Net Worth

I played some more retiarus/myrmillo/secutor bouts this morning, as part of my aim of playing out ten fights to see what the overall balance was like. In game terms I used the same gladiators in each bout, but swapped the figures around in order to make a more interesting blog post.

First up was a repeat performance from Valentinus and Mongo. Valentinus swiftly netted Mongo, and then ran him through with his trident. Quick and easy.

For the remaining five bouts I used an idea Victor is playing with of limiting each to ten turns and calling it a draw if it timed out. Draws seemed to be a more common occurrence during some periods of the games, but games tend not to reflect this. I have a mechanism in testing for forcing one when gladiators are exhausted, but Victor's change ends fights regardless of the state of the gladiators. I amended it to make it variable; at the end of the tenth turn and each turn thereafter you roll a D6 and on a 5+ the bout is ended. This prevents any 'Last Turn Syndrome'.

Anyway, for this set of bouts I started the retiarius was Rodan and was opposed by Astinax. In the first game Astinax easily outfought Rodan, who rolled terribly for Action Points, and wounded him to the point where he was forced to seek mercy from the crowd. The refight saw neither gladiator wounded and ended in a draw after ten turns, despite plenty of action.

I switched to Cupido vs Pugnax for the next fight. Cupido got in an early trident hit on Pugnax, which gave him the edge.

The fight went on well past the ten-turn limit. Towards the end Cupido lost both his net and trident, but he recovered. He managed to get hold of the net, then trip up the myrmillo. This gave him time to retrieve his trident as well and force Pugnax him to appeal to the crowd, who granted him mercy.

Finally I matched Thalia the retiarius against Fabia.

Fabia got the initiative early on in their first bout and quickly ran Thalia through with a critical hit.

The second bout lasted longer, but still saw Thalia defeated.

Overall, after ten bouts, the retiarius won two, lost five and three bouts were draws. I might need to experiment a bit more with various matchups to see if there is a disadvantage to being a light gladiator. As I see it at the moment, the biggest issue is that a light gladiator is less able to translate their agility to defence than a heavy gladiator is to simply block damage with armour.

Balancing games. I love it.