Dan Smith of the Fashion Mall Commons store graces us today with the first in a series of articles entitled Smite with Mathhammer, a series focusing on simple statistics in games such as Warhammer. Now, I’m not too good with those little squiggles they call “numbers” but let’s see if the boy can teach us a thing or two. -DKC
There are two camps when it comes to Warhammer. The first camp I’ll refer to as the afficianados, the gamers for whom back-story and painting are most important. The other group, powergamers, are those who consider the most important aspect to be competitive play. These are by no means intended to be exhaustive or even necessarily accurate categories, merely generalizations.
The afficianado’s goal is generally to make a story-driven or aesthetically pleasing army, choosing troops and vehicles that either appeal to his sense of style or that he believes can be made to look particularly attractive through painting and conversions. The powergamer, on the other hand, chooses nothing but troops that he feels will be the most effective.
Effectiveness is a tricky thing, however, and can have quite a few different definitions. Is a unit that is powerful offensively but weak defensively still good? Is an increase in mobility necessarily worth a decrease in versatility? And this is all before one even considers the question of points cost or such things as force organisation slots which inherently limit what a given army is capable of fielding.
One of the powergamer’s most useful and most often maligned tools is the trusty Math Hammer. A term first leveled against Warhammer players who used a knowledge of statistics and probability to compare units, Math Hammer is never-the-less extremely important to some powergamers when they feel torn between two equally appealing options. Basic statistical understanding can also go a long way towards understanding how the game fundamentally works, and helps almost as much on the gaming table as it does at the planning stages.
I could go on forever about math and statistics, but for today I’ll just stick to introducing the concept with a fairly simple example. Today we will follow the journey of Battle Brother Pythagorous, an Ultramarine heavy weapons trooper who carries a high powered anti-tank lascannon. Pythagorous has been tasked by his commander with destroying an enemy Rhino APC, a fairly light vehicle that should stand no chance against his mighty cannon. It would be possible for his shot to immobilize, stun, or otherwise cripple the Rhino, but for our example we’ll just assume that, for one reason or another, destruction is the only positive outcome (maybe thanks to mission objectives or some such).
First, Pythagorous sights down his weapon and fires at the Rhino. The vehicle’s foolish crew has parked it out in the open and well within the weapon’s range, so the only factor is Pythagorous’ own Ballistics Skill. His Skill of 4 indicates a 4 out of 6 chance of hitting with any shooting attack. 4 out of 6 is the same as 2 out of 3 (thank you, middle school arithmetic), thus Pythagorous’ chance of success so for is:
Next, since Pythagorous must destroy the vehicle, he must penetrate its armor. Glancing hits won’t cut it today. In order to penetrate the vehicle’s armor we compare the Strength of the lascannon (9) to the Front Armor of the Rhino (11. The foolish crew wasn’t so foolish as to turn their backs on Pythagorous). Pythagorous’ player will roll a die and add the roll to the weapon’s Strength, needing a 3 or higher to exceed the Armor stat. The odds of rolling a 3, 4, 5, or 6 on a six-sided die are 2 out of 3. Since both events, the hitting and the penetrating, must occur for Pythagorous to succeed, our formula now looks more like this:
For those keeping track of score at home, this makes Pythagorous’ chances of both hitting and penetrating 4 out of 9, less than 50%. But he’s still not finished! Now that the Imperium of Man’s heroic champion has penetrated the Rhino’s armor, he must actually destroy it rather than inflicting some other damage upon it. He determines this by rolling on the Vehicle Damage chart, which has six results. Two of those six results are Destroyed results (Wrecked and Explodes, for those who want to split hairs), and 2 out of 6 equals 1 out of 3.
All in all, Pythagorous chances of destroying the Rhino with a single shot of his Lascannon are 4 in 27, just shy of 15%. As mentioned earlier, this ignores glancing hits and non-destroyed results of a penetrating hit. In a real game rather than a simulation any result can sometimes be a good result, so don’t lose heart for poor Pythagorous.
This general process applies to just about any offensive roll in either version of Warhammer. To summarize: Roll to Hit -> Roll to Wound or Penetrate -> Roll for Results (Armor Saves for non-vehicles, damage results for vehicles). Those are the basics, but next time on Smite we’ll discuss using this process in a wider variety of situations as a method of comparison. We’ll also find out which Eldar Aspect Warrior is, statistically speaking, more lethal: the graceful Howling Banshee, or the brutal Striking Scorpion! Don’t miss it!
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