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This thread has probably bin on here more times then i can count but here it go's

With this game being a dice rolling game, and a skirmish base set rule system (And the numbers never going higher then six or lower then 1). I here alot of people talk about how they got skill and how there army is the best list out there and how they know every tactic better then Santa knows Christmas. But simply, It's luck that's winning you game's, one of these days your gunna have a game, that you will rarely see anything go past a 3 on the dice, and your gonna be thinking "BUT MY ARMY IS THE MAAAN, WTF, WTF!!!

This thought has come to many plenty of times, but it hit me harder then bricks when me and my twin brother were having a HQ battle. Me-(Ghazghkull) my brother-(Logan Grimnar) were fighting. I rolled to go 1st and won. And as we went on I called WAAAGH and charged him, he went first cause i had a power claw, and caused 1 wound to me cause of my awesome saves. then i attacked, and got 2 wounds on him which i thought 'OK' or 'Meh' then he came back at me, but gave me no wounds i thought "PHEW..lucky for me" and then i went on with 5 attacks, 4 to hit and 2 to wound, i got 4 out of 5 to hit, and when i rolled to wound, i got 4 for 4, then he went to save "belt of ruse' 4+ inv save, he made all them...unlucky for me eh? With 3 Wounds left on ghaz i thought i was fine, then logan came to make me roll 4 wounds.....i rolled 3 one's and 1 two.....WHERE I HAVE SHOULD HAVE WON...i lost....with the odds on my side...Ghaz is dead...with Ghaz's 'skill' higher then logan..i still lost...

See if there is any sort of skill in this game. Its really only in the deployment and that's about it

Don't take this as me ranting on because i lost, we thought it was really funny and had another go. I just simply wanna see what you guys have to say about it
And don't get me wrong, love the game, bin playing for a long time and thousands spent on it, so I'm not a beginner ranting on about the rules. Cheers

This game has elements of luck, however skill definitely plays a part.

This is why the top players consistently ARE top players.

Continual losses or continual wins are the sign of player ability and/or army awesomeness.

I gotta say, true "tactics" do not exist so much in this game, but there is a skill involved and you can tell by consistancy which players got it and which don't got it.

A lot of player ability in my opinion is involved in exploiting loopholes and stacking the most efficient army of exemplary units while minimizing the "meh" units too. Cooking from the good ol' spam and cheese menu is a skill itself, a skill of designing an army that doesn't take much skill to put into effectiveness.

It annoys me when people ask for "tactics" advice on an army and instead get suggestions on how to tweak their list - as if army creation is a substitute for tactics. But, in a restricted sized board with finite resources, to a point it is.

Both armies are stuck in that space, so the more efficient one is the better one. Grand strategy plays no part in 40k games as the theatre of battle is restricted. There are no feints of troop positioning, no surprise attacks short of stuff that is rolled for pretty randomly like flank entrances - nothing like setting up a plan to trap an enemy like in real world cases of great generalship. The enemy is already trapped, he is stuck in a 4x6 area full of weapons with enough range to find im, and has to survive for 6 turns. I don't think a 'tactics' or strategic thinking approach works at all in this game. There is a skill involved though in optimizing an army, assessing calcullated risks, weighing objectives priority versus engagement priority, predicting outcomes of assaults before committing to them. All of these add up to skillful players winning more games.

Skill definitely plays a part in 40k. Army selection, deployment, fire priority, all of these elements (and more) require skill.

Your example happens to be filled with statistical outliers, e.g. the chance of rolling 4 4+ saves in a row (essentially what your brother did) is .5 x .5 x .5 x .5 = 6.25%. There are worse odds out there but none that I'd be willing to bet on...

If you're using Orks the massive amount of dice that you're using should practically guarantee that your going to get average results. Learning how to get the results that you want with those average rolls is another place where skill is very important IMHO.

You're looking at this in a vacume.

Each individual action (unit a shoots unit b or) is subject to some degree of luck, sure you know 30 slugga's should hit with about 10 shots, but that doesn't mean its impossible for 20 to hit (or none at all!). Having all 30 boys in a squad hit is insanely lucky, but a skillful player would have a back up for their backup plan. If their opponent is fortunate (1 remaining boy wrecks an untouched raider by himself in one shot ect.), there will still be a hundred other ways to win the game, if you only have one hope of winning, you obviously haven't made good tactical decicions up to that point.

As nos said, why would the same people consistantly beat face at the highest level tournaments if there was no skill involved? Nobody is that lucky!

Egg Baskets:

One of my first games in what I call "new" 40k (3rd ed. marines vs SoB) - I call it "new" because I was gone for years and was used to 2nd ed., so everything was new (AP? what's that? Where's my overwatch?).. My opponent had an exorcist. I killed it on the first turn with a krak missile. I really had no idea what the thing was I just saw big artillery tank and thought "blow it up". The opponent had a very hard time for the rest of the game, and was really crippled by the loss of this thing, as in a bolter shootout, my simple horde of tactical squads with standard weapons upgrades (i.e. all missiles and flamers) were far better off than his SoB. If that thing had lived to ever get a shot off, or so I was told, I would have been the one suckin it big time. All of this over a lucky first turn kill that either maked or breaked the game outcome. All eggs in that one basket. Basket got dropped.

In another game, against orks, a player tried the huge mobs + PK nob green tide on me with Gaz and a deathstar of nobz around him. What could I do, outnumbered about 6+ to 1? Oh yeah, 'mind war' the nobs and tarpit each whole mob with a warwalker, while just avoiding the deathstar until I had picked away at it. This led the ork player into a huff and puff session about how 'if i hadn't had mind war, my walkers would be so dead.. blah blah..' well, yeah, but you should have thought about that when you put all your eggs in one basket, right?

Another game, another super points sink megabadass to deal with, and this time a lowly Diresword. Well wouldn't you know it, that roll you always assume you will make as its 10 or less? He failed it and lost his gigantic superstar character who was supposed to be eating my dire avenger squad like Khorneflakes was just... dead! Neat how that 1/18 chance of it working comes through (after having to get a wound through with the whopping S3), because, 17/18 of the time he has to make this roll, his character would have survived and slaughtered my unit and proceded to do the same to each subsequent unit as he rolled down the line.

He claimed to be unlucky to die from something like that and that if his mega-character had lived, he would have been eating my spirit stones and blah blah blah. If If If. Well, there's a reason they put those slim chances in there. If you put half the points of your army into one super unit in a game where there are many many ways of having an unlucky, unlikely fate befall him - sooner or later it will. If it doesn't then your Logan madness or Gaz deathstar or whichever OTT power unit will dominate and you can gloat all you want. If it suffers that mishap, you claim the opponent got 'lucky'? What, lucky that you invested in a gamble that gave you a massively advantaged unit that wasn't completely impervious? Is that lucky, or is that just cautious army building?

Thinking of alternative ways of doing things is skillfull.

Having stuff that has a higher probabilty of killing the other side than they have in killing you is no skill at all. (Unless they win then well done them)

shhh... don't tell the wound allocation guys.. they'll cry.

At the end of the day the only time luck comes into play is obviously with the result of the dice. The reason why luck isn't the hugest factor is simply because in my opinion it depends on the units fielded. Models with a higher balistic are obviously going to have a better chance of scoring hits than an equal number of shots taken by lower balistic models.

So the end result does indeed come down to luck, however there is a huge amount of tactics involved as you play the game that help to either decrease or increase your ability to come out of it better or ... be more lucky.

For example, if you hide your tank behind a building and then bring it out only when you want to shoot then your chances of YOUR tank surviving are far higher than if you brought your tank out into the open early on in the game in order to take the exact shot. The simple act of hiding the tank means that it could be saved long enough to take its one shot rather than if it had been blown up on Turn 1 before it was able to take its shot.

Another example would be that you have a squad of 10 Marines inside a Rhino(transport) and nearby you have an enemy squad of assualt marines hiding behind a building. It would be bad tactics to disembark knowing you cannot attack them but then allowing him to move, shoot then assualt you in his/her turn when you could have left them in the Rhino instead and he/she would have been forced to destroy the Rhino first and if failed, they would be closer in the next turn for you to shoot and/or assualt. That simple act of tactics has made it statisically more likely for that squad to survive and even get the upper hand.

Yet another example is I've had a Space Marine Chaplain survive three consquecutive shots from 2Lascannons and a Tau Railgun in a 1vs1vs1 game, whereas he died in the first round of CC against a Daemon prince in another game.

In Closing
So While "Yes" there IS luck in 40K and it does play an important part in the outcome, its the tactics that are used by the players that can hugely affect the likelyhood of getting favourable results over less favourable.

Shh.... Don;t let Dash see this topic ;-)

There is definitely both a luck (that is, a random factor) and skill factor. A skilled player utilizes the rules to minimize the negative effects of luck. However, the degree of impact that luck has is subject to debate! I maintain that, player skill being played at equal level and lists being equivalent in power, luck *is* the deciding factor. However, one player playing better than another or mismatched lists will have a significant impact on the game generally greater than raw luck.

Some armies are more resilient to bad luck than others too. I don't mean the specific lists, but some Codex are just meant to be very resilient. Small numbers suffer more from bad dice taking saves or hit rolls or wound rolls and mighty powerful vehicles costing loads of points die just as easily as a rhino to a bad roll on the damage chart.

A single powerful shot is nowhere near as likely to accomplish anything as a TL or higher ROF weapon that accomplishes less, but at least doesn't just miss. Having the single powershot weapons in the hands of the worst skilled marksmen is something I am always frustrated with in my Eldar.

Fast but flimsy armies like Eldar/DE, or certain IG builds that rely on flimsy troops with move-or-fire weapons in massed gunline for protection are all a lot less forgiving of a less-than-optimal move (or a Lash) than something with T4 3+ who can often stomp around stupidly in the open and get away with it.

For all I find them extremely mediocre, I think the Vanilla marine codex is one of the most resistant to bad luck ruining your day kind of codex out there (next to Orks) because they just don't have anything that awesome to place your bets on. It's all "kinda" good but not really superunit good, some of it kinda sucks but is still decent. It's so balanced across the board to any kind of game, I don't see it ever really excelling, but I don't see it ever realling suffering much to bad matchups or even bad dice. I used to beat up Marine armies all the time, but I never really SMASHED a marine army ever (or got smashed by one) like I have to some of the more high stakes egg basket kind of armies.

A good player is one who is able to capitalize on their good luck and addapt to their bad luck.

Luck is a part of the game, but there is a ton of skill involved as has been mentioned previously. Bad rolls are going to happen, but so are good ones. Statistically, over enough rolls and enough games, the "luck" part will average out.

Anecdotally, I played my first game against Necrons last week. I wiped out a unit of 20 warriors. They passed their WBB rolls. All twenty of them. If you whip out your calculator, thats over a one in a million chance! I will (probably!) never see that happen again, it was incredible.

I've killed Ghaz pleanty of times with Grimnar...
Luck is a part of it but getting to the point that makes luck the deciding factor takes skill and tactics...

I had one Berserker weather 20 Pulse Rifle shots and two Plasma Rifle Shots, and he still managed to butcher the Fire Warriors before taking 2 our of the 3 wounds off the Crisis Suit before croaking. He should, by all means, be a dead man.

Anecdote aside.

I think this is why people advocate spam lists and redundancy, this way you simply overkill to make sure what you want dead dies and stays dead when you want it, and that you'll always have another unit to pick up the slack should one fall.

I'm going to make a broad and sweeping (and mildly offensive to the kind of people whose opinions I don't respect anyway) statement:

People who believe tactics and skill have little or less to do with 40k than luck only believe that because they do not understand either tactics or skill.

I wrote a an *extremely* long Dark Eldar tactica. NOTHING in it has anything to do with army building or unit selection. An entire section of it is dedicated entirely to the most important tactic of any Dark Eldar player, which has nothing to do with tape measures, dice rolling, or models.

Another section of the tactica deals with tactics for dealing with your opponent.

People say that your list is 50% of it, and your skill and luck make up the other 50%. That's a load of hogwash. My Necrons - the worst codex in 40k - with a tiny number of Necrons, an effective army of 11 models (yay wraiths) - and I play close combat Necrons - is undefeated. Necrons are sad, and I consider any soul who fields them against me to be valiant, brave, and good-spirited, but ultimately doomed to die. So why do mine win?

Skill is knowing what to do on the table, moving, shooting, assaulting, how to mitigate bad luck, finding advantage.....and none of those things touch on tactics - which is the HOW to go about applying skill, the WHY, the WHEN, and the WHERE.

There's more to winning at 40k than most people can grasp. That ridiculous 10 page guide on Dark Eldar...is a sampling of my thoughts. On one army. Not even a complete DE tactics guide, or even a playing guide, but a high level touch on several important things - but not all, or even most. The fact that virtually none of those, or any of the other things important to tactics every come up for discussion around here....is indicative of how much tactical discussion goes on around here.

And the reason the people with it don't discuss it....well, Ketara summed it up well elsewhere - and it translates roughly into, "Dakka is a gigantic trash-heap, and the effort to plant a flower is too much when everyone keeps dumping trash on it."

Even this post - mildly worded, slightly frustrated - a bunch of people are going to read it and feel like I'm categorizing them. Because whether they will consciously admit it or not, they're the people I'm talking about. And they'll be indignant. They'll call me abrasive and arrogant. My entire existence here on Dakka is dedicated to trying to lift the communal tactical intelligence level a notch or two. Stupid people fight me at every turn. Troll my threads, PM me hatemail, tell me how worthless and arrogant I am and "HOW DARE YOU THINK YOU KNOW BETTER THAN US?!? HOW DARE YOU USE YOUR EXPERIENCE AS A PLATFORM FROM WHICH TO GIVE ADVICE?!?"



Ok, I'm done.

Tactics are more intrinsically tied into 40k than most people can comprehend. Hell, I'm a MENSA invitee, a West Point graduate, former professional soldier that's been both enlisted and commissioned that got an Ivy League education in tactics. That's a long way from the orphan who ran away to join the army a week out of high-school.

And *I* get confused, mix up tactics and strategies, make sometimes glaring errors, approach tactical situations with the wrong expectations and I work through permutations of possibilities.....why would I expect mere mortals and lifelong civilians to be better at it than me?

Don't presume you've figured it out. None of us (including me) ever will. There are only degrees of understanding its elements.

Personally, as someone new here, I wish you'd post more of your insights (with your 'offensive' in your face style, which I find hugely amusing, and very reminiscent of Mark Twight, the US climbing guru, who many climbers despised for his elitism, to their detriment as many, indeed most, of his thoughts were useful, sometimes very insightful).

Certainly, a lot of rubbish will be posted here. it's an internet forum, what else is to be expected? I probably post my fair share of rubbish -- and more. But if people like you continue to turn out quality posts - like in your DE thread - then some people will learn from that. And they'll get better because of it. And you'll have advanced 40K understanding. Okay, no Nobel prizes for that, but what the hell, virtue is it's own reward (so I'm told).

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm going to make a broad and sweeping (and mildly offensive to the kind of people whose opinions I don't respect anyway) statement:
rant
rant
rant

C'mon Dash. You're not fooling anyone. We all know that you made a substantial sacrifice to the dice gods a few years ago and have been coasting by with pure luck ever since.

Everyone know that there's only 3 lists that stand any chance of being successful, and none of them are xenos. You're able to win with Necrons and DE because you roll a 6 95% of the time.

Luck is all that matters in 40k. I mean, didn't you see the OP? Two models locked in combat rely entirely on die rolls in order to win.

QED.

/sarcasm

Well I read your tactica Dash and don't find you abrasive either (and arrogant is just another way of saying you know you are good, so I guess that applies, but not negatively).

Anybody who says the game is 50% list 50% luck 50% this that or the other is being annoyingly reductionist in my opinion.

Sure they all factor in, but percentages? Just a pet peeve of mine. A power list will do better than a crummy list when both are challenged by bad luck or bad play. But a not-so-great list can still do well with good play, despite bad luck, or facing a badly played great list. Saying any of these are unimportant is silly, but putting 'luck' on the top of the factors involved as opposed to the other factors is missing the point that it is possible to create your own luck, to use fallback plans instead of the one big game-breaker plan that could go horribly wrong with a bit of bad luck. If we pick and choose our risks carefully, bad luck becomes far less a factor. And no, I can't provide a percentage of how much less.

Dashofpepper wrote:My Necrons - the worst codex in 40k - with a tiny number of Necrons, an effective army of 11 models (yay wraiths) - and I play close combat Necrons - is undefeated.

11 model Necron army? Explain.

Radical wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:My Necrons - the worst codex in 40k - with a tiny number of Necrons, an effective army of 11 models (yay wraiths) - and I play close combat Necrons - is undefeated.

11 model Necron army? Explain.

No...I said that it is an effective Necron army of 11 models.

Warriors are mandatory garbage and useless. So they sit in reserve every game until forced to come in, then pretty much hide as far away from everything as possible unless I need to teleport them onto objectives.

My army is literally 9 wraiths and a destroyer Lord with Monolith support for dual WBB rolls. And a Deceiver. I suppose that's 14 models. The Wraiths do all the work though. 228 points of my army wishes it didn't exist and hides every game hoping to go unnoticed. 365 points of my army is one model that wishes it had better than a 4+ save, that poisoned weapons didn't exist, and that it could move more than 6" per turn or be fleet, especially considering that he's a GOD. And that GODS couldn't be subjected to Instant Death. Among other things.

That leaves 10 models that matter, and 3 models that try to keep those 10 models in the fight.

[quote guy#1]: Stuff

[quote guy #2]: Moar stuff

[quote guy #3]: even moar stuff lolz

[quote guy #1]: rebuttal

[quote guy #2]: o'rly

[quote guy #3]: ya rly

Actual Warhammer > Theoryhammer

40k is a game and some people know how to play games better than others. Crap armies are crap armies but you have someone play that army to the point of mastery and they can hold up against better armies out there. You know what the army can do and against other armies you know what they can do then.

Just out of curiosoty is it luck or some kind of dice rolling skill how ive penned and exsploded a land raider first turn for 57 consecutive times?

Also sorry about spelling and grammer

Knowing the probabilities of each unit's success in a given situation (during a battle, not in the army selection process) and using the right unit for the job? That's skill.
Maximizing the effect of a unit's abilities by working with the table's terrain and selecting the right targets for the unit to attack so as to make the most of it's abilities? That is also skill.
There are more examples, I'm sure.