Mathammer: Basics

let me begin with this: luckly, there's not a right way to win at wh40k. personally i really enjoy to have a nice time with my friends when i play with "toy soldiers" but, of course, no one wants to lose games all the time and i am no exception.
every player, when it comes to list making, asks himself what unit he should put in or which piece of wargear suits best a possible combat with a designated enemy. some simply choose the most expensive options, others always use the same bone-crunching combo that their codex allows.

well, this article wants to be something different. some time ago, while i was passing from one defeat to another, i worked out this method which is a simple probabilistic analysis of what is more likely to come out with a roll of dice.
let's say you want to know how likely is that your space marine kills an ork, ok? in order to understand how much this event is likely to happen you simply have to make a little maths but don't worry, only some products or divisions :-)
space marines has BS4 so hit on 3+, bolter has S4 so wounds a T4 on 4+, bolter's AP is 5 so no armour save is allowed. on a D6 a roll of 3+ happens in 4 cases on 6 so we use a fraction to say this: 4/6= 0.66. we can say almost the same for the 4+ roll: 3 cases on 6 so 3/6=0.5

let's put this altogether:
if space marine shots 1 time we have: 4/6*3/6*100= 33.33%
(as you can see i multiplied by 100 to have a number in percentage)
if space marine shots 2 times (eg: target within 12") we have: 2*4/6*3/6*100= 66.66%

you can apply this approach with nearly every weapon and target in the game, there are some tricky issues i'll explain in next posts.

i hope i've been clear, i explained the question in the most straightforward way i found. i don't know if any other player wrote on this issue before, so if this is not that piece of news, please tell me. thank you.

PS: of course to apply this method you've got to know, at least vaguely, which enemy will stand before you.
PS2: BIG WARNING, this is a method with which you can know the average behaviour of a weapon or trooper against a given enemy. if you are lucky/unlucky with dice the "statistic prediction" may not work! also: the more dice you throw, the more you'll stick with Mathammer results.

and yes, i'm a nerd.