Terrain Wreck

So I left you last week with a cliffhanger, namely how much does terrain impact your odds of reaching assault?  More specifically:

Is Barra the Berzerker better off charging guardsmen in the open 8” away, or going for a squad in terrain 6” away? What about with rerolls, or with Fleet?

When terrain comes into play, the assault range mechanic gets a little more complicated.  Instead of a straight 2d6 roll, it becomes 3d6 drop the highest.  To show the difference this makes, here’s a straight up comparison:

So the red line shows the probability of achieving an assault distance in the open, and the green shows the same for terrain.  Unsurprisingly, terrain always makes it harder to reach your opponent, but what’s more important is by how much.  I’ve highlighted two points here as they give us the answer to part of the question I posed.  At 8” the berserker has a 42% chance of reaching the guardsmen in the open, but at 6” he has a 48% chance of reaching the guard in terrain.  The guardsmen in terrain are the right choice of target.

But what about rerolls for the Icon of Wrath?  How does Fleet affect it?

The chart may seem daunting at first, but hopefully a quick bit of explanation will make it more accessible.  The three red lines are the odds of assaulting a certain distance in the open with no reroll, with a reroll, and with Fleet.  The three green lines are the same but for assaults through terrain.  To address our specific question about 8” in the open vs 6” in cover I’ve again added the relevant dots with percentages.  These clearly show that in a ‘like for like’ comparison (i.e. with a reroll, with fleet) it’s always better to assault 6” in terrain than 8” in the open.  So to answer the original question, Barra the Berzerker should go for the guardsmen in cover in all of our scenarios.

That said, I didn’t build the chart just for this one scenario, you can use it to compare all kinds of situations – and can draw some interesting insights from examining it.

For example, comparing the darkest red line with the darkest green line, we can see that a unit with Fleet charging through terrain has equal or better odds of making assault than a normal unit charging the same distance in the open.

Similarly, checking out the mid-tone green line versus the dark red shows us that when assaulting though terrain units that can reroll charge distance (not Fleet) are also better than normal units charging in the open but only for distances up to 6”.  After this point we see a crossover in the lines and a normal charging in the open is better from 7” onward.

Even simply taking a look at the normal line, vs the reroll line, vs the Fleet line can really highlight how big a difference these abilities can make.

I do have to apply the caveat that my analysis assumes that the player using Fleet always makes the optimal choice for which dice to reroll.  But you’ll have to wait for those rules until next week…