 1-(40 walk actions made with extra general ap/50 extra general ap) is .2 or 20%; this is a crude extra utility that a general ap is to me over say just being nimble. This is not going to be the same for you and as I stated this is a crude assessment meant to be a quick way of thinking about it and there is better math for a more exact measure. Deck efficiency: When I talk about deck efficiency I am mostly talking about flip efficiency or the ability to cheat. This is less intuitive then Ap efficiencies as it varies from action to action based on positive flips, rules, Tn or triggers. The Mature Nephilim is a great example, with a skill of 6 and a positive flip you can normally flip multiple cards that will work and possible get one of the triggers you want and those time you are at a negative to hit you go to an even/strait flip and can cheat. Hand efficiency: Come up with a number above 13 and now subtract your action value and that the card you need to play from your hand to make it work, the more cards the more efficient the model is. The reason for choosing a value is to have an idea of what something cost between models and coming up with a cut off card; is this shot really worth a 13. This is very much like deck efficiency with the exception that you control this. I could point to the mature again but instead I will shine a light on Hans, he does not randomize into melee, has a good value, trigger for every suit if you want to use it and is often focused; this means I can often cheat with a middle if needed and then put down high in the damage. It is also good to think with hand efficiency how often do I need to cheat to do x action as another measure. Of these there are 2 factions that seem more efficient than most in one or more of these 3 efficiencies. First is gremlins as they have a lot of ways to get a general ap which can then turn into deck efficiency and some models have a high enough skill to make it into hand efficiency or a lot of ways to skim actions. Such as the gators: 0 action push then focus once and melee expert attack finally I have 1 general action left. The next is 10 thunders which have a lot of ways from aura buffs to extra focus to buff their ability to top deck what they want or be able to cheat what they need. A fair number of 10 thunders also seem to be 6 skills on their minions, but they also started as a very expensive minion organized faction. Most factions have models/masters that can help in these efficiencies. I could probable go on about some very good examples of each but I feel that it is less productive. These models are the opposite of eater models that I talked about a while ago. What are some of your thoughts on efficiencies or models that fall under these efficiencies?

The ultimate queen's champion is a very hard topic, I tend to try and get a mature with it but it has been killer on the young, any of the knights, Barbaros, and Angel Eye. It is gilding the lily on Nekima, as she often does not need the plus flips to hit and though the armor is nice it is not a game breaker. A mimic blessing Angel Eyes with queen champion makes a wonderful skirmisher where there is little that is not wrong with an armor 2 double positive attacking mature with retributions eye. Is there a topic about just what is the best champion?

If you like Aeslin tools she is good but if you want fire support that does not randomize go with Hans or Angel Eye. I tend not to use her as I rather use my schemes to make Titania better.

So first it is a way to learn the master because you are probably playing them at the earliest in half the games, sometimes sooner depending on the campaign organizer. Next even with adding things such as skills or campaign upgrades you are looking at the master in different ways and evaluating them and the models they take. Example: he would be great if someone else could stop the charge, wait I have a way of doing with this upgrade. Now when you go out of campaign you will be looking at ways to do that in a different way. I find the more critical thinking I do for a master the more I understand them and the more I play with them the more I can see. First off a 65 script game is a normal 50 stone game as a point of reference. As for 40 script in a master vs non master battle. It favors in my opinion and what my would be opponent expressed the non master side in a lot of ways. Bring a master to the game is 15, even though they are 10 to higher. If you take 1 or 2 upgrades that is say 17. Next you have no catch so if I was using Asami and wanted enough for her basic catch that takes me to 20. There go half your points for the game. If you are a master that relies on stones to do things other than survive this puts you in a bind. Next the chances of having multiple 5 point models is low because you get a 5 script discount on a model every week, even if you have 1 script you will probably take a cost 6 model over a 5. Once again this cuts into what you can bring in the form of bulk. The scenario for that week favored interactions and numbers. That makes the game a master and probably 3 guys. He did offer to go up to 45 but that still does not make a master much more valuable so I said it is week 7 of 8 I do not need a game. Note: your master is your leader and you must play with your leader. All and all it was not a strategy on there part that I liked, it is no different to me then saying I am at a disadvantage and instead of playing it straight and making even I am going to put you at a disadvantage. He did get in a game vs another person with 6 or 7 models to 4. With some exceptions I feel a master in less then a 50 script game is at a detriment. I have played a 60 script game with my Toshiro vs Nelly and only lost by 1 point in week 4. I was not hurting for script or upgrades. I did arrange a game with him after he got his master, which in our campaign meant that after it was after week 6 he had his avatar.

My thoughts setting up to play in a campaigns First off, I have not done one of these in a while because various thoughts are scrambled in my head and this one just happened to come to the top. Also you will see me mention my father, my father and I have been playing in miniature games for about 15 years and my goal is often to beat him. I am currently in the last week of a campaign with the group I play with being ran by our local henchmen. I currently have 7 wins out of 9 games and a differential in the mid to high 20s; this does not put me in first as I know that going into this week there where 2 people ahead of me including my father. This is the second campaign I have played in and I have some thoughts about the strategy behind them. How I See Goals in a Campaigns I see pickup games, campaigns, and tournaments as test of different skills. Pickup games are a testing ground, I have all these models I can take and now I want to see what works. Campaigns are a refinement of vision and concept, I am starting here and I want to end there is that possible or even going to happen. Tournaments are a trial by fire of your skill and adaptability. The first goal of any game is to have fun, if you do not have fun then why are you playing. Now as for more specific goals for a campaign it is about growth and sometimes you might have to make hard choices. I literally had to choose between completing my bounty and getting a master for the next week or winning a game. That is a hard choice and I choose getting my master. Some background on that game, the strategy was one of the odd story ones where you have to give valentines to your enemy but the event was to interact with a thing in the middle of the board to get script. My bounty was to make script on the event and my enemy was the Vic of Blood and Ronins. I had to clear the center to be able to interact which put the 2 outcomes at odds with each other. The next part of growth is managing your injuries and campaign ratting. For most of this campaign I have kept my rating down at 0 or into the negative. Only this week did I chop a model up that had two injuries. Why do I want it at 0 or less, well I get stones and script equal to the difference in the ratting so in many cases buying more models to help me cover different situation early campaign was better. The next part of this is knowing when to bow out and retreat. I tend not to if I have a few 2 or less but I can understand when people do and try not to fault them for it. Honesty here, I do get a little disappointed when someone bows out early but it happens (I once killed 4 models of an enemy crew turn 1 in a blind deployment) and generally after a little while I get over it, I mostly just dislike non games even if I win. Finally I use campaigns to learn or relearn masters as it forces me to become intimately knowledgeable with them. Remember that you must bring your leader always, and once you get a master they are your leader. The size of the game is determined through conversations and sometimes you may say that you will just walk away. It has happened to me, a guy with about 60 script but no master wanted to play at 40, I said 50 as it seemed like a nice mid area but we did not come to an agreement. Got me a glare from someone else when I told my father that I was not getting a game in but meh such is life, if you let that bother you then you have bigger issues. On to the building blocks. Campaign arsenals are by their nature incremental changes to make a grander whole. That being said do not worry about buying a model early in the campaign and not using it late campaign, sometimes you have to do what you need too early to survive till late. For instance I started with Toshiro and once I got Asami poor Toshiro is now on the side lines. I may bring him out but he and Asami are both card hogs. Another issue is failure to plan the pivot point in the list. This is where you want to make a dynamic change in your arsenal and hopefully you can. Let’s look at Toshiro again, if I bought 2 punk zombies in my arsenal and then I want to go with Asami and sideline Toshiro then the punk zombies are a loss. Either I leave them in my arsenal to use on the few cases I want both Toshiro and Asami or I cut them up and get half the script back. Note: Cut ‘em Up For Parts is an optional rule so you might not get that half cost refund. Alternatively if I went with Collodi, Leveticus or Mie, I might have to spend a significant amount of script to add models that I want/need for that master after I get that master. For instance if I wanted to build into Collodi I might want the fallowing that I need after picking up the master: 3 marionettes, 2 effigies, 3 upgrades and a coryphee. So let’s ball park this a bit 3 one stone upgrades is 6 script, 3 marionettes is another 9 script, 2 effigies is 8 and a coryphee is 7. That is a total of 30 script not including the 10 for the masters. Even if you use the 5 script discount on the coryphee taking it to 25 that most likely 2 weeks’ worth of scripts. The max script is 16 a week but I often only get 12-13. To offset this I tend to like leaving my option on masters I want open to two and decide on it when it comes up. For instance, I started this campaign with the fallowing models Toshiro, Izamu, Shadow Effigy, an obsidian oni and komainu. As I added on my first few models where a sniper, Chiaki and a tengu. This was a nice set that then let me say Yan Lo or Asami. Though Asami was my first choice I left the option for another master opened till I had to make the plunge. I have forgotten how long these are and how they tend to change between what I think they will be and how they end up. I will probably do some of these sporadically as things pop up in my mind. Feel free to ask question and comment. What have other people experience been with there factions and campaigns? I have done one with Ressurs and 10 Thunders.

Is brownies and option or cake batter?

The volume needed for that is quite a bit, especially if you want to account for all the variations in the game and it means that someone new to the system is going to assume not to have any skill even if they have been in the game for a prolong period of time. For instance I do not tend to go to large tournaments, just do not have the time, but most in my meta consider me a hard win but if I go to the a major tournament for the first time it will hit that as a new player irrelevant of my skill. So I am going to ball park this: Lets assume the tournament is using GG doc for that year so we can eliminate stratagem and deployment from the unknown, which is not always the case. If we uses GIBBS sampling and Bayesian methods over frequentice we can use smaller samples and lavage our believed expectation of skills. I would still want about 30 observation per a person as a baseline, more would be better. Factoring possible things, such as a person giving in top of turn 3 (yes that has happened when I have played a person), I would up the observations by 10 at a minimum. there are about 550 people on the tournament site, so that is 550X40=2200 observations just to get what I would think is a baseline estimation of skill. That number is actually to low in all probability. Lets say that the average tournament enthusiast goes to one every other month, that is probably high. That is 6 tournaments a year and a total of about 7 years. I always round up on things like this. That is also assuming that we do not see a major change in the game in that time. If we have it broken down by round and who they played vs then we can change this timeframe by a lot, but we do not. Especially if we have the differentials from the game.

Thank you, I am taking a break from my large breakdown for a while as I was running out of ideas, at least the structured ones. Taking what is unstructured and reorganizing it as well as breathing a bit. Putting my words to text is not natural or easy for me, luckily I come off overconfident enough that most people I know who read it do not pick up on how nerves I am when I do them. The one magic player that came over in my group had some real problems getting in the grove that you do not loose early game and suffered from self defeating acts but has gotten over it. Magic, at least when I played it over 15 years ago, had a lot to do about adapting and playing power moves. Often this leads to victory or defeat a lot fast then other games in terms of time not turns. A magic player can be an absolute monster if they for alpha strikes or an early mid game power. Also most magic players I know are all about that powergaming, it is the norm for there scene, which makes it so much fun to murder them in an RPG.

Not sure when or if I will get to the UK data. Partly because it has little effect on me. Though I might try to do a 2016 vs 2017 USA one in December, I might add the 2016 and 2017 UK to that. I am interested in the differences between the two groups as well as those from the GG 16 vs 17.

I am going to chime in because I can. I feel that people either over simplify player skill or are often trying to talk about familiarity with the game. Player skill is a latent variable or a variable not directly observed but are rather inferred. This means it can be very subjective. I will now brake down my opinion on how to model this. Let me define some terms and put my shorthand for it. Note this is very subjective. First is familiarity with the games as a whole: simply number of games played sort of works. F(MAL2end) Other miniature games played: Warhammer, 40k, warmachine, guild ball and others can teach a lot about how to play, read rules and resource management. MG Strategy computer and board games played: It like the other miniature games played, in fact sometimes even more so. Ex: starcraft 1 & 2, battle realms, total war (rome and forward), Warcraft 1-3, C&C 1-4, Homeworld, and many more. You can also brake this one down into 2 groups. SG Luck: number of times they get extremely normal cards. Mine tends to be bipolar. Luck Historical knowledge: This may sound odd but I have found knowledge of warfare in history to be helpful in formulating my plans. HK I think that does it for overall components….. But what about weights, can a player have a different skill level with other factions or even other masters? Well yes, in fact we can go all the way down to the granularity with per model basis. Could they have a different skill level in a different Meta? Well yes. I would probably depict these as weights to the entire equation. We can probably have these go from .5 to 2 to represent familiarity or just other knowledge effect even if you do not play them, are not in that meta, or do not play that faction. For sake of easy I will call these weights category or Cat fallowed by faction, meta or master. Where to put theses weights is debatable. player skill=( F(MAL2end) *Cat_faction_played * Cat_master_played + MG+ SG+ Luck+ HK) * Cat_meta_played Even this model is incorrect, it sort of goes with it being a latent variable. This is also a subjective model with factors I feel are important. I would also love to try and make a data set that calculates someone’s player skill but it is not probably. Also how little a difference is there to actually be a significant difference is another important thing I would like to know, answer is probably impossible to know. Even if you get totally new players to the game they will have a difference in skill.

No, I actually means what I said. People have a theory about what perform well in tournaments. With what limited data there is I can pit that vs what the data indicates and tell you the probability of it happening. I am not using the word historically because for various reasons. The US data can not be used to make a multi year trend nor examine more then this limited snap shot in time. As this snap shot at the time of the original post was the GG 2016 life time which was still going on it is not historic but concurrent. Now if I went back and looked at GG 2016 vs GG 2017 then I would describe the GG 2016 data as historic.

Wyrd traditionally go Japanese with there Asian undead. I think this leads to some confusion and miss opportunities. I seem to remember some scary undead in China and India but non are popping into my mind.

Hi, when will I meet you in person at giga bytes?

If I am taking 1 in a general list, Claw. Looks great and is versatile. If I am taking one with Titania, then Tooth as she still looks good and can keep Titania alive.

I am getting a cult army, court of two champion and squad of broken. A friend is getting the gibbering horde and some stuff.

Not really. It makes taking pact more common to get that one summon off no mater what but I often only summon one and use the rest as support actions. If you plan on doing an alp spam then the errata does not even effect you because it only deals with the manifest nightmare action and not daydreaming.

Sorry missed that.

Collodi can summon but he does so at a slightly high card and the Dreamer is still so much better as a summoner.

Simple question: What are you getting? I am going with the commander level so I have 2 units of warped, 1 unit of stalking portals, 1 unit of doomseekers, Adeodatos and Fenton. I am planning on getting a breachling for the doomseekers to summon and the Immolated RHINO!!! because who does not want a rhino made of fire. Then I am debating getting on of the other squads. I am skipping Horomatangi in the hopes of the Court of Two. If you are taking Horomatangi what of the Gibbering Horde are you looking at adding?

Currently cult but I want to do the Court of Two

You got my hypothesis wrong. Your think it is: But it is stated as: I tend to associate this with level of mastery or confer with a faction not how strong a faction is. The issue with braking it down by name is that you are stratifying your data and will probably have very few observation for most name this will most likely lead to meaningless results. I did think of making a skill level variable but there is just not enough data for the USA to do so, it would also be very subjective and probably wrong in a lot of cases when "new" players like myself who have been playing from gen 1 on suddenly show up for the first time in a tournament on the site. If you feel that it is important then by all means go and make a data set to look at it.

I am waiting for a Lucius nightmare edition box or one that is better for neverborn. As for the Daydream thing, I will take Pack as a counter on the Dreamer now otherwise meh I normally only summon 1 model a turn. Also it does not stop you from summoning a ton of alps as it is after the manifest nightmare action not the day dream summoning action.

I WANT AN ARMY OF DOOMSEEKERS!!! The Cult, logistical superiority, madness, magic, and tentacles what is there not to love.

How do I get this.