3 hours ago, Khobai said:

Yes obviously different lists will use different cards. But every time they use list X they always use cards Y.

They will always use the same cards with the same list. And the only way the cards will ever change is if they use a different list. But even if they use a different list they will always use the same cards theyve always used with that list.

I don't know that it actually fixes anything though. If I'm red player and I'm substituting an entire category I have 4 cards that work well with my list and it will always be those 4 cards with that list and those 4 cards are now in the setup. That is also assuming I brought the 4 cards you did not bring. If you're mainly in tournament settings or only around tournament first minded players this will always be true. A player will always select as many pieces as they can that work together and there is no benefit to pick sub-optimal pieces. Maybe talk to your play group about running more casual style games. I agree tournament style meta gets stagnant and personally for me is not a lot of fun. We try new stuff all the time in all the different games we play. Most Legion games I shuffle each category up and flip the top 4 for each and that is what we pick from. And if something starts to pop up a lot or we feel an arms race has been going on someone brings up a janky (fun) house rule for next time like a made up scenario or you have to build off this commander or only ships from this movie.

Quote

2) Refund the bid? What game does that, how does it work? Can you provide more info on that, I would be interested in looking into a game like that.

A lot of games use the mechanic where players bid to go first and only the player that actually wins the bid has to pay.

Just like when you bid on something at an auction... if you lose the auction you dont still have pay what you bid and then not get the item too.

When players bid on being blue player, and red player loses the bid, they should get their bid back. Because they didnt win being blue player. Red shouldnt lose points for nothing just because they didnt win the bid.

Whoever is red player should always get to run an 800 point list. Players should bid points to go first. Then whoever wins the bid should subtract that amount of points out of their 800 points total to be blue player. And whoever loses the bid pays nothing. Then both players should construct their lists.

2 minutes ago, Khobai said:

Players bid to go first and only the player that wins the bid has to pay the bid. The rest of the players dont pay the bid because they didnt win.

Just like when you bid on something at an auction. If you lose the auction you dont still have to pay what you bid for the item and then not get the item.

When players bid on being blue player, and red player loses the bid, they should get their bid back. Because they didnt win being blue player.

Thank you for the explanation on it, what game actually has this mechanic in it?

axis and allies has a bidding system like that

you bid on whos going to play allies and how many extra points the axis player will get

because the allies are considered to have an advantage just like blue player does in legion. so both players bid on who will play allies and the player who plays axis gets extra points equal to the bid to spend on starting units. So like if one person wins the bid to play allies for 6 points the axis player starts with 6 extra points in units.

whereas the way legion works both players bid on blue player but only the player who wins the bid gets to play the blue player. and the player who loses the bid has to play the red player but doesnt get anything refunded for losing, they still lose their bid, and theyre mostly just at a huge disadvantage (unless they bid nothing). lol.

For that reason, legion essentially has this bid big or bid nothing philosophy. You either bid big enough to get blue player or you accept that youll be red player and bid nothing. Because if you make a big bid and end up losing the bid youre now at a huge disadvantage since youre not only out the points for the bid but you didnt win the bid either. I find that kindve silly and unituitive.

I really like the axis and allies bid system because its self-balancing. Because the more you bid to play allies the stronger axis will be. Where with legion the red player often just gets screwed. Imagine if you bid on an item on ebay and lost the bid but ebay still took your money and you didnt get the item. Thats what being red player is like in Legion.

16 minutes ago, Khobai said:

axis and allies has a bidding system like that

you bid on whos going to play allies and how many extra points the axis player will get

because the allies are considered to have an advantage just like blue player does in legion. so both players bid on who will play allies and the player who plays axis gets extra points equal to the bid to spend on starting units.

whereas the way legion works if both players bid on blue player.. only the player who wins the bid gets to play blue player. and the player who loses the bid has to play red player but starts with less units instead of more. lol.

Axis and allies is a board game for up to 6 players, each country has a predetermined amount of starting points. No bid system what so ever. Maybe it’s a house rule you use when playing 1 on 1 with someone.

regardless the system you talking of doing doesn’t work for competitive play. In a tournament situation your list is submitted to the tournament officials, who verify your list is legal and valid. Then at the start of the tournament everyone’s list is public info, while their command hand, object, condition, and deployment cards are private info (only shown when you reveal them). So when would the red player get to change their list? Who verifies that’s the list is still legal? It’s not a viable option.

Instead of looking at it like auction bid, think of it as a bet. Your betting x number of points to be blue player, but just like at a poker table you don’t get the chips back if you loose your bet.

Its not a house rule. its the tournament rules for axis and allies.

They should make blue player determined by who has fewer activations.

And give sniper strike teams another bump in price. They often contribute well above their current cost.

1 minute ago, Khobai said:

Its not a house rule. its the tournament rules for axis and allies.

Can you reference a link please. I am legitimately interested in reading those rules.

I dont even know if there is an official link anymore because axis and allies is such an old game.

But when people played A&A competitively, allies were determined to win most of the time, so to counteract the advantage allies had the game designer implemented a bidding system.

Both players wrote down a bid on a piece of paper and whoever had the highest bid would get to play Allies. But the Axis player would get to place extra starting units of value equal to the bid in any zone where they already had units (so you couldnt put them in an empty zone).

I remember usually no one was willing to bid higher than 7 because that would give axis too much of an advantage on turn 1.

The game rebellion by FFG has a similar bidding system for tournaments. Except they bid probe cards instead of units. So instead of giving the empire more starting units they bid on probe cards which potentially accelerates the game in the empires favor by more quickly eliminating the planets where the rebel base might be hidden.

So it doesnt have to be starting units. Some games bid on other resources as well.

On the randomly off topic discussion on Red Player vs Blue Player, there is a lot of generalising going on without taking some things into consideration.

"Why should Blue Player get to be Blue Player if they only have 1 less point?"

Well either you both went low and his upgrades were slightly cheaper, or neither of you expected to be Blue and went High, and his upgrade costs came to an odd number so he couldn't make the full 800. In either case, that's just bad/good luck, and still not the end of the world, Red still gets a say in what cards see play to eliminate the most objectionable cards that Blue has brought.

Certain lists play very well to being Blue player, like gun lines. Red now needs to come to them to have a hope of winning, it is why Sabotage the moister vaporators is so popular, in those lists. It is an even 2 objectives each, both of which eat up 2 activations, usually for 2 rounds. That is a heavy cost to pay in Legion, and now you are dead even, Red either needs to go to Blue's vaporators or get some points off the board just to win, this is why gun lines love this objective.

Now if Blue's list gains such a big advantage from being Blue, the smart thing would be to take a big Bid. But this is just part of the strategy of the game, sometimes you will be outplayed before the game even begins by pure list building, and squeezing the most out of the least points, and sometimes, even if you are Blue, they can force you into a combo from your own deck that is actually quite favourable for their own list.

I think if Blue was such a massive advantage, we'd see it reflected in the Win Rates at tournaments, but as it stands there is still a lot of things Red can do to claw back the advantage and even completely throw off Blue's game plan. The unexpected will always cause problems for people who play the same lists consistently the same way over and over.

9 hours ago, Khobai said:

There is no depth in one person picking all the cards that favor their army the most. Because they will always pick the same cards. Always.

It creates predictability and stagnation. The complete opposite of depth.

If both players construct the deck together it creates more depth because you have an element of counterplay being added.

You seem to play a very different Legion than I do or the people that played in the leagues and tournaments I participate in. You know the Red Player can veto cards? And that the deck will most likely contain cards that support the red player's army strategy too?

If you build a battle deck you don't only consider what benefits your own army but what the opponent might bring too. Certain cards will be good in one match-up but not the other. However, if your army composition is already strong in that specific match-up it might be a good idea to bring these card to bolster the other. Or take deployments like Disarray - maybe your army isn't at its best in that deployment, but GAR and CIS are much worse at it plus you have practiced it! So you have advantage not based on your army composition but because of your own experience and the match-ups you are expecting.

There is much more going on here. Neglecting experience and match-ups oversimplifies battle card selection.

I would be interested in blue vs red win rates since Vital Assets. Before that wins were very evenly split see for example the analysis of LVO 2019 from the Notorious Scoundrels .

3 hours ago, Decarior said:

You seem to play a very different Legion than I do or the people that played in the leagues and tournaments I participate in. You know the Red Player can veto cards? And that the deck will most likely contain cards that support the red player's army strategy too?

If you build a battle deck you don't only consider what benefits your own army but what the opponent might bring too. Certain cards will be good in one match-up but not the other. However, if your army composition is already strong in that specific match-up it might be a good idea to bring these card to bolster the other. Or take deployments like Disarray - maybe your army isn't at its best in that deployment, but GAR and CIS are much worse at it plus you have practiced it! So you have advantage not based on your army composition but because of your own experience and the match-ups you are expecting.

There is much more going on here. Neglecting experience and match-ups oversimplifies battle card selection.

I would be interested in blue vs red win rates since Vital Assets. Before that wins were very evenly split see for example the analysis of LVO 2019 from the Notorious Scoundrels .

I would as well, I would like it for FFG to request this data from all tournaments and for it to be made public so that we can all see how the game is doing.

Any decision made using not enough or anecdotal data is suspect, they should all be taken with evidence to back up the decision made and the evidence used should be public. This goes for ALL decisions made about changing the game.

On 9/17/2020 at 3:02 AM, Khobai said:

Because a lot of people own 3 strike teams. You will thoroughly piss them off if they cant use the models they bought.

I think players should be able to take as many strike teams as they want but they should be detachments. That forces players to choose between more activations or a more optimized army.

But if you recall, I said full units would be playable.
So for your suggestion of detachments, were you thinking a full unit would have 1 strike team as a detachment? If so, since you can only have 3 Special Forces, that would mean you can only have 2 full units and 1 Strike team... exactly the same as I suggested when I said that players should be limited to 1 Strike Team, but can take up to 3 full units. But you said it differently and somehow my suggestion was unacceptable. Also with you suggestion it is impossible to field a single Strike Team by itself. My suggestion would be less restrictive to players who own multiple units.

3 hours ago, JediPartisan said:

But if you recall, I said full units would be playable.
So for your suggestion of detachments, were you thinking a full unit would have 1 strike team as a detachment? If so, since you can only have 3 Special Forces, that would mean you can only have 2 full units and 1 Strike team... exactly the same as I suggested when I said that players should be limited to 1 Strike Team, but can take up to 3 full units. But you said it differently and somehow my suggestion was unacceptable. Also with you suggestion it is impossible to field a single Strike Team by itself. My suggestion would be less restrictive to players who own multiple units.

To be fair to him, in the 11 times he's brought that up in the last two weeks, he also usually states that they should raise the cap for Special Forces to 4. I think if they made those 2 changes it would be fair, but I also think that that means you'll just never see Commandos or Scout Troopers ever again, given the...issues with the full-size units.

I think Strike Teams are a symptom of a larger problem with the game's activation system. As much as I love the order system as a whole, it runs into the activation control problems you find in any alternating system and lacks any sort of pass token mechanic to make up for it. The other big issue to address is the power of total activation control and how it breeds homogeneity in list construction. I think without solving those issues, any fix to Strike Teams simply moves the problem onto other units.

So here's a crazy idea I just had that I doubt FFG would ever use, but I am interested in what other people think about it.

I have seen people suggest limiting the number of activations allowed in a list (10 is a number I have seen bandied about). Personally I'm not a fan of that as I feel that would result in very samey lists being the norm. However, what if activations per round were limited? So a player could bring a list with 13 activations, but would only be able to activate, say, no more than 10 of them per round. After the 10th activation any unused order tokens in the bag can't be used at all. This would also limit how many faceup order tokens could be placed per round to the same limit, to prevent CIS Coordinate chains from dominating. This would likely drive average activations per list down, but there would still be a reason to take more than whatever the activation limit were (10 seems like a reasonable number?) as a player could lose units without losing activations. It would also give players with more units than activations an extra reason to take Improvised Orders.

2 hours ago, arnoldrew said:

To be fair to him, in the 11 times he's brought that up in the last two weeks, he also usually states that they should raise the cap for Special Forces to 4. I think if they made those 2 changes it would be fair, but I also think that that means you'll just never see Commandos or Scout Troopers ever again, given the...issues with the full-size units.

They should do that cause then I can bring 5 death troopers with krennic. (I havent done the math so I dont even know if it would be possible, but if so that would be ridiculous 😁 )

I don't think you'd have the points for that, unless you run everything naked.

Just now, costi said:

I don't think you'd have the points for that, unless you run everything naked.

It's doable if you run min corp. Heck 9 activations with 5 heckin strong ones would be good.

Yup, I take that back:

772/800 (9 activations)
Director Orson Krennic
3× Stormtroopers
5× Imperial Death Troopers (DLT-19D Trooper)

5 configs won't fit, though, but there's still 28 points for upgrades.

I'd like to see strike teams changed so that the heavy weapons Mini is NOT the leader. This would fix their extreme durability in terrain scoping, and make them much less desirable in list building.

Since the saboteurs need to survive to detonate, another change to the saboteurs would be to change their arm action into a free action.

On 9/18/2020 at 3:30 AM, Nithorian said:

On the randomly off topic discussion on Red Player vs Blue Player, there is a lot of generalising going on without taking some things into consideration.

"Why should Blue Player get to be Blue Player if they only have 1 less point?"

Well either you both went low and his upgrades were slightly cheaper, or neither of you expected to be Blue and went High, and his upgrade costs came to an odd number so he couldn't make the full 800. In either case, that's just bad/good luck, and still not the end of the world, Red still gets a say in what cards see play to eliminate the most objectionable cards that Blue has brought.

Certain lists play very well to being Blue player, like gun lines. Red now needs to come to them to have a hope of winning, it is why Sabotage the moister vaporators is so popular, in those lists. It is an even 2 objectives each, both of which eat up 2 activations, usually for 2 rounds. That is a heavy cost to pay in Legion, and now you are dead even, Red either needs to go to Blue's vaporators or get some points off the board just to win, this is why gun lines love this objective.

Now if Blue's list gains such a big advantage from being Blue, the smart thing would be to take a big Bid. But this is just part of the strategy of the game, sometimes you will be outplayed before the game even begins by pure list building, and squeezing the most out of the least points, and sometimes, even if you are Blue, they can force you into a combo from your own deck that is actually quite favourable for their own list.

I think if Blue was such a massive advantage, we'd see it reflected in the Win Rates at tournaments, but as it stands there is still a lot of things Red can do to claw back the advantage and even completely throw off Blue's game plan. The unexpected will always cause problems for people who play the same lists consistently the same way over and over.

the issue isnt blue player getting to be blue player because their list was less points.

the issue is blue player gets too many advantages for often only being 1 less point.

and the advantages that blue player gets are certainly worth more than 1 point.

1 hour ago, Thraug said:

I'd like to see strike teams changed so that the heavy weapons Mini is NOT the leader. This would fix their extreme durability in terrain scoping, and make them much less desirable in list building.

Since the saboteurs need to survive to detonate, another change to the saboteurs would be to change their arm action into a free action.

its not just the leader rules for strike teams. the leader rules in general make absolutely no sense. they need to completely revamp leader rules to stop leaders from constantly respawning and teleporting around.

As for the saboteur changing their arm into a free action, I dont think I agree with that. Saboteurs should not be able to arm for free because then you can double move and arm an explosive. I do think saboteurs could probably use some kindve buff though. Maybe allow the unit to suffer a suppression token and take a free speed-1 move after using the arm action?

I also think the base cost of strike teams should be increased by a few points and then the cost of snipers and saboteurs should be decreased by the same amount. that would make taking snipers and saboteurs in full sized units more viable.

5 minutes ago, Khobai said:

the issue isnt blue player getting to be blue player because their list was less points.

the issue is blue player gets too many advantages for often only being 1 less point

That is why I (and several other people) would like to see blue player determined by which player has fewer activations. Having fewer activations is inherently a weakness, therefore letting the "weaker" list use their battle deck seems like a reasonable compromise. I don't think this would necessarily fix every problem with blue player advantage, but I think it would help (plus it would likely eliminate point bids [though they would still be used in the case of equal activations], which is a system I absolutely hate ).

10 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

That is why I (and several other people) would like to see blue player determined by which player has fewer activations. Having fewer activations is inherently a weakness, therefore letting the "weaker" list use their battle deck seems like a reasonable compromise. I don't think this would necessarily fix every problem with blue player advantage, but I think it would help (plus it would likely eliminate point bids [though they would still be used in the case of equal activations], which is a system I absolutely hate ).

thats unfair to CIS though

not all factions are designed around having the same number of activations. some will inherently have more than others and shouldnt be punished for it. CIS would almost never get to be blue player against GAR for example.

but all factions get 800 points. so points are a fairer metric for determining blue player.

its just blue player currently gets way too many advantages. thats what needs to be fixed IMO.

the activation disparity issue needs to be solved a different way I feel, by adding a pass mechanic to the game, like giving the player with less activations a pass token. They can cash in their pass token to not take an activation.

2 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

That is why I (and several other people) would like to see blue player determined by which player has fewer activations. Having fewer activations is inherently a weakness, therefore letting the "weaker" list use their battle deck seems like a reasonable compromise. I don't think this would necessarily fix every problem with blue player advantage, but I think it would help (plus it would likely eliminate point bids [though they would still be used in the case of equal activations], which is a system I absolutely hate ).

I strongly agree with blue going to fewer activations if no other changes are made.