Bodiless

Thanks! From some basic tests I've been doing it looks like with two decks of cards it looks like is by far the biggest determinant of who wins a duel. Fair statement? You can certainly hit an outlier and lose against a negative flip, but it doesn't happen very often. And that is even without factoring your cheat hand in. After that, if the decks are well mixed and it is a new draw every 2pts difference in skill works out to about 15%, so roughly shifted by 1pt on a d6. So far the best I've been able to do in terms of counting cards is keep track of whether I have seen the jokers or not. I'm not the sort of person who can leave well enough alone though - going to have to work on my memory.

Hello! I've recently (you're posting in the new player lounge, what were the odds of that?) gotten into Malifaux after years of other table-top games, and am really enjoying the game in general (barring one waffle-stomping by Perdita) and the unique card mechanic in particular. The card mechanic, I'm finding, is leaving me even more of a newbie than I usually am after moving into a new game. Every tabletop game I have ever played uses d6's, and I can basically calculate the probabilities of an action succeeding or failing instinctively. If I am really unsure about what my odds are, there is always the trusty binomial to let me work it out precisely. With Malifaux though I am at square 1 on understanding the odds. How much does a 1pt differential in Ml and Df change the odds of success? If it was 40k and WS I could recite the whole table, but here I honestly don't know if it is that big of a deal when you have things like cheating and flips. I realize that I have been playing the game as though I was rolling dice and each action was independent, but obviously the last flip of the deck is not random at all. So, long-winded lead up to a short question - is there any kind of odds calculator out there for Malifaux? Or a standard system for working out what your odds of success are for any given moment and situation? Thanks!

I think this would be a great idea. Like I said above, my friend running Lilith actually won his game, due to some central hard cover and Turf War, and *still* spent the next week scouring the internetz looking for advice on what else he could have done. No one really wants to play a game where you just pray you have somewhere to hide for five turns. And our Perdita player is still new and has not employed some of the more horrifying combinations people have talked about here, and no one is currently running Rasputina. So it is only going to get worse before it gets better.

Good to know. And I think I will indeed ask one of our league organizers to dust off their Neverborn and take a run at Perdita, just so I can see how the hell you actually close the distance on them. I took something like 5pts of damage on an Illuminated during my own activation for god's sake... ::sobs, shakes::

I definitely like the game in general, and my friend also is sticking with it because he loves the concept of the game (as a pair of old farts we've been wargaming even longer than 15 years ), but getting absolutely mauled by another crew like that, especially one piloted by a player who is just as new as you are, definitely makes you feel like you have picked the wrong faction and possibly the wrong game. I think what would probably benefit us the most would be to see an experienced player take a Neverborn crew like the ones we have put together up against the Perdita crew. Actually, now that I think about it, are there any good video batreps out there showing Neverborn pulling off the things you talk about against a Perdita crew? Because even after reading everything written here, and knowing that the terrain basically determined my game when we sat down at the table, I don't understand on a gut level how I am supposed to actually carry out an instruction like "Kill Francisco ASAP". Since our shooting is fairly pitiful, who is going to survive the wall of lead to carry out this deed? How do you lure a model out of position if it has +2Wp and can just be Shackled back? If we can barely get a model to the frontline of his crew alive, how do we get multiple models around them to limit the various movement tricks? I accept that more experienced players than we are accomplish these things, but damned if I can look at the different crews and see how it is done....

Yep, I know I will be back to this page often. Probably with a few more variations on "so, when you say I should do this... how exactly is that supposed to work again?". It also turns out I am not the only one of our crop of new Neverborn players having a real WTF? moment dealing with Ortegas. Another newbie is running Lilith, no guns, and also felt completely outclassed. He was lucky enough to have hard cover in the center of the board and Turf War, so he actually won his game. But he still felt like all his crew could do was hunker down and pray. Not a very fun introduction to the game.

Heh. I could have saved us all a lot of electrons if I had read that article earlier today. Opening lines: "Now most people will realize quite quickly that if they use a traditional Warmahordes board of 2 trees and a small hillock Masters like Perdita get muchmuch stronger as their shooting attacks dont have to worry about pesky LoS or Cover, so we have to cover the board in a lot more stuff to make things fair. " Someone actually called it a Warmachine setup in pointing out how open it was. I think I can stop tearing my hair out looking for an answer here. Thanks again to everyone for commenting, and I look forward to putting this advice into practice on a table that is not a shooting gallery.

Ok, thanks everyone. So, if I was going to sum up. 1. Fix the board before fixing my crew. 2. See 1. 3. Adding some Stitched Together to provide additional cover would not be a bad plan. 4. Either go all in on taking them out, weathering casualties in the first two turns as needed, or leave them alone completely. 5. Start by peeling off key support pieces like Fransisco and Papa Loco before taking on the rest of the crew. Sound about right? And is this a good general plan for other shooty crews, like Ophelia?

I definitely appreciate the time people are taking to help me here, and I know I am getting a lot of good advice. I guess what I am struggling with on the advice given is the execution of it, because in many cases I don't understand how I would have actually carried it out last night. Some examples: "Focus fire on Fransisco". Ok, excellent. Given that the Ortega crew outranges mine by multiple inches, how do I do this? One option given was using Lure to get him out of position, but Perdita has the upgrade that gives out +2 Wp so this was very much not a sure bet. Plus his crew had the Enslaved Neph and could move him back if needed. So I had to rush him in melee, and deal with the damage. I did eventually kill him, but by that point I had taken enough damage that my force was no longer really viable. I never got close to getting a shot on Perdita. Schemes: I deployed first in this game, so I deployed centrally. He deployed down one flank that would bring him out into a clear area near my deployment zone. So, in order to prevent him from just waltzing into my zone and scoring max points I had to cross that empty area to engage him. That was where the charging into a gunline occurred. Basically all of my damage potential with this crew is in melee, so if I remain at range against a gunline I'm just letting him attrition me down. I took Assassinate as one of my schemes, thinking my crew is good at killing things, but apparently this was a rookie mistake against Perdita. I also made a mistake in moving Hungry up to Heed Nino into taking a shot at Perdita on the first turn, which did essentially nothing, and then he was promptly firing-squaded. Size: We were playing at 45ss, so I think we were ok there. This is a slow-grow league though, so reaching 45 took most of my available models. Terrain: It was a VERY open board, several of our veteran players commented on it. Ultimately I think that was my undoing, which is just frustrating. The board was set up ahead of time by someone else, much like at a tournament, so we just sat down and started playing. If things turn so delicately on how much terrain there is I'm afraid I can see a lot of frustrating games in my future.

If I have learned anything over years of wargaming, it is that you can never rely on a table to have decent cover against a gunline. I think the Stitched are getting upgraded to must-have. On a more general note, using cover seems to be a double-edged sword. Most of my hitting power is in melee, and with the exception of Hungry using cover means slowed movement and more time exposed to fire. In this game Perdita had Entourage/Breathrough revealed, so I really had to engage them unless I just wanted to concede max scheme points. The strategy was Reckoning, so again I couldn't just let them pick me off at their leisure. Between the Enslaved Neph, Enfrente a Mi, Where'd He Go?, Cover Me, Diestro, etc. I'm not so clear on how I end up eating them in melee. They have so many options to keep distance or move out of melee or just shoot into it, even once I reached melee I basically got one or two swings before the target moved away and the rest of the crew lit me up. Not to mention that Faster 'n You meant that one charge caused more damage to me that it did to the target...

Would just adding Stitched give me enough resilience to cross a swath of open ground to get at them? I'm really hoping not to rebuy my entire crew...

I hear what you are saying, but for a new player this is a godawful frustrating answer. I've only recently gotten into the game, and picked up the models that 'go with' my master. To find out that I will need to buy a completely different set of models to deal with an archetypal build like a gunline makes me regret getting into the game at all.

This is what I am starting to worry about. That Lynch is so hamstrung against gunlines that I will basically need to pick up a second master and crew if I don't want to get rolled each time I come up against one.

Given that her crew tends to cluster together and has massive movement shenanigans, how in the world do you swarm it to death? The Enslaved was tucked safely behind the wall of enforcers in my game - I don't know that I even got within range of it much less actually threatened it. I'm running the basic initial Lynch crew, which is to say I've added Graves/Tannen/Doppelganger/Beckoners to the Dark Debts box, which is to say I have no blast weapons. So, if Perdita's crew is moving as a coherent mass down the field, with the Nephilim and Cover Me active, and has open sight lines, how does anything in my crew arrive alive to start attritioning it down?

I had essentially the same experience as the OP last night. My opponent was also a relatively new player, but I just got rolled. It was bad to the point where it honestly made me question if this is a game I want to be playing - if I wanted to march my army into the teeth of a gunline with precious little chance of reaching it alive I could go pick up my Tyranids again.

Greetings all! I'm in Silver Spring, MD, and part of the same gaming club as Mik and Dan above. Malifaux has pretty much taken over the local club at the moment, so if you are in the area and interested swing by Dream Wizards on Wednesdays.