Blood Bowl Basics: Team Management

At the end of the player development post, I mentioned that player improvements bloat your Team Value, which can lead to your opponents entering the game with more cheaty wizards and chefs and star players. "That sounds dangerous!" I hear you cry. Well, good eye. That stuff will kill you. But it's okay, I'm here to teach you how to develop a devastating team without getting devastated in return.

Too Big To Succeed?
First, let's tackle the elephant in the room: Is it always good to improve a player? It's true that improving a player improves your game overall, which is to say that yes, it is always good to improve a player. But that's not really the question; the question is whether a given improvement helps your team more than it helps the opposing team.
Everything that helps your team, from rerolls to Fan Factor to the players themselves, has a Value. The Value of a team element is based on its initial cost and then, in the case of players, augmented by any improvements they may have. The Value of all of your team elements combined is your Team Value. At the beginning of each game, your Team Value will be compared to your opponent's Team Value, and the team with the lower Value will receive money equal to 1,000 times the difference with which to buy inducements (things like extra rerolls or the wizard I keep mentioning). The point here is that every time you increase your Team Value, you increase the the inducement money your opponents will receive (or decrease the money you will receive, if you're the lower team). This means that you want every improvement to your team to be better for you than the Value it adds is for your opponent. Let's talk about the non-player elements that inflate Team Value.

• Team Rerolls increase your Team Value by a thousandth of their initial cost. This Value varies by team between 40 and 70 inclusive. The cost of Team Rerolls doubles after team creation, but their Value doesn't double. Team Rerolls are extremely powerful and are nearly always worth their Value increase. (For comparison, the inducement cost of an extra reroll is 100,000 gold, meaning a TV difference of 100.)
• Fan Factor increases your Team Value by 10 per point. You have a chance to gain Fan Factor every time you win a match and a chance to lose some every time you lose a match. You can also purchase Fan Factor for 10,000 gold per point, but Fan Factor improves your team by such a small amount that this is not a worthwhile purchase. Your Fan Factor is going to vary up and down almost in spite of you and it's really not even worth thinking about.
• An Apothecary increases your Team Value by 50. The Apothecary is invaluable and you obviously want one, but the cost and the TV increase may make it worth playing your first few games without one. You should get one as soon as you start developing valuable players, however.
• Cheerleaders increase your Team Value by 10 each. One kickoff event (with a ~14% chance of occurring) uses each team's number of cheerleaders along with a couple of random factors to determine which of the teams will receive an extra team reroll. This is not worth the TV increase in my opinion, but I suppose if you bought enough of them you could secure the reroll every time that kickoff event comes up.
• Assistant coaches are exactly the same as cheerleaders, except for a different kickoff event which also has a ~14% occurrence rate and functions exactly the same as the cheerleader event.

From looking at these values, you can see that the vast majority (generally greater than 80%) of your Team Value comes from your players. Team Value from players is calculated by dividing their initial cost by 1,000 and then adding the following values for improvements:

• 20 Value for each skill the player has gained from one of his Normal categories.
• 30 Value for each skill the player has gained from one of his Double categories.
• 30 Value for each point of MA or AV the player has gained.
• 40 Value for each point of AG the player has gained.
• 50 Value for each point of ST the player has gained.

The first conclusion to draw here is that players who don't contribute enough to the team are actually making your team worse by inflating your TV. You don't want to have many players sitting on the bench, and anybody carrying an injury that significantly impairs their ability to do their job is too injured to be on the payroll (note that injuries do not reduce the Value of a player, although a player that's injured enough to miss a game won't contribute his Value to your Team Value during that game). The second conclusion is that each time a player improves, his new improvement needs to be useful enough to offset the Team Value bloat that it causes. Very small marginal improvements can actually be slightly damaging to your team!

Managing the Bloat
Your TV is going to go up as your team improves. There's not a lot that can be done about it, and frankly most improvements are more than worth their TV cost. You want your team to get better, and that means a slow TV climb. There are things you can do, however, to maximize your increase in game-winning ability per point of TV.
First of all, pay attention to your injuries and fire players who are injured in a way that interferes with their job. -AG is a career-ending injury on a thrower or catcher, for example, while it means nothing to a minotaur or troll. Firing critically injured players serves your team development in another way as well: it prevents them from claiming the MVP from the bench and robbing your useful players of SPP. The value of keeping your roster trim is significant.
In the same vein (and as mentioned above), don't employ a half-dozen extra players who don't spend time on the field. If they're not out on the pitch shedding blood for you, they're only helping the opponent. It may be worthwhile to keep an extra man or two in reserve if you have an important strategic use for them, however. Examples include a backup player on a low-AV team as a replacement for KOs/injured players, replacement players for your Secret Weapon guys so that you're not playing short-handed after the first drive, and a second-stringer to replace called-out players if you like to rely on fouls (but make sure you know the math before you try this).
Finally, think hard about the climbing costs of your non-vital players. If a player like a skink or a zombie lineman gets a third or fourth skill without getting any extraordinary rolls, they may just not be worth the TV they're adding anymore. This obviously is a complex issue that there's no hard and fast rule for, but carefully consider whether a developed player on your team is worth the 60-100 TV they're costing you. Is that goblin worth an extra team reroll every game? Would you rather have a Bloodweiser babe than that lineman?

Travelling the Old World On 1000 TV A Day
Remember that the important thing is the difference between your TV and that of your opponent. A TV of 1400 has a very different meaning in a league that averages 1800 than it does in a league that averages 1100. Keep your eyes on the TVs around you and be prepared for the inducements that you'll have to face (or that you'll get to wield).