A new tenth edition Codex for the Leagues of Votann is right around the corner and if you missed our review of it over the weekend, you can find that here. In this week’s Hammer of Math, we’re taking a look at various rules in the upcoming book and the statistics around them, looking at how they’ll affect your games.
Yield Points
The new army rule for Leagues of Votann is Prioritised Efficiency. Votann armies generally have one of two abilities active, either Hostile Acquisition or Fortify Takeover. Which of these abilities is active will change depending on how many Yield Points (YP) the Leagues of Votann player has. Players start with Hostile Acquisition in play, then at the end of their Command phase, if they have fewer than 7 YP they have Hostile Acquisition until their next Command phase, or if they have 7 or more, they get Fortify Takeover.
- When Hostile Acquisition is active, each time units attack an enemy unit on an objective they get +1 to hit as well as being able to reroll advance and charge rolls.
- When Fortify Takeover is active, each time units make an attack while they are in range of an objective you control they get +1 to hit. Also each time an attack targets your non-vehicle units, if the Strength is higher than your unit’s toughness, -1 to wound (and this applies everywhere, not just on objectives).
+1 to Hit vs. Re-Rolling 1s
These have a major impact on unit probabilities, and generally act as a necessary replacement for Grudge tokens, which previously acted as the way to get 3+ to hit with Votann. Most Votann units hit on a 4+, which will typically make their shooting and melee feel anemic, as they don’t really have the high volume of attacks you need to make up for that level of accuracy. With WS/BS 4+ you’ll hit 50% of the time on average, and getting +1 to hit ups that to 66.7%, a 34% increase in accuracy and output.
Many units in the new book now re-roll 1s to hit with Pan-Spectral Scanners. This is a big help for when you can’t get +1 to hit, often because your target may just not be on an objective. A unit hitting on 4s with the ability to re-roll 1s will hit 58.3% of the time. That’s worse than +1 to hit, but significantly better than just hitting on 4+. Think of it kind of like BS3.5+. Combined with +1 to hit, your success rate will jump to 78%, and that’s where you’re going to see some very solid conversion rates.
Re-rolling Advances and Charges
It can be difficult to quantify how re-rolls to Advances and Charges can affect your games. Generally speaking if you adopt a “re-roll charge results under 4″ strategy, your average charge distance will go up, from 3.5 to 4.5. With re-rolls to charges, your odds of getting a 7+ jump from 58% to 83%. For 9” charges, you go from 28% to just under 50%.
-1 to Wound
Giving incoming attacks -1 to wound when their Strength is higher than your Toughness essentially guarantees you can’t be wounded on anything less than a 3, and in some cases will turn those 3+ wound rolls into 4+. That’s a 20% increase in survivability if you’re going from 2+ to 3+, and 25% if you’re going from 3+ to 4+.
Acquiring YP
At the end of each player’s command phase you gain 1 YP if you control an objective in your deployment zone. Starting in the 2nd Battle Round, you gain 1 additional YP if you control an objective outside your deployment zone, 1 YP for controlling two or more objectives outside your deployment zone, and 1 YP if you control more objectives than your opponent.
This generally means that, without any support or spending, you’ll have 1 YP in your first Command phase, and 2 going into your second, with a max of 6 if you control two objectives in the middle of the table in your Command phase (or 3 if you’re playing Hidden Supplies). You can influence this result to get into Fortify Takeover in round 2 using either Detachment Rules – Needgaârd Oathband gives you 1 YP each time you destroy an enemy unit – or units – The Memnyr lets you manipulate your YP up or down as you need. Because YP are generated in both player turns, it’s easy for that value to shoot way up during a game, as even holding one objective outside your Deployment Zone and your home will mean gaining 2 YP per turn, putting you at 8 at the end of your third Command phase.
Hekaton Land Fortress Guns
The Hekaton Land Fortress saw some major shifts to its guns, moving away from the “casino gun” moniker it had picked up thanks to having SUSTAINED HITS D3 on its SP Heavy Conversion Beamer. They’ve lost [IGNORES COVER] in favor of re-rolling 1s to hit with their pan-spectral scanners and picked up more shots on the Heavy Magna-Rail cannon and Heavy Conversion Beamer. That heavy Conversion Beamer remains the key weapon option you’ll want to take, and it’s worth looking at how it changed:
- The original Beamer fired two shots, hitting on 4+ with Sustained Hits D3. On average, that would mean 1.7 hits, or if you were firing from more than 12″ away, 3 hits as a 4+ would score a critical and you’d average 2 additional hits. Against a target where you roll a 3+ to wound, you’d average 2 wounds before they roll saves.
- The new beamer just has four shots with [LETHAL HITS] and re-rolls 1s to hit. That means that, on average, you’ll score 3.1 hits with the new gun, with 0.8 of them being Lethal Hits after you account for the re-rolls. If you need to roll 3+ to wound, that’ll average to 2.3 wounds.
This makes the new version not just more reliable but better on average, and that’s before you factor in that Lethal Hits is must better against targets that have you roll a 5+ to wound, i.e. bigger vehicles.
Cthonian Beserks
Beserks seemingly got done dirty in the new book, losing a wound while gaining one point of Toughness and an improved armor save (5+) and Feel No Pain (4+). That said, it’s not as bad as it looks, depending on the weapon profile you look at.
- If you’re taking heat from S3 weapons like lasguns, you’ll notice a small improvement on a per-shot basis, where being T6 immediately puts those weapons on a 6+ to wound and having a better save matters. this is more than a 100% increase against them, and so makes up for the lost wound.
- Against bolt rifles (S4, AP-1, 1 damage), Beserks are a little less durable than they were – a single shot at BS 3+ will do an expected 0.093 damage now, compared to 0.15 previously – this is where a 5+ save does the most work, but the 4+ FNP helps as well. Of course, your Beserks now only have 1 wound each, and 0.15/0.093 = 1.6, and we’d like that number to be 2+, to round out the fact that it takes half the wounds for them to die.
- On the flip side, against weapons that do 2+ damage, Beserks are now marginally more likely to survive than before. A hit from a heavy bolter is likely to do 0.28 damage to a Beserk now, versus 0.67 before, and even with 1 wound a Codex Beserk has a slightly higher chance of surviving than an Index Beserk.
- That said, we’ve mostly been looking at weapons with AP0 or AP-1 here; against AP-2 weapons that save won’t matter – Power fists are more likely to kill Beserks, and the difference becomes more stark if we look at 1-damage weapons, though it’s worth noting that high high-AP weapons that only do 1 damage aren’t super common.
Ultimately, Beserks are slightly more durable now against most S3 and S5 weapons, and a little less durable against everything else. That said, you could argue they were mostly going to die anyways after coming out of their transport and hitting something, so the +1″ movement is a much bigger deal than the changes in wound count and likewise, the loss of a sweep weapon profile hurts.
Final Thoughts
There were a lot of little tweaks to datasheets in the new Codex that affect the math behind certain units, but most of it is pretty straightforward, giving you benefits in exchange for CP or YP, or both. One big key to success will be stacking buffs to hit, to ideally hit that sweet spot of having +1 to hit and re-rolling 1s so you can convert more of your shots into damage.
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