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I'd be interested in seeing something like this where each individual player has skill levels for different actions, varying across both positions and teams. No

I'd be interested in seeing something like this where each individual player has skill levels for different actions, varying across both positions and teams. Not sure how to make the competition fully fair then (perhaps a sum skill level "salary cap") but it would be cool to see what strategies might arise when a team knows the strengths and weaknesses of their own players and can learn (maybe starting with a reasonable ballpark guess from "scouting") the weaker points of a given opposing team. To make a ridiculous analogy to the other football, in NCAAF video games the mascot mode had every "player" on every team have 99 ability in all possible skills. Which means that any player standing on the field could throw as well as the quarterback, punt as well as the punter, etc. Opening up many unrealistic trick plays. But even adjusting for positional differences, I think a lot of the cool sports stories have involved seeing how a particular team strategizes against another particular team, which goes away when all teams start with equal across the board abilities.

rjtobin 6y ago
There is an upcoming contest to write an AI for an (American) football based board game, Bloodbowl. The players have different stats as you describe, and the teams can be asymmetrical (though for the competition, both teams select 11 players from a fixed 12 player roster, so not too asymmetrical). Here is a link to the competition: https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii (As an aside, just wanted to mention that the original article is actually about soccer, rather American Football. The comment I'm replying to is certainly about American football, so I feel my comment here is fair.)
- mennis16 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing, I've never played Bloodbowl but heard about it a few times now, will have to look into this! (I honestly don't know enough about soccer to know how much positional variation or asymmetric skills matter. I assume they do but probably to a lesser extent than football, which I also know way more about, hence going on a bit of a tangent when trying to make the idea concrete.)

rjtobin 6y ago

There is an upcoming contest to write an AI for an (American) football based board game, Bloodbowl. The players have different stats as you describe, and the teams can be asymmetrical (though for the competition, both teams select 11 players from a fixed 12 player roster, so not too asymmetrical). Here is a link to the competition: https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii https://njustesen.github.io/ffai/bot-bowl-ii (As an aside, just wanted to mention that the original article is actually about soccer, rather American Football. The comment I'm replying to is certainly about American football, so I feel my comment here is fair.)

mennis16 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, I've never played Bloodbowl but heard about it a few times now, will have to look into this! (I honestly don't know enough about soccer to know how much positional variation or asymmetric skills matter. I assume they do but probably to a lesser extent than football, which I also know way more about, hence going on a bit of a tangent when trying to make the idea concrete.)