Points Trading: An army point guide.
 

I used this strat. to win NHSD in michigan, so it worked well for me.;)

Point Trading:

I know many of you don’t know what this is, but it’s a concept I picked up playing yu-gi-oh. In yu-gi-oh if I played a card that would take you two of my opponents I would be up 1 card. Versus if I played two cards to take out one I would be down a card. This is what is known as card advantage in yu-gi-oh. Well I applied a similar concept to heroscape, Point trading.

Take for example Cyprien Esenwein, a 150 pt hero. Now I know 150 is a lot to pay for a medium sized figure, but is he worth the points? After play testing a few games with him I found out that he would usually take out 175-250 pts on average. Now this leads us with a plus pt advantage of 25-75. Where as Taelord the Kyrie Warrior is a 180 pt figure. But is he worth his points? Now you may not use him for combat but instead to give extra dice to a ranged figure, so if in combat he only takes out 50-80 pts. You need to decide whether that extra die is worth spending an extra 100-130 pts.

Many times it isn’t the combat value we are looking at but the ability value. For example the Marro Hive, it regenerates common marros. But can it bring back its value worth, and if not can the common squads make up that difference? Lets say that we have our army of 500 pts Marro Hive, Raelin (rotv), Isamu, and 5 squads of marro drones. Now in this case the Hive may only bring back 6 drones, (100 pts) the hive (160) will be down 60 pts. The drones we know are often not worth their points so lets say that our 7 squads (5 scouted 2 reborn) we kill 260 points worth. That gives us a plus 10 (5 squads of 50 points). We are currently down 50 points. Isamu is a great draft for 10, but for this we’ll say he’s off on the dice and only took out one 4th mass (4 men a squad for 70 pts) each man in this unit is worth about 17-18 points, so Isamu is a plus 8. this still gives us a minus 42 points. Raelin (rotv) is an 80 point figure however she is used more for extra dice then her offence. So in offence we may only take out 2 of the 4th mass (35 pts). This makes her a minus 45 points. This gives the army a minus 87 pts.

Now you may have played your amy a couple of dozen times and found out that you usually win. But now you have to factor in consistency. Now you may win against you best friend every time, but you guys don’t have a lot of figures, so if you want to show up at a big tournament scene, you want to make sure that you know what youll be facing, and that your army has a back up plan. If your hive gets decimated by a fast moving Cyprien. You may be screwed out of the game by being unlucky. You should always have more then one ace in the whole. You should make sure your army is prepared for any thing. You should try to be statistically safe in you army choices.

A 500 pt army that takes out 800 pts is amazing. But is your 500 pt army only takes out 450pts and you still win every game, that’s because you may have misjudged some abilities. If a rat ties up a Q10 long enough for you to snipe 1 life off of the giant then that rat was not a minus 10 but rather the figure attacking the Q just paid for the rats entire card and 5 points of his own, so any other value the rats come up with will help to pay for our attacking figure. Make sure your offence destroys more points the is costs and your defense protects more points then its costs All in all make sure your army is mathematically correct in its points trading.

Re: Points Trading: An army point guide.
 

I think this is the way a lot of us think about the game. Your post did get so small in the font that I kind of lose focus.

Re: Points Trading: An army point guide.
 

I think this concept will be more useful when tempered by In Game Point Value, a concept originated by UranusPChicago. Once you do that, I think you may more accurately get an idea of the worth of units, based on their position, order markers, and a number of other factors. If you're simply out to 'trade points' you could be overlooking the big picture and run the danger of losing map control. In small, tournament-style games, going in with the idea of controlling the map is more important than coming ahead in points.

Re: Points Trading: An army point guide.
 

I would like to see Taelord, Ralien (old and new), Kiova, etc all playtested like this:
Denrick is attacked, and is in old Raelin's arua (Den has 5 Life left)
3 skulls are rolled
Denrick rolls 4 dice and gets 2 Shields
Now roll 2 more defense dice
You roll 1 Shield
Then you can see how many points Rae has saved by her extra shield: 20 points.

Re: Points Trading: An army point guide.
 

Thanks for pointing this out. But as Rev pointed out, a lot of us already use the point economics to judge efficacy of an army.

In fact, the principle has been well used in many games long before YuGiOh. In fact, it is almost impossible to read the strategy articles on the MTG website (particularly Swimming with Sharks) without having a masterful understanding of the mechanics and terminology - card advantage, momentum, etc.

Each game has its own flavor, and CCGs usually have more resources and less emphasis (if any at all) on positioning and board control - so its hard to make the kind of absolute calculations with a miniatures game that are possible with a CCG.