Team Strength Explained

This page is very heavy on math. Before we get into all that, let's just establish what Team Strength (TS) is for.

LRB 4 Team Rating (TR) is a good measure of a team's long-term capabilities, and is thus important for determining winnings, handicaps, etc. However, it is not always a good indicator of how strong a team will be in its next game, since it does not take into account injuries (both permanent and MNG), very poor or very good skill combinations (and stat bonuses), concentration of SPPs on one player, money in the treasury, etc.

The purpose of TS is to fill that gap by providing a quick reference to give you an idea of how strong a team will be next game. In the Ranked division it is used to determine legal match-ups. In the Blackbox division it is used along with other factors in the generation of match-ups. Elsewhere it is purely indicative (and does not function very well at all in Stunty or Div5). However, it is not the only indicator, and you should not feel compelled to accept (or refuse) games solely on the basis of TS. There are many other factors (such as the roster-vs-roster pairing of a given match-up) which should also be considered.

Now, let's get back to that maths, but be warned: if the ranking formula made your head spin, you should know that this is far worse.

Still with me? The first thing you should know is that the strength system is based on Jervis Johnsson's original player cost formula. You can probably find that one floating on the net somewhere if you want to compare.

The first thing we calculate is the team's "base" strength which is almost like calculating TR. Add the following values

• Fan Factor / 2
• 5 if the team has an apothecary
• Number of Cheerleaders / 5
• Number of Assistant Coaches / 4
• ReRolls * (ReRoll Cost/10000)
• If the team has 0 ReRolls, no player with leader and no assistant coaches or cheerleaders, subtract 3

That was the easy part. Now we need to figure out the strength of the players. For each player, we do the following:

A player's "value" starts at 5. To this, we apply the following modifiers for stats:

Then we move on to skills. We define two new values here:

• Multiplier - A multiplier that modifies the player value by multiplication. Starts at 1.
• Cumulative - This value is added to the player value and increased by 0.5 for every skill unless otherwise specified. The increase is done after the addition each time.

For most skills, we add 2 to the player value (and add the Cumulative value as specified above). However, there are alot of special cases as follows:

• Coach, Infect, Undead and Right Stuff are completely ignored
• Spikes, +MA, +ST and +AG have already been taken into account in the above tables, but still give the "default" 2+Cumulative addition to the player value.
• Stunty does not affect or include cumulative. If the player has ma<7 and ag<4, there is no player value change. For ma>6 and ag<4, add 1. For ma<7 and ag>3, add 1.5. For ma>6 and ag>3, add 2.
• Wild Animal reduces the player value by 7. The Cumulative is not added or updated.
• Big Guy reduces the player value by 2. Cumulative is not added or updated.
• Throw Team Mate adds 1 to the player value.
• Always Hungry reduces player value by 0.5. No addition to the player value.
• Bone Head multiplies the Multiplier by 5/6. No addition to the player value.
• Off For a Bite, Take Root and Really Stupid multiplies the Multiplier by 4.5/6. No addition to the player value.
• Very Long Legs updates the stat effect in the above table and adds the standard 2+Cumulative to the player value.
• Thick Skull adds 1 to the player value. Cumulative is not increased or added to the player value.
• Horns and Frenzy adds 1+Cumulative to the player value and updates the Cumulative as normal.
• Pass and Leap adds 1+Cumulative to the value of the player. If agility is 4 or higher, an additional +1 is added. Cumulative is handled as normal.
• Razor Sharp Claws adds 1.5+Cumulative to the player value. Cumulative is increased as normal.
• Guard adds 2.5+Cumulative to the player value. Cumulative is increased as normal.
• Hypnotic Gaze adds 1 to the player value. Cumulative remains unchanged.
• Break Tackle adds the default value plus 1 further point. If the player has a strength of more than 3, an additional 2 points are added.
• Regenerate adds the default value plus 1 further point.
• Dirty Player adds 5+Cumulative. Cumulative is increased as normal.

Now we handle the injuries for the player.

• For each niggling injury, player value is multiplied by 5/6.
• For stat reductions, we check to see if there is a corresponding +stat skill. If so, the effect of it is removed (Cumulative is reduced by 0.5 and player value is reduced by (2+Cumulative).

After going over all skills and injuries, we apply the following:

• If the player has Block and Dodge, add 1.5 to the player value.
• If the player has a skill that modifies armour roll in addition to Razor Sharp Claws add 1 to the player value.
• If the player has Pass and Throw Team Mate and there is at least one player on the team with Right Stuff add 1 to the player value.
• If the player has Sprint and MA 10, add 3 to the player value. For higher MA, the one-turner effect is already taken into account in the movement array above.
• If the player has ST<3 and AG<3, remove the effect of one skill (reduce Cumulative by 0.5 and subtract [2+Cumulative] from the player value) and reduce player value by 4 (so in total reduce by [6+Cumulative]).
• If the player has ST>3 and MA>5, add 2 points to the player value.

In order to get a proper "cost" of the player, we apply the following:

• If the player value is higher than 12, set player value to 12+(player value-12) / 2
• If the player value is 1.5 or less, set player value to 1.5
• If the player is missing the game entirely, set player value and Multiplier to 0.

Now we apply the multiplier to the player value by multiplying it to the player value.

When all players have been taken care of, we define the following:

• TotalPlayerStrength - The sum of all player values.
• PlayerCount - The sum of the Multipliers for each player.
• AverageAV - The average AV of each player Sum(av*Multiplier) / PlayerCount.

We add AverageAV - 8 to the PlayerCount and make sure it's between 0 and 16. Then we use this to look up a weight in the following table:

This weight is multiplied to the TotalPlayerStrength value and finally we add the "base" strength we had from the start.

The value we have now is rounded to the nearest integer for the final strength value.

For ranking purposes, each handicap roll a team gets increases the strength for that team with 5 points