luck and tactics in 40k

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**Reecius**

Ailaros wrote: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.

This is an excellent analysis and one that my personal experience largely reinforces.

I play in a LOT of tournaments, typically several a month. And what I have noticed is that in good games, against good opponents with good lists in balanced missions (reduction of variables) it simply comes down to who makes less mistakes and who gets a few lucky dice to fall their way. That's it.

Is it disheartening?

It depends on your point of view. It has made me a more relaxed player for the most part (although I still get VERY engaged in competitive games) as I have come to accept that a lot of it is simply out of my hands.

However, the counterpoint is that we see the same players winning consistently. So, given the above premise you have to accept that either they are more lucky (which is contrary to the very nature of probability), cheating (which in 99.9% of the cases is going to be false) or that skill does play more of a roll than you think, albeit not by much. Victory or failure in a tight game comes down to minutiae (as it does in all high level competition). It is just that in our game, unlike a lot of others, luck plays a much larger roll.

I believe that skill in playing and list building is the greatest determinate of success or failure in 40K. However, as you state, as skill levels and all other variables come closer together so as to become negligible (or at least less determinate), then the uncontrollable and inherently random element of chance plays a larger part in the game. But, given the real-world facts that the same players consistently do well in tournaments, skill still reigns supreme in 40K, otherwise real-world results would be much more skewed.

**The Grog**

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:
Because the negative results produced from bad play are much greater than the negative results produced from bad luck.

Sufficiently good/bad luck can destroy any plan. Watching a Eldar player lose two grav tanks on turn one to glancing hits (this was 3rd). Watching that same player with White Scars have a Chaplain charge 3 times and spend 8 phases in close combat, yet not cause a single wound. Having a turn where you roll 30% under average is crippling, just like having repeated mulligans in magic is crippling.

Another thing to considering is consistent luck, be it good or bad. Stat simply says that things trend towards average over larger numbers of events. There are still outliers, and still lucky players.

**Kilkrazy**

Dashofpepper wrote:Alright....I had typed up a pretty lengthy response, highlighting key issues that I wanted to address, then realized that some of the presumptions that I was going to have to respond to (like all my opponents being really bad) are ridiculous, or that I already hit them.

I will offer this instead as a note on minimizing luck's factor in your game.

When 10 Orks fight 10 Marines, they are going to need luck to win the combat.

When 20 Orks fight 10 Marines, they are going to need luck to wipe out the marines.

When 100 Orks fight 10 Marines, luck is no longer a factor in the Marines dying.

This is common sense, but think on it deeper than face value.

This ties into my point that good players try to set up situations in which luck is no longer a factor. Naturally they will do this for crucial tactical situations rather than trivial ones.

Ailaros countered that the opponent does the same, which is true, however if both players are minimising the effect of luck in tactical situations, then the effect of luck in the game as a whole is reduced.

I don't believe luck can be eradicated from 40K, because the scope of the game does not offer enough time and space to make all the manoeuvres you might want to.

**Nurglitch**

Warhammer 40,000 is about managing luck and potential. How does this even come up?

If you want to know about managing games of luck, look up classical game theory. If you want to know about managing games of potential, look up combinatorial game theory.

You use the likelihood of some event occuring, or not, and cross-reference that with the event's potential value to winning you the game. Sometimes it's a no-brainer, it's the only way you could win, and sometimes you might as well, between two otherwise identical S9 shots, the one with AP2 can be expected to return better results than the one with AP4.

I think the reason Ailaros has come upon his curious theory is that he's used to thinking of the odds of stuff happening in 40,000, and not thinking of the value obtained. You're not going to get luckier by rolling a few hundred more dice, and you're not going to roll significantly closer to the expected value simply by rolling a fw more either.

However, by rolling more dice, you will benefit from more effects when you do get lucky. To understand this we need to turn to the Bolt Gun, and its developments: the Stormbolter and the Twin-Linked Bolter.

Supposing a Tactical Space Marine is firing the weapon, notice that at 12"-24" the Twin-Linked Bolter expects a hit-rate of 0.88 while the Bolter expects a hit-rate of 66. Comparatively, the Stormbolter expects a hit-rate of 1.33. That's because the Stormbolter has twice the firepower, whereas the Twin-Linked Bolter only increases its chance of hitting by the likelihood of a miss being re-rolled successfully.

Now, interestingly, the Twin-Linked Bolter is better at 1"-12" ranges, expecting 1.76 hits, as it gets twice the potential, from the extra shot, and the re-roll to both.

Likewise, getting lucky at the beginning of the game has knock-on effects because Warhammer 40,000 is always about managing resources. This was such a problem in 4th edition that the reserves rules were broadened to enable players to reserve their armies out of the harm's way of T1, and the game start finally matched set-up to player turn priority with a randomiser in Seize the Initiative so that the game didn't rely on winning the role for the first turn. But the advantage was not eliminated.

For example, suppose you have three units of Heavy Weapon Teams with Lascannons. They can shoot up to three Rhinos, in any combination. Without any worry about terrain, contents, mission, etc, the ideal fire pattern would be to shoot on lascannon at each Rhino. That's so you can maximize the amount of damage you can do if you get lucky. Alternately if the mission is to capture an objective and only one Rhino full of Tactical Marines was within 13" of the objective when the game could end next turn?

Here's where player organization comes in, devising a fire plan, wagering not only that a particular result will occur, but that it will enhance your ability to win the game.

For example, suppose you have a unit of Chaos Space Marines. You could take a pair of Melta Guns, so that the Chaos Space Marines can charge the contents. However, even if successful in destroying the Rhino, the opposing player can place the wreckage or crater between the Tactical Marines in the Rhino to claim cover and cause difficult terrain to short-circuit a charge.

Alternately you can rely on another unit killing the vehicle, and a unit of Chaos Space Marines with two Flamerthrowers ready to move up close and rapid fire whatever falls out of the Rhino. The number of hits is usually equivalent to a round of close combat except no worries about being attacked in return until the following turn.

Very alternatively, and this doesn't really work with regular infantry, you move and run to surround the vehicle with the unit, blocking off emergency disembarkation, and shooting the vehicle with the other unit. Jump Infantry though, like Gargoyles, are great at it.

Each tactic has its pros and cons, given the likelihood of accomplishing the given tasks in order, but also in positioning given the likelihood of failing to accomplish destruction of the Rhino and the Tactical Marines inside, and the costs of doing so (say, leaving a Land Raider alive if using an external unit to shoot).

After all, remember that plays in 40,000 can always fail, the "1s before modification are always failures" rule. Rather than putting you at the mercy of fate, it places a floor of cost to your actions: If the cost of your action is greater than the cost of doing nothing then you really shouldn't do it.

Of course, this isn't a cost in points, but in increasing your likelihood of winning the game.

**pdawg517**

Luck can never be fully eradicated from the game so long as we are using dice or any other means of simulating an uncertain outcome (flipping coins, random number generators, etc.). But as stated in this thread, we can TRY to reduce the factor of luck through redundancy and making sound tactical decisions. But in the end, lady luck will still play a part in the game no matter how much we try to reduce that factor.

@ the OP,

I think this thread is interesting from a theoretical point of view. In theory 2 players with the same list and same skill, the game would boil down to luck. But in reality, no 2 players are exactly equal. Also as mentioned earlier, the "small" mistakes good players make become huge mistakes against good opponents.

**nyenyec**

How much skill is there to learn in 40K?

There is an interesting analysis of two player games by a mathematician (Laszlo Mero) that indicates the "depth" of a game, i.e. how much you can improve your skills.
(Sorry, can't find a good link.)

Let's say there is a spectrum of players from a newbie, who learned the rules yesterday and the absolute perfect player.

You can divide up this spectrum into layers, where to a gamer to be qualified as layer X has to have the skills to beat the players in the layer below 75% of the time.
(E.g. you're layer 2 if you can beat total noobs 75% of the time.)

Some games, like chess have a lot of depth (many layers) and can take years to master. Go is one of the deepest games by this definition and the skill level between an average player and a master is just enormous.

We would find out how deep 40K really is if it had an ELO system like chess or dans/kyus like Go.

I actually think that 40K is not that deep, a beginner still has a chance to beat an average player.
E.g. http://warhammer40kbloodangels.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-player-profile-my-friend-jim.html

**jmurph**

I agree, nyenyec. Chess is inherently skill (not chance) based, and GO has limited chance (similar to cards). 40K has greater chance than either, which, as a correlary, limts the impact of skill. 40k is simply not designed for competitive play, despite some veteran players wanting to be regarded as some sort of tactical genius. It simply requires basic probability understanding and some spacial aptitude. Contigency planning is very shallow compared to more classical games. Which makes it more accessible to new players and arguably more "fun" since these factors can allow a newer player to beat a more skillful player.

It's a fun, light game based largely on chance and should be enjoyed as such.

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

ElCheezus wrote:However, there's a point where bad luck *does* emulate mistakes, as Ailaros suggests. The example mentioned that a small mistake cost a unit a few models, which then reduced its ability to perform later on. Rolling poorly on armor saves emulates this perfectly, and can cost you the exact same number of models.

Yeah but a truly bad mistake isn’t going to get a few guys killed. It is going to get an entire unit whipped, it might start a run on an entire side of the board, it might put a unit out of position so they can’t claim an objective. Fairly minor mistakes can have BIG game impacts. Substantially bad luck does not impact the game nearly as much as a minor mistake.

nyenyec wrote:How much skill is there to learn in 40K?

A lot. Maybe not as much as chess, but maybe. Either way there is a lot to be mastered. Just learning the strengths and weaknesses of your own and other peoples armies can take a LONG time.

I’m not very good at chess so this may also be true with other competitively played games, but 40k is very unforgiving. If you deploy when you should have reserved, it can cost you the game. If you advance too soon, or not soon enough, it can cost you the game. If you assault the wrong unit, or shoot the wrong thing, even just once, it can cost you the game. Everybody wins every now and then, but if you want to win consistently, and if you want to win big tournaments, you need to make good decision and make them virtually all the time. Knowing how to win in all this situations is a skill, then executing every time is a skill on its own.

And a new player might beat someone who has been playing a while. But just because you are new doesn’t mean you are bad, and just because you have played awhile doesn’t mean you are good. There are eight year old chess prodigies that beat grown men who have been playing since they were eight.

**Redbeard**

I agree, 40k is not a deep game. But, on a fundamental level, it's also not a game that's intended for serious competition.

Evidence:

Well, first, there's the designers own statements to that effect.

Then, there's the fact that the game is clearly written to sell models, without a thought for balance. The idea of creating a new rule system every 3 or 4 years, while taking longer than that in many cases to update part of the game system (codexes) should be evidence of that. The fact that something so simple as a rhino can have multiple versions, each for a different number of points reveals that balance is not something given a high priority in the development studio, pushing sales is. Not selling enough Rhinos are 50 points each, better cut their price and give them better built in equipment...

Each codex is developed, seemingly, in a vacuum, with little thought given to how the introduction of new powers will effect prior codexes (after all, they've already sold those models).

But, okay, assume then that you take only the most competitive books, and only their most competitive units (what a lot of tournaments seem to involve anyway).

The game is still fundamentally flawed from a competitive standpoint. Luck, whether you're able to mitigate it or not, is a huge factor in games, especially in the early turns. If you fire your entire army at your opponent, making 100% correct decisions, and fail to achieve even a single shaken result, you're probably in trouble. If their every shot on you not only pens your AV14, but gets past your forcefield save and explodes your battlewagons back in your deployment zone, you're in for a world of hurt.

Most competitive pursuits, be they sports or games, are based on multiple rounds/turns/halves, with the 'advantage' given alternatively to each player/side. Chess tournaments are rarely single-game affairs, especially at the high levels. M:tG matches are best 2-of-3, with each player getting the option for first turn at least once. Baseball's World Series is a best-of-seven event. Boxing has multiple rounds, poker plays multiple hands, and even American Football plays two halves, with each team receiving the ball once.

Not in 40k. You get one shot. Your army does better if it goes first, but you're going second - too bad. You may not ever get to use a certain unit if your opponent neutralizes it on their first turn, and while reserving can help, we've all had games where our needed reserves didn't show up until turn 5, well after the game had been decided.

All of the above fall into the category of luck. And multiple games would do wonders to address these issues, but last I checked, it's hard enough for people to want (or be able) to play six games in two days, let alone eighteen games over a week. So we settle for the luck-based environment.

Obviously, players who consistently perform are doing so because their skill is allowing them to defeat their opponents in spite of these possible pitfalls. But to think that they're doing so without any luck is a fallacy.

Something else to consider. If Reecius is right, and the greatest determinants of success are list building and play skill, what impact is the internet having on the games?

I'd venture to say that, in a vacuum, list building is more important than play skill. But, with the internet providing this skill for people, in practice, play skill becomes the more important factor.

List building is very complex. You're looking for synergies, balancing cost-effectiveness versus different target types, and hoping to achieve redundancy. Yet, thanks to blogs and forums, few people actually have to master this skill. Looking just on this forum, I'm not sure many people know what it takes to break down a codex to find the gems and the turds. But they don't need to, because someone else is doing that for them.

As a result, of the skills that a player really needs, it is the simpler one (knowing distances, optimizing firing order and target priorities, getting the most from your charges) that holds more sway over the games.

**Dashofpepper**

The reason I can't seem to get behind the "luck" argument is this:

There doesn't exist a 40k game in which both players are identical in skill, list power, and make no mistakes, such that dice play a significant impact.

Two games I'd like to use for example that onlookers would attribute the result of to luck:

1. In Game Six of the Nova Open, playing against Mark XXXXX's Blood Angels to see who would advance to the final table, our game (and my loss) was ultimately decided by a single D6. Two of them honestly. If either roll had gone my way, I would have won. At the end of the game, tied on everything, with a tie-breaker of table-quarters, we were tied on those too - with Mephiston standing exactly on the line between two table quarters. If he was standing in one quarter, I win. If he was standing in the other, I lose. I lost the D6. The previous turn, I was winning. If the game had ended on a 4+, I would have won. Instead, the game continued. While the end result of the game was decided on a dice roll....it wasn't determined by luck. Player skill (or lack thereof) put me in a position where the game *could* be decided by a D6 roll, instead of making such a roll irrelevant. I can point to several mistakes I made in the game (and I think I did in my battle report), including one *major* misunderstanding of a Deffrolla (The Nova Open ruled that the Ram itself has to explode a vehicle for the battlewagon to continue, the deffrolla results were irrelevant) that shifted tactical advantage away from me and to my opponent. The fact that a dice roll was critical in our game was a direct result of player skill.

2. In the Whiskey Challenge at the Nova Open last year, where we tied all conditions and had to go off the chart to find a tie-breaker, a couple instances of dice rolling were game changers. Example: Two units of Lootas completely whiffing against a unit of wolf-scouts who popped onto their table edge. Not a single one of them died. Bad rolling? Sure. Luck? No. It should have been irrelevant - if I hadn't forgotten that there were wolf scouts that *were* going to come on back there, I would have had something back there to assault and eat them. My Lootas were supposed to be on anti-tank duty, not trying to sort out an outflanking unit in the backfield. My dice rolling only mattered because I didn't take all components into consideration.

My point is that the probability of a dice roll or a set of dice rolls affecting the outcome of a game should *never* be a consideration to a skilled player. Playing an army full of AV10 open-topped skimmers against a mechanized Blood Angel army sporting 6 predators and 4 las/plas razorbacks....when my alpha strike of 26 darklight weapons gets me 2 hits and one shaken result, I still won. My opponent was good - but my rolling poorly doesn't affect my games, except to make them more challenging.

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

Dashofpepper wrote: While the end result of the game was decided on a dice roll....it wasn't determined by luck. Player skill (or lack thereof) put me in a position where the game *could* be decided by a D6 roll, instead of making such a roll irrelevant. I can point to several mistakes I made in the game ...

I think we have the same perspective on this. Your story kind of sums up what I said about pivotal roles being a symptom of bad play. I do it myself all the time, trying to do it less.

I don’t think anyone here is saying that luck doesn’t affect the game at all, but some of us think it is by a fairly large margin the thing that affects the game the least. And a truly great player figures out ways to win despite bad luck. Trying to that level myself.

**Redbeard**

Dashofpepper wrote:... At the end of the game, tied on everything, with a tie-breaker of table-quarters, we were tied on those too - with Mephiston standing exactly on the line between two table quarters. If he was standing in one quarter, I win. If he was standing in the other, I lose. I lost the D6. The previous turn, I was winning. If the game had ended on a 4+, I would have won. Instead, the game continued. While the end result of the game was decided on a dice roll....it wasn't determined by luck. Player skill (or lack thereof) put me in a position where the game *could* be decided by a D6 roll, instead of making such a roll irrelevant. ... The fact that a dice roll was critical in our game was a direct result of player skill.

So your opponent was a better player than you? Unless the die roll had gone your way, in which case you were the better player?

Not trying to be combative, and I totally understand your point about making mistakes leading to that die roll. However, your opponent must also have made mistakes in order for the game to come down to the die roll, no? If they'd played flawlessly, they'd have won outright and the die roll would have been unnecessary.

So you both made mistakes? That would point to luck indeed being the determining factor in a game between two equally, highly, skilled players, which was the OP's claim.

Just because you could have played better to avoid the chance that this die roll would cost you a game doesn't mean that the game was not decided by a single d6 roll - something that cannot, in any way, be assigned to skill (unless the roller was cheating at dice).

**sourclams**

This is a very good thread, and Ailaros' and others' similar observations largely reflect my own.

40k is the game that I play for 'funsies', meaning that I can build a relatively hard armylist and have one or two general 'plans' for gameplay and regardless of opponent, as long as I can slowly work my way through my mental checklist of target prioritization and objectives, I can win reliably unless my dice screw me.

**Shenra**

So, a sound player obscures his landraider, and a noob fires a lascannon at it. The noob is lucky, succeeding in the roll to hit and penetrate. The sound player is unlucky, failing the cover save. The noob is lucky, wrecking the raider.

In some instances, tactics and skill can be completely outmatched by luck. I don't care how good you are, if you roll ones and twos and your opponent rolls 5's and 6's your sunk. Period.

**Ailaros**

Kilkrazy wrote:Ailaros countered that the opponent does the same, which is true, however if both players are minimising the effect of luck in tactical situations, then the effect of luck in the game as a whole is reduced.

Ah hah, there we go. When both players are good, the "blue line" is brought down somewhat. Of course, it can only be brought down so much.

Anyways, there are a lot of good ideas here, which I'd like to thank people for. Most of what I'd have to say is rehash, so I won't bother. The one thing I'd note is to remember that things are relative, here.

I'm not setting up a situation where players have to be perfect, in order for luck to be controlled for, the two players just need to have the same skill level. To the effect that they don't, the amount that luck is a determining factor would be something like ( luck - difference in skill = amount that luck determines the outcome). The only thing I'm adding to this is that the better you get, the less getting better actually matters relative to things which basically don't change, like luck.

At no point am I saying that tactics or player skill becomes unimportant when you look at things as a whole. My point is that they matter relatively less the higher up you get. The idea that tactics are always what matters until you get up to perfect play (at which point it switches over to pure luck) seems a little strange to me. The less that controlled factors are dissimilar, the more uncontrolled factors matter to the outcome. At some point, luck matters more than tactics, and luck continues to matter more, the better players become, as the better players become, the less difference there is in skill level between them.

As for countering luck, once again, it's relative. Furthermore, there is an absolute part that seems to have gone unspoken. If you receive bad luck, and you lose a vehicle, no amount of planning will replace that vehicle that you lost. Yes, you can make your individual components of your list less necessary to victory, but you will never actually get that hardware back. It will never be a thing that the player can use to help achieve victory.

I mean, if you get shot at turn 1, and half your army falls back off the board, those units are gone. Tactics can not replace them, or the serious potential lost when they went away. Of course, this is an extreme example, as I don't think anyone would assume you could pull off victory with 1/2 your army missing unless you were playing against a much worse opponent, but this extreme points to the rule - when bad luck limits your options, your options are limited. When bad luck destroys stuff, those things are gone. Talk about some sort of infinite complexity if you will (which I have yet to see why we should), but if you get 100% of your army blown off the board turn 1, I really fail to see how tactics make the difference. Likewise, lesser luck would still have a lesser impact, but the impact would never go away.

Finally, there's something that I'd like to rehash. I think that talking about "mistakes" earlier was a poor way of putting it. Really, we should be talking about "risk" and "reward".

Now, certainly newer players will take bigger risks where, if successful, they will get little reward, and if they are unsuccessful, they will be severely punished. As you get better, you start more smartly assessing risk, making choices that lead to less awful punishment when the dice go your way, and to greater reward when they do. There is, however, no decision that a player can make that has NO risk of bad things happening, nor a decision that has only great possible outcomes. There is no "perfect move" as it were.

As such, in order to have success, you need to risk failure. Good players pick better decisions, but they do not pick risk-free ones (remember, your opponent also helps make this true). But here's the thing, the quality of the move you made is no guarantee of success. You can mitigate the price of failure, and you can increase your odds of success, but just doing something "right" doesn't mean that you'll get the desired result.

I think one of the things that some people are doing is looking at things post-facto, and that if something worked as desired, it was the right move, but if there were negative consequences, then the player must have made a "mistake". This kind of hindsight is not only useless, but it obscures a more pertinent fact. Regardless of the quality of the decisions you make, the end result is ALWAYS determined by luck.

So, in reality, we have to start from a base where 40k is ONLY a game of luck, like craps. From there, we can note that increasing player skill allows you to play the odds better, and to stack them somewhat in your favor, but the better you and your opponent get, the less it matters. You can only stack things so much in your favor, and your opponent is also trying to stack things against yours.

In the end, though, it's still all determined by dice.

**MrEconomics**

I think the following statement needs to be corrected:

Nurglitch wrote:You're not going to get luckier by rolling a few hundred more dice, and you're not going to roll significantly closer to the expected value simply by rolling a fw more either.

However, by rolling more dice, you will benefit from more effects when you do get lucky.

This is some dangerous thinking. It is true that the best and worse case scenarios tend to deviate much more strongly from the norm when there are a lot of dice involved than a few. For example, a unit of 5 Terminators failing 1 out of 1 armor save isn't as bad as failing 5 out of 5. We must remember, however, that the more dice that are involved, the less likely the worst case scenario becomes. A Terminator needing to make 1 armor save and failing is a 1 in 6 event, and can't be considered very improbable. Failing 5 out of 5 is a 1 in 7776 event, that is, it will happen less than .1% of the time. If this has happened to you more than once or twice in your 40k career, your dice are probably biased. The simple fact is that deviations from the mean outcome are common when the number of dice (or random draws in a more general sense) is small, while having overall results close to the mean approaches probability 1 as the number of dice gets large.

You do have a good point, however, in that throwing a few extra dice will not quickly move the overall result to the average once an overall deviation is present. The Law of Large Numbers only holds in the limit, as does the central limit theorem. Most reasonable random variables approach normality at a speed that is proportional to the square root of the number of trials, which is rather slow once you have more than a few trials.

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

Shenra wrote:In some instances, tactics and skill can be completely outmatched by luck. I don't care how good you are, if you roll ones and twos and your opponent rolls 5's and 6's your sunk. Period.

That's the whole point of the discussion. A lot of us don't think you are automatically sunk.

**Redbeard**

Okay, at what point do you consider yourself to be sunk.

Let's say that, after one turn each, at 2000 points, you've lost 33% of your forces, and have not made any significant impact on your opponent's force. He now outnumbers you 3:2.

Would you go into a 1500 point game with 1000 points and believe your skill would pull it out?

What if your opponent destroyed 50% of your forces on turn one, with no significant damage in return? Unlikely?

What if you're playing a fateweaver army, and, while you did you best to pick a landing spot, you did need to make sure your juggernauts could get in range of Big Bird and so tried to land them 14 inches away (knowing that between base size and both units running, that you could get there. But instead, your scatter die came up 12" right towards the bird, and you lost the unit to perils. And then, your opponent's opening salvo saw Big Bird take the one wound that scared him away too. Bam, you're down 800 points and your opponent has fired all of one gun. That's what, seven dice rolls (scatter, mishap, to-hit, to-wound, save, re-roll save, leadership). Plus, the lynch-pin of your strategy is gone. (Oh, right, good players never use units like Fateweaver...) But your skill can compensate...

I'm the first to recognize that skill is a huge part of 40k. The same people don't win game after game, event after event, without it depending on something they control. But, I'm not so blinded as to discount the role of luck either. And as a realist, you have to admit that, at some point, bad beats are just bad beats and no amount of skill could have changed that. Maybe your skill allows you to recover from a greater loss than someone else could. But at some point...

You know, would you put money on a four turn game where you started with 50% fewer points than your opponent? Where they got to pick which 50% you didn't get to use? Can your skill recover from an opening turn like that?

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

Redbeard wrote:Okay, at what point do you consider yourself to be sunk.

Let's say that, after one turn each, at 2000 points, you've lost 33% of your forces, and have not made any significant impact on your opponent's force. He now outnumbers you 3:2.

How often does this really happen? I was playing the shootiest army in the game and I had very solid dice and all I did was blow up two tanks, stun a third, and get one squad to go to ground.

But even assuming first turn shooting are devastating, you go into crisis mode and you either start playing for a tie and use lots of stall tactics (not stalling for time, but playing evasively on the board and using lots of speed bumps and stuff) or you press on as intended and hope the luck swings back your way. I say the former is the better choice, and the choice of someone who wants to win consistently.

Redbeard wrote:Would you go into a 1500 point game with 1000 points and believe your skill would pull it out?

What if your opponent destroyed 50% of your forces on turn one, with no significant damage in return? Unlikely?

Again, who loses 50% of their stuff on turn one? The game just isn’t designed like that. I had very strong dice, made very good target priority decisions, and I killed far less than 1/3 of his points.

If you are really worried that your opponent is going to cripple you before you get to do anything, reserve. If you do get crippled, play for the tie. If you want to win tournaments you can’t lose games. So when bad luck comes you either throw the towel in for the day or your get what points you can out of it.

Redbeard wrote: What if you're playing a fateweaver army, and, while you did you best to pick a landing spot, you did need to make sure your juggernauts could get in range of Big Bird and so tried to land them 14 inches away (knowing that between base size and both units running, that you could get there. But instead, your scatter die came up 12" right towards the bird, and you lost the unit to perils. And then, your opponent's opening salvo saw Big Bird take the one wound that scared him away too. Bam, you're down 800 points and your opponent has fired all of one gun. That's what, seven dice rolls (scatter, mishap, to-hit, to-wound, save, re-roll save, leadership). Plus, the lynch-pin of your strategy is gone. (Oh, right, good players never use units like Fateweaver...) But your skill can compensate...

I think you answered your own question when you said lynch-pin. You decided to build an army dependent on a not very tough 333 pt MC and 400 pts in slow models with a HUGE footprint. That’s inherent in your army build, you either accept it or have a plan for when this happens. You play that army long enough it is going to happen. Getting crushers to mishap on something is not that hard, then getting Fateweaver killed is not that hard either. I say this is a player problem not a dice problem.

Redbeard wrote: You know, would you put money on a four turn game where you started with 50% fewer points than your opponent? Where they got to pick which 50% you didn't get to use? Can your skill recover from an opening turn like that?

No, but I would put money on six turn game where I knew there is an incredibly small chance that a large portion of my capabilities will but cut out early on, but I still have a huge ability to dictate whether or not I achieve the mission.

Luck can only help you with killing stuff, it doesn’t necessarily help you achieve the mission. There are ways to mitigate the other person’s ability to kill stuff and still win. It’s not easy, but if you want to win for long stretches of time that’s how you need to think and that’s the level of play you need to expect from yourself.

**Redbeard**

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:
How often does that this happen? I was playing the shootiest army in the game and I have very solid dice and all I did was blow up two tanks, stun a third, and get one squad to go to ground.

Just because something does not happen often does not invalidate those times when it does happen. This is what the rest of us call luck. There are some things that are outliers, but that are beyond the ability of skill to impact.

Again, who loses 50% of their stuff on turn one?

Ask the people who played against the leafblower army at 'ard boyz a couple of years ago... It happens. It happened then. You say, 'well, you shouldn't have deployed like that' - sorry, you cannot control for the terrain that happens to be at the event. You say 'well, you should have used reserves'. Right, against the army with the -1 to reserve rolls, because that worked really well, as your forces trickle onto the board and are defeated in detail. That was tried too, without much more success. I'm not saying there is no way to play against this. You do seem to be saying that luck is never a factor. But, one of the best pieces of advice for playing against a leaf-blower force is 'win first turn'. Isn't that a single die roll - isn't that "luck"? Was it skill that enabled him to win all his 'ard boyz games? Absolutely. Was it skill that led to him getting first turn in all those games?

If you are really worried that your opponent is going to cripple you before you get to do anything, reserve. If you do get crippled, play for the tie. If you want to win tournaments you can’t lose games. So when bad luck comes you either throw the towel in for the day or your get what points you can out of it.

Oh, but then you admit that bad luck comes.... Which is it?

Luck can only help you with killing stuff, it doesn’t necessarily help you achieve the mission. There are ways to mitigate the other person’s ability to kill stuff and still win. It’s not easy, but if you want to win for long stretches of time that’s how you need to think and that’s the level of play you need to expect from yourself.

Thanks. I'm clearly a tournament noob and didn't know that.

**sourclams**

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:Again, who loses 50% of their stuff on turn one? The game just isn’t designed like that. I had very strong dice, made very good target priority decisions, and I killed far less than 1/3 of his points.

It's 2009. You're playing Vulkan and two Crusaders filled with Hammerbros. You have 3 Tac squads with melta/multimelta in rhinos and a min. scout squad with snipers.

Your opponent is playing a truly horrible list for the matchup. Two Big Meks with SAGs, a Battlewagon with no Deffrolla, ten MANz, shoota boyz without Rokkits, and ten Deffkoptas with t/l rokkits.

T1 he rolls double sixes with his SAGs on your Land Raiders. Vulkan, Two Crusaders, and 15 Terminators vanish from the table.

Three Tactical squads with meltas and the scouts are staring at his entire army.

**DAaddict**

Generally, I find with more experience, that it is a calculation of risk/reward. Also it is a matter of lists becoming more generic and less eggs-in-one-basket.
For example a list of 4 landraiders I would dislike as I have 1000 points stuck into 4 targets. If an opponent gets lucky early, I have handed over half of my "power" to lucky or unlucky rolls on those 4. OTOH, while a raider list allows for a tight packed and hard to kill list, it is less numberous and more subject to luck. Whereas for those same 1000 pts, I could field 12 razorbacks. Sure the razors are more likely to be affected but if we are talking a mass efect, they are less likely to be destroyed en mass so rather than one roll of the dice taking out 2 TL las, 1 TL HB and a multi-melta shot, I have changed that to 4 Las and 8 TL plas and that in four separate targets.

**Witzkatz**

T1 he rolls double sixes with his SAGs on your Land Raiders. Vulkan, Two Crusaders, and 15 Terminators vanish from the table.

Because everyone failed their 2+ save against the vehicles exploding as a result from their single automatic penetrating hit?

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

Redbeard wrote:
ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:
How often does that this happen? I was playing the shootiest army in the game and I have very solid dice and all I did was blow up two tanks, stun a third, and get one squad to go to ground.

Just because something does not happen often does not invalidate those times when it does happen. This is what the rest of us call luck. There are some things that are outliers, but that are beyond the ability of skill to impact.

Again, who loses 50% of their stuff on turn one?

Ask the people who played against the leafblower army at 'ard boyz a couple of years ago... It happens. It happened then. You say, 'well, you shouldn't have deployed like that' - sorry, you cannot control for the terrain that happens to be at the event. You say 'well, you should have used reserves'. Right, against the army with the -1 to reserve rolls, because that worked really well, as your forces trickle onto the board and are defeated in detail. That was tried too, without much more success. I'm not saying there is no way to play against this. You do seem to be saying that luck is never a factor. But, one of the best pieces of advice for playing against a leaf-blower force is 'win first turn'. Isn't that a single die roll - isn't that "luck"? Was it skill that enabled him to win all his 'ard boyz games? Absolutely. Was it skill that led to him getting first turn in all those games?

If you are really worried that your opponent is going to cripple you before you get to do anything, reserve. If you do get crippled, play for the tie. If you want to win tournaments you can’t lose games. So when bad luck comes you either throw the towel in for the day or your get what points you can out of it.

Oh, but then you admit that bad luck comes.... Which is it?

Luck can only help you with killing stuff, it doesn’t necessarily help you achieve the mission. There are ways to mitigate the other person’s ability to kill stuff and still win. It’s not easy, but if you want to win for long stretches of time that’s how you need to think and that’s the level of play you need to expect from yourself.

Thanks. I'm clearly a tournament noob and didn't know that.

Calm down now, I didn’t say anything offensive.

About the leaf blower, I play a mini leaf blower, I have gone 7-1-2 in my last three tournament (against pretty solid guys, maybe not the likes of you and Dash, but solid) and I think in 11 games I first turn alpha struck twice , and one of them I didn’t win. Every game I’m either reserving or their reserving or I’m going second or any number of things. The army is different between 1250-1850 compared to 2500 or whatever ard boyz is, but results for that army definitely don’t come down to one dice roll.

And no one is saying luck isn’t a factor, we pretty much have all said the opposite. But some of us think it is the smallest factor, and even at its most extreme is still usually not a game losing factor. Game changing, absolutely, almost always. Game losing, not in my experience.

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

40k isn't a good enough game to merit this kind of analysis, though I agree.

**nevertellmetheodds**

Luck go down as the size of the army increases, and goes up with matching skills with familiar terrain. However if you fight campaigns, that changes the whole game, new tactic, new desperate plays. That why i prefer a uneven fight, being out numbered, or outnumbering them to see what they do.

**Ailaros**

So, something I'd note here is that units have a limited potential. That and the potential you have is limited by the aggregate potential of your units.

After all, if you only had a single guardsmen on the table, regardless of skill, there is only so much you can do. In this case, player skill would be a relatively insignificant factor, as a bad player and a good player aren't going to be able to make much difference about how they use that one dude on the table. Yes, a better player is more likely to make closer to 100% usefulness out of that guardsman than the noob, but the limiting factor is that you still only have one guardsman on the table. He is not going to win a 1000 point game by himself.

Good players may be able to squeeze a higher percentage of power out of what they have on the table, but it's die rolls that actually determine what you have on the table. If your opponent blows up a land raider, that amount of potential is gone. If you squeeze more out of the rest of your list, you can still have a net higher power, but the closer you and your opponent are in skill level, the more the fact that you have less potential on the board actually matters.

Furthermore, the better both players get, the closer the amount of power they can get out of their units becomes, meaning that the actual units on the board matter even more.

Since which units stay on the board and which ones don't is determined by luck (either the lascannon penetrated or it didn't), this is another indicator that luck becomes more relatively important as skill levels become closer/go up.

**Redbeard**

Witzkatz wrote:
T1 he rolls double sixes with his SAGs on your Land Raiders. Vulkan, Two Crusaders, and 15 Terminators vanish from the table.

Because everyone failed their 2+ save against the vehicles exploding as a result from their single automatic penetrating hit?

FYI, double-sixes with a SAG removes the target from the game. The land raiders don't explode, they simple cease to be, along with their contents.

ArtfcllyFlvrd wrote:
And no one is saying luck isn’t a factor, we pretty much have all said the opposite. But some of us think it is the smallest factor, and even at its most extreme is still usually not a game losing factor. Game changing, absolutely, almost always. Game losing, not in my experience.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were getting at. Still, if all other factors are equal (player skill, list quality, terrain impact, and so on), then even if luck is the smallest factor, isn't it going to be the one that determines the battle?

**scuddman**

As for countering luck, once again, it's relative. Furthermore, there is an absolute part that seems to have gone unspoken. If you receive bad luck, and you lose a vehicle, no amount of planning will replace that vehicle that you lost. Yes, you can make your individual components of your list less necessary to victory, but you will never actually get that hardware back. It will never be a thing that the player can use to help achieve victory.

This is true for most competitions. It's definitely true in sports. It is part of the game.

Phil Jackson as coach or player has won 12 championship, he has threepeated 3 times, and may do it a 4th time this year. No coach has won more rings than he has.
And one of the things in his book he greatly advocated, was having the poise to carry yourself through difficult situations. You see, winning a championship in the NBA does have a lot of luck to it. It's a marathon season, random injuries happen all the time, and you can't always be at your best. On top of that, you're playing the odds on the court...someone might make a shot, they might not. Your opponent may have more energy on his homecourt. All these factors that you can't effectively control (especially the injury one).

And he said, "The key is poise in difficult situations, to have the ability to play through rough and difficult spots out of your control." This is a big part of winning...to completely disregard luck and worry about putting yourself in the best position to win. Sometimes the referees don't call the game like they should...but it's on YOU as a player to adjust to the situation.

Case in point: Last year's Nba finals, final game 7. Really physical game, and the referees let them play. It wasn't a certain thing if fouls would be called or not (they mostly weren't)...and it greatly disrupted both team's offense. What did Phil tell his team? Go get more rebounds, if we have more shots in this kind of environment, we have a better chance to win. Crash the boards, get more possessions, put yourself in the driver's seat. People keep saying Kobe isn't clutch, but that night he had 15 rebounds. If you look at the stat sheet, both teams shot poorly and were pretty much comparable except for two stats: Rebounds and number of shot attempts

This is the type of thing you do to become a champion. If this game is so much about luck, how come the same people every year take the top spots? That's just it...there's more to it than that.

**ArtfcllyFlvrd**

Redbeard wrote:Perhaps I misunderstood what you were getting at. Still, if all other factors are equal (player skill, list quality, terrain impact, and so on), then even if luck is the smallest factor, isn't it going to be the one that determines the battle?

Yeah, I think I agreed to that on pg 2 or something. But I really don't think that every actually happens. And if it did there really is no way to prove it.

I think skill can go back and forth between days, so one day I play better than you, the next day you play better than me. But I think one person almost always plays better than the other. No way to prove it either way, just my gut feeling.