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I like math. So I made these spreadsheets. They take every standard infantry weapon, and provide the average number of wounds against all toughness and armor combinations. More importantly, it also presents wounds per point (wpp) calculations, the best statistic for estimating efficiency, and a good overall measure of effectiveness.
As far as I know, nobody has really presented data like this before. If they have, I would really like to see it.
These are not end-all-be-all by any means. Some special rules can't be accounted for, and of course the frailty of the units firing them is not accounted for in any of this. But these are still useful.
I would like to see more of these made, and might tackle a few more myself. With allies being a major aspect of the game now, it would be nice to have these available for all armies. That way, it should be possible to objectively gauge what the best units in the game are against any toughness/save category. But these work better for some armies than others.
It's fairly easy to make tables for shooting vehicles too; I have in the past but haven't saved any of them. Assault is a possibility as well.

Some notes:
Weapons are grouped by range. Templates are counted by number of hits scored, and are thus often overstated. I did not account for weapons not being able to damage above a certain toughness, but that's easy to account for by eye.
There are likely some mistakes, but I think I got all the math done right.

Some observations from the data:
Radium carbines are underrated. They perform as well or better than 3 lasgun shots in nearly all circumstances, which is really impressive considering it is attached to a harder-to-kill unit with far superior range -- however, guardsmen have the advantage of having twice as many men. And Radium carbines work surprisingly well against high-toughness units: on average, a points-equivalent group of vanguard will take down a Wraithknight in one turn.
Grav guns are awesome, and remain incredibly cost-effective against high armor units, even the cost of bikers is accounted for.
Heavy Bolters and Plasma generally do pretty well for themselves
Lascannons are only really effective against 2+ saves.
Snipers suck.
Overall, decently balanced.

Have fun!

Looks nice but the Skitarii one won't do you much good because their BS changes constantly (they'll only be BS4 for one game turn). I guess it's easy to change it but you'll end up with 6 different tables.

Also in the skitarii spreadsheet:
I guess it's not really that relevant because how often do you come across T1 and T2, but the first few weapons make the same number of wounds against armor save of 6+ than they would against a 2+ despite none having a better AP than 4.

Thanks for pointing out the error, it was present in the SM one too. I have fixed it and re-uploaded.

As for the changing BS, you are right that it would be inelegant to incorporate. I just change the BS column when I want to see how it affects things.

OMG that is jaw droppingly, beautifully, impressive! I cannot believe how much effort you have put into that. Thank you for spending the time on such a monumental endeavour!


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As a maths teacher (we spell maths properly over the water :-p), I love things like this.

First things first: mad, mad props to you for doing points per wound calculations, which, alongside resilience per point calculations, are about 80% of all sensible discussions of units in 40k (most of the other 20% is movement). For example, the heavy wraithcannons and ghostglaive on the Wraithknight are vastly inferior to the suncannon loadout in most lists. Failure to do the kind of math you and I do is what has the community embarassing itself with over-reactions about the Wraithknight's strength D weapons.

I've been playing Eldar exclusively since 3rd edition, and I used to do a ton on points per wound/HP unit evaluation. Now that the new Codex dropped, I'm going to revisit the method, using your spreadsheets as a model to make my life easier. THANK YOU.

If you'd like about half a dozen examples of what this kind of analysis can do, just search for "The Mattler's Mathhammer" on TheWarmaster forum to find my 5th/6th edition Eldar unit evaluation. When I revamp my existing articles and expand into the units I haven't reviewed yet, I will almost certainly be posting them on Dakka Dakka as well as on TheWarmaster.

Here is an example of my work, a comparison between Warp Spiders, Swooping Hawks, and Shadow Spectres from 6th edition:

http://thewarmaster.com/index.php?topic=3392.msg32162#msg32162

oh my, this is absolutely beautiful.

I HEART spreadsheets, and analysing data is a favourite pastime, to the point of over analysis.

I... didn't understand this. Are the redder cells better than light yellow ones? I believe that's the only thing I got right.

Hoping to see a Tau one