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like i said, some dogs cant learn new tricks, and some people are to stubborn to follow a point of view that is different from their own, but makes perfect sense.

it doesnt matter that you made the perfect move and brought the most probable weapon and all you have to do is roll for the highest probable outcome. because even if you can say the dice have a set number of probables, there is still a set number of non probables, and those happen. its all chance, and if you are to stubborn to not understand and see that this is the simplest way of puting it then you are entitled to your own opinion. no matter how complex your opinion is, you can still have it.

no sense in us circle talking and just sayin our own points over and over again to each other, you either get it or you dont.

See, and I definitely disagree with this. You can play certain odds, but you can't predict the actual outcome of events, because randomness is unpredictable. Knowing the exactitude of the odds you are playing will not make anything happen by itself. You can't shout "I have an X% chance of killing you" at a land raider and have that blow up the raider. It's the dice themselves that determine the outcome. All you can do is play the odds.

Knowing the statistical averages and deviation levels certainly helps you pick better odds to play (this is where your idea of expectation fits in), but it doesn't do anything until you roll the die, and the die tell you what happens.

No I can't predict anything, but I can prepare myself for all possible outcomes. Knowing the exactitude of certain odds is quite unimportant. 36,7% or 48% is in fact unimportant. What matters is: Both chances are unreliable. So I have to prepare for both cases: Success and failure.

Yep the die tells what happens in the given event. But 1. The event doesnt decide the game, 2. The skilled player has ways to deal with all happenings.

And dice have the habit to act beyond average in both directions equally often and more often beyond average than actually average. (3 dice, bs4, average is 2 hits. Thats 1 possibility. Beyond average would be 3 hits, 1 hit and no hits. Thats 3 possibilities) But hitting 3/3 with 3 bs4 weapons we don't remember. We remember hitting 1/3 and 0/3.

But whatever, I have a question: What do you mean with "playing the odds"concerning 40k? Relying on average dice rolls?

And this is exactly what I was talking about with the idea of player skill being shrouded by the actual results of dice. Perhaps three meltaguns was the correct number to bring to the situation. Two may have been giving the tank too low of a priority, while four might mean that you're taking away a meltagun that was really needed elsewhere. If you roll poorly, you can not go back and say "I should have brought more meltaguns" because in this case you'd actually be making a mistake. You played the right odds, and they failed. The failure isn't indicative of having played the odds wrong.

This is a strange approach to the game imho.

There is no "correct" number of weapons for a certain target. There is only the target and what you have at your disposal to deal with it. If it is immediate primary target, everything that is available has to be turned on that target. I don't assign certain numbers of weapons to certain specific targets. This is where long range weaponry comes into play it is important to have weapons that can shift targets immediately without the loss of firepower. If it is not so important, you should move some potential away from it in order to be used at more important spots.

Example: If I have a primary target chimera, I will move in a group of meltaguns within 6" with the hope of exploding it. Another group of meltaguns is within 6" of the next chimera and within 12" to the primary. In addition there are some supporting lascannons. Now target priority is set: chimera 1 should go down, chimera 2 also down is excellent. chimera 1 only damaged is not very good, no damage at all is worst case. Now I start with the 3 meltaguns in 6". OK they immobilize the chimera. Now I have to decide whether it is more important to actually kill the first chimera or it is better to target the second one. Maybe the latter. I get a shaken. OK now long range weaponry can decide: kill the first chimera or stop the second? And so on...

So there is actually no "failure". There are just decreasing possibilities.

In this case: If both meltagroups had killed their respective targets, the lascannon support weapons could open up on a new target. Thats a new possibility given by good dice. If every weapon was needed to take down the first chimera, one possibility was taken away by bad dice -> the second chimera. But it is still within the plan, because the first chimera is down and the primary mission has been successful. Now of course there is the worst case then I have no possibility left in the given scenario. But there were several big dice blunders necessary to "achieve" that size of bad luck. What would be the result? Maybe the first meltagroup is killed due to that bad luck event. Now I start the same again with 1 less melta group. And so on.

If I have constant bad dice, slowly the material available to accomplish the main goal (winning the game) decreases and my capabilities are reduced. But if I am more skilled than my opponent I can decide the game with much less material in my favour. If I am less skilled than my opponent I need more material, so I am dependent on good luck on my side.

-Nazdreg- wrote:Example: If I have a primary target chimera, I will move in a group of meltaguns within 6" with the hope of exploding it. Another group of meltaguns is within 6" of the next chimera and within 12" to the primary. In addition there are some supporting lascannons. Now target priority is set: chimera 1 should go down, chimera 2 also down is excellent. chimera 1 only damaged is not very good, no damage at all is worst case. Now I start with the 3 meltaguns in 6". OK they immobilize the chimera. Now I have to decide whether it is more important to actually kill the first chimera or it is better to target the second one. Maybe the latter. I get a shaken. OK now long range weaponry can decide: kill the first chimera or stop the second? And so on...

So there is actually no "failure". There are just decreasing possibilities.

That might be your typical situation. And for someone playing IG with all your firepower, it's probably your typical situation moreso than some (probably most) other armies. But even your situation can change to the point where you have to depend on single die rolls with a lot of individual importance, and be forced to allocate forces before knowing if they're "enough to do the job".

When I read the OP's initial post I was nodding, "yep". And then I read yours, and I was nodding, "well, maybe that too". But they can both be true, even for your army. The reason I was nodding "yep" at his is that I always see opponents making decisions in the early game about how many searchlight equipped rhinos (or equivalent) to move up as spotters. You need to be cautious about how close you get, Necrons have a ton of CC AT. Those initial night-sight range rolls have a lot of significance, they determine your ability to focus fire. If those rolls go bad, you can't re-appropriate firepower - you've already ended your movement phase, you can't move more spotters up. And in this case Ailaros's melta gun example is even more appropriate, swapping out searchlights for meltas. You have fewer searchlights, their 2d6 rolls have a lot of variance, and if they fail they affect your ability to be flexible later in the fire phase. If you put in too much redundancy or get too close, though, you'll risk multi-assaults at combat speed with scarabs, that's the definition of "bad".

So in this case your IG fire-centric army might be in a situation where Aileros' examples are more applicable. Movement skill becomes much more important than usually is the case for you, while fields of fire and target prioritization relatively less so.

-Nazdreg- wrote:the die tells what happens in the given event. But 1. The event doesnt decide the game, 2. The skilled player has ways to deal with all happenings.

For #2, I certainly agree, as that's just a less precise way of talking about decisions in movement and target prioritization.

#1 doesn't make sense, though. The end result of the game is the sum of all of the constituent events of the game. Some are certainly more important than others, but it's still the events that determine the outcome (and, as events are determined by dice... you know the rest).

-Nazdreg- wrote:There is no "correct" number of weapons for a certain target.

Well, I introduced this idea as platonic for a reason. We may not know what the perfect application of our killing power is during the game, but, however unknowable, it is useful to think as if there is a, THE, set of moves to make during your turn. That we can easily identify bad choices made in the shooting or movement phase implies that there are better decisions which implies a hypothetical best (or best range) of choices.

The fact is, outside of a very, very few units, a unit's killing power has limits. It can only shoot so far away, or can only engage certain targets effectively. This means that you have to engage in target priority and movement, in which there are better or worse choices. Every choice, however, has an opportunity cost. Every bad choice robs you of a good one. While this may be more pronounced with, say, shorter ranged weapons (which give you more room for mistakes), it's true about heavy weapons as well. For example, let's say that you needed both an ironclad dread taken down as well as a rhino full of sternguard. You have an autocannon. Which do you shoot at? Even if the ironclad is a more "primary" target, it still might be the better choice to shoot at the lower priority target that is easier for the weapon to actually do damage to. In this case, shooting the autocannon at the dread would, indeed, be bringing too many weapons against a certain target.

I have certainly seen both sides of this before. I've seen an opponent underrate the threat something posed against them and didn't bring enough killing power to bear against it early enough, which was an incorrect amount of killing power. Likewise, I've seen opponents, in an act of desperation at something that their proper weapons failed to kill through bad rolling, throw killing power at something that they really should have thrown against something that the unit would have been more effective against - chasing worse and worse (more and more wrong) odds in a desperate attempt to quell the crazy part of their brain that is willing to double and triple down if that's what it takes to remove the splinter from their mind.

If it's possible to shoot too much or too little, then it's also possible to shoot the correct amount.

-Nazdreg- wrote:But whatever, I have a question: What do you mean with "playing the odds"concerning 40k? Relying on average dice rolls?

Which brings me to this.

How do you know when you've shot enough at something, and, even though it's not dead, it's time to move on and try again next turn? How do you know how many units you need to bring over to participate in an upcoming close combat? Too many, and your opponent has stuff that's now left unthreatened and has free reign. Too few, and you lose the close combat. How do you know what the correct amount of killing power to apply is?

It's this that I'm talking about when I talk about "playing the odds". Really, what I'm talking about is the bridge that connects the way we understand the randomness that determines the outcome (in this case, statistics), and that part of you that does a gut check when you apply player skill.

For a more specific example. Let's say that you have some meltaguns that are in range of a land raider and some that are not. You decide that you need the vehicle dead this turn, or next turn, but it can't survive after that or things will go badly for you. It turns out that the group of weapons that are already basically in range have a roughly 50-50 shot of blowing it up. You could bring in the other group, upping the odds that you kill it this turn, but you lose the ability to attack whatever else you were looking to attack (because it might be out of LOS behind some terrain, or out of range, or now gets a cover save, etc.), or you could use the units nearby to handle the problem and have the other stuff handle the other stuff, or you could pull away from the first group so that you can apply more killing power to more units because you feel "lucky" about a diminished number of weapons still being able to handle the land raider accordingly.

This combination of movement and target prioritization (player skill), is where you make actions based on the odds of certain events occurring, and then comparing them to the kinds of odds you think you should have to make them occur. This can be done mathematically, though it's usually done by a gut check (as in, most player skill is intuitive). I've actually done calculations mid-game on a couple of occasions (shoot at front armor, or move to shoot at obscured side armor, etc.), but most people, including myself, aren't human computers that can do this on the fly. You'd probably have a great deal of player skill if you could, though.

-Nazdreg- wrote:

There is no "correct" number of weapons for a certain target. There is only the target and what you have at your disposal to deal with it. If it is immediate primary target, everything that is available has to be turned on that target. I don't assign certain numbers of weapons to certain specific targets. This is where long range weaponry comes into play it is important to have weapons that can shift targets immediately without the loss of firepower. If it is not so important, you should move some potential away from it in order to be used at more important spots.

Example: If I have a primary target chimera, I will move in a group of meltaguns within 6" with the hope of exploding it. Another group of meltaguns is within 6" of the next chimera and within 12" to the primary. In addition there are some supporting lascannons. Now target priority is set: chimera 1 should go down, chimera 2 also down is excellent. chimera 1 only damaged is not very good, no damage at all is worst case. Now I start with the 3 meltaguns in 6". OK they immobilize the chimera. Now I have to decide whether it is more important to actually kill the first chimera or it is better to target the second one. Maybe the latter. I get a shaken. OK now long range weaponry can decide: kill the first chimera or stop the second? And so on...

So there is actually no "failure". There are just decreasing possibilities.

In this case: If both meltagroups had killed their respective targets, the lascannon support weapons could open up on a new target. Thats a new possibility given by good dice. If every weapon was needed to take down the first chimera, one possibility was taken away by bad dice -> the second chimera. But it is still within the plan, because the first chimera is down and the primary mission has been successful. Now of course there is the worst case then I have no possibility left in the given scenario. But there were several big dice blunders necessary to "achieve" that size of bad luck. What would be the result? Maybe the first meltagroup is killed due to that bad luck event. Now I start the same again with 1 less melta group. And so on.

If I have constant bad dice, slowly the material available to accomplish the main goal (winning the game) decreases and my capabilities are reduced. But if I am more skilled than my opponent I can decide the game with much less material in my favour. If I am less skilled than my opponent I need more material, so I am dependent on good luck on my side.

This is probably the most pertinent part of the discussion. 40k is really a game of rapidly changing differences in the material available to you to win, and the correct analysis of not only the current material odds and how to best leverage them but also the myriad of future potential material distinctions that arise from the success or failure of your 'pieces' to prosecute the tasks you give them.

Very roughly, consider chess, and it's assigned value of '3 points' to a Knight or Bishop, and '5 points' to a rook. In a vacuum, the player with the pair of minor pieces is said to have small advantage. But introduce a credible back rank mate threat that the rook player can prosecute, and it's advantage rook player.

In 40k terms, vs the deepstriking shooters, the Plasma Cannon is king.

Unlike a game of Chess where you might consider white to have the tiniest initial advantage from first move, players might have equal listed points of material before the first dice is rolled, but introduce factions and force composition and one player already has a tremendous advantage as his material is far more suited to whatever particular challenge is laid out before them on the table. In such a matchup, the player who recognises he is behind and fairly judges his opponent as a competent general, will recognise he's going to need the dice or 'luck' on his side to compensate for material deficiency at some point in the game, of course the earlier the better.

Thus to bring that to your question Ailaros, the player who recognises he is currently behind in material and presented with the problem of the Landraider, can 'court the favor of the dice' and hope one or perhaps two teams will achieve success, thus allowing the remaining teams to play out against other targets and give him a decent chance to put the material balance of the game in his favor, or at least closer to balance at that current point of the match.

As for the other side of the coin, for the player who knows he has the advantage, as in chess where you're up in material, common valid strategy can be to simplify, exchange, and play down to the endgame where your advantage can be safely and easily realised. In 40k, this is employing overkill to shut out your opponent's meaningful material or cut out his lower percentage/high payoff attack vectors. Example, these tanks are an overwhelming advantage in this matchup for me so I will send half my army to kill those Fire Dragons when expectancy tells me 1/4 is ample, simply because once those Dragons are gone I have a crushing advantage through my armor

-or-

That Multimelta Landspeeder has fairly low odds of killing my Landraider, but if I were to lose it at this point my current material advantage would be significantly dented, so I will dedicate two/three AT units to take that out. The outcome of that means I can't increase my material advantage significantly this turn, but perhaps more importantly in my opponent's next turn he doesn't have any real possibility to close the gap either, and I am likely to be able continue to play this current advantage out for the win.

Regardless, the dice never pass or fail your choices, they always stand on their merit or lack of before the resultant cube hits the table.

Further applications of chess to 40k, in an unfavorable material position, introduce as many problems as you can - making your opponent think and increasing his or her pool of options increases the likelihood of a suboptimal play.
In addition, when analyzing a game, there is not just ! and ?, but also !? and ?!

Even when discussing the merit of moves/plays/plans and the game is chess, it's never just black and white.

The end result of the game is the sum of all of the constituent events of the game. Some are certainly more important than others, but it's still the events that determine the outcome (and, as events are determined by dice... you know the rest).

This is somehow correct although there are events that do include dice and there are events that don't. (Movement, interferance with terrain, LOS etc.) So talking about the outcome of a single event including dice as a precedent outcome for all other events of the game (and what you are saying sounds like that, dunno if you meant that), is not correct.

And if I might add, in the sum of all events dice actions beyond average result cancel each other out.

The only thing that is important concerning the randomness of dice is, that you can't control their results in a single roll. But the more dice are rolled the more reliable the results will come in in the long run.

What I am saying is: In a series of infinite games, we will have exact statistical results in the long run. If we are dependent on a single event, it is as reliable as a coinflip. (I win on 4+)
What is the conclusion? If I get 3 chances to coin flip it is more likely to have a success than with one chance. If I get one "coin flip" with increased chances that it equals the average success rate of three 50% coin flips it is still worse than having the 3 50%. Because if I success with the first flip, I can use the other 2 for other events. But in the other caseI am dependent on the single flip.

So the way to mitigate dice impact is the following:

Try to break big encounters down to many small dice events. Then more failures are necessary to disturb your plans. This is why I don't like sternguard combimelta onehit-wonder stuff. I favour less weapons that fire more often.

For example, let's say that you needed both an ironclad dread taken down as well as a rhino full of sternguard. You have an autocannon. Which do you shoot at? Even if the ironclad is a more "primary" target, it still might be the better choice to shoot at the lower priority target that is easier for the weapon to actually do damage to. In this case, shooting the autocannon at the dread would, indeed, be bringing too many weapons against a certain target.

This is a good example of a complicated target priority (and don't tell me guys that this game is simple...). I don't know what I need the Ironclad to be. Destroyed, then the AC is worthless because it is completely incapable to do this regardless of dice. So there is actually no choice for me. AC on Rhino. If I had a missile launcher it would be a much harder choice. But yes, I would fire on the Ironclad then if it is immediate high priority target.

This is exactly the same as the previous diatribe.

Halfpast_Yellow wrote:

-Nazdreg- wrote:

There is no "correct" number of weapons for a certain target. There is only the target and what you have at your disposal to deal with it. If it is immediate primary target, everything that is available has to be turned on that target. I don't assign certain numbers of weapons to certain specific targets. This is where long range weaponry comes into play it is important to have weapons that can shift targets immediately without the loss of firepower. If it is not so important, you should move some potential away from it in order to be used at more important spots.

Example: If I have a primary target chimera, I will move in a group of meltaguns within 6" with the hope of exploding it. Another group of meltaguns is within 6" of the next chimera and within 12" to the primary. In addition there are some supporting lascannons. Now target priority is set: chimera 1 should go down, chimera 2 also down is excellent. chimera 1 only damaged is not very good, no damage at all is worst case. Now I start with the 3 meltaguns in 6". OK they immobilize the chimera. Now I have to decide whether it is more important to actually kill the first chimera or it is better to target the second one. Maybe the latter. I get a shaken. OK now long range weaponry can decide: kill the first chimera or stop the second? And so on...

So there is actually no "failure". There are just decreasing possibilities.

In this case: If both meltagroups had killed their respective targets, the lascannon support weapons could open up on a new target. Thats a new possibility given by good dice. If every weapon was needed to take down the first chimera, one possibility was taken away by bad dice -> the second chimera. But it is still within the plan, because the first chimera is down and the primary mission has been successful. Now of course there is the worst case then I have no possibility left in the given scenario. But there were several big dice blunders necessary to "achieve" that size of bad luck. What would be the result? Maybe the first meltagroup is killed due to that bad luck event. Now I start the same again with 1 less melta group. And so on.

If I have constant bad dice, slowly the material available to accomplish the main goal (winning the game) decreases and my capabilities are reduced. But if I am more skilled than my opponent I can decide the game with much less material in my favour. If I am less skilled than my opponent I need more material, so I am dependent on good luck on my side.

This is probably the most pertinent part of the discussion. 40k is really a game of rapidly changing differences in the material available to you to win, and the correct analysis of not only the current material odds and how to best leverage them but also the myriad of future potential material distinctions that arise from the success or failure of your 'pieces' to prosecute the tasks you give them.

Very roughly, consider chess, and it's assigned value of '3 points' to a Knight or Bishop, and '5 points' to a rook. In a vacuum, the player with the pair of minor pieces is said to have small advantage. But introduce a credible back rank mate threat that the rook player can prosecute, and it's advantage rook player.

In 40k terms, vs the deepstriking shooters, the Plasma Cannon is king.

Unlike a game of Chess where you might consider white to have the tiniest initial advantage from first move, players might have equal listed points of material before the first dice is rolled, but introduce factions and force composition and one player already has a tremendous advantage as his material is far more suited to whatever particular challenge is laid out before them on the table. In such a matchup, the player who recognises he is behind and fairly judges his opponent as a competent general, will recognise he's going to need the dice or 'luck' on his side to compensate for material deficiency at some point in the game, of course the earlier the better.

Thus to bring that to your question Ailaros, the player who recognises he is currently behind in material and presented with the problem of the Landraider, can 'court the favor of the dice' and hope one or perhaps two teams will achieve success, thus allowing the remaining teams to play out against other targets and give him a decent chance to put the material balance of the game in his favor, or at least closer to balance at that current point of the match.

As for the other side of the coin, for the player who knows he has the advantage, as in chess where you're up in material, common valid strategy can be to simplify, exchange, and play down to the endgame where your advantage can be safely and easily realised. In 40k, this is employing overkill to shut out your opponent's meaningful material or cut out his lower percentage/high payoff attack vectors. Example, these tanks are an overwhelming advantage in this matchup for me so I will send half my army to kill those Fire Dragons when expectancy tells me 1/4 is ample, simply because once those Dragons are gone I have a crushing advantage through my armor

-or-

That Multimelta Landspeeder has fairly low odds of killing my Landraider, but if I were to lose it at this point my current material advantage would be significantly dented, so I will dedicate two/three AT units to take that out. The outcome of that means I can't increase my material advantage significantly this turn, but perhaps more importantly in my opponent's next turn he doesn't have any real possibility to close the gap either, and I am likely to be able continue to play this current advantage out for the win.

Regardless, the dice never pass or fail your choices, they always stand on their merit or lack of before the resultant cube hits the table.

Further applications of chess to 40k, in an unfavorable material position, introduce as many problems as you can - making your opponent think and increasing his or her pool of options increases the likelihood of a suboptimal play.
In addition, when analyzing a game, there is not just ! and ?, but also !? and ?!

Even when discussing the merit of moves/plays/plans and the game is chess, it's never just black and white.

Your material advantage view on things is a very useful one, but the actual link to chess is tenuous. The same could be said for any game that involves taking another player's pieces. Once you have an advantage, you have more options than your opponent, and you can bring more resources to bear on threats. The opportunity cost of applying overkill to a situation is greatly reduced thanks to redundancy of force granted by your material advantage.

I believe Ailaros' point is that, unlike chess, there is a very early limit to the impact that a player's increasing "tactical" skill has on the result of a particular game, very much unlike chess.

In 40k, list-building is king. If you do not correctly anticipate the rough make-up of your opponent's force, or if your codex matches up poorly with theirs, you start the game with an inherit material disadvantage, sometimes one that can be impossible to overcome. Net lists can get new players over this hurdle quickly. That's not to say that there's no skill involved list-building, just that there are handicaps to help overcome what is a huge, huge factor in whether or not you can win a battle. In chess this is obviously not a problem - both sides are identical. Really good tactical wargames like Crossfire also can minimize this problem simply because there's little difference between, say, a German rifle company and an American one at the scale the game is played.

Second is strategy, and deployment is a critical part of that. You have an overall plan and you deploy accordingly. Failure to correctly deploy your army, or failure to initiate a general strategy that can result in success, can hamstring a player from the start. I believe this is the one area where chess and 40k actually have some real overlap. Obviously everyone starts with the same "deployment" in chess, but your "opening" in chess can be a lot like a 40k deployment. It sets up the game to come, there are good and bad openings, and typically good players have memorized openings based on a) what their overall strategy is, and b) what their opponent seems to be doing.

Third is the roll off for first turn. Coupling deployment order and turn order in 40k helps offset the downsides of deploying first/going second, but thanks to antiquated turn mechanics, getting the first turn can almost be a make-or-break proposition for some armies. Proper deployment and redundancy in army lists can help mitigate this, but there's no denying that this single dice roll has an outsized impact on the events of the game.

Finally we get to the actual tactical aspect of the game, where the rubber meets the road and units clash. Unfortunately, if you're hoping for a "fair" fight, things may or may not already be stacked against you by the time you get to this point. You could already be screwed by a bad army list match-up, you could have lost the roll-off and either lost the first turn or had your clever deployment countered by the enemy, depending on which is worse for your army.

I will say that in real war, things are not fair. Many wargames simulate and even encourage this, especially when replaying historical match-ups. The difference is that 40k is ostensibly an even playing field with symmetric goals. You won't be judged on whether you can do better than Napoleon at Waterloo, you'll be judged based on kill points in a game where your opponent's army may have 7 units and yours has 15, and half your transports got popped in the first turn in spite of good deployment simply through bad luck. (This is just one reason why I have stopped thinking of 40k as a wargame, or as a real competitive game, and just play to see wacky things happen now. The alternative is too frustrating).

Anyway (this is getting to be a very long post!), back to tactics, which is an area where some players like to brag about their skill. Ailaros is making the case, and I agree, that once you get past the three things I discussed above (list building, deployment/strategy, and turn order), games of 40k to a large extent "fall into place" for experienced players. As turns unfold, most of the choices a player makes will be fairly obvious to anyone who is familiar with both armies and can keep the mission objectives in mind. This is not a small feat, it takes awhile to gain that level of experience or skill. The randomness inherent in the dice also prevent anyone from predicting exactly the outcome of any action.

The point here is that beyond a certain point, the game is "in motion" and players are largely just responding to what happened in the previous turn using "best practices". You keep your objectives in mind, you keep your overall plan in mind, but this is not chess. A pawn can take a queen, and a queen can take a pawn, and it happens with 100% certainty each time, and their movements are precisely constrained. Action on the board is entirely determined by player decisions - the longer and deeper your plans are, the more potential moves you can take into account, the better a player you are. The skill "plateau" for chess players exists on the supercomputer level.

For 40k players, once you've bought everything you need for your net list and you know the basic strategies for your army and good deployments for different mission types, the game sadly comes down to Aspergers levels of rules memorization. If you know your codex and your opponent's codex and the technicalities of the rules inside and out, most tactical decisions in a battle are fairly obvious.

To wrap it all up and get back to Ailaros' point, the really difficult decisions get washed out in the randomness of the dice anyway. You and your opponent are both competent players with a good grasp on the rules and each other's armies. You both bring competitive lists, and you both set up as best as possible for the mission with a good idea of what your armies have to do to win and reasonable strategies for doing so, but your codex is regarded as weak against his in general. He beats you fairly soundly. Is he really a more skilled player than you? Or a few crucial dice rolls go your way and you beat him. Are you a more skilled player? At best an observer can tell you are both competent and it was a hard-fought game. How many identical missions with symmetric terrain and symmetric army lists might you have to replay before you could really determine who was the most skilled player given the sheer number of separate dice rolls in a given battle?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

-Nazdreg- wrote:
What I am saying is: In a series of infinite games, we will have exact statistical results in the long run. If we are dependent on a single event, it is as reliable as a coinflip. (I win on 4+)
What is the conclusion? If I get 3 chances to coin flip it is more likely to have a success than with one chance. If I get one "coin flip" with increased chances that it equals the average success rate of three 50% coin flips it is still worse than having the 3 50%. Because if I success with the first flip, I can use the other 2 for other events. But in the other caseI am dependent on the single flip.

So the way to mitigate dice impact is the following:

Try to break big encounters down to many small dice events. Then more failures are necessary to disturb your plans. This is why I don't like sternguard combimelta onehit-wonder stuff. I favour less weapons that fire more often.

This is a good way of looking at things, and the player that is most successful at equally weighting the importance of each individual die being rolled will, over the course of the game, probably be affected least by the randomness of the outcomes (things should average out, and *where and when* bad rolls do occur should have less impact on the game because all dice rolls are equally important).

However, 40k by its design does not have equally weighted dice rolls. Sometimes individual dice have a much greater impact on the battle than they should and there's no way around it (rolling for first turn, rolling for number of objectives, rolling for end of game, etc). Sure you can (and must) plan for all possible outcomes of these rolls, but different outcomes will definitely be better for you (for example, a 33% chance of the game ending after 5 turns could mean the difference between a tie and an almost certain crushing victory - can the outcome either way really determine who is the most skilled player?)

This is one more reason why I dislike the Mech meta. Anti-tank weapons make up a minority of every army's arsenal, thus the comparatively smaller number of dice rolled to hit, penetrate, and damage vehicles will end up being much more important to the outcome of the game (versus the larger number of anti-personnel weapons in most armies, and the buckets of dice often rolled in close combat, whose outcomes are usually closer to the mean). Smaller number of dice equals higher standard standard deviation and less predictable outcomes, even once you've spammed anti-tank weapons. The arms race between target saturation and anti-tank overkill is an uninteresting one in my opinion.

Ailaros wrote: Poker is a game where you play against the other player. There is a random element to the game, but that element often doesn't have a direct impact on the result of the game. Poker is a game of bluff, and whoever bluffs best wins.

Poker is not about who bluffs the best. Poker is actually very similar to 40k. Once you have your cards (talking hold 'em), you need to determine what odds that hand favors. As the flop, turn, and river come down you are now calculating the number of outs you have versus the amount of money in the pot. As your opponent bets, you need to calculate what are your odds of winning (i.e. how many outs you have) versus what are the pot odds for winning.

If you have a very low chance of winning (i.e. you have a pair of 3's in your hand and you expect the only way to win is to draw a 3. That means there are only 2 cards left in the deck that will help you), a heavy bet is probably going to push you off. If you have a better chance of winning (i.e. you either have the nuts outright or are on a nice flush draw, you are now looking at 9 cards left that will help you), the amount of the bet to push you off is going to need to be significantly higher.

Poker is a game of strategy, position, knowing your opponent, and lastly luck. The parallels to 40K and poker are very similar the more you compare them.

Sorry. I am off my rant.

Thanks.