The wood elves are great fun as long as you realize it’s a passing and catching game, and don’t try to go toe-to-toe with any other team’s players. My only problem is on defense: most teams form a cage around their receiver, and I have no idea what to do beyond send a lineman behind the cage and hope beyond hope that he manages to block the carrier hard enough to knock the ball from their hands.
In that situation you have to wait until you have a guy with leap and strip ball so you can jump in there and throw a 2 die block their favor, with a reroll it’s a pretty good chance you can knock the ball loose.
If you don’t have one of them your best bet is to place guys 1 square away from the box and limit them to a slow grind down the field, maximizing their chances for a bad dice roll.
OK, I need serious tips for playing as an agile team (specifically skaven). When on defense I just feel completely impotent and on offense I can never get the ball passed scrimmage. >.<
As any of the other teams I do well enough. Won a few game as dwarfs. But the skaven are the ones I love!
System question: what sort of machines are you playing on. The interface really stinks on my PC but the Processor is older. I have a 512MB nVidia 6200 card and at least 2GB of ram. Win XP. The Processor though is probably about 5 years old in it.
I’m fair to middlin at BB.
In my opinion, the best thing to do is play against other people. Playing against AI just gives you bad habits.
The BB computer game from Cyanide has a somewhat active community. Once you get in there there are 2 ways to play. There is Matchmaker (MM) or you can join a private league.
Matchmaker gets a bad rep but I love it. You will run across all sorts of bad sports in there and play against babbling idiots one game and then one of the best in the world the next (serious - I have played games against whatever they call world championship winners}
Don’t worry about getting your face kicked in. Don’t worry about your team getting hurt and maimed. Don’t feel you have to win. Roll up a team and throw yourself into MM and you will learn 
My name in there is Muleskinner btw…feel free to look me up.
I’m running on a 3 year old Dell desktop. I sprung for a decent graphics card when I got the pc, so its been handling the game quite decently. Not high settings or anything but acceptable.
I believe I have a 512 mb ATI card. I don’t remember the model number. I preordered Civ 5 on steam, and I’m a bit worried if CiV will work well on my pc, but Blood Bowl had no snags or graphical issues or anything. Loading up the game is a bit slow, but once its loaded, everything runs fine.
Actually, do we have enough interested dopers to start a small league? Playing against the computer is fun but it WOULD be neat to get our collective players’ teeth kicked in by other humans. ^^
Skaven can take on anyone if you play them right. Player for player, they’re as fast as the Wood Elves, but with cheap disposable linemen instead of skilled expensive ones. They have some generic Throwers and Blitzers and up to 4 Gutter Runners, who have the highest Move in the game, high Agility and Dodge as an inherent skill. Don’t get to attached to your Skaven - they die lots - but they can score from anywhere, against anyone.
The Elves will make supremely awesome plays, but the best plan against them is to punch them in the face. Repeatedly. And stomp on their naughty bits when they’re on the ground. Plan to let them score, but plan to jam your fist down their throats. It’s the only way to stop the little ponces.
If you somehow manage to knock down a Wardancer, or she misses a Leap or whatever, gang-foul her lousy face until she cries. Who cares if your player gets called off? She’s better than any of your players. Even if you only KO her, it’s worth it. Same thing with the Catchers.
Try to force them to make as many dodges as possible. Sure, they’ll dodge a hundred times in a row, so make them dodge a hundred and one. Keep lots of players back from the line.
Yeah, the key with agile teams is to bash their face in, and if you can’t do that then just add up as many negative modifiers as you can. Stick a good catcher (if you have one) in a free space between the ball carrier and any likely throwing-to options. Really, if you’re against an agile team, it could well be best to make the first half purely about kicking the shit out of them and only worry about scoring opportunities in the second; after all, if you manage to get a touchdown chance on turn 4, they then have 4 or 5 turns to do the same to you. And they will.
I’d be interested in a Doper league. Should be fun to see all my skinks get horribly murdered again.
Whelp, we’d need at least a dozen of us to make it remotely interesting, but if we’ve got the numbers I’d be up for it too - I’d even be willing to administer the whole annoying thing and get yelled at when something goes wrong with it 
I’d play in a Doper league.
Skaven are a top tier team…
For you newbies let me explain. In BB, not all teams are made to be equal. The teams that are the most competitive are Dwarf, Undead (not in the Cyanide version), Skaven, Wood elf and I forget the rest
There are teams that are deliberately made to be inferior. Goblin, Vampire, Halfling and Ogre (last 3 not in Cyanide version) come to mind.
There are teams that are not as bad as goblin, vampire, halfling and ogre but have a tougher time…Humans for example. The designers deliberately did this so that if people wanted a challenge they could get it.
However, the Skaven, while top tier…can really get their teeth kicked in.
IMO, to play Skaven correct you need to play them like a psycho on crack…throw caution to the wind and just be aggressive as all hell. Offense it is usually easier to score with them but on defense you need to not let the defensive cage formed. If it has formed, all you can really do is delay and that usually doesn’t work for Skaven.
So, on defense as Skaven you flood the ball…flood flood flood it and hope for the best
Goblins are a comic relief team whose win condition is to drive the opposing coach crazy. But the other 8 teams in Cyanide’s version (Chaos, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Human, Lizardman, Orc, Skaven, Wood Elf) are all pretty well balanced. There are some unbalanced matchups (Lizardmen have problems with Dwarves, for example) but which is best overall depends mostly on the coach, partly on the dice and partly on whether you’re playing a one-off or a league, and whether you define “best” as winning the most games, killing the most players, or building the strongest possible team in an open-ended league.
BlinkingDuck gave some good advice about the Skaven - they’re poor at breaking a cage (better than elves, but still bad), so their best hope on defence is to swarm the backfield before the opposition can get into formation. And everyone on the team except the Gutter Runners and maybe the Rat Ogre should be regarded as expendable.
I’d be up for an SDMB league, but I’m on UK time.
I’d be up for SDMB league, but also timezone would be an issue for me, being down in Australia.
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Just a general observation on the dice in the game. I’v never noticed the AI itself cheating, however the dice are loaded against the player in Hard mode.
Despite that, with the exception of a goblin team I was having fun with, I’ve never yet lost a game to against the AI with any ‘normal’ team. If you’ve played the tabletop game for a while the AI in this game is a complete numpty.
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I’d be up for league play as well.
And a big thank you to the OP. I would have missed the sale on steam without this post.
Just as a heads up, Cyanide will be releasing the Legendary edition of the game in late October.
This is technically a seperate game, and features all of the standard races (with he exception of Chaos Dwarves). By all accounts it fixes a lot of the bugs in the game (bugs that would only be really noticable to players of the tabletop game though).
Oh by the way, I’m obviously in if we were to have a league- I’m on Japan time.