Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey everyone,

I did some looking online and wasn't able to find any info on this topic, so I figured I would ask here.

Do any of you know if anyone has compiled a data analysis of toughness and strength distributions.

I.e. how common is it for a unit to have a strength 3 or toughness 4; that sort of thing.


The reason is I'm trying to do some basic mathhammer, but nobody really addresses average damage output for GENERAL use. Whenever any example tutorial brings up toughness they always say "well, if you tank opens fire at a grot, it's great!" which doesn't do much in trying to determine if similar weapon profiles are notably better - particularly if the key difference is the strength. OR more to my point - trying to figure out average damage GENERALLY SPEAKING without going into unit-per-unit matchups is almost a moot point without knowing what the distribution is.


So yeah, if you have seen anything like this - or you have some insights on the matter - please let me know.

Thank you!

You looking for pure data or practical?

(FYI, I have neither, just want to help focus your question)

There would be a set of data that could be gathered from the sum of all datasheets. Plug everyone into a giant spreadsheet, look at the pretty curves. For toughness that’s easy. Generally it’s one value per sheet. Strength would be harder, as a lot of units have options they can swap, or even different S values at the same time.

This info might be interesting academically, but functionally pretty useless. Lot of trash units nobody takes, or things like the multitudes of datasheets for similar units (different flavors of captains, SM speeders, etc) would skew things.

It would however, probably be the easiest data to gather.

Harder, but more useful would be to take a look at lists that people actually play. There are places that list these. I know we often see copies of top tournament placing armies here. Sit down with one and crunch the numbers. Repeat. This would also give you a placement rank to score things. How does average S/T correspond to tournament placement? Much more labor intensive, but actual meaningful results.

I’m pretty sure this doesn’t exist, and if it does I think it’d be less useful thank you think for two reasons.

First and foremost, being good into t4 is inordinately valuable due to the presence of marines. Not just the preponderance of marine-centric armies, but literally in that marines are the most played army. This means that the “safest” bet when trying to analyze weapon usefulness is to estimate its effect when firing on marines. This is doubly true because most people who to math about such things are generally going to be the more competitive sorts, so they’re going to care less about strength and toughness spread over the breadth of the games armies and more about what sort of spread they’re likely to actually encounter in game.

Secondly, strength isn’t a 1 for 1 with toughness. Due to the way toughness works there are major breakpoints in strength and not every point of strength is as strong (pun intended) as any other. For example the 1 point of strength to go from 4 to 5 id a major player, because it steps up to-wound against a majority of targets in the game (t4, t5, t8, and t9). Meanwhile the transition from 5 to 6 is also obviously valuable, but it’s noticeably less so. This is again exacerbated by the prevalence of some factions (marines).

I’m normally not at all enthused about AI, but this kind of task seems uniquely suited for it

 Nevelon wrote:
You looking for pure data or practical?

(FYI, I have neither, just want to help focus your question)

There would be a set of data that could be gathered from the sum of all datasheets. Plug everyone into a giant spreadsheet, look at the pretty curves. For toughness that’s easy. Generally it’s one value per sheet. Strength would be harder, as a lot of units have options they can swap, or even different S values at the same time.

This info might be interesting academically, but functionally pretty useless. Lot of trash units nobody takes, or things like the multitudes of datasheets for similar units (different flavors of captains, SM speeders, etc) would skew things.

It would however, probably be the easiest data to gather.

Harder, but more useful would be to take a look at lists that people actually play. There are places that list these. I know we often see copies of top tournament placing armies here. Sit down with one and crunch the numbers. Repeat. This would also give you a placement rank to score things. How does average S/T correspond to tournament placement? Much more labor intensive, but actual meaningful results.

I'd like to see something along the lines of a 3 color bar graph - 1 color for Toughness, 1 color for default/primary ranged weapon strength and 1 color for default/primary melee weapon strength. Then I want to email it to GW with a sad trombone sound effect.

Thanks everyone who replied! I'm going to tailor my comments more toward a general reply to everyone at once.


so after reading the comments, I think a PRACTICAL distribution of targets/weapons would be more useful ... even if it's just a rough estimation from us here (i.e. I guess putting 50% of targets at t4 makes sense).
- I should note that estimating toughness is going to be far easier than strength.


Any rate...

yeah, the disparity of value between those critical jump points (s3->s4 is more impactful than s8->s9) would be ideally solved by having both approximate practical-estimation charts. At that point you (you as in rhetorical "you" would be able to mathhammer out the probabilities and get a pre-matchup estimation of damage output per weapon.


so ... yeah, I'm too new at this to give any sort of meaningful insight on guessing the distribution. The logic of the process is "sound enough", I just can't provide any data.
Would y'all be able to help? I figure a reply something like ...
s1 = x%
s2 = x%
s3 = x%
s4 = x%
s5 = x%
s6-7 = x%
s8-9 = x%
s10+ = x%
would probably be the best way?