You’ve been looking at suits wrong, and it’s making your lists suck. Have I gotten your attention? Clickbait is so hard to do on a blog. This was supposed to be an article about Action Economy, but no, we have to go even more basic than that. We need to break this down to the bare essentials: just you, and your hand.
The problem is, you’re looking at the Activation Suits all wrong. You see 4 different suits, 3 different experience levels. A whopping 12 possible combinations, which is more than I can count on both hands! What if I told you that I can simplify that to 2 suits, and 2 experience levels? What if I said that as an added bonus, this will make your Plunder lists the best they can be?
While I hate to show my hand early – here’s a table of contents for your convenience. This article isn’t that long, I promise; this is just book-keeping for me, actually.
- The two types of card
- Action Totals
- A Conspiracy of Averages
- Free Actions, Expert Artillery Crew
- Command Points
- Reality Check – outro
♠♦ Two Houses, Both Alike In Dignity ♥♣
We can dive down a rabbit-hole talking about Standard Hands and the abysmal odds of you drawing one (10.5% that you draw ♠♥♦♣) I could demonstrate how the ‘Law of Large Numbers’ stipulates that you can still plan your list around all 4 suits in the long run, but that level of statistical navel-gazing has kept this article crushed under a writer’s block for nearly a year.
In truth, you only need to see the suits as two families: Fast[♠♦] and Slow [♥♣].
That determination comes with Experience, literally. Compare the Actions for a Trained and Veteran unit:
♠1 ♥2 ♦2 ♣3 <- Trained
♠2 ♥2 ♦3 ♣3 <- Veteran
We can see from the highlighting that the only difference in actions are where the Veteran unit gains actions on ♠ and ♦.
We can do the same comparison with Trained and Inexperienced:
♠1 ♥2 ♦2 ♣3 <- Trained
♠1 ♥1 ♦2 ♣2 <- Inexperienced
Here we see that Trained gains actions on ♥ ♣, or in other words, that Inexperienced does not lose actions on ♠ ♦.
We do not need to plan our hand around 4 suits. This saves us the stress of wondering what to do if we have 3 units, or 6 units. The odds of you drawing a “perfect hand” are 10.5%, or 1-in-9.5 draws, and they only get worse as the game progresses. The odds of you drawing a hand that is more generally ‘split’ between the two families is 39% and the most likely split in a 4 card hand – it also remains the most stable as the game progresses.
Right away, we can glean 2 useful bits of information:
- As long as you prioritize ♥ & ♣ to your Trained units, you are maximizing actions efficiently.
- Trained units are slow: giving them ♠ is wasteful
- Because half of the suits favor Trained units, then half of our Units should be Trained to receive them.
Action Totals
Now that we’ve decided how we’re going to assign our cards, we can start to consider how those cards translate into actions on the tabletop. This is a fundamental aspect of Action Economy; we pay points for Experience levels, so we should know what we’re getting and how it impacts play.
There are two ways that we can look at our action counts: across game, or across turn. Across game, we assume that we draw each suit in the family 3 times each (eg. 3♠ + 3♦). If we’re just calculating per turn, we take an average of the two (or just the cross-game total ÷6).
For example:
Trained: ♥ = 2 actions, ♣ = 3 actions. We want averages: ♥♥♥ + ♣♣♣ = 2+2+2 + 3+3+3 = 15.
We are not looking at all 4 suits! This is by design – we are not planning to fail (yet). We expect to be able to choose the best suits for our units – that’s why we’re splitting our list 50/50. We only care about the two suits that we’ll actually assign.
Because I like you, I’ll do the math:
Veteran (♠ ♦) – 15 per game, 2.5 per turn
Trained (♥ ♣) – 15 per game, 2.5 per turn
Inexp’d (♠ ♦) – 9 per game, 1.5 per turn
Notice anything interesting?
Veterans don’t actually gain actions, they’re just able to activate on the faster cards without a penalty. In other words, you could get the same number of shots, move the same distance, etc – by using a Trained unit, only slower.
Of course, the other advantage to Veteran is consistency…
A Conspiracy of Averages
Up to this point, we have been making several assumptions. We’ve assumed:
- That you are drawing an even number of cards (4, 6, 8…)
- That your cards are split evenly between [♠♦] and [♥♣]
- That your cards are split evenly within their pairs [3♠+3♦]
- Trained is the default Experience Level
Within this scheme, we have concluded that 50% of your list should be Trained, and the rest should be either Inexperienced or Veteran. But what if you have an odd number of units?
Normally, we would assume that an odd unit has a 50/50 chance to draw either [♠♦] or [♥♣]. In other words:
[2♠ 3♦] or [2♥ 3♣] for Veteran
[1♠ 2♦] or [1♥ 2♣] for Inexperienced
[1♠ 2♦] or [2♥ 3♣] for Trained
We could just take averages:
2+3 + 2+3 ÷ 4 = 2.5 … Veteran
1+2 + 1+2 ÷ 4 = 1.5 … Inexperienced
1+2 + 2+3 ÷ 4 = 2.0 … Trained
…and that works well for Veteran and Inexperienced because they are consistent. They don’t lose actions between either pair and, more importantly, the pairs are ‘mirrored’; if my Veterans draw a 2-action ♠ they can offset it next hand with 3 actions from either a ♦ or ♣. Remember – you will get an even 50/50 distribution of suits on 39% of draws.
Averages don’t tell the whole story for Trained though, because [1♠/3♣] is a problem. Not only do you lose actions between each pair [♠♦] / [♥♣] but the pairs are not mirrored. The only way to offset a ♠ is with a ♣, and as we established before, the odds of you answering 1 suit for 1 suit are significantly lower.
What this means is that while 12 actions per game is the average number of actions for a Trained unit, you are statistically much more likely to see 10-11 or 13-14 during a game. Across several games, they will balance out to 12, but it will be “this game hot” and “that game cold” – and you have no control over it.
Because the majority of units are Trained with the option to change experience, we have been conditioned to believe that Trained is a “happy medium” between two extremes; that “Veteran is worth it if you can feed them“. That logic is flawed; Trained is the least reliable experience level in the game. Trained is the gamble. It is the only way that you can truly “gain” or “lose” actions based on luck of the draw.
- Upgrading from Inexp’d to Trained is a gamble that only pays off if you can feed them [♥♣]
- Downgrading from Vet to Trained is a gamble that only pays off if you can avoid giving [♠♦]
If every unit in Plunder started off as Inexperienced with either 2 or 1 action per card, and could be upgraded to Veteran for +2pts/model and had either 3 or 2 actions per card – I would probably have to convince you that paying +1pt for Trained is actually worth the gamble.
“+1pt for a 50% chance at an extra action, and only on the slow cards? Humbug!”
It is a worthwhile gamble though – just as long as you can feed them.
Which means that under normal circumstances, those odd units should probably be either Veteran or Inexperienced, and not Trained. Having more than 50% of your units be Trained makes it very likely that you’re going to lose the gamble.
I have even been having a lot of luck with even-numbered lists that are not 50/50, but rather more like 3 Inexp, 2 Trained, 1 Veteran.
I ♥ xpert Arty – a Love story
No discussion of activation cards would be complete without talking about Suit Activated Abilities and of course, Free Actions.
Once new players learn to play out their cards more strategically than “fastest first,” the next step is usually learning to plan ahead for rules like Quick, Fast Reload and Artillery Crew which give extra actions on a ♠. I have seen players develop “tunnel vision” over this, almost compulsorily handing out ♠ to their Artillery Crews when they had even better cards in hand.
Free Actions don’t add to your total number of actions. Your maximum number of actions remains the same, and never comes from the suits which trigger the suit-activated freebies. Stop feeling compelled to assign your hand wherever it will trigger free actions!
What Free Actions add to, is your average number of actions. They are a “smoothing” mechanic. We’ll discuss “action mapping” in its own article, but when you need 16 actions to fire your cannons 4 times per game, it helps to know that your Veterans are getting 3 actions per [♠♦].
♠ = 2 Actions + Free Reload
♦ = 3 Actions
Really, they’re getting 3 actions on anything but ♥ – which is also true of Inexperienced units, who would get 2 actions on anything but a ♥.
In a similar way, Trained units have a strained relationship with abilities that trigger on a ♠ because we don’t normally want to give them that suit. Rather than balancing out Veteran / Inexperienced preferred suits to a reliable plateau, ♠ Free Actions on Trained exist primarily to insure against bad draws; if you’re planning for 2/3 actions to maintain your rate of fire, then hitting a ♠ for 1 Action + Free Action won’t throw you off.
No, the true soulmate of Trained is Expert Artillery Crew. Because it triggers on ♥ Xpert Arty makes your Trained units reload like Veterans. They get 3/3 on their favored [♥♣] and they get the same 2/2/3/3 action split that the Veterans would have. This is why Experty Artillery feels like a must-have for any gunnery list; at 3pts, Sea Dogs and Zeelieden are able to equal a 5pt Marin(ero) or European Sailor in a contest of artillery.
The Point of Command
One final thing that I would like to point out, is an oft-overlooked aspect of Command Points, in that they allow you to activate units on a different timing. This is especially relevant to Trained units, who would normally lose actions if activated on a ♠ – for example, to get out of an emergency, or to attempt to Throw Grapples before the enemy can move away.
For this reason, we probably already want to plan on certain critical units (boarders, melee units) to not be Trained. But also, we can put Command Points into Vet/Inexp’d units, and rather than “waste” a ♠ on the Trained unit, we can give that card to a unit who actually wants it, and throw a Command Point at the problem.
Zoom Out: Reality Check
Arguing that Trained is a gamble is about as far down the rabbit-hole as I’m willing to go. We’re quibbling over 1, maybe 2 activations per game of difference, here. We would have more effect from Fatigue or from Pushing, than from a missed card taking us “off average”. Sometimes you just get a bad shuffle.
The quality of your actions matters more than the raw number of actions that you take. I am working on a companion article to this one, to release next week (optimistically) which will apply this same “action logic” to show you one possible way to consider “Action Economy” when comparing Plunder units. It should hopefully all culminate in a “let’s build” of my Adepticon Sea Tournament list… from 2025, just in time for that article to be a full calendar year late.
Until then, I hope that this article gives you a fresh way to think about the activation cards – maybe how you organize them in your hand [♠♦]/[♥♣] and how you prioritize Experience in your lists. I hope that you consider Trained as its own distinct, and dynamic choice rather than “the default,” and that you see Inexperienced as a viable option.
It’s difficult to state anything as a definitive rule in a game with so many variables, but consider these as helpful guidelines:
- Your deck can be divided into [♥♣] Trained and [♠♦] Veteran / Inexperienced
- Trained is a gamble that only pays off with the right cards [♥♣]
- The higher the proportion of Trained to Vet/Inexp’d units, the more unstable the list
- Free Actions smooth-over stability, not provide “more actions”
- Command Points, and ‘decisive units’ should be Vet/Inexp’d to avoid wasting ♠
You Made it – The End!
Yep, that’s really it. My goal was to keep this article (relatively) short and accessible, without getting too bogged down in boring math. It might seem a little basic, but it’s meant to be a building-block piece. Over time, I hope to build a catalogue of articles like this one, that I can link to when I’m posting about a particular list, or reviewing a specific unit or commander.