FFFL 2018 - Discussion / Interest Thread

I'm in.

Yeah, if we had a small number of players it could be that each ship, sub, and installation is limited to its class limit and can't be brought back at all. So, if you had one sunk you can either draft its replacement from the FA pool, make a trade, or pull another off your bench. Damaged/crippled pieces could be repaired one (two) hull damage between rounds.

For example, there are three cards for the four South Dakota-class battleships. Solo drafts Massachusetts, I pick up South Dakota, flak gets Alabama. Herky could pick a duplicate of one of those to finish the class, and there would be no more. In solo's first match Big Mamie gets crippled and so he's got a few choices to make: play the next game with that ship partially repaired, or he could play another ship off his roster and let the crews have more time to fix her up, or make a trade to find a replacement. As for me, not so lucky: my SoDak is sunk in round 6 and I need a replacement ASAP. So I can make do with what I have or pick up a free agent, since it's past the trade deadline.

I do not want to stomp on ideas, but I do want to express my concerns. Do not take this as keeping you all from brainstorming.

I'm strongly against measures that would limit a drafted units use for several reasons.

1) I don't like penalizing players for using units or for drafting a good unit then getting it purposefully targeted by other players to prevent future use. As said, I want to avoid punishment but rather find ways to encourage trades.

2) Since we are points based for deciding winners, we will get situations where an entire roster is destroyed, leaving a player already in poor standing in a worse situation. Nor does it make sense to exclude the loser of a game from a penalty imposed on a winner.

3) Most importantly, the tracking would be an administrative nightmare. It already takes far too much time to organize, track drafts, run, track results, track trades, track adds/drops, etc. But adding helpers also gets you into an issue where you have too many cooks and errors can easily be made. I do not want to have to track where each unit ends up in a game and add/drop it from lists plus track its condition.

4) With that concern is also timing. With future units based upon current game results, it also becomes extremely hard for players to plan ahead--you have to wait until every game is complete to even know what your opponent will be able to bring, what they will trade for, what they will be forced to give up. No one will trade until a game is over--how could you?

Roster point caps are likewise limited. Certain units are going to cost more or less than others, but that does not necessarily equate to value per point of cost. You can do great things with inexpensive units. This also requires an additional element of tracking each and every unit.

Class limits is both a tracking issue and a unit type issue. The uniqueness of builds becomes nonexistent when everyone and their mother has a Fletcher class. You also end up with a person who drafts fourth (or however many we have in the game now) has to take Fletcher while the fifth person gets to retake USS Johnston. Or where everyone takes USS Johnston.

I think a lot may depend on the level of interest. If we do have only 8 players, more options may open up to try to make other ideas work out of necessity. Perhaps larger rosters, but where you cannot bring the same unit twice in a row (this relies more on players keeping each other honest than administrative tracking).

I will return for a second go round, someone has to be at bottom

We've also got the option to use the other formats- night, convoy, 100pts/major engagement.

Never been a fan of the blacklist. And the last time, with so many players and TWO rounds of blacklisting, it REALLY got out of hand IMO.

Too many units removed from play.

It killed my interest. I'm not a fan of banning units.