Maths of 6th ed: Assault moves

6th edition has landed, and its more than a nip here and a tuck there. The ramifications of some of these changes are hotly debated, but what is without doubt is that suddenly, there are a whole lot of fascinating mathematical scenarios!

This post will look at the first, and perhaps most obvious; the random charge distance.



By itself, it isn't that special. Your choppy guys can charge 2d6", instead of a straight 6". So sometimes you won't make a charge that you should, and other times you'll make a preposterous charge that should never have happened. Which happens more often depends on how you play.

But, pointy ears like me were immediately drawn to the change of 'Fleet'. No longer does it allow a prospective combatant to charge after running. Now, it is simply a reroll. Cunningly, the space elfs and their kindred get to pick which dice to reroll, rather than being forced to reroll all or one of their dice, making Fleet much more useful than at first glance.




How much more useful? Not as useful as in 5th ed. Let's get that out of the way. It will not take you as far (on average). Shit happens. Everyone else can assault further than they used to, and my wyches end up assaulting less far. They'll deal with it.

However, it is certainly better to have Fleet than not. What it does, if not enabling further assaults per se, is make it much more likely that the Fleet unit will make it into assault at any distance. For example, a Fleet unit is twenty percentiles more likely than a non-Fleet unit to land a 6" assault, 92% to 72%. Put another way, the chance of the Fleet unit failing that assault is less than 1/3rd of the unit that doesn't have Fleet.

And that means, aside from my wyches embarrassing themselves at short range less often, that Fleet units can charge almost an extra 2" to have the same chance of sticking the charge. Which is handy - particularly as the new overwatch rule will probably kill enough of my poor T3 dudes to make that extra 2" necessary.

Difficult terrain is the other piece of the 6th ed assault puzzle. Compared to the 5th ed difficult terrain affected assault, you will go further, but you will go further in a normal assault than you would have last edition as well, so that's not particularly notable.




What is notable is the speed at which the probability of making an assault decreases. By the time you are 4.1" away, you have less than a 66% chance of making it. 6" is less than 50%. Again, this tends to be in the range of around 20 percentiles less than an unhindered assault.




Also notable is that an assault through difficult terrain with the Fleet rule has a better chance of succeeding than an unhindered assault without Fleet! The difference here is more marginal, about 10 percentiles in the useful range, but handy to know. If my wyches are in a mexican assault standoff with a slower unit, I can hide them in the trees and still have an advantage. Well, as long as the trees don't eat me. Bloody carnivorous trees.

Next post, fleet reroll strategy: I would include it here, but its already more of a thesis, and it deserves to be more than just an afterthought. Which dice do you reroll to get the optimal results shown above? In most cases it is obvious, in some, less so. Stay tuned!

(It won't be another six months, I promise!)