Decisions, Decisions…
by Chris Pastore, Abington Games
Your Scorpion army is prepped for war. The attack plans are laid and the dice are hot. As you get ready to roll, you consider the Gift of the Scorpion…
Gift of the Scorpion: Each Scorpion unit can use this gift once per round, before any characteristic test. The chosen test is resolved rolling as many additional dice as the unit’s Rank. These dice are not bonus dice, so they can be re-rolled.
You pause and consider – Should I apply the Gift for the Attack Test or for the Strength Test? Well, it depends. Particularly it depends on the difficulty of each of the two tests and what your objective is.
Let’s consider a situation – your unit of 4 Skorize warriors have scouted out a band of Great Fangs and engaged them in hand-to-hand combat. You have two dice with an Attack of 5 and Strength of 5. The Great Fangs have a Defense of 3 and Resilience of 5. The Skorize have rank 2, so the Gift of the Scorpion can give you two additional dice to one of the tests. Where will you use them?
Of course, you can just use intuition and make a gut decision, or you can use a statistical analysis. The problem with statistics is that we are not really considering many dice in this analysis – only throwing 6 dice won’t ensure the results match statistical expectations, and your throw may be far off the curve one way or the other. However, if you play frequently (like I do!) you will find that you should play the odds when possible because over multiple games it does bear out.
So for the sake of this argument lets look at the mathematics behind it all:
Our Attack test is at +2 (5 - 3 = 2), which means we will be successful on the roll of a 3 or higher. That means that two-thirds of the time we will have a successful hit. And, of course to make it more complicated, 1/6 of the time we will generate bonus dice!
The Strength test is a 0 (5 - 5 =0). So we will damage the opponent on a 4 or higher, which is a 50% chance.
Gift on the Strength Test
Let’s consider what happens if we put the Gift on the attack, we will have 10 dice to roll (2 per model, 4 models per unit = 8, plus 2 from the gift). When we roll those 10 dice we would expect to get at least one 6, and only a little more than 3 misses. When we roll that six again, we would expect to get 1 more hit. (I’m rounding things off here for the non-mathematicians). So we can expect almost 8 hits (7.9) from the 10 dice!
We have 8 dice for the strength test, so we expect 4 misses and one 6, which will have a 50% chance of success. So we end up with 4.7 wounds. I know you can’t cause a partial wound – this is just the statistics!
Gift on the Attack Test
OK, what if we had put the gift on the Strength test? We have 8 dice to roll on the Attack test, which will yield 2 misses and a 6, probably a little more than 6 (6.3) hits. Then we add on the Gift to the Strength test so have 8 (8.3) dice there, so expect 4.9 wounds. There is a SLIGHT advantage to applying the Gift to the Strength test.
But what if it was my Hybrids shooting at the Great Fangs from a range of 5? Suppose I have 8 Hybrids shooting. The Range test will have a difficulty of -2 (3 - 5 = -2) and the Strength test will be +1 (6 - 5 = 1). The Range test succeeds on a 5+ and the Strength on a 4+. In this case, if we apply the Gift to the Attack test we expect 2.3 wounds, and if we apply it to the Strength test we expect 3.0 wounds. That’s a significant difference!
So when does it matter? It might seem counter intuitive, but in general you should put the bonus dice on the Strength test NO MATTER WHAT. It is tempting to put them in Attack when you have that “sweet spot” on the Universal Table of Resolution – you know, where 2+ hits and 4+ turns into bonus dice? It sure seems like you should load up there to get many bonus dice, right?
Wrong. It turns out that even then, you get more expected wounds when you put the additional dice in the Strength test – even if the Strength test only wounds on a 6+!! So what did we learn? Well, you can certainly use your instincts and have fun! The math doesn’t guarantee anything – I had an opponent roll 8 sixes in a row against me at Nationals! The chances of that are about 1 in 1.7 million!!! However, if you want to play the odds, always put your Gift of the Scorpion on the Strength test!
