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I was bored, so I stayed up until 3 am making this.

Enjoy. It can tell you how many attacks or shots from a type of weapon are needed to bring down a character or model

Some notes:

You shouldn't have to change anything but the characteristic profile. Make sure all values are simply numbers. Armour saves should be written as 2 rather than as 2+. FNP must be written as 1-6, rather than simply true. If your model doesn't have an invulnerable save, write 1 as his invulnerable save [i]this will not impact upon your result, as anything multiplied by 1 is itself[i], but you do need a value for Invulnerable saves.

For Eternal Warrior, Write "TRUE" or "FALSE". In any case where the weapon shooting at your opponent gets Re-rolls, be sure to change the appropriate box (below characteristics.)

PM me with a screenshot if you run into any errors, I'll do my best to fix any mistakes that may occur.

Oh, and you're free to use this as you please. Just be sure to say "I got this off some nerd on the internet with too much time on his hands".

Thanks, Scipio.

Corbulo is OP, need 216 lasguns to fall!

Thank you Scipio Africanus, I'll try it, seems really nit.

Can we delete sheet 1 and 2?

Cheers,
H3r0

Nice.

One thing I'd really like to see someone do (and I did a while back but lost the spreadsheet) is to make a calculator that tells you the percentage chance of doing damage.

So it's all well and good to say that, on average, you need 100 shots to kill someone. What I'd like to see, if you fire 100 shots, what percentage chance to you actually have of killing them? What percentage chance of wounding them? What percentage chance of inflicting more wounds than you needed?

To do that, you have to write it as a binomial distribution, so you calculate the chance of 1 shot wounding, then use the binomial distribution equations to see that if you have 50 shots, what's the chance of 1 shot wounding, 2 shots wounding, 3 shots wounding.......... 49 shots wounding, or 50 shots wounding.

It's not hard to do and I made a spreadsheet years ago that did it but I've lost the sheet and the site I uploaded it to all those many years ago is gone now.

I think it gives a more accurate representation of what to expect in a game than simply the averages. As if you fire in to a unit and expect an average of 5 kills and only get 1, you can say, well, that had a 15% chance of happening (or whatever), but another unit might also on average have 5 kills, but you might find the chance of getting only 1 kill is only 5%, so you actually have better odds of getting 3-5 kills with the latter unit, while the former unit may have a better chance of getting 4-7 kills, but with a higher risk of getting less than 3.

h3r0 wrote:Corbulo is OP, need 216 lasguns to fall!

Thank you Scipio Africanus, I'll try it, seems really nit.

Can we delete sheet 1 and 2?

Cheers,
H3r0

I claimed your first post. That's gotta be, like, a medal or something

And, yes. You can. They serve no purpose but to confuse.

I've removed them anyway.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:Nice.

One thing I'd really like to see someone do (and I did a while back but lost the spreadsheet) is to make a calculator that tells you the percentage chance of doing damage.

So it's all well and good to say that, on average, you need 100 shots to kill someone. What I'd like to see, if you fire 100 shots, what percentage chance to you actually have of killing them? What percentage chance of wounding them? What percentage chance of inflicting more wounds than you needed?

To do that, you have to write it as a binomial distribution, so you calculate the chance of 1 shot wounding, then use the binomial distribution equations to see that if you have 50 shots, what's the chance of 1 shot wounding, 2 shots wounding, 3 shots wounding.......... 49 shots wounding, or 50 shots wounding.

It's not hard to do and I made a spreadsheet years ago that did it but I've lost the sheet and the site I uploaded it to all those many years ago is gone now.

I think it gives a more accurate representation of what to expect in a game than simply the averages. As if you fire in to a unit and expect an average of 5 kills and only get 1, you can say, well, that had a 15% chance of happening (or whatever), but another unit might also on average have 5 kills, but you might find the chance of getting only 1 kill is only 5%, so you actually have better odds of getting 3-5 kills with the latter unit, while the former unit may have a better chance of getting 4-7 kills, but with a higher risk of getting less than 3.

% of doing damage confused me. I assumed you meant % of killing the target outright.

I included a small conditional that said "If the guy doesn't die from 1 wound it has a 0% chance of killing" but otherwise it will list a % value for 1 wound models or things that suffer instant death.

 Scipio Africanus wrote:
% of doing damage confused me. I assumed you meant % of killing the target outright.

I included a small conditional that said "If the guy doesn't die from 1 wound it has a 0% chance of killing" but otherwise it will list a % value for 1 wound models or things that suffer instant death.

Sorry maybe I didn't explain it well. I'll use an example.

A character has 3 wounds. You fire a weapon at it that has 0.3 (30%) chance of hitting, wounding and killing.

So logically, the number of shots required to kill would be 10 on average (10*0.3 = 3).

BUT, what is the chance of actually killing? To do that, you use a binomial distribution to calculate the probability of each outcome (excel has a built in function to do this, otherwise check wikipedia).

So the chance of doing 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 or 10 wounds, is respectively (in %):

2.82475249
12.1060821
23.34744405
26.6827932
20.0120949
10.29193452
3.6756909
0.9001692
0.14467005
0.0137781
0.00059049

So, with 10 shots, you actually have 61.7% chance of killing (35% of overkilling and inflicting more than 3 wounds), 23.34% chance of inflicting 2 wounds, 12.1% chance of inflicting only 1 wound and 2.8% chance of not doing damage at all.

So what if you only fired 8 shots? You're below the average number of shots required to kill, but you still have a probability of killing, what is that probability? The distribution of 8 shots looks like this...

5.764801
19.765032
29.647548
25.412184
13.61367
4.667544
1.000188
0.122472
0.006561

So even with 8 shots you have a 44.8% chance of killing. How about 6 shots?

11.7649
30.2526
32.4135
18.522
5.9535
1.0206
0.0729

So even with 6 shots, you still have a 25.6% chance of killing.

5 shots drops to 16%, 4 shots drops to 8.37%, 3 shots is only 2.7%, 2 shots is obviously 0% (but you still have a 65.7% chance of inflicting at least 1 wound).

That's what I mean

If, instead, you fired 5 shots with 60% chance of wounding for each shot, you are still bang on the average required to kill the character, but your % chance of killing jumps to 68.3%.

This is awesome, especially for someone like me, numbers hurt my head. Any chance of an equivalent programme for Vehicles?

AllSeeingSkink wrote:Sorry Maybe I didn't explain it well.
That's what I mean

I don't think it's that you didn't explain it well, I think its that its out of my grasp.

If you have the time and want to put in such values to the calculator, by all means. I have no problem with collaboration, but I do believe that what you're talking about is outside of what I feel I'm capable. (I'd like you to just note that I still prefer to write dice rolls as 'over six' rather than as decimals.)

Math hammer is easier because multipliers can usually only be
.1667
.3333
.5000
.6667
.8333

Eh, maybe I'll look into it over easter. Maybe I'll learn something!

Eldercaveman wrote:This is awesome, especially for someone like me, numbers hurt my head. Any chance of an equivalent programme for Vehicles?

I hadn't thought of it, but I could do. It wouldn't work quite the same and it may be a little more complicated, but we'll see.

 Scipio Africanus wrote:

Eldercaveman wrote:This is awesome, especially for someone like me, numbers hurt my head. Any chance of an equivalent programme for Vehicles?

I hadn't thought of it, but I could do. It wouldn't work quite the same and it may be a little more complicated, but we'll see.

Wouldn't necessarily need to include the damage chart, as I'd imagine that would complicate things to far, just the odds of pen AV10-14 with each weapon.

Yeah, doing what I want is a bit tricker, but it's mostly what you'd learn in a high school level probability class.

As soon as the term "math" and "accurate" are mentioned, it brings out the engineer in me

eg. Say you have a 3 wound model and one weapon requires 1/2 to hit, 1/6 to wound and 1/3 to get past the save.

That's 1/2*1/6*1/3 = 0.02778 chance to wound, requiring 3/0.02778 shots to kill.

108 shots.

If, instead, you fired a weapon that was 5/6 to hit and 5/6 to wound with no save, 5/6*5/6 = 0.7, requiring 3/0.7 = 4.32.

4.32 shots on average to kill.

But if you actually figure out the probability of killing, if you fired 108 shots of the first variety, you'd actually have 58% chance of killing the target. But the second one, with only 4 shots (since you can't take 0.32 shots ) would actually have 64% chance of killing the target.

So even though, on average, it requires 108 shots with the first weapon and 4 and a bit shots with the second weapon, 4 shots from the second weapon actually has a higher probability of killing the target than the first weapon with 108 shots.



If I can be bothered maybe one day I'll make a spreadsheet to do it, but I don't think most people appreciate actual probabilities and prefer to think in averages (it's only the engineers like me who have to be precise ).

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Yeah, doing what I want is a bit tricker, but it's mostly what you'd learn in a high school level probability class.

As soon as the term "math" and "accurate" are mentioned, it brings out the engineer in me

eg. Say you have a 3 wound model and one weapon requires 1/2 to hit, 1/6 to wound and 1/3 to get past the save.

That's 1/2*1/6*1/3 = 0.02778 chance to wound, requiring 3/0.02778 shots to kill.

108 shots.

If, instead, you fired a weapon that was 5/6 to hit and 5/6 to wound with no save, 5/6*5/6 = 0.7, requiring 3/0.7 = 4.32.

4.32 shots on average to kill.

But if you actually figure out the probability of killing, if you fired 108 shots of the first variety, you'd actually have 58% chance of killing the target. But the second one, with only 4 shots (since you can't take 0.32 shots ) would actually have 64% chance of killing the target.

So even though, on average, it requires 108 shots with the first weapon and 4 and a bit shots with the second weapon, 4 shots from the second weapon actually has a higher probability of killing the target than the first weapon with 108 shots.



If I can be bothered maybe one day I'll make a spreadsheet to do it, but I don't think most people appreciate actual probabilities and prefer to think in averages (it's only the engineers like me who have to be precise ).

I'm afraid I'm only doing anything that could be considered higher level math around now, and I'm a first year.

I can appreciate the need for what you want, but I think you may have overshot the value of this spreadsheet.

It is designed with the intention of giving you an idea of how many shots a model can take before it is downed. Yes this is an average, but I'm measuring the character whereas I think you would want to measure the weapon.

Oh, and Caveman, I'm doing the penning tables now. Including rending and armourbane/melta is what will take time, not the damage tables. If you want to see complicated, check cell K6-18, that's complicated. (Half of that only applies if the weapon rends...)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Update, hopefully there aren't any more bugs. I gave it a name, too.

Hammer of math is a brilliant pun!