Feast of Blades '13

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Bolter Resistence Efficiency: How to determine the toughness of your unit using mathhammer

Hey all, Kevin here again to bring to you how I determine the odds of another unit killing my unit, or in general terms how tough a unit is....and I call this Bolter Resistence Efficiency (From a MEQ)....So what is BRE? Well basically it is how many bolter shots it would take, from a MEQ, to take down a model or a unit in a game of 40k. So how do we determine this? Well we determine how many wounds it would take to kill a model. For instance a marine with a 3+ save would stop 2 out of 3 wounds before it dies so therefore it takes 3 wounding hits to kill a marine and 15 wounding hits to kill a squad of 5 marines (statistically). A MEQ with a S4 Bolter and BS4 would fail 1 out of 3 shots therefor it would take 45 shots to cause 30 hits to cause 15 wounds to kill 5 marines. So therefore a squad of 5 marines has a Bolter Resistence Efficiency of 45. This is a simple concept  to determine how tough a unit is. So lets look at another popular unit, a 5 man unit of Terminators. A terminator with a 2+ save effectively needs 6 wounding hits to kill it on average. So a unit with 5 of them needs 30 wounding hits to fell it coming from 60 hits and 90 shots. So a unit of 5 terminators, saying statistically only, needs to take 90 shots from bolters, or bolter equivelents, to fell it. Now weapons with higher strengths and lower AP's definatly splices this number while units with lower BS's and lower strengths will need a lot more shtos to take down. For instance my Biker command squad which, for all purposes of this arguement does not need the full kit out (4 storm shields and a bunch of save ignoring weapons for instance) all have FNP from an apothecary and T5 with a 3+ (also 3++) save while their are 5 of them. So it would take 2 failed saves, because of FNP, to down one of my CS bikers. Meaning it takes 6 wounding hits to cause one FNP wound (effectively as good as 2+ armor). Since the biker is toughness 5 it takes 3 hits to cause one wounding hit (From a bolter)....aka 18 hits to kill one biker...or 27 shots.....So times this by 5 and it takes 135 bolter shots to kill my biker command squad....not including my captain.....My captain, with FNP while in the squad, has a 2+ save and T5 as well with 3 wounds has a rating of 108 BRE or 108 bolter shots to kill him. This gives my biker command squad (as a whole unit) a BRE of 243.......Which is fairly tough and hard to kill.....So the next time you think about assaulting a unit or shooting a unit determine how tough it is and how many shots it will take to down the unit.......now I am not a math major nor do I have a degree in statistics so my hypothesis is just a theory using a standard statline from a very common weapon but you can figure this ot from every weapon in the game using the method I descibed...mathhammer for the win...even if the dice never like to agree with you...more on this later....

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