7th Ed. Developing a damage calculator

[Caneghem]

So I had some free time on my hands and decided that I was tired of wondering... "how much damage would this do against that?" So I am cooking up an excel sheet that calculates hand-to-hand casualties and spits out about how many kills to expect. It was pretty simple at first but as I added in special attacks like killing blow, poison, etc, it got more complicated (Not to mention excel only does IF, AND, and OR functions).

I doubt I'd be able to post it since it incorporates GW rules, but I'm not really sure. It doesn't directly quote the book or anything.

So basically if you have any suggestions of things to add, I'll toss them in. I'll list out what I got so far...

Attacks:
A, WS, S, AP factor, auto-hit, poison, killing blow, flaming, ignore armor, wound multiplier, re-roll to hit, re-roll to wound, +1 to hit
These covered the bulk of magic weapons (as most simply adjust the above stats), but I added some of the odd ones from the two armies I play.

Lizardmen - Blade of Realities (makes you realize how awesome this can be)
Dwarf - MR of Skalf Blackhammer, Rune of Might (these adjust strength based on target, so had to do them separate)

Defender:
WS, T, Wounds, Initiative, Leadership, Unit Strength, Arsv, Ward, Immune to KB, Immune to Poison, Regen, Flammable, Re-roll armor save

Outputs:
Ld fail rate, Hit Ratio, Hits, effective strength, Wound Ratio, Wounds, Wounds after reroll/poison, effective arsv, wounds after arsv, after armor re-roll, after wrdsv, after regen, multiplied wounds, and finally kills expected.

In the meantime I'm open to anything you want odds on real quick, like "What are the odds my carnosaur would kill a chariot with X,Y,Z protections.." No need to post stats, I can fill them in myself and it tends to anger GW anyway. Just tell me what equipment they have.

 

[asrodrig]

Seems like a pretty good idea to me. Only problem is that now you'll be toting your computer along to your battles as well lol!

 

[strewart]

Sounds like a pretty good idea. I think it should be ok to post as long as it doesn't have points values, since GW seems to be posting unit stats on their website now anyway. Just no points values. Better wait for Sammy to give an opinion just in case anyway.

 

[Caneghem]

Seems like a pretty good idea to me. Only problem is that now you'll be toting your computer along to your battles as well lol!

Nah, battles are all about the dice! I'm so traditional I'd never even use those "dice roller" programs people have on their iPhones now. It's just not right, I like to see them roll across the table.

This is more for planning out a battle. Figuring out which units could probably handle themselves against others. Also another thing that happens sometimes, is a combat might go really badly and I want to know if it was a bad matchup or just bad dice. This gives me something to look at and figure out whether my choices were in error or I just need to order some of those cool Lizardmen dice.

Fun fact:
An Oldblood with the Blade of Realities will kill, on average, 2.8 Varghulfs with his 5 attacks, or 3.35 if he is frenzied. Not really surprising, given their abyssmal leadership.
His poor Carno on the other hand will only kill .42 Varghulfs or .52 if he is frenzied. Danged regen.

Hmm, wonder what would happen to a steam tank?
Carno averages 3.5 wounds, while the Oldblood will only muster .55 (dern soulless tank). Of course, 4 wounds is enough to start putting the risk of misfiring pretty high when steam points are generated. And the thing will be downright useless after one more round of combat with the OB on Carno. And you could always get lucky and wipe the thing out in one turn anyway.

This is a heck of a lot easier than figuring it all out each time.

 

[kroxigor01]

I did one of these myself, but gave up when I had integrated poison and hatred and was trying to find a way to intergrate them (how did you do it? Though Witch Elves are the only unit I can think of that would actually have this combination).

 

[Sammy the Squib]

I wrote something similar for 40k a while ago, it was in C++ and gave you the expected number of wounds for various situations depending on the user input. I could write another for FB I reckon, I would do it in Java or Python this time to make it more portable (and easier to make a GUI ^_^)

 

[Caneghem]

I did one of these myself, but gave up when I had integrated poison and hatred and was trying to find a way to intergrate them (how did you do it? Though Witch Elves are the only unit I can think of that would actually have this combination).

It's not too bad, you just have to treat poisoned hits as wounds. So if something makes poisoned attacks, I actually subtract from the hits column and add the same proportional amount (1/6 of attacks) to the post-rerolled wounds column. I have a separate column for re-rolled hits, and it works off of the "hit ratio" which I store in a separate cell, and the original number of attacks. Then it can find the actual number of misses (1-(hit ratio) = miss ratio) and calculate hits and poison one more time, subtracting poison from hits and adding it again where needed. Those re-roll functions got really messy because of the limitations of Excel.

A similar thing is done with killing blow... as I couldn't just treat those as normal wounds. So the amount of killing blows are actually subtracted from the original wounds and added into the multiplied wounds (with the ward save taking its chunk of course).

 

[strewart]

So how does the blade of realities go against a Ld 10 lord? If the opponent has higher WS? Chances of killing him with only 50% hits?

 

[Caneghem]

So how does the blade of realities go against a Ld 10 lord? If the opponent has higher WS? Chances of killing him with only 50% hits?

Ah, I need to throw in a %chance to kill one model formula.

and done...

OB - with 5 attacks 19.2% chance to kill Ld10 model
OB - with 6 attacks (frenzy) 22.5% chance to kill Ld10 model

Drop one point of leadership. Ld9
5 attacks - 35.3% chance
6 attacks - 40.7 %

The Ld9 values are identical to the chance to kill with killing blow, with of course the big IF of no ward saves and not immune to killing blow and under US3 etc.

rolled the above against a toughness 10 Ld 10 target, so as not to factor in normal wounds (I didn't know what type of Lord).

Here's a rules question that never comes up... if you couldn't normally wound your target on a 6, does killing blow work? I know for poison 6's to hit gets rid of poison. I can't think of a matchup where this would be a question.

 

[strewart]

Wow... That is worse than I thought, and makes the blade of realities a touch less appealing. Still good for killing dragons etc, but that means if you are in combat with a ld 10 lord (toughness shouldn't matter) it will take an average of 5 turns to kill him with the blade.

This might be a bit of a stretch, I don't know how it is setup, how would that then compare to an old blood with 8 s5 attacks against... Say a t5 lord with 2+/4+ armour/ward, just for an extreme example?

I can't think of anything that has KB and couldn't wound on a 6 either.. I think it would stop KB from working given the nature of KB. The to hit and to wound tables are different to each other though, I wil have a look when I have my book.

 

[lupercal]

i thought a 6 always wounds but if not mabye a scraplauncher vs. a greater deamon

 

[Caneghem]

i thought a 6 always wounds but if not mabye a scraplauncher vs. a greater deamon

If toughness is 4 better than the strength of the hit, it can't be wounded on a 6. T6 is immune to str 2 and lower. T7 immune to 3 and lower etc.