You know what's cool? When one of your hosts comes in third place at Worlds, and another local player and friend (and your first-ever podcast guest) comes in second!

This one is just a big ol' Worlds recap with JJ and Shane talking about their experiences, their games, and the fantastic Runewars community.

(Disclaimer: Josh's mic was doing some strange things during recording, so some of his audio is not up to our usual quality. We apologize if the slightly wonky audio makes listening to Josh even worse than usual .)

http://initiativeone.libsyn.com/website/episode-24-the-north-carolinians-take-minneapolis

Oh, and here's Greg's awesome compiled document that we mentioned: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IA3ckM1Yp91ZUHQPAKUfyZ6KsOafWTfom7Ip5VXPZws/edit?usp=sharing

I'll give this a listen. I'm not usually one to follow podcasts, but this is bound to be interesting.

On the document, it would be helpful to get a description of what counts as each "archetype" and some examples of each. I know I found that some really big brushstrokes are possible with Star Wars Armada, but it really broke down pretty quickly after that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Runewars lists feel much the same way.

An interesting episode, with some good posts.

First off, congratulations to North Carolina for replacing the Montana meta we had going last year! Andrew and I were hoping to make it to the top 4 again.
I don't know if you guys realized it, but Shane and JJ knocked us both out Round 5. JJ did it by utterly crushing me, and Shane by getting an amazing 9-2 victory that leapfrogged into 3 and shoved Andrew into 5th.

Regarding Uthuk and such, one of the biggest things that need to be changed is tournament structure. Step one is the objectives. They should actually matter. The current cycle, they absolutely do not. Hopefully that will change next cycle.

Hopefully there is a next cycle.

I'm glad to hear that things seem to be going well at some of the communities like San Antonio and North Carolina. Sadly things are not great locally. Literally while Andrew and I were at Worlds, the FLGS put every single Runewars box on the clearance racks.

9 hours ago, DekoPuma said:

I'm glad to hear that things seem to be going well at some of the communities like San Antonio and North Carolina. Sadly things are not great locally. Literally while Andrew and I were at Worlds, the FLGS put every single Runewars box on the clearance racks.

Buy them all and give them to friends you think will like the game for Christmas. Then, once you've gotten a few more people hooked, have everyone go back to the FLGS and order more stuff.

I don't check the forums nearly often enough. 😅

On 11/9/2018 at 11:41 PM, DekoPuma said:

Regarding Uthuk and such, one of the biggest things that need to be changed is tournament structure. Step one is the objectives. They should actually matter. The current cycle, they absolutely do not. Hopefully that will change next cycle.

I agree that the tournament structure needs to change, but I don't think the objectives are the problem. I think these objectives actually helped bunker lists, as people observed before the event; none of them incentivized getting out and fighting, and in every scenario we've tested where Uthuk has to run up and fight a good bunker list, the Uthuk list has trouble. They can pull it off sometimes, but it's an uphill battle.

The main trouble with the tournament structure, imo, is that big wins and small losses are worth too much. When Uthuk wins, it often wins big, scoring 9-2 or 10-1 very often. When it loses, it's often able to take a lot of enemies with it, scoring 4 or 5 points even from losses. This is how Uthuk players with 2 losses are able to often outperform other players with only 1 loss.

We're experimenting with some numbers locally, just tweaking it so big wins are less valuable, as are marginal losses. We've taken away the 6-5 and the 10-1 entirely, and rearranged the three remaining score combinations in a way that we think will help with overall game balance. After a few events with it, we'll report in with the results.