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I mentioned this topic in my thread about whether the IG was still a good swarm army, but I figured I should start another one to discuss it specifically.

Budget-wise, low model count armies (like the Astartes) are very attractive to me. Indeed, I ran Astartes last time I played 40K. The problem is, my dice luck usually sucks, so I feel every natural 1 I roll. So what can I do to make the dice work for me?

I recall in the 8th Edition Astartes codex (the most recent one I have) that there were reroll options (the Chaplain for melee attacks, the Captain letting you reroll 1s on attack rolls). Are those still around? And are there any other options that I've overlooked or have been introduced in the years I've been away?

Have you actually recorded your numbers of 1s verses the number of dice rolled to check if you are objectively rolling badly? It is almost certainly just confirmation bias.

It's been a few years since I've played an actual game, but I suppose I could do some test rolls.

Even if it’s just conformation bias, wanting to avoid clutch rolls is not a bad thing.

There are a LOT of ways to mitigate it. especially in marines, there are a large number of ways to get re-rolls, either via character auras or stratagems.

Another thing to consider is avoiding all or nothing kind of weapons. Go with high volume shots, rather then high damage weapons. Assault cannons vs. lascannons. So you never have a big impact hinging on a single toss of the die.

Bias or not, for elite armies rolling bad has more impact. When all your anti tank is two or three dreadnoughts with a lascanon, then any miss from those weapons is huge, when comparing to armies that can run 10-15 weapons of that kind.

A good way to think about elite armies is. First often you have to play all in. If you try to spread fire or charges, play careful, you are often just delaying losing. Against good armies sometimes not even that. Second you have to avoid one roll stuff that is crucial to your army, unless it is something like +2/+2 with re-rolls. There is a reason why a lascanon is a bad weapon right now and a melta is better.
Third thing is you have to look out for units other armies would normaly not use. A custodes player may not love SoS, a GK player may not love servitors. But there are no cheaper objective drones in those armies.

Fourth thing is linked to the first. Sometimes all in means overloading the opposing armies ability to deal with certain targets. Sure if they can stop you, you will get tabled. But if they can't beat 10-12 wardogs and abadon, you may have a good game.

The last two posts have really given me some food for thought. I do remember favoring "big gun" weapons (lascannons, missile launchers, etc.) over smaller but higher RoF heavy weapons, and my tactics were somewhat lacking (playing somewhat timidly, favoring multiples of certain units over tactical diversity, etc.). It sounds like both of those just make bad die rolls all the more crippling.

Karol wrote:
Bias or not, for elite armies rolling bad has more impact. When all your anti tank is two or three dreadnoughts with a lascanon, then any miss from those weapons is huge, when comparing to armies that can run 10-15 weapons of that kind.

That's more of a list choice than an "elite army" choice when it comes to Marines. You can jam a crapload of heavy weapons in there if that's your aim.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

LoreSeeker wrote:
The last two posts have really given me some food for thought. I do remember favoring "big gun" weapons (lascannons, missile launchers, etc.) over smaller but higher RoF heavy weapons, and my tactics were somewhat lacking (playing somewhat timidly, favoring multiples of certain units over tactical diversity, etc.). It sounds like both of those just make bad die rolls all the more crippling.

The choice de jour for Heavy Weapons in a Space Marine army at the moment is Multimeltas. They're strong weapons to start off with, and they also have two shots which helps diminish the swingy behavior of a single roll. The other great "big gun" right now is Grav Cannons, but they are more shots at lower Strength. They do great work though, because they're four shots apiece.

Edit: fyi these are all for Firstborn/TrueMarines. I haven't a clue what Primaris options are, my brain stops me from recognizing their entries in my codex

I would say Custodes suffer from this, HARD. YMMV, but I fail a save on my Telemon and it's bracketed into uselessness, if not just taken off the table. That's almost a fourth of my army gone, to a unit that costs about a third as much, in one shooting round. I don't even want to get into Jetbikes being shot off the table by units such as Harlequins with Fusion Pistols.

It's silly how one crappy roll can ruin my entire gameplay experience. But that's the hard part about running hyper elite armies.

 Insectum7 wrote:

That's more of a list choice than an "elite army" choice when it comes to Marines. You can jam a crapload of heavy weapons in there if that's your aim.

But they won't be efficient. There is a reason why we have good and okey assault armies from marines and marine chapters that are based around shoting are way down in win rates.

The choice de jour for Heavy Weapons in a Space Marine army at the moment is Multimeltas. They're strong weapons to start off with, and they also have two shots which helps diminish the swingy behavior of a single roll. The other great "big gun" right now is Grav Cannons, but they are more shots at lower Strength. They do great work though, because they're four shots apiece.

Edit: fyi these are all for Firstborn/TrueMarines. I haven't a clue what Primaris options are, my brain stops me from recognizing their entries in my codex

Being the best what marines can have, doesn't mean they are good. Inv saves, ton of vehicles, damge immunity and faste moving armies, while marines are rather slow, Primaris have no good shoting weapon option. they have aggresors which are vunerable and slow, eradictors which are the same, but have better guns and that is it. Their tanks are beyond bad, the attack bike is an over costed version of the regular marine oneetc

Karol wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

That's more of a list choice than an "elite army" choice when it comes to Marines. You can jam a crapload of heavy weapons in there if that's your aim.

But they won't be efficient.

I'm curious as to your definition of "efficient". Quantitatively, if you can.

That sounds less like “Elite armies inherently have ineffective weapons” and more like a specific points issue.

A 40 point Lascannon is inefficient, whether it’s on a Marine or a Guardsman.
A 2 point Lascannon is much better.

One thing that would really tighten up balance accross 40k I feel would be uniformity of value for damage. If a "melta weapon" is S8 AP4 D6+2 (With melta rule), then it needs to be that across the spectrum. No matter who's holding it. GW tried to do this with the Meltas, but they completely failed with Flamers, Lascannons, HBs, and Stubbers. Every time a new faction drops they have a better variant of a new weapon. Why is the flame of a Imperial guard flamer any less hot than a SoB flamer? Or a Ork Flamer? Why is the Multi-melta on a Venerable Custodian Dread less powerful than the one weilded by a Space Marine?

Make base weapons uniform across the game.

*Steps off soapbox.

Just did some test rolls. Ten rolls each of:

-10 Astartes firing 1 shot each
-10 Astartes firing 2 shots each
-20 Guardsmen firing 1 shot each
-20 Guardsmen firing 2 shots each

I assumed I was facing Astartes for Strength vs. Toughness roll purposes. Didn't roll Armor Saves.

The results (averages):

-Astartes:
--3.5 Wounds at 1 shot each
--7.7 Wounds at 2 shots each

-Guardsmen:
--3.6 Wounds at 1 shot each
--5.0 Wounds at 2 shots each

Maybe quantity over quality isn't the way to go.

 JNAProductions wrote:
That sounds less like “Elite armies inherently have ineffective weapons” and more like a specific points issue.

A 40 point Lascannon is inefficient, whether it’s on a Marine or a Guardsman.
A 2 point Lascannon is much better.

Yeah I would assume that's more the intent behind the statement, although I'm still wondering what that threshold is.

It can also be hard to tell because the benefits of more weapons can be nonlinear. (One Multimelta = meh, 10 Multimeltas = serious damage output)

Karol wrote:
Bias or not, for elite armies rolling bad has more impact.

No, it doesn't. You're more likely to totally whiff six Guard lascannons hitting on 4s (~1.5%) than you are to whiff three Marine lascannons hitting on 3s RR1 (~1%).

Fewer dice with higher success rates roll closer to average than lots of dice at lower success rates. Elite armies are more reliable, not less. The failures just stand out more prominently because rolling snake eyes when you needed 2s feels worse than flubbing a couple of 4+ rolls.

I think you two may be speaking about different points.

Missing your shots of the main Gun on your knight, is far more impactful than missing an entire squad of IG las shots. One is the knight player has no effect on the game this turn, and the other is oh well, lets see how the other 5-10 squads of Guard shoot this turn, then we'll shoot with the tanks, then the HWTs, then the CC can fire it's bolter, etc.

A Knight list is the pinnacle of "elite" army. If you miss 50% in your shooting phase, the entire phase is wasted. Because that much more of the enemy can then shoot back.

I must be missing the intent of the thread here, because this seems too obvious.

Check your dice, they may be badly weighted. I had a batch of cheap D6 that would roll a 1's like crazy. I threw them out.

Don't buy cheap dice. If you can get them, buy dice with sharp corners and clear plastic. They haven't been tumbled to remove mold lines and you can see if they have voids. In the extreme, you can get precision backgammon dice, which are basically tiny casino craps dice, milled rather than cast and the pips are backfilled with plastic of the same density, so they should roll as random as humanly possible.

The dice GW sells are often terrible - you can see the rounded corners are inconsistent and will be biased in some way. You can get decent D6 from almost any other company for way way cheaper.

Sounds like the big problems usually happen with "all or nothing" weapons like lascannons and such. Which tracks with what I remember from playing years ago.

So my next question: what would you recommend for anti-heavy armor weapons? That stuff typically has a low RoF, and the most powerful ones only fire one shot per turn (at least I'm pretty sure that latter one is universal).

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think you two may be speaking about different points.

Kinda.

I'm saying that while it's true that missing a lascannon shot when you have a total of three anti-tank units in your army certainly stings, you're less likely to do that than the Guard player with more guns but individually less chance of hitting. The idea that elite armies have to play especially cautiously because they're at greater risk of under-performing, like Karol is saying, is the opposite of how it actually works in practice. Elite armies have more ways to assure predictable results and are less susceptible to vagaries of the dice than armies with more, lower-quality attacks that are mathematically more swingy and prone to extremes.

The math to get there is not intuitive, but that is how it works out. Elite armies are more consistent and reliable. They don't need to 'make the dice work', the dice already work for them- confirmation bias aside.

Well, with equal CP availability, low model count armies get more out of one-per-phase re-roll spends. And they typically have a much better BS across the board. This can insulate them from disastrous turns in which you just get nothing useful done.

But you’re also more vulnerable to your opponent having a Golden Turn, where seemingly nothing goes wrong and the dice are super favourable.

Whilst somewhat rare, I think we’ll all have at least one story of awful luck in the face of an opponent’s spectacular luck. Stuff like a unit of Grots mercilessly gunning down recently teleported in Terminators, or every unit in your army getting stones in their shoes and fluffing every charge on a turn when you were otherwise pointed to break your opponent’s line.

Smaller model counts also require greater attention to detail. Whilst typically fairly tough, your opponent is able to focus their attacks. And a poor choice of deployment can cede quite large areas of the board, potentially leaving you struggling to reach certain objectives. A full on horde army has its own drawbacks of course, but can still flood the board and objectives with bodies, giving the opponent too many targets which can lead to errors of judgement when it comes to target priority.

In the modern day I simply don’t know how Stratagems factor in, but I can imagine its a significant part, so please take this post with a pinch of salt.

LoreSeeker wrote:

So my next question: what would you recommend for anti-heavy armor weapons? That stuff typically has a low RoF, and the most powerful ones only fire one shot per turn (at least I'm pretty sure that latter one is universal).

Multimeltas. They fire two shots

LoreSeeker wrote:
Sounds like the big problems usually happen with "all or nothing" weapons like lascannons and such. Which tracks with what I remember from playing years ago.

So my next question: what would you recommend for anti-heavy armor weapons? That stuff typically has a low RoF, and the most powerful ones only fire one shot per turn (at least I'm pretty sure that latter one is universal).

It depends on who your opponent is, and whether you’re likely to have any foreknowledge as to what it’ll be before the game. No, not your opponents exact list (for that is a douche move when one sided) but whether you’re up against Orks, Marines, Knights etc.

If your typically list features low shot count but powerful weapons, they may end up wasted against say, a Green Horde or Gaunt Swarm. Yes they’ll be useful against Characters, Dreadnought etc. But are of little to no value when blatting infantry. And so leaning into dedicated role weapons can be a real risk.

So I did a few more test rolls to see if there was indeed confirmation bias at work, this time with Age of Sigmar rules.

I did ten test rolls for each of three groups, each of which costs 100 points in AoS and is the faction's standard infantry unit:
-5 Stormcast Liberators with double blades (one with a grandblade)
-5 Stormcast Liberators with double hammers (one grandhammer)
-20 Skaven Clanrats with rusty blades

As with the 40K example above, I didn't do any armor saves.

Liberators with blades
-Average Wounds: 4.6 (ranging from 3 to 7 Wounds per roll, with 5 Wounds being the most common result at 4 out of 10 rolls)

Liberators with hammers
-Average Wounds: 5.9 (ranging from 2 to 8 Wounds per roll, with 6, 7, and 8 Wounds being the most common results at 2 out of 10 rolls each)

Clanrats
-Average Wounds: 5.8 (ranging from 4 to 8 Wounds per roll, with 6 Wounds being the most common result at 3 out of 10 rolls)

Not quite sure what to make of all that yet (only did it a few minutes ago), but that's the data.

It's weird: I tried a few test rolls yesterday (results are no good for data because I forgot about the extra attack each squad leader gets), and the Skaven were all over the place - average of 4.7 Wounds, ranging from 1 to 10 Wounds per roll with 2 and 7 being the most common results (2 out of 10 rolls each). Yet they were a lot more consistent this time around.

I wouldn't bother with any game context. I'd just roll your dice 100 (or a thousand) times and just see if your results are on par with mathematical expectations. There are various ways to do it. You could roll a single die a thousand times and record how many times each number came up. Or using multiple dice, like ten at a time, you could roll 100 times and record what each batch of 10 added up to. At the end of a hundred rolls you could find your average sum and see if it's significantly higher or lower than expected.

Edit:
Just for yuks I might try the second method on my own dice sometime.

How many times would you need to chuck a brick of dice to get a sample set that would be statistically relevant? Obviously “relevant” is a flexible term, but we aren’t doing rocket surgery here. But if I’ve got a set of 36 dice, how many times would I have to toss and tally them to say with a reasonable amount of confidence that they roll high/low/average?

LoreSeeker wrote:
Just did some test rolls. Ten rolls each of:

-10 Astartes firing 1 shot each
-10 Astartes firing 2 shots each
-20 Guardsmen firing 1 shot each
-20 Guardsmen firing 2 shots each

I assumed I was facing Astartes for Strength vs. Toughness roll purposes. Didn't roll Armor Saves.

The results (averages):

-Astartes:
--3.5 Wounds at 1 shot each
--7.7 Wounds at 2 shots each

-Guardsmen:
--3.6 Wounds at 1 shot each
--5.0 Wounds at 2 shots each

Maybe quantity over quality isn't the way to go.

Bruh do you think they cost the same or something?

EviscerationPlague wrote:

LoreSeeker wrote:
Just did some test rolls. Ten rolls each of:

-10 Astartes firing 1 shot each
-10 Astartes firing 2 shots each
-20 Guardsmen firing 1 shot each
-20 Guardsmen firing 2 shots each

I assumed I was facing Astartes for Strength vs. Toughness roll purposes. Didn't roll Armor Saves.

The results (averages):

-Astartes:
--3.5 Wounds at 1 shot each
--7.7 Wounds at 2 shots each

-Guardsmen:
--3.6 Wounds at 1 shot each
--5.0 Wounds at 2 shots each

Maybe quantity over quality isn't the way to go.

Bruh do you think they cost the same or something?

I don't know what they cost, "bruh." Like I said a couple of times, I haven't picked up a codex in years. Best I could do was ballpark.

 Nevelon wrote:
How many times would you need to chuck a brick of dice to get a sample set that would be statistically relevant? Obviously “relevant” is a flexible term, but we aren’t doing rocket surgery here. But if I’ve got a set of 36 dice, how many times would I have to toss and tally them to say with a reasonable amount of confidence that they roll high/low/average?

100 times ought to do it.

Test rolls are a waste of time, unless you're testing to see if your dice are fair. If you want a strong list copy one that topped a Grand Tournament. If you want to know which armies are more swingy then just looking at Sv and BS is not enough because sometimes an army's entire strategy can come down to two rolls each turn, like a Magnus list in 8th was toast if Magnus was placed aggressively and you went second, took damage and then didn't get all the right psychic powers off in the next turn. BS 3+ and 2+ Sv and just as luck-dependent as Orks with their 5+ Bs and 6+ Sv.

As a casual newbie don't even worry about any of this, what you should focus on is having the right attitude that makes games fun for you and your opponent and picking a faction you think is fun. Multimeltas are good because they aren't too expensive, when missile launchers are changed to 5 pts and multi-meltas to 35 balance will be flipped on its head and that could happen in a month. Build a varied collection and then you won't be too bad or well off compared to other varied collections.