Stop looking at the picture. The stuff I'm going to write is way more interesting.
Nah, it isn't.
But it might be a little bit useful.
So, percentages. What use are they in a game of 40k? And I'm not talking about the percentages relating to mathhammer here.
Any ideas?
Well to be honest this has probably been covered somewhere else by someone who actually knows what they're talking about and who didn't need a picture of a sexy maths teacher to grab your attention.
I think they can be used when building your army.
Forget all the shit you hear about the air forces and navies of the world being the military arms that win wars.
They don't. They can definitely heavily influence battles by flying about bombing the crap out of everything that moves or is deemed a threat, or by launching super dooper missiles from hundreds of miles away that can target some poor guy sitting on the toilet reading the paper, but they don't win battles; feet on the ground do.
And it's exactly the same in a majority of objective based games in 40k.
Your fancy flier, dreadnought or tank isn't going to hold that objective. They may deny someone else holding it, but unless they're a scoring unit, or you've got one of your troops choices sitting on it at the end of the game, you ain't getting the points.
'Yeah numb-nuts, we know that.' I hear you say.
Well, if you know it, then why do so many people take the bare minimum of troops choices and fill out the rest of their army with expensive, non-scoring units?
I recently played a 1500 pt game against an opponent running Dark Eldar. Points wise my troop choices made up about 42% of my army. When I looked at the number of models on the table, they added up to around 50% of my total.
Now it was an objective based game, and my opponent took two minimum number troop choices. I don't know the exact number of points he had spent on them, but even being generous, it couldn't have been more than 20 - 25%.
I targeted that 20 - 25% points of his army with as much as I could and by turn 3 they were gone; I was able to start taking the rest of his army to pieces bit by bit and the game was as good as over. My troops? For the most part he ignored them, preferring to target my more expensive elites and heavy support units that could cause him a lot more pain.
'But that's a tactical error on his part, nothing to do with percentages. He should have hidden his troops better.'
That's a fair point and perhaps it has more than a grain of truth to it.
But, if I hadn't been able to target his troops all of my firepower would have been raining down on his other units. Or, if he had spent more points on troops choices it would have taken me longer to destroy them, giving him more time to kill my other units.
There's a reason that we're able to take more troop choices than anything else on the Force Organisation Chart, because they're the units that are going to win you games. The percentages in the game I spoke about above were against my opponent from the start; I had the ability to put more feet on the ground than he did.
And if real life or history teaches us anything, it's that it is a good job there aren't too many maths teachers like the one in the picture above in our schools. If there were, there would be a hell of a lot more innumerate people in the world.
Here's Kate.
'Yeah numb-nuts, we know that.' I hear you say.
Well, if you know it, then why do so many people take the bare minimum of troops choices and fill out the rest of their army with expensive, non-scoring units?
I recently played a 1500 pt game against an opponent running Dark Eldar. Points wise my troop choices made up about 42% of my army. When I looked at the number of models on the table, they added up to around 50% of my total.
Now it was an objective based game, and my opponent took two minimum number troop choices. I don't know the exact number of points he had spent on them, but even being generous, it couldn't have been more than 20 - 25%.
I targeted that 20 - 25% points of his army with as much as I could and by turn 3 they were gone; I was able to start taking the rest of his army to pieces bit by bit and the game was as good as over. My troops? For the most part he ignored them, preferring to target my more expensive elites and heavy support units that could cause him a lot more pain.
'But that's a tactical error on his part, nothing to do with percentages. He should have hidden his troops better.'
That's a fair point and perhaps it has more than a grain of truth to it.
But, if I hadn't been able to target his troops all of my firepower would have been raining down on his other units. Or, if he had spent more points on troops choices it would have taken me longer to destroy them, giving him more time to kill my other units.
There's a reason that we're able to take more troop choices than anything else on the Force Organisation Chart, because they're the units that are going to win you games. The percentages in the game I spoke about above were against my opponent from the start; I had the ability to put more feet on the ground than he did.
And if real life or history teaches us anything, it's that it is a good job there aren't too many maths teachers like the one in the picture above in our schools. If there were, there would be a hell of a lot more innumerate people in the world.
Here's Kate.
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