New league – Old World Football League

I have joined another scheduled league – the Old World Football League, or the OFL. 

This is different to all the others in that it is a “direct IP” league – it does not run via the Cyanide servers but via direct communication between the players. The owners have developed software to allow all the participants and teams to be stored on their own servers. This allows full control of rosters (and also means that it is not necessary for Cyanide’s servers to even be running – if Cyanide cease to support the game the OFL can continue). 

It all seems fearsomely complex to a Luddite like me, but they were able to talk me through the setup via steamchat and I connected to a practice game. 

The league is primarily US-based, with a structure very much like the NFL (two conferences, multiple divisions, an end of season superbowl between the two conference winners) and access is on a one-in-one-out basis. Like the real NFL they are expanding into Europe though and I have just joined the new “Lothian Football Conference” which is made up of European coaches. 

One of the real draws of the league is that with full roster access they are able to implement the full star player list – so you can induce players like The Mighty Zug and Nobbla Blackwort who I remember from the tabletop game as a kid. In addition they have added two new races – Slann (who are rebranded as Goblin Circus and use goblin and hobgoblin models from the Cyanide game) and Chaos Pact. I had to try this out and will be running as Chaos Pact in the OFL. 

With 1150 TV to spend initially I went for the standard (!) build: 

1 Minotaur 
1 Chaos Ogre (uses the Rat Ogre model so that mutations show) 
1 Troll (uses the Warpstone Troll model so that mutations show) 
1 Dark Elf
1 Goblin 
1 Skaven 
6 Marauders (use the Rotter model so that mutations show) 
3 rerolls 
1 apo 

It looks absolutely insane and I’m really looking forward to trying it out – with 3 big guys I am basically expecting chaos and carnage in equal measure. Not expecting to win many games, at least initially. 

 The division draft is 

LFC North 
Bantha - Chaos Dwarf 
Everblue - Chaos Pact 
Netsmurf - Skaven 
Fastshark - High Elf 

LFC East 
Crimsonsun - Nurgle 
Zulu591 - Khemri 
20Phoenix - Amazon 
Dreamy - Wood Elf 

LFC West 
Barmution - Nurgle 
Matts373 - Dark Elf 
Dode74 - Pro Elf 
RTSD - Lizardmen 

LFC South 
ScottishDunc - Chaos 
Gusya - Chaos Pact 
CharlieBanks - Goblin Circus 
Gingerella - Goblin 

So it's rammed with some of the best European coaches including past league champions in Fastshark and Matts373, plus some of the OCC coaches with the highest ELO rankings around. It's going to be a great league, and I'll report here on how I get on.