Armoured Clash: Basic Statistics

So I’ve been meaning to start writing stuff about Armoured Clash now that I’ve had a game to see how things tick, but I figured I’d get this out to have a baseline for discussion and to give an idea for how much you can expect out of a unit. Most of the background text here is copied from my Dystopian Wars Basic Statistics post.

Pure damage output is less important in Armoured Clash than in Dystopian Wars, from what I’ve seen so far. The lack of defences, infinite exploding dice, and sustained makes these calculations significantly easier and straightforward too. Output on average is lower as well due to the lack of infinitely exploding dice, though defenses are lower as well.

Result Multipliers

Neutral: 0.889
Improved: 1
Weakened: 0.778
Neutral against Durable: 0.667
Neutral with Arc: 1
Neutral with Give Em Hell (Strikes count as 2): 1.333
Weakened with Give Em Hell (Strikes count as 2): 1.167

These are multipliers on the expected successes per dice. These are not multipliable with each other, so if anything relevant is missing please let me know.

As an example for how to read this: If you attack with an neutral dice pool that has 10 dice, you can expect to receive at least 8.89 hits 50% of the time. If that same dicepool is Improved, you can expect 10 hits. This includes the results of exploding dice.

Point Efficiency

So what’s the point to all this? Special Rules and Qualities can make an attack 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 an attack, using the multipliers above for the qualities or state of the attack, 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 attack arrangement compares.

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 attacks to a target and then wiff on taking it out, so buyer beware.

Closing

Overall, I think this is going to be less relevant for Armoured Clash than Dystopian Wars, but it’s still useful info to have. At the moment I don’t think I’m going to be updating my simulator, but it’s not going to be a lot of work either (cap exploding at 1 iteration, reorder exploding and rerolls, change up the qualities). I hope it’s helpful, and if I have an error or there’s a multiplier that’s missing please let me know.

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