How to evaluate your force

When designing an army list, particularly when you are new to the army, it is sometimes difficult to identify what is valuable and what is not. Following the idea that the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war; do some homework. Here are some tools to help you.

Run the numbers

When you are designing an army, you can judge some of the value by running the numbers. Certainly, statistics is not the be-all end-all of the game, but it works in a pinch. Here’s how to do it. Weapons kill by first hitting, then by wounding then by having the opponent fail his armor save. Take the chance on a d6 of each roll. This example is for a Dark Eldar Warrior with a splinter rifle firing at a Space Marine. BS4 S3 AP5. It hits on a 3+, wounds on 5+ and he fails on 1-2.

Translated: 2/3 x 1/3 x 1/3=2x1x1 over 3x3x3. That is 2/27. So on average, 2 marines will die per 27 shots. That’s 0.074Dead Marines (I like to evaluate my units in terms of DM, or Dead Marines) so a squad of 10 would be 0.74DM. A Dark Lance, on the other hand, gets the same 2/3 to hit, but wounds on a 2+ and penetrates their armor, yielding this calculation: 2/3 x 5/6 x 1, or 10/18, which becomes 0.55DM. Add two of these to the previous 10, and you get 1.84DM. Now, for each turn that this squad has marines in range, it should take care of 1.84/turn. Many things will actually complicate this number (starting range, terrain, your tactics and those of the opposition, targets, etc.) but this is one way to evaluate the army. If you compare the cost of fielding that weapon or combination of weapons to the amount of damage it can do, you can find out if it is worthwhile or a waste of time. The sample squad would cost 116 pts, so it would take 4.2 turns (round to 5, it prepares you to take casualties) to get back the points. If it would take the squad 10 turns to get back the points spent on them… Hmm, most of my games go 6 turns, not 10, so a 10 turn payback isn’t very good. Running the numbers also lets you compare different weapons. For example, early on, I felt that Shredders were much better than Blasters, since they could hit more models. They both have the same chance of hitting and, against marines, the same chance of wounding. At first I thought that the Blast template would let me hit enough to make up for not penetrating the armor. So I looked at the calculations. I realized that I’d need to average 3 marines under a template to get the same result.My primary opponent is quite good at spacing, however, so I rarely get more than 2 under a template. The result? I have 3 shredders in all. One came in the Reaver jetbike boxed set, and I promptly trimmed down the edges so that it looked like a slightly slender Blaster. The other two came with my Wyches boxed set and have languished, unpainted and untouched ever since.

Play with the big boys

Before you go out and actually pit your army against a live opponent, use a paper target. Find a battle report and replace one side. When I first started playing 40k, I didn’t have many opponents. When I was trying to figure out what would work and what would suck, I went to Andy Chambers and Gavin Thorpe for advice. Since I don’t know them personally, I used the battle report in the beginning of the 3^rd Edition rulebook. I figured out the points for each side and found that it was roughly 500. I then carefully wrote out where each unit was during the battle and what it did. I also tried to estimate what it would have done if it hadn’t been killed off when it was. When I was satisfied with that, I replaced each army in turn, playing a rough game against the other. You can do that with any battle report, just be careful. If there is a large difference between your army and the one you are replacing (ie: Imperial Guard with Blood Angels) there will be a large difference in the deployment your opponent will have.

There is a saying that every army is best prepared to fight the last war. Usually this means that armies don’t prepare to face new threats, they dwell on what used to work or not work. In 40k, this can be good. Even without an entire battle report, you can take an opponent’s old armylist and try to take apart it’s good points and find it’s weak spots. Was there some combination of things that they deployed that gave you trouble? How did it work and why was it trouble? Figure it out, then see if there is something you have that will negate the advantages it offered.

Try before you buy

This is a hobby and it costs money, sometimes a lot of money. If you are considering a new acquisition for your army, try to figure out if it will be a good buy for you. If you have a friend that will let you use proxies (that is, “this model is a stand-in for a different model”) then make sure you try it out first. Try to find a model or item that you have that is somehow similar to the model you want to try. Sometimes a friend will let you borrow a model that is suitable. For example, someone in our group wanted to try out a dreadnaught before buying one, so I let him borrow my Carnifex. They are about the same size and fill a similar role, so it was easy for the opponent to remember what it was. It also helps if it is not a model that goes with your army, so it will stand out in the opponent’s mind that it is not an ordinary Carnifex or whatever. I would also recommend only playing with one or two proxies at a time. If half your force is proxied, it will be hard for both you and your opponent to remember what’s what.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully at this point you will have several ways of evaluating your force and it’s effectiveness. The final thing to do is to try to see if there’s anything that you couldn’t handle. Think about a number of very different armies and ideas, and try to work out what your army would do about them. I would recommend these as starting points: tons of cheap troops, like Ork boyz or termagants; a Wraithlord; a LandRaider; a Whirlwind; Terminators; Genestealers; lots of fast moving bikes and transports; an objective more than half-way across the board. These cover quite a few very different challenges that often require either different types of units or different tactics to face. This doesn’t mean that your army has to take all of these into account, but the more that you can take care of, the better off you’ll be on the battlefield. It can also help you decide what to spend those last 200pts on, or how to fill the Heavy Support slot.

If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know

Return to Warpstorm!