AoS and fun with numbers!

[Hobbitron]

Skip to the bottom if you want to see the end result, don't want to read.

 

A Skeleton Warrior has 1 attack (with their Ancient Blade) with to hit of 4, to wound of 4, no rend, and 1 damage.

 

This means they have a (3/6 * 3/6) chance of inflicting a wound. Or, a 25% chance to do a wound.

 

Now, the Warscroll says you get 10 or more in the unit. So, you could even say that a unit of 10 will do 2.5 wounds. (there is no extra math here since there is no rend, and we only do 1 damage).

 

The warscroll also states that Ancient Spears are an option for a weapon. These increase the To Hit value to 5+, and increases the range to 2". So, makes it harder to hit, but increases a potential number of attacks by increasing the number of attacks one can throw in (in particular for larger units).

 

So, let's pretend we're trying to comp things here. A suggestion to make the process easier: You pay per warscroll (not per model). So, to determine a comp value for skeletons, you would do so by saying "10 skeletons cost X".

 

Let's say we determined it by wound potential. A unit of 10 skeletons could be 25 points (multiple the 2.5 potential wounds for the 10 by another 10 to end up with cleaner numbers, and more room for fudging as desired).

 

Now, that seems pretty straight forward to me. Let's kick it up a notch, what about 20 skeletons? Well, if we just doubled without taking into account special rules, we'd now be at 50 points. But, there is a catch. Skeletons gain an extra attack each if there are 20 or more. So, we can easily just double that value again to 100 points. You have jumped to .5 wounds per model (since we doubled the base attacks), and you have 20 models.

 

However, this doesn't seem entirely accurate. If you have 20 models, and a 1" range, you are reducing the chance to get attacks from all 20 models. So, it would make sense that the value per model would decrease as a result. I will address this in a moment.

 

Now let's take Tomb Guard (with Tomb Blades). 2 attacks, To Hit of 3, To Wound of 4, -1 rend, 1 damage.

 

So, wound potential is now: (4/6 * 3/6 * 2) or 2/3 or 66%. However, we could even make an assumption on top of that. Most everything in the game has a 6+ or better armor save. So, you could even say that you are MORE likely to wound, because nearly 100% of the time you will reduce that armor save by 1. So if we take (2/3 * (1+1/6)) we get approximately 83% for a wound now.

 

 

 

Some stuff is straight forward (roll to wound * roll to hit * attacks). Some is not (range of weapons and attacks, and scaling that with unit size especially with model size taken into account).

 

So... here is my hope. I want to refine the formula above so that it provides a meaningful value to most or all units. Then, I want to capture that formula somewhere so that anyone can use it. Then I want that formula to eventually take into a

 

You could then multiply that by your damage (2 in case of d3, or 3.5 in case of d6) and get an even more meaningful value.

 

So, we have .83 wounds per tomb guard, and .25 per skeleton. Now, we get 10 skeletons, but only 5 tomb guard per warscroll. Tomb guard have a superficial value (per warscroll) of 4.15 while Skeletons are 2.5.

 

Those values though are the total potential wounds given, and do nothing to increase the value of a unit based on potential wounds they can take. So, let's look at that.

 

We can easily say wounds * models here. There are 10 wounds in a skeleton unit, and 5 in a tomb guard unit. That would be 10, and 5. But, that isn't quite right either, because they have armor saves. Let's toss those in too. Skeletons have a 6+, so we do this math: (10(models) * 1(wounds) * 1/6(chance to pass armor save) and you get: 1.66. This could then be used as a similarly superficial value. Tomb Guard have a 5+ save and end up with (5 * 1 * 2/6) = 1.66

 

Now if we total those up:

Skeletons: 2.5 + 1.66 = 4.16

Tomb Guard: 4 + 1.66 = 5.66

 

Tomb Guard look better on paper, and are represented that way here. I'd love to see how 10 SW vs 5 TG end up fighting it out over a number of sequences to put these values to the test.

 

After the base stuff is done (all warscrolls are input, and the base fomula is determined) I want to revisit it and start determining some of the abilities that enhance units. For the initial run of this, I want to more or less ignore everything that isn't in the description, or weapon/stat profile.

 

So, issues for base stats:

• How exactly do we calculate a base value?
• Should it be fairly neutral in terms of comparison to other units, or do we determine a "baseline" (1 attack, 4 to wound, 4 to hit, no rend, 1 damage, 1" range, 1 wound, 6+ save, 4" move, 7 bravery for instance) and then add/remove value to a warscroll based on how it deviates from that profile?
• How should something like range be used?
• How should movement be used?
• How should bravery be accounted for?

For range, I have something in place to take (range-1)/2 + 1. This works out in the case of skeletons. That is, 10 spears is the same as 10 blades in terms of wound potential. But, it doesn't exactly reflect that it's less valuable for 10, and more valuable for 20.

 

Bravery is more or less bravery + unit size / 10 currently.

 

Move is a % based modifier based on whether the unit moves more, or less, than 4".

 

tl;dr: There is likely an algorithm that could be applied across the board to determine a "base" value for units. I'm looking into it, and would like some input. Then once that sort of thing is settled, I could use some help getting all the warscrolls into my little app that can be made available to people who want to use it to build an army list for AoS.