Dystopian Wars: Basic Statistics

When comparing units, one of the first things we usually care about is their damage output. Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story, but it’s always useful to know how much you can expect your units to do. I’m not particularly good at statistics, so I threw together a little program to validate these (plus I couldn’t figure out sustained with statistics alone).

Result Multipliers

• Repairs: 0.33
• Defense Dice: 0.5
• Obscured (Dice don’t explode): 0.8333
• Heavy Hits count as Hits: 0.8
• No Modifiers: 1
• Reroll Blanks: 1.16
• Devastating: 1.2
• Sustained: Between 1.27 and 1.2, depending on dice pool size.
• Reroll Blanks + Sustained: Between 1.405 and 1.366, depending on dice pool size.
• Fusilade: 1.33
• Fusilade + Sustained: 1.5

These are multipliers on the expected successes per dice. You can multiply these with each other if more than one applies, except for sustained with other reroll effects. I think I covered the relevant ones there, but if you know of any others feel free to let me know.

Sustained is better on smaller dice pools. For the ends of the range above, I went with 10 dice to 50 dice. For my calculations, I usually go with a midpoint between the two.

As an example for how to read this: If you attack with a dice pool that has 10 dice, you can expect to receive at least 10 hits 50% of the time. If that same dicepool has Devastating, you can expect 12 hits. This includes the results of exploding dice.

Point Efficiency

So what’s the point to all this? Weapons with qualities such as Devastating, Sustained, or Fusilade are much more effective than the raw number of dice would indicate. If you want to compare the output of two units, you can calculate the hits you’d expect for a certain set of weapons and ranges, using the multipliers above for the qualities, and then divide that by the point cost of the unit. That gives you an efficiency factor for determining how that unit compares to any other unit, or if you want to be more precise, how a certain weapon arrangement compares.

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Damage breakpoints are very important in Dystopian Wars, so a single dice pool that consistently gets 24 hits is going to be much better than one that does not (24 hits being the common breakpoint for crippling most cruisers in one shot). Certain factions, such as Sultanate, are better dealt with by split attacks, instead of one large volley. Again, keep in mind that the resulting hits from the calculation above is what you can expect 50% of the time. The other 50% will be lower than what you calculated. Figuring out how much you can expect to deviate is covered by Statistics as Standard Deviation, but that’s a whole other topic that I’m not good at.

This is a basic first step that one can expand upon for a more detailed analysis, not the end all to what unit is better. But it’s a factor, and knowing about how many hits you can expect from a pool is useful. It is also a great way to underallocate guns to a target and then wiff on taking it out, so buyer beware.