My New Year’s wargaming resolution is to git gud at Warhammer 40k, something I am failing at spectacularly. But I may have found a new tool to help me in my quest – Adept Roll, a new mathhammer app that makes the likely outcomes of one unit attacking another a lot easier to predict, so I can build my battle plans based on a solid foundation of statistics (Roboute Guilliman would be proud).
Adept Roll is an unofficial app for calculating odds in Warhammer 40k, with basic functionality that’s free to use. It’s a simple interface that lets you input the profiles of the weapons you’re attacking with, the defensive stats of the models you’re targeting, and then outputs the likely results in easy to understand ways.
It gives quick numerical summaries of the number of models you can reasonably expect to kill or wounds you’ll deal, as well as graphs that reflect the likelihood of dealing different amounts of damage. You can see the output for different weapons side by side – a good visual aid that brings home just how much more effective some weapons are than others into a given target.
The annual subscription fee (roughly $5) unlocks a lot more functionality. For a start, you can easily import the stats for models from all the Warhammer 40k factions from the community maintained Battlescribe data repositories, so you can quickly pair up attacker and defender. Bear in mind that these are fan-maintained data sources and may contain errors, and if they ever go down, this feature won’t work!
Then you can apply a variety of modifiers to either the attacker or the defender. If you’re facing off against Space Marine Chapters, you can easily toggle on their Armor of Contempt to see what impact that has on their survival; if you’re playing with Chaos Space Marines, you can try an attack with Lethal Hits, and then with Sustained Hits, to determine which is a more valuable use of your Dark Pact.
I don’t dislike 40k’s multi-stage dice rolling system – buckets of dice are fun to roll! – but I did write a whole article about why I think the dice system in Warmachine is more elegant. It’s certainly one I find easier to predict outcomes in. But getting good at 40k means overcoming that mental barrier, and quickly running mathhammer simulations is helping me out.
And perhaps the full Warhammer 40k Codex release for the Death Guard will also help. My collection is very Plague Marine heavy, and I don’t think that has ever been the right way to build the army. Still! No excuses.
For another app that’s useful for a different part of the hobby, check out this article on Pile of Potential, a great little project tracking app I’m using to tame my pile of shame.