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This theory has since been updated, to see the new version, click here or here.

So, I'm working on a theory that's been mulled over in my most recent battle report, and I wanted to drag my net of input wider than just my regular readers.

The theory, in brief, is that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck.

So, to break it down, one of the things that's important to know is that this is relative. The outcome of any given game is determined by factors that are relative to each other between the players. For example, if you and your opponent both brought the same lists, then list-building errors are extremely unlikely to be a determining factor in the outcome of your list. In this case, things like how the two players use the list, or how the dice roll are far more likely to be determinant, as the lists are relatively insignificant, being equal to each other.

Likewise, if both players roll average (or, actually, if they roll the same level of luck relative to each other), than the dice are going to play a relatively insignificant role in determining the outcome of the game than the lists the players brought to the table, or how they were deployed and moved.

Of course, this is no eureka moment, as this idea is pretty obvious. Where it gets interesting is something that I've come to notice about tactics as of late.

The better a player gets at 40k, the smaller their mistakes are. Their lists are good, so any list-building errors are going to be very small. Their movement is good, so any movement errors are going to be small. The smaller the errors are, the less likely they are to effect the outcome of a game relative to other factors. For example, forgetting to bring any anti AV14 is much more likely to impact the game than if you accidentally drove a piece of AV14 within 48" of a model armed with a missile launcher.

Of course, if you had two players of roughly equal skill at everything, these small differences would actually be the only determiner of outcome (see chess, for example). The thing is, though, there's this other element in 40k: luck.

How the dice roll is always going to be random (unless you're cheating), but even though they are not predictable in any given roll, they are still constrained (it's not possible to roll a 13 on 2D6), and they are controlled (it's not possible to get better at luck). This means that the relative luck between the two players is going to produce a set advantage to one player or another in any particular game. Now, if everyone always rolled exactly on average, this would be a relatively insignificant factor (such as the significance of luck in chess), but as it is, that's not the case in 40k.

There is only one final piece to this before I wrap it all up, and that is that the better you get at 40k, the less better you get at 40k, and the less it actually matters. When you start out, you make serious errors, and fixing those errors can make a huge impact in the game. The better you get, though, the smaller the mistakes you make. When you and your opponent are both seasoned players, unless one of you happens to make a real blunder that game, the most likely outcome is that the two of you are going to be making small errors, and that they're unlikely to make much of a difference with determining the outcome of the game...

... compared to luck. The point I'm trying to make is that as player skill improves, the only way that mistakes can still be a determining factor (like in chess), is if everything else is even MORE relatively irrelevant. The better you get, the less likely your mistakes are going to matter compared to what the dice show over the course of a game. The dice may be unpredictable, but there is a certain range to which they can be influential. Skill may diminish in relative importance, but luck always has the same range of influence. The less skill matters, relatively, the more luck matters.

Now, I'm not claiming that there is an ultimate level of 40k-ness where you make perfect lists, and have perfect tactics. What I'm claiming is that the closer you get to perfection, the less your perfection actually influences the course of the game. After all, if you had two perfect players with perfect lists and perfect field-play, then the ONLY determining factor would be how the dice roll.

Thus, my theory that 40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck. It's not that skill literally doesn't matter, it's that it practically doesn't matter. Yes, you can play any given game at a lower skill level (you didn't get enough sleep the night before, or just made silly mistakes), and relative skill level between players still matters.

My point is that the higher player skill level becomes, the less the difference between the players matters, and the more that the results are determined by luck.

Of course, this is a somewhat disheartening conclusion to reach. I'd like to believe that 40k predominantly is a game of skill rather than predominantly one of chance. As such, I'd like to get more input before I set this down in stone.

Your view is absolutely correct Ailaros, both players could make zero mistakes and have perfect lists, and they could still roll terribly and get blown off the board. Such are the whims of dice. Although you can't make incredibly stupid mistakes and expect to win.

An excellent way to test this theory is with loaded dice.

It'll require three games:

1. Control game: Equally skilled players, fair dice.
Outcome should be unpredictable.

2. Loaded dice game: Equally skilled players, unfair dice.
Outcome should be predictable in favor of loaded dice.

3. Loaded dice/novice list: Unskilled vs skilled player, unfair dice.
If you're right, the loaded dice should cause the unskilled player to win.

If you're not using egregiously loaded dice (e.g. always roll a six) then the higher trending dice will play the part of "luck" for you. I'll see if I can find anyone to run these experiments with.

Lonecoon wrote:I'll see if I can find anyone to run these experiments with.

Please.

Also, I've taken the liberty of making some graphs to more clearly explain what I'm talking about:



The better you get, the smaller the mistakes you make are. The smaller the mistakes, the less likely mistakes will determine the outcome. Also, the closer in skill level the players are, the less their actual skill level will matter. Luck is a constant factor.

One of the things this implies is that the better you get, the harder it is to get better (that is, the same increase in skill will have a smaller affect on the determination of a game). Combine this with the closer the skill levels you are, the less it matters, and one of the conclusions that can be reached is that when you have two players who play well (even if they're not playing at exactly the same level, as difference in skill level the higher up you go matters less), the end result is that 40k, played by good players, is predominantly a game of chance.

Well... Obviously luck is going to be a deciding factor of any game, whether you and your opponent are closely matched or not. Right?

If you and your opponent are both good enough players not to make tactical mistakes, I guess you could discount that factor, making the luck factor "bigger" in theory. Seems pretty natural. Although there is still the list building. Two "balanced" lists, when pitched against each other, can create tactical advantages/disadvantages/imbalances, yes?

Are you worried that tactics isn't as complicated as to provide endless room for improvement?

I agree that luck is always a factor, but I don't agree that luck always influences the game equally. A better player is going to be much less impacted by bad luck than a new player.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:I agree that luck is always a factor, but I don't agree that luck always influences the game equally. A better player is going to be much less impacted by bad luck than a new player.

Are they? I'd think that problems with list building and movement/deployment would be a more determining factor for new players. Sure, luck is obviously also going to be a factor (the same factor, regardless of player skill), but it seems to me that luck is a relatively less determining factor. Bad luck emulates mistakes. New players are already making big mistakes, so luck doesn't add as much. If bad luck emulates serious mistakes in a player that doesn't make many serious mistakes, then luck would be a much more determining factor.

Almarine wrote:If you and your opponent are both good enough players not to make tactical mistakes, I guess you could discount that factor, making the luck factor "bigger" in theory.

Well, my point isn't about people that make NO mistakes, rather that as player skill improves, the less difference there is in the size of mistakes between unequal players. One player may be nearly perfect and the other only half perfect, but the difference in their mistake load is going to be tiny (not relative to each other, but relative to the same gap between an utter noob and someone twice as good as an utter noob). Because this gap is so relatively small, it matters less and less against constant factors, like luck.

Almarine wrote:Well... Obviously luck is going to be a deciding factor of any game, whether you and your opponent are closely matched or not. Right? Are you worried that tactics isn't as complicated as to provide endless room for improvement?

This was mostly in response to people griping about me talking about luck in my battle reports, and accusations that I was blaming my dice for the outcome of games, rather than looking at what I did wrong.

I'm not claiming in any way that I'm a perfect player, but I find that the better I get, the less that improvement in my skill level seems to matter.

Also, there is apparently a camp of people out there who believes that player skill is the most determining factor of the outcome of games regardless of skill level. Needless to say, I expect acerbic comments from tournament winners who will undoubtedly rightly question whether my theory degrades the idea that they've earned their success.

yep luck is always a factor, even in real warfare.
anyone who says diferent is kidding themselves, however, the more skill you have to more you can account for the randomness this game puts out, look at ork players

Ailaros wrote:
What I'm looking for is an example of two good players, where one makes a tiny mistake, and even with good luck, the mistake trumps the luck. What I'm looking for is examples of GOOD tactics trumping luck.

Here's an example of a SoB player losing to an IG player because he lost sight of what the actual objective of victory was. He had the complete advantage early, then failed to capitalize on it and played right into his poorly rolling opponet's hands.

It's actually an example of one player's mistakes not costing him the game, and another player's mistakes costing him. The player who won was still the player who rolled worse, but he kept better track of a path to victory.

Your right on this. Me and my mates can to this conclusion fairly quickly when we picked up 40k. For a tactical game 40k isnt very tactical. We equat it to checkers alot or chess if you like even though chess does take alot more thought.

After you reach a certein "level" in 40k and everyone is at this same level...40k really does turn into more of a game of chance. This thought yeah can be a little disheartening depending on why it is you are into 40k in the first place.

If your in it cause you like the models..modeling..painting..haning out at the stoere.. plaing campaigns..ext..ext then this thought isnt nearly as big of a deal. Compared to someone who is in it more just to win and go for first prize. Cause really in that scenario its more of up to chance on how your dice roll and what your match up are.

fuegan17 wrote:well I think another facet of this is the ability to adapt to luck or take in account bad luck when determining you moves.

Formosa wrote: the more skill you have to more you can account for the randomness this game puts out, look at ork players

Most certainly. The higher player skill you have, the more you can work around bad luck, and the more you can take advantage of good luck.

The thing is, though, that it's all relative to your opponent, as this is a competitive game. What you're talking about makes a HUGE difference in solitaire, but when it's two player's skills against each other, things change.

Because, remember, bad luck for you is good luck for your opponent. While your skill helps you work around the bad luck, your opponent's skill helps him take advantage of it.

DarknessEternal wrote:Here's an example of a SoB player losing to an IG player because he lost sight of what the actual objective of victory was. The player who won was still the player who rolled worse, but he kept better track of a path to victory.

Yes, this is a perfect example of tactics mattering. Both players made big mistakes, but one player made a really huge mistake (losing sight of the strategic aim of the game), and the mistake was so huge, that it mattered more than luck.

When you're taking about big mistakes, they matter more than luck (see the above graphs, for example), but saying that big mistakes is very determining doesn't break the theory, it only reinforces it.

What I'm talking about is when SMALL mistakes are the determiner of a game DESPITE luck going one way or the other.

well I think another facet of this is the ability to adapt to luck or take in account bad luck when determining you moves. Luck is just another part of the skill set required to play the game at higher levels, and luck must be mastered as much as it is possible to work with luck. Yes luck will always be a determinant of a game, anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves, but its just another part of the game that needs to be accounted for.

Ailaros wrote:

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:I agree that luck is always a factor, but I don't agree that luck always influences the game equally. A better player is going to be much less impacted by bad luck than a new player.

Are they? I'd think that problems with list building and movement/deployment would be a more determining factor for new players. Sure, luck is obviously also going to be a factor (the same factor, regardless of player skill), but it seems to me that luck is a relatively less determining factor. Bad luck emulates mistakes. New players are already making big mistakes, so luck doesn't add as much. If bad luck emulates serious mistakes in a player that doesn't make many serious mistakes, then luck would be a much more determining factor.

But bad luck won’t prompt mistakes out of a really top notch player. Just because the dice aren’t participating doesn’t mean you have to make bad decisions. Even in a bad situation there are right decisions and wrong decisions. A better player has presumably played more often, been reamed by the dice more often, and knows how to make the best of a bad situation.

A new player on the other hand won’t have that experience. Not only are they not as good at decision making in the first place, but the bad luck puts them in situations they have no idea how to handle.

Part of it is also emotional. I think calm, collection, and focus are hallmarks of a good player. Bad luck can really throw the emotions of some people and then their decision making tanks.

Bad luck will only affect a top notch player’s opponent. It won’t affect them if they really are a top notch player. A newer or not as good player will really get thrown by bad luck.

I’m not saying bad luck can’t cost a good player a game. But at the same time if you have any tournament ambitions you need to know how to at least tie no matter what the dice do. If you can’t at least tie when things aren’t going your way then your whole day is shot. It’s a skill that takes a lot of discipline and sometimes playing in not so fun ways, but if not losing is really your goal that’s what it takes to do it consistently.

Ailaros, I think you have it exactly backwards.

Exactly.

You wrote, "The higher player skill level becomes, the less the difference between the players matters, and the more that the results are determined by luck." You also wrote, "...40k is actually a tactically limited game, and once you achieve a certain level of skill, your skill becomes relatively insignificant compared to luck."

You have it exactly backwards. In truth, as a player's skill level becomes greater and greater, luck factors into their game less and less - because part of skill is learning how to mitigate luck as a factor in your strategy since it is an uncontrolled variable.

While the following cannot prove my claim, it is based on personal experience, and combined with the above explanation, should be sufficient to disprove your claim.

The following thread about dice: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/346793.page

In short, I have a legendary reputation for my dice rolls. Everyone knows someone who can roll a 5+ like no other. I'm the guy who balances that guy's luck. Rolling 26 dice (taking 26 shots) with dark lances over the course of a turn and getting two hits out of 26 (on a 3+), followed by a single glance of a razorback (3), followed by a shaken result (1). That's a bad game for anyone. But I consistently do it. Pretty much every game. Even on Vassal, where the dice are based on a RNG. I'm truly not overstating my rolling (or understating in this case), it is truly an abomination.

And yet I win. Almost every game. I've been playing almost exclusively Dark Eldar for two years now.....56 wins and 2 losses on the tournament circuit (the kind you can verify if you cared); and something obscene outside of the tournament scene - so obscene that I took it out of my signature because I was tired of people calling me a liar simply on the principle that "no one is that good, luck is too much of a factor." At the time it was something to the effect of 297 wins and 1 loss....and that was probably a year or so ago. And most of those wins were with the old codex. I had a lot fewer lances then. At 2,000 points, I generally had...8 dark lances, sometimes nine. Then again, I had haywire grenades and the possibility of a 12" charge. =p

My point is this: Luck has nothing to do with me winning or losing, because my "luck" defies statistical probability, and I still win. I *win* because I've minimized the role of luck in my games. I'm not unique, I can rattle off names. I'm just the most vocal, and willing to point to my W/L record and draw correlations.

Yup that's sports. Sometimes your star QB slips in mud or a wild haymaker downs a fighter. Napoleon used to ask " Is he lucky?" when trying out a new commander. You'll learn how to set up to where you are in a good position to take advantage of good luck or if in a bad position not let luck ruin you (too much). You should pick up a book called "How to lose a Battle" It's a good read on how luck has affected every majoir conflict and how great leaders account for luck....or how they didn't.


Edit: dash said it better.

Ailaros wrote:One of the things this implies is that the better you get, the harder it is to get better (that is, the same increase in skill will have a smaller affect on the determination of a game). Combine this with the closer the skill levels you are, the less it matters, and one of the conclusions that can be reached is that when you have two players who play well (even if they're not playing at exactly the same level, as difference in skill level the higher up you go matters less), the end result is that 40k, played by good players, is predominantly a game of chance.

On the same vein of disagreement: If two players of incredible skill meet on the tabletop, both players will have achieved the same result - minimizing or mitigating the possibility that luck will affect their game.

From there, it comes down to complete skill. There is only one game in the entire history of my gaming where I would attribute my loss to luck. I can point to every other loss, and name the specific mistakes, the specific actions that cost me the game. They might be minor mistakes, but the fact that I didn't account for them, or made the wrong move meant that they got exploited. That's a matter of skill.

And that's what it comes down to. I'm not God. I *am* skilled. And I'm experienced enough to know that people who blame luck for losing (or winng) are not skilled enough to understand anything else. Its like a car. If you're not mechanically inclined; if you don't know when to change or rotate your tires, you're going to think that you were unlucky if a tire blows out. In reality, its a matter of education.

Not knowing something is not justification for presuming it doesn't exist.

@ Dash, can you give an example on how to minimize luck in your plans?

Players can do things with lists and tactics that offset or minimize the effects of luck--things that aren't related to player skill. The battle report makes me think of something from probability math that I've become increasingly aware of while playing Eldar lately, the law of large numbers: that the more dice you throw, the closer your average outcome is to the expected outcome. Or the converse--that only throwing a few dice tends to magnify the effects of bad outcomes (and also the effect of good outcomes).

So in simple 40K terms pertaining to shooting in particular--if you have a lot of shots, your overall results will tend to be close to the expected results, while if you have fewer shots the effects of a miss (or hit) will be magnified.

From the battle report, for example, you're running a vanquisher, and he's running a vendetta. A vanquisher has two shots (with the hull lascannon) so you throw two dice. The vendetta has three shots, and they're twinlinked, so he's throwing as many as six dice. The chance that your vanquisher will not even get a hit is 25%, and the chances that it will get only one hit are 50%. I can't even calculate the odds that a vendetta will get no hits, but experience tells me that vendettas usually get one or two hits, very consistently, every turn, and that the zero hits things only happens very seldom. Certainly less than 25%.

Now the chance that he'll get the massive vanquisher cannon hit/pen is zero, but with fewer dice if you get on a bad streak of a lot of misses, that vanquisher is doing nothing turn after turn (which is what happened on the game). Streaks like this are much less likely for vendettas because they throw more dice (and the twin-linking gives some of those dice "memory" which pushes the frequency even more toward expected outcomes).

You can see the same thing happening with his hydras, which throw out twice as many shots for the same points as your executioners. And his manticore, which has the chance of multiple templates, and his multilasers at three shots each.

In Eldar you see the same thing happening with the single-shot fire prism versus an EML falcon in an anti-tank role. The falcon nearly always gets one hit every turn, and a second hit about half the time on average. But a prism has about a 25% chance of missing completely *two* turns in a row. If those two turns are the first two turns of the game (as they were in your battle in Bloomington) then the effects on the rest of the game are huge.

And the effects are magnified even more in antitank shooting, since multiple kills on the same vehicle with a single volley don't matter the way that they would in shooting against infantry.

So for long-range antitank shooting, your army has (I don't count HBs as anti-tank in this case since they can't hurt AR12).
4 lascannons
vanquisher battle cannon
2 exterminator autocannons

So you're throwing 13 antitank dice per turn, 8 twinlinked (possibly more with orders)

Against that he's throwing
5 multilasers
6 TL lascannons
1 medusa blast
1-3 storm eagle blasts
4 hydra autocannons

That's 31-33 dice, half of them twinlinked. So yes, he had really good luck in this particular game. But more dice means that the odds of his guns doing nothing were extremely small, and most likely he'd get results closer to the expected value than the army with fewer shooting dice. Notice that--at least according to the report--the tank with the fewest shots (medusa) did the least, while the tanks with the most shots (hydras) did the most. Likewise your own exterminators got the best results, while the dual shot vanquisher basically whiffed.

So, math gurus please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the probabilities here, but more dice = less dependence on luck.

Flavius Infernus wrote:I can't even calculate the odds that a vendetta will get no hits,

It's 1.56% . And you are certainly right about large number, they lead to much more consistency which I like. But on the other hand if you are playing an army that puts out fewer but more powerful shots and they land on the positive side of the stat curve it really hurts.

I think that one of the unspoken assumptions in this thread is that no mistakes were made in that battle report. It's hard to deny that Ailaros rolled poorly, and his opponent rolled well (though not as significantly as you'd think).

However, I think there are some other factors at play here. The lists present a pretty tough match up: ailaros needed to advance, while his opponent only needed to shoot. All of ArtfcllyFlvrd's heavy hitters had cover on turn one (either by terrain, chimeras, or scouting). That's going to halve anybody's damage output.

Additionally, I would have deployed different as Ailaros. Why not deploy the tanks on the flanks? That prevents the opponent from sneaking side shots, and increases the side shots gained. It would also allow the tanks to advance fully in support.

I think luck plays a pretty crucial role, and I'm not an expert player, but when I play somebody very good I can usually trace my loss to an error I made, not to bad dice rolls.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:@ Dash, can you give an example on how to minimize luck in your plans?

I'm not Dash, but I can throw out an example not related to shooting and the law of large numbers:

In the batrep, Ailaros decided to send his infantry through rough terrain--which resulted in his getting bogged down for at least one additional turn, and possibly two. The decision to go through rough terrain made his success dependent on dice--so when the dice came up bad, it caused him a problem. If he had moved through the open, there would have been no luck involved in his ability to move--he could have gone 6+d6" in the open without having to count on a good die roll.

Now moving in the open has its own hazards, and given the outcome you could ask the question if he would have lost more guys by screening one unit with another instead of keeping everybody in terrain, but that's all after the fact.

But this does highlight a point I was trying to make a couple months ago in a thread about the advantages of mech guard over infantry guard--that you always know your vehicle will move 12" in the movement phase without having to depend on luck, unlike infantry who need a favorable outcome and can be screwed over by a run of bad dice.

I'm willing to test this theory given that I'll bring the "Noob" side of the equation and the gimmicked dice to the table. I'm half tempted to challenge Ailaros to meet me somewhere in Indianapolis to test this.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:

Flavius Infernus wrote:I can't even calculate the odds that a vendetta will get no hits,

It's 1.56% . And you are certainly right about large number, they lead to much more consistency which I like. But on the other hand if you are playing an army that puts out fewer but more powerful shots and they land on the positive side of the stat curve it really hurts.

Wow, that's even less than I thought.

I've been noticing more and more as I tweak my own guard list that I'm leaning increasingly toward things that get more shots rather than things that get powerful shots. And of course, differences in the range of the two armies also played a huge role in the battle.

I also think that this huge element of luck is what makes 40k good!

In a game with no chance, like Chess, you don't get the same 'oh my god!' moments that you do in 40k when a Guardsman kills Kharne the Betrayer.

Over a lot of games, things perform averagely, so luck doesn't factor much overall. However, it adds the excitement, the twists, the reward for daring strategies to 40k. Chess is more like a puzzle, where there's always a 'best' move if you can spot it. But in 40k, the dice gods make the game interesting.

I well understand the law of large numbers. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much bearing on this.

Polonius wrote:I think that one of the unspoken assumptions in this thread is that no mistakes were made in that battle report.

No, actually. My assumptions relate to relative player skill and player skill relative to perfection. You can have two awful players, and they'd still fit the graph.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:But bad luck won’t prompt mistakes out of a really top notch player.

Ah, my point wasn't that bad luck causes mistakes, it was that it emulates mistakes. The end result is the same (a unit destroyed prematurely, for example), even if the means is different.

So, it seems that there is this idea that a good player can cancel the effects of bad luck, and that the better they are, the more it cancels. A perfect player, then, would be totally unaffected by bad luck.

How is this possible? I understand having backup plans to mitigate bad luck to a certain extent, but at best, you're mitigating the luck, not erasing it. If you lose 50% of your forces to a spectacular alpha strike, just how exactly is perfect skill going to get you a win?

The only way I can see is if you ALSO get good luck (or he gets really bad luck), or if your opponent makes a spectacular alpha strike sized mistake.

Remember, just as good player skill can mitigate bad luck, so can good player skill exploit bad luck. If you had two perfect players, and one had bad luck, one player would perfectly mitigate it, but the other player would perfectly exploit it, meaning that the end result is based entirely on the badness of the luck. Meanwhile, with two bad players, one wouldn't be able to mitigate the luck, but the other wouldn't be able to exploit it either.

As such, I really don't see how, between two good players, luck wouldn't be just as deciding of a factor as between two bad players.

Dashofpepper wrote:Not knowing something is not justification for presuming it doesn't exist.

What?

Illumini wrote:Also, I would love to hear your answer to my earlier question: If skill has such low value, how can a player dominate every single tourney he goes to? How can some players win 99% of their games?

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm truly not overstating my rolling (or understating in this case), it is truly an abomination. And yet I win. Almost every game.

Well, according to the above model, if you have bad luck and are still winning, it's because you're playing people sufficiently worse than you. That or there's something deceptive in the luck. Remember, luck only matters when it counts. Just having bad rolling doesn't necessarily mean it's significant to the results of the game.

you are missing one other factor in games, terrain. If terrain is equal and set up where both halves mirror each other then it is not a factor. If it is not, then terrain can affect a games out come.

Ailaros, I have to disagree with you as well. I think that you are focusing too much on the idea of a mistake. I agree with you, that as a player gets better, they make fewer and less painful mistakes, and it becomes progressively harder to learn to avoid them. But there are a host of other decisions that go in to a game of 40k that are harder or impossible to characterize as mistakes/correct decisions. Primarily, I'm thinking of list building.

You mention that experienced players make few mistakes in building their lists. I agree, in the sense that they will avoid weak units, make sure everything in their list works together, etc. Perhaps it is possible to agree that there is one best, say IG power blob build out there, and a veteran player's list will tend to be close to it. But, there is also the matter of deciding what sort of list to take, which can also have a huge impact on the outcome of the game. Surely we've all heard people complaining recently that the tournament meta is a Rock-Paper_Scissors game between SW, Mech IG and BA. My opinion is that amongst top players, one of the most important skills, at least for tournament play, is anticipating the likely meta and building a list to take advantage of it. I'm new to 40k, so I don't have any examples of this, but I know for a fact that this has happened in M:TG tournaments in the past. Players have won with decks that were not good against all comers, but were good against the decks the top players used. I realize that many 40k players will find this sort of logic disgusting but I really don't think anyone with aspirations of winning major tournaments can afford to be sentimental about stuff like which army they use.

Lastly, I wonder if some top players are successful because they are better at being unpredictable and thinking several turns ahead. This might not be so relevant for your army, Ailaros, since it is slow by nature, and hence can't redeploy easily. But I imagine a good player of a fast army, like Dash, has the ability to threaten to do a lot of things 3 turns from the current one, and can take advantage of that.

Finally, I would like to point out that results from other games suggest that luck won't be the determining factor for top players. I think a useful comparison is Poker. We all know that top Poker players are successful due to skill, not luck. It is interesting to note that the skills that separate a winner from a loser change as the overall skill level of the game increases. If you're playing against idiots and people who are there to gamble, simply not playing bad starting hands can be enough to make you a major winner. As the skill and stakes increase, everyone stops playing crap hands, so you have to get good at other things, like buying a free card or switching up your play. I think the same thing is true at 40k. The most basic thing is to know the rules and not make obvious mistakes. The next is to make a decent list, etc.

I will close by noting that we can find evidence for the importance of luck by looking at the top ranked players. If that set of players doesn't have a lot of turnover year-to-year, luck really can't be a major factor in tournament success. Is that the case? I don't know the answer myself.

Ailaros wrote:Ah, my point wasn't that bad luck causes mistakes, it was that it emulates mistakes. The end result is the same (a unit destroyed prematurely, for example), even if the means is different.

But they aren’t the same. Having a couple more transports blown up than average, or failing a few more saves is not the same as bad target priority, deploying when you should have reserved, running when you should have shot, advancing when you should have retreated. One gets a few models killed, the other wrecks your whole game. The game is not about killing things. Killing things is a tool to achieve the objective. Getting lucky and killing a few more things than normal does not necessarily stop you from achieving the objective.

For example, the store I play it is LOADED with very similar chaos armies. Every now and then I get lucky and blow all the transports up (or most) in the first turn or two. The not as good players keep rushing at me with no hope of ever making it. The smartest player, who I have never beat, find terrain to sink into, hangs on, goes to ground when appropriate and doesn’t when it isn’t, and keeps enough of his force alive that when he moves on objectives turn 5 and 6 it very difficult for me to move on the same objectives.

He keeps his cool, makes good decisions all the time, and even when the dice favor me strongly I can’t beat him. I’m getting closer each time, but I’m still not quite there.

Ailaros wrote:So, it seems that there is this idea that a good player can cancel the effects of bad luck, and that the better they are, the more it cancels. A perfect player, then, would be totally unaffected by bad luck.

It's not that they are unaffected, they just adjust tactics and adjust style depeding on what happens. Sometimes they make boring decisions but if they are the right decision than that's what it takes.

Ailaros wrote:Remember, just as good player skill can mitigate bad luck, so can good player skill exploit bad luck.

Absolutely true. But if you build lists that aren't dependend on linch pin units, and you practise situations where you lose important elements of your army, then you can mitigate what your opponent is able to do to you, and you can adapt, and you can still win.

Now if someone in one round of shooting blows away 75% of your army then there probably is nothing you can do. But I have never seen or heard that happen. And people do blow away game changing amounts of stuff in a single turn, but then change with the game.


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And I'm no expert in it, I'm learning just like the next guy. But I have watched some pretty good people and this is how they do it.

MrEconomics wrote:Primarily, I'm thinking of list building... Players have won with decks that were not good against all comers, but were good against the decks the top players used.

Right. Working with meta is an example of player skill. A person not bringing any anti-AV14 isn't actually a mistake, if they know they're not going to come up against AV14. It would be list tailoring (a meta-based player skill), not an error.

MrEconomics wrote:Lastly, I wonder if some top players are successful because they are better at being unpredictable and thinking several turns ahead. This might not be so relevant for your army, Ailaros, since it is slow by nature, and hence can't redeploy easily.

Sure, but movement is only one part of tactics, and you have to take player skill as a whole. I mean, most ork players aren't going to win a long-ranged shooting contest, but that doesn't mean orks aren't competitive. Likewise, just because a guard player doesn't bring skimmers means he's out of the running.

MrEconomics wrote:I think a useful comparison is Poker. We all know that top Poker players are successful due to skill, not luck.

Poker is really fascinating to me, actually, but it can't be applied directly here. In the end of a game of poker, the winner is most likely the last person not to fold. Yes, there still is a random element, but it's not the same. In 40k, you can see the results of your opponent's dice, and your opponent's randomness affects you, whether you care to believe it or not. For poker to really be analogous to 40k, you'd need to be able to see your opponent's hand.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:

Ailaros wrote:Ah, my point wasn't that bad luck causes mistakes, it was that it emulates mistakes. The end result is the same (a unit destroyed prematurely, for example), even if the means is different.

But they aren’t the same. Having a couple more transports blown up than average, or failing a few more saves is not the same as bad target priority, deploying when you should have reserved, running when you should have shot, advancing when you should have retreated. One gets a few models killed, the other wrecks your whole game.

Yes, but that's because you're not looking at the same level of mistake v. luck. Having a couple more transports blown up than average is a much smaller deal than advancing when you should have retreated.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:But if you build lists that aren't dependend on linch pin units, and you practise situations where you lose important elements of your army, then you can mitigate what your opponent is able to do to you, and you can adapt, and you can still win.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote: The not as good players keep rushing at me with no hope of ever making it. The smartest player, who I have never beat, find terrain to sink into, hangs on, goes to ground when appropriate and doesn’t when it isn’t, and keeps enough of his force alive that when he moves on objectives turn 5 and 6 it very difficult for me to move on the same objectives.

Exactly. Skill makes more of a difference when you're in the realm of more serious mistakes.

I'm not arguing that skill never matters, I'm arguing that it matters less the more you go, relative to other factors, like luck.

Ailaros wrote:
Yes, but that's because you're not looking at the same level of mistake v. luck. Having a couple more transports blown up than average is a much smaller deal than advancing when you should have retreated.

But you almost never see the type of luck that would equal a truly bad decision. Even in our game, as good as I was rolling, it equated to one extra vehicle that was stunned, and a couple extra guardsmen killed every turn. The type of negative results that are produced through luck, even the worst luck, just aren’t the same as the results created from bad play.

Ailaros wrote:
I'm not arguing that skill never matters, I'm arguing that it matters less the more you go, relative to other factors, like luck.

I would say that if you had two players of the exact same skill (skill including decision making, target priority, list building, and tons of other things) then luck is going to be the deciding factor because it’s the only thing that isn’t exactly equal. But if there is even a small disparity in skill that disparity is more influential then a very large disparity in luck. And having people with the exact same skill level is really never going to happen. And that level may change, one day I may be able to pull a fast one over you. You think about it, the next time you try something I have never seen before. The odds of a match coming down to nothing but luck are very, very small. I would say I have never lost solely on luck. With every game I can point to decisions that were wrong and would have increased my chances of winning. Had I made those decisions I might have won. Not saying it can’t happen, it just hasn’t happened to me.