Introductory Dirty Tactics

Fighting dirty is an important aspect of WeBL. At some point in a gyms life, an important fight will be decided on a decision of when to and when not to fight dirty. It adds some randomness to fights that can make things both exciting and demanding strategically.

Lets examine fighting dirty and how you can use it to your advantage. There are no easy answers, however, as the tradeoffs are a matter of taste more than a matter of math.

The facts:

Fighting dirty gives you a 10% increase in raw damage for that round. As you should know, raw damage has several effects. Every point of raw damage adds 1% to your scoring for the round in the judges' eyes. It accumulates each round for calculating Injury Points. Most importantly, it is the basis for Endurance Damage. This is where fighting dirty will be at its most important.

When you are fighting dirty, you are at risk of being penalized by the referee.

Any round in which you are fighting dirty there is a 50% chance of being warned by the referee. If it is your first warning there will be no score deduction. If it is your second or more, you will be deducted 1 point on the scorecards. The biggest penalty is that there is a 5% chance of being disqualified on the first warning, and that chance doubles every successive warning:



10% on the second warning

20% on the third warning

40% on the fourth warning

80% on the fifth warning

100% on the sixth warning.



Most gyms consider fighting dirty beyond the first warning unneccessariliy risky. There are exceptions, and we'll get into them later, but if you want to fight dirty until you are warned that first time, here is the conditional:

if warnings=0 then cheat

This should be placed at the end of your fight plan. Notice that "warnings" are counted in a variable and can be used with other modifiers. You could cheat until warnings=2, you could use different tactics if warnings<3, or whatever you so choose, although there would be little value to that.

The main use for fighting dirty is to gain an all-important endurance advantage. Cheating for the early rounds gives you 10% extra endurance damage. If that allows you to get the advantage, you can quit cheating after a short number of rounds (although you will probably have been warned by then), and your advantage will continue to expand until you decide to stray from efficient fighting. You may want to cheat against a more efficient fighter in order to keep him from gaining too much of an endurance advantage. Not cheating when you know the other gym will can put you at a disadvantage.

Outside of efficiency fighting, there are a few other instances where cheating is in your best instance. Flashers should always fight dirty unless they are involved in a sure win. Last minute desperation KO's when losing a fight should probably also fight dirty. Some people will force their fighter to fight dirty when losing a fight where they are getting beat up, in an attempt to get DQ'd and limit the IPs.

Dancers should never fight dirty, unless they are attempting to counterpunch and do damage. If your goal is solely to win rounds, take care that conditionals are not causing your fighter to fight dirty. If you have to, write a seperate set of conditionals:

if score>3 then 4B/8!/8 (clinch)

if score>3 and warnings=0 then 4B/8/8 (clinch)



This concludes our lesson on dirty tactics.