Wound allocation and Weapon Strength

[Vindicatus]

Alright, so I've been away from the gaming aspect for a while (I spent a good amount of time deployed over the last year+, so I'm a bit rusty on the rules).

 

I was talking with a friend of mine, and he spoke about wound allocation, and weapon strengths, as to why it's sometimes better not to pour the lead on a unit. Seeing that half of my books are still in storage, I pose you this question : what the devil is he talking about?

 

The example he used was hosing down an entire unit with a heavy flamer, and then firing on the same unit (with the same unit as the flamer), but thanks to the allocation rules, he only scored two wounds when by rights he should have toasted the majority of the unit.

 

So, help a hobbyist get his feet wet again, and explain to my head-cold-addled mind what in the duece he was saying, while I try to find the key to my storage unit!

 

Thanks in advance :P

[BOBMAKENZIE]

its not the strength so much as the AP. The flamer can cut through 4+ saves but bolters for example cannot. Leading to "This guy takes 18Heavy flamer wounds and I lose my missile launcher. and the rest of the scouts take armour saves"

[Gurth]

Something seems wrong to me in these examples. As I understand it, you roll to hit with all your weapons, then roll to wound for all the hits, allocate the hits evenly to the target unit, and then the models in that get to make saves (if allowed). That precludes sticking all the flamer hits on a single target, because if you hit all models in the target unit with your template and then some more with your bolters (say, seven flamer hits and four bolter hits), all models must take at least one wound, and some will take two.

 

The smart way to allocate them would then be something like two flamer hits each on three models, one flamer hit and one bolter hit on another model, and one bolter hit each on the remaining three guys. This does mean you are making your own fire less effective, yes: if you had only fired the flamer, all models would have had one flamer hit with STR5 AP4, which is more likely to cause a lot of casualties than the example above is …

 

Chalk this one up to poor statistics research from GW, too :lol:

[JamesI]

Yeah, if you are shooting at marines with a squad with plasma and bolters, sometimes you are better off just shooting the plasma to avoid piling up the no armor wounds on the same group of models.

 

Now remember, saves are taken by group. A group is models that are different than the others, so if you have 5 scouts with bolters, they are all identical no allocation.

[Vindicatus]

Alright, so let me get this straight.

 

I have a unit of dudes up close to a unit of 5 guys who have +4 armour saves, and hose them down with a heavy flamer. After I calculate how many I hit, I add in the bolter shots from my unit.

 

Are you telling me that something that is a TEMPLATE WEAPON can be allocated with the bolter rounds in such a way to take extra flamer hits on a few dudes, and bolters on the rest in order to make their saves so that the unit doesn't get killed off?

 

What sort of ass-backwards logic is that?

 

Does this same retardation apply if I lay down a Strength D pieplate on a unit and then kicked off a few heavy bolter rounds from my thunderhawk? Giant walls of flaming death don't 'hit guys twice' to save the people behind it. It's enveloping.

 

 

My jaw is seriously kicking around near my ankles right now from how stupid that is.

[Meatman]

Yeah, if you are shooting at marines with a squad with plasma and bolters, sometimes you are better off just shooting the plasma to avoid piling up the no armor wounds on the same group of models.

 

Now remember, saves are taken by group. A group is models that are different than the others, so if you have 5 scouts with bolters, they are all identical no allocation.

 

 

Yup, and if those scouts take 2 plasma and 4 bolter wounds, you remove the 2 dead guys, and roll the saves on the scouts, removing the ones that fail saves.

 

2 plasma + 3 failed = 5 dead scouts

[nurglez]

this has been done to death, really.

 

ok, you shoot at my 5 terminators, inflicting 4 plasma wounds, and 16 bolter wounds, each of my terminators will receive 4 wounds, yet I choose which wounds go where. thus I shall put the 4 ap 2 plasma wounds on my 1 storm shield and the rest get 4 bolter wounds each to save. perfectly legal, perfectly within the rules, and perfectly set up to be taken advantage off (nob bikers/thunderwolves anyone?).

 

hence why, in that same situation, if you just inflicted 4 plasma wounds and no bolter wounds, i have to assign them to different models, thus risking 4 of my terminators making their 5+ save.

[Vindicatus]

I don't know, maybe I'm over-thinking this (which is entirely possible), but in certain instances, yes, I can see that physically happening. The dude with the most protection sits up front and soaks the heavy hits while the rest can pile in behind him and drop the hammer.

 

But template weapons? Sorry, this isn't Dragonball Z where we can just absorb a twelve foot wide ball of fire and leave everything behind completely unscathed. They really need to take a look at that (but obviously won't because it makes you have to, y'know, think objectively), because one dude taking gout of fire/plasma/burnydeathkill in the face for the rest of his squad when it falls over all of them, merely because someone plinked off a few shots with a bolt pistol at them too makes no damned sense.

[nurglez]

I agree, it doesn't make sense, but warhammer 40k is a rules based system, and we play by the rules.

 

the wound allocation system is why it's better to put a powerfist on a squad champion instead of a power weapon.

 

where it gets really silly is if where you have uniquely equipped models in a unit, I have 3 guys left, a champion, a plasma gunner and a normal trooper, I suffer 3 lascannon shots, they all die, I suffer 3 lascannon shots and 6 bolter shots, I put the 3 lascannon shots on my normal trooper and get to try and make 3 saves on my champion and plasma gunner.

 

I may not agree with this, but I play by the rules.

[Vindicatus]

By the same account, if I took a potshot with my Thunderhawk at someone/thing that had Eternal Warrior or some version thereof who was in a unit, by logical thought alone, EVERYTHING under that template is going to be the gooey paste covering the massive crater I'm about to create, and knowing that the EW warrior will likely survive, I might as well toss some las or bolter rounds at it too as I fly by, to try to knock it out.

 

But no, because he's a part of a unit, by this logic, he can just eat ALL of the Strength D hits himself and let everything else fall to the unit around him. (I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but merely theoretically possible) So...the EW model DBZ-style-throws himself in front of the raging sun of a turbolaser shot and gloriously sacrifices himself for the unit he's in.

 

I think the hell not. I'm going back to painting.

[Leonaides]

no he can not. He can take 1 Sd hit, then every other model has to take 1 wounding hit, then he can take 1 more Sd hit, then every other model has to take a hit. If your eternal warrior character- lets say lysander- is with a squad of 5 termies, in order for him to soak all the Sd hits himself, you'd need to cause over 30 wounds, not hits but wounds mind, with a single unit, in a single round of shooting. To do that you're talking the entire fire of a reaver titan. 2 vulcan megabolters and a strength D cannon of some kind.

[Frosty the Pyro]

Frosty's Wound Allocation Order of Operations

 

1. Enemy Rolls to hit

2. Enemy Rolls to wound

3. Apply one wound to each MODEL untill each model has one wound, Then Apply a second, third, and so on untill there are no more wounds to allocate.

4. Seperate wounded models into different identical groups based on wargear and profile (so all marines with just a bolter in one group, ones with a boltpistal/ccw in another, plasmaguns in another, sergents in another and so on)

5. Roll armor saves for each GROUP

6. Within each group aply wounds in such a way to remove the maximum amount of models/wounds posible (for example intant death goes on the ones with the most wounds remaing), extra wounds do NOT carry over into other groups, they are lost.

 

 

 

while it can result in less deaths sometimes than the old method, it is still vastly superior, while the new system can let you avoid some deaths by manipulating who gets hit with what, the old sytem ment that a you could not kill a powerfist, IC, or special weapon in a unit untill every other person died first. With the curent system, if you put 10 wounds on a 10 man unit, everyone in that unit has a chance to die, and if the first one to go is your power fist, well, tough luck people shoot at officers these days.

[Algesan]

Frosty's Wound Allocation Order of Operations

 

1. Enemy Rolls to hit

2. Enemy Rolls to wound

3. Apply one wound to each MODEL untill each model has one wound, Then Apply a second, third, and so on untill there are no more wounds to allocate.

4. Seperate wounded models into different identical groups based on wargear and profile (so all marines with just a bolter in one group, ones with a boltpistal/ccw in another, plasmaguns in another, sergents in another and so on)

5. Roll armor saves for each GROUP

6. Within each group aply wounds in such a way to remove the maximum amount of models/wounds posible (for example intant death goes on the ones with the most wounds remaing), extra wounds do NOT carry over into other groups, they are lost.

 

 

 

while it can result in less deaths sometimes than the old method, it is still vastly superior, while the new system can let you avoid some deaths by manipulating who gets hit with what, the old sytem ment that a you could not kill a powerfist, IC, or special weapon in a unit untill every other person died first. With the curent system, if you put 10 wounds on a 10 man unit, everyone in that unit has a chance to die, and if the first one to go is your power fist, well, tough luck people shoot at officers these days.

 

Reversing 3 & 4 makes it a bit cleaner IMO.

 

The issue is how do we allocate wounds? It seems that in 4th Ed, you just picked the casualties you took until all that was left were the most effective models. Ok, that is reasonable to some extent, the wily vets survive longer and if they guy with the flamer goes down, his buddy next to him will snatch it up to use it. It was also easier to kill entire units.

 

In 5th Ed, you can play wound games to help "hide" the units, but they all have a chance of dying. If you have an IC in artificer armor, you can also do what I have a few times, take that AP3 hit for the rest of the squad, yeah, you might lose a wound, but otherwise you lose a troop. While it does give a shot at "special" models that 4th Ed didn't allow, it also makes units harder to kill. Works both ways, which is the important thing for this rule.

 

The problem with not firing weapons is that if you don't fire weapons, you don't get saves. Okay, if you see five scouts and you know you can cover them with your heavy flamer template, then don't shoot the bolters at them. You will wound 2/3 of them or 3.33 and they will die without armor saves. If you shoot a plasmagun, and 8 bolters along with it, then you should get 1 plasma wound and 5.33 bolter wounds. Doubling up the plasma and one flamer, kills one. Doubling up the other two flamers kills another, so now we have 2 of the 3 we would have gotten with just the flamer. You are left with two scouts with a 75% chance of dying and one scout with a 50% chance of dying. which will probably give you two more kills and a decent chance of wiping the unit. You don't do that without the bolter fire.

[Grey Mage]

Something seems wrong to me in these examples. As I understand it, you roll to hit with all your weapons, then roll to wound for all the hits, allocate the hits evenly to the target unit, and then the models in that get to make saves (if allowed). That precludes sticking all the flamer hits on a single target, because if you hit all models in the target unit with your template and then some more with your bolters (say, seven flamer hits and four bolter hits), all models must take at least one wound, and some will take two.

 

The smart way to allocate them would then be something like two flamer hits each on three models, one flamer hit and one bolter hit on another model, and one bolter hit each on the remaining three guys. This does mean you are making your own fire less effective, yes: if you had only fired the flamer, all models would have had one flamer hit with STR5 AP4, which is more likely to cause a lot of casualties than the example above is …

 

Chalk this one up to poor statistics research from GW, too :blush:

You shoot off a squad, say of legion of the damned, with a heavy flamer and 9 bolters. The enemy tau get hit 8 time by the heavy flamer as theyre relatively bunched up. You have good round of shooting with your bolters and score 14 hits. Your heavy flamer doesnt do well, only wounding 4 times- your bolters do very well, wounding an incredibly 13 times!

 

He takes all 4 heavy flamer wounds on the 2 gun drones. He takes the 13 bolter hits on the other 10 fire warriors, who get their 4+ armor saves vs the bolters AP 5. Perfectly legal- no particular model had more than 2 hits on it, thus as the controlling player he gets to say where the 5 'left overs' go. And he can assign them in any order he so desires.

 

Its odd, but such things happen all the time. Why? Because statistics are for people who dont understand the concept of probability.

 

It becomes more important the more weapons with different APs you have, and where your opponents armor saves are. Like Terminators- Deathwing terminators are amazing at this. My GH pack with 2 Plasmaguns and a Pistol get 5 AP 2 shots off- and on a day of good rolling with them and my bolters theyll all be stacked onto 1 guy with a chainfist. If I just had the one plasmaweapon in the squad it wouldnt matter much at all... *say a tactical squad with PP*.

[Seahawk]

This situation actually came up last night. I was playing against DE with my IG. There was a Wych squad with a Pain Token that was down to 2 members: the unit champ and another with a special weapon, and they were joined by an Archon. My stormtroopers had plasma. So I figured, why fire the hot-shot las when they get FNP from it, and he could lump the death on a chump? So I fired just the plasma, killed off the Wych squad (stupid 2+ Archon!) and was happy.

[JamesI]

This situation actually came up last night. I was playing against DE with my IG. There was a Wych squad with a Pain Token that was down to 2 members: the unit champ and another with a special weapon, and they were joined by an Archon. My stormtroopers had plasma. So I figured, why fire the hot-shot las when they get FNP from it, and he could lump the death on a chump? So I fired just the plasma, killed off the Wych squad (stupid 2+ Archon!) and was happy.

Its one of the flaws in the game. It shouldn't be better to hold back shooting.

[breng77]

Except in that case it is probably not better, sure wyches get FNP but they get no armor save. Doing more wounds is almost always better than holding back.

[Seahawk]

Well, this way I had a chance (albeit small, but he rolls 1's a lot) to insta-gib his Archon too. If I caused 3 plasma wounds and 4 las wounds, the plasma all goes on the wyches along with two hot shot wounds (which are now wasted), and the Archon only takes two 2+ saves from wounds that don't cause Instant Death (and it also gets its FNP too). Or he lumps all the plasma onto the Archon for the easy saves (or unfortunate death) and he gets his FNP on the Wyches for a decent chance of nobody dying at all.

 

A simple three plasma wounds means the wyches die straight up and the Archon may or may not follow suit. In this case it was much better to only fire the plasma.

[breng77]

For me that would depend on game turn and other conditions, because should the archon fail that 2+ he loses it, so making him take more saves is better than fewer that have a chance to cause instant death, unless it is the end of the game and I need the kill point.

[Seahawk]

Remember though, in one of the cases I listed, there's a decent chance nothing dies because I fired more low-powered shots. I'd rather be assured of one kill point than maybe getting two. Bird in the hand, and all that.

[breng77]

True, however it is still fairly likely you will get one KP, in both cases, it also depends If You need 2 KP or 1 KP, everything is situational.

[Grey Mage]

As this is become a good, solid, tactical discussion it will be moving to Tactica.

[DarkGuard]

A lot of people seem to be overplaying the rule on here, with examples such as 5 Scouts only losing a couple of models because you fired the bolt shots and the heavy flamers. Remember that wounds are allocated individually to each model, and that you can't add another wound to one model without every other model possessing the same amount of wounds that model currently has. Furthermore, when rolling you roll in groups, not specific models.

 

So in the example of Scouts, if they are all ordinary Scouts armed identically, it's actually a good idea to fire your boltguns with the heavy flamer. That way you can compensate for any poor rolling with the heavy flamer, and your opponent has to roll all the saves at once, he can't play wound tricks with the squad. For example, I fire the heavy flamer, scoring 3 wounds. I then fire four boltguns (hellfire, they're in cover, and this is a Sternguard squad if it's a heavy flamer), I score a further 5 wounds. My opponent has to make all saves at once, as these models have identical profiles and equipment, and fails 3 saves. 6 wounds results in a dead Scout squad.

 

If the squad was a sniper squad with a heavy weapon however, five men again, then you need to weigh up the advantage of more shots with the disadvantage of wound games. In the same scenario as above (3 heavy flamer wounds and 5 AP5 wounds), my opponent could feasibly allocate two of the heavy flamer wounds to the heavy weapon, one of them and four bolt shots to the snipers, and one bolt shot to the sergeant. In this case only two people die, and he has a chance to save three more, with his sergeant having a good chance of surviving. However, his other snipers are likely to die, and at most he'll only save one or two models from this squad. Alternatively, he could use the wound allocation system to protect his upgrade models (heavy and sergeant), allocating the heavy flamer wounds and three bolt shots to the snipers, and one wound each to the heavy and sergeant. Doing so gives his upgrades a good chance of surviving, and forfeits three wounds caused. However, he has just seen his unit reduced to below half strength.

 

Such actions forces your opponent to make decisions, and the more decisions he is called to make the more likely he will make a mistake. There are times when less shots may be better, the Wych example above is one. However, remember that even for five man squads, you still need to inflict a lot of wounds to only have one model die to unsaveable wounds, and a lot of the time that model is an upgrade model.

 

I normally go for more shots however, as it's rare that your opponent will double up killing wounds on one model. Such models tend to be upgrade models, and your opponent is more likely to want to keep that meltagun or heavy bolter alive than two boltgun models. The only specific case I think I'd encounter this most is in combat, whereby the amount of attacks back would mean more than a simple heavy weapon.

 

Overall, I feel a few people here seem to be overstating what the wound allocation system can do. Yes it can result in less models, and it may be understandable with plasma shots hitting the same guy, but in the case of templates what if a squads comrades dive out of the way, while the unfortunate soul at the front thrashes around the flames in agony and terror? 40K isn't meant to make sense in real life situations, its a game set in a futuristic and fantastic universe. This is just one more example of abstract rules, but I am happy to play them as they are, especially as in this case wound allocation is not nearly as silly as some people seem to think it is.

[Wildfire]

I don't think people are overstating the rules at all. It's certainly possible. What I think is that with all the examples people may be getting the impression that such oddities happen more often than they do.

[Grey Mage]

Well and it depends on the unit, and in part the army. C:SM has most of its units with a sergeant and 1-2 upgrades in a full squad. C:SW on the other hands can have 5 individual models in a standard troops unit, and all 10 models unique in a wolf gaurd unit just as a matter of course.

 

Example- wound allocation rarely comes up much in my Eldar Army. Aspect Warriors are fairly uniform, so all I do is minimise the hits on my important, and expensive, exarch.

 

My SWs on the other hand are more varied, and I have no problem sacrificing the guy with the Powerfist against a C:SM player to make all the AP 2 wounds go away. Even better if I can just sacrifice the flamer guy and keep the SCCW and Meltagun.