Changes from the Living Rulebook 6
I had a link to the rulebook in the video description but BB2 has a few differences from it. I found these in a forum thread on the Steam boards and I'll try to keep it up to date - and if I find a list from the devs, I'll have it linked here as well. The bits in brackets is how they are in the LRB.
- Human Catchers are AV8 (up from AV7)
- Human Ogres cost 130k gold to hire (down from 140k)
- Orc Blitzers cost 90k (up from 80k)
- If you have more than 150,000 gold saved up, everything above that counts towards your Team Value since it's enough to let you buy some of the more expensive pre-match inducements.
cKnoor
cKnoor is a Blood Bowl YouTuber who's been around for a while. There's a link to it in the forum thread I mentioned in the video description but he did a series of videos to help people get the hang of Blood Bowl. Even if you're not exactly a newbie coach, it can still be useful to watch some of his matches to try and learn new strategies or tactics or even just to get an idea of how a certain team plays before you try it out. You can find his channel through here.
Downloadable Content
As I mentioned in the video, other teams will be coming as paid DLC in the future and, while I think a lot of the arguments for having all 20+ teams in the initial launch are being pretty-damn optimistic, there is one that I agree with - namely that if it turns out you don't enjoy using a particular team you've bought, you're now out-of-pocket. Sure; it may not be a huge amount of money (some of the more plausible guesstimates I've seen have been around the $5-$10 mark) but it would still be annoying.
One easy way around this, though, is if Cyanide implement a trio of pre-made teams of each race to the base game. So if the Amazons get added, the core game gets three pre-made Amazon teams you can try out in friendly matches without having to buy the Amazon DLC. The base game already has pre-made teams for the existing ones; three per species and each at different Team Values (1000, 1300 and 1600 for those curious) and you can still play against DLC teams you don't own so the files for them'll already be in the game. For all I know, they've already done this but I have no way to check - don't know anyone who owns BB2 but doesn't also own the Wood Elves and Lizardmen. I'll ask around on the forums and update this when I have an answer.
Cyans
These are an in-game currency that you earn independently of your teams. There's nothing to use them on at the moment, but Cyanide have said that you'll be able to spend them on cosmetic stuff for your teams, like new jersey colours, stadiums and so-on. Nothing that affects gameplay, though, purely cosmetic stuff. I've heard some people say you'll be able to buy Cyans with real money, but nothing official. It wouldn't surprise me, to be honest, especially since they'll only be used for cosmetic stuff.
I just hope that it'll let you change which stadium you picked for your team - the Hellborn Hooligans ended up with a Skaven-themed stadium since that was the closest to a Chaos-oriented one. It'll still be named "The Elfblender", though, that's not gonna change.
The Hellborn Hooligans
This next section's just me raving about my Chaos team so if you're not interested in some of the narratives that can form from how your team progresses, you can skip it.
So these guys were the first real team I used in the original Blood Bowl game and, unlike the team's current incarnation, I just let the game name the players for me. One of whom was a Beastman named Gnar'tigor. As I took the team through the various cups in the single-player campaign, they kept growing and growing. Gnar'tigor himself did plenty of growing as well, soon becoming the Hooligans' best player, both thanks to skills he'd picked up and a variety of mutations - a second head, a third arm, claws... he left piles of broken bodies in his wake as he scored touchdowns and even a smashed ankle didn't slow him down.
But then the Hooligans faced one particular Wood Elf team and partway through the match, one of the spindly tree-huggers got lucky. Gnar'tigor got brain damage.
Between the two injuries and his own value as a player, I had no choice but to let him go; he was bloating the team value more than he was contributing. But because I'm a big fan of narrative and story, I always imagined that Gnar'tigor took over as the team's PR representative and took to handling the team's publicity - appearing in various CabalVision ads for their sponsors, handling press conferences and so-on. And while he's normally very polite and well-spoken, his second head would occasionally spout a stream of vulgar-yet-creative profanity towards anyone in the vicinity or on whatever the main head was talking about. A lot of it aimed at wood elves, to no great surprise. And during the matches, he'd be up there in the crowd alternately cheering the Hooligans on and beating the ever-loving crap out of the opposition's fans (and any wood elves regardless of who they supported).
With the team's current incarnation, I hired an assistant coach and always imagined him as being Gnar'tigor having shifted from publicity to helping the team train, lending his experience to the new lineup. Either way; the team now has his son in the roster, Gnar'tigor the Second. So far he hasn't been blessed by Tzeentch as much as his dad, but he's well on his way to being our premier ball carrier thanks to his first level-up getting him an Agility boost. At the very least, his mutations'll be along more focussed lines; I was still learning the game when his father was on the team so I'll try to be turning him into a dedicated runner/thrower/catcher, etc. He may not rack up his dad's body count, but he'll still be making a name for himself.
The Dice
Yes, I know I harped on about these in the video but I just want to re-iterate. Every dice roll can fail, every dice still has a 1-in-six chance of coming up a 1 (or an Attacker Down on the Block Dice). I don't care what stats are involved or how skilled you think the player is, they can always screw up. If you don't get your head around this and accept it, you won't enjoy this game. If you ever say the dice are being inconsistent (which is an actual complaint I've seen on the Steam forum for the game), I want you to stop and think back over that statement. At what point are dice rolls supposed to be consistent? That's why I tried to emphasise where the real strategy in the game is; minimising the risks your team takes while forcing the other team to take a lot of risks.
Anyway; got another video planned, just need some good background music. We'll be trading in the grass and pigskin for neodurium and titanium and the digital for the physical.
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