Well, this is intuitive mathematics from almost 30 years of wargaming, so please forgive me if I am totally incorrect, but a higher number of dice rolled should make for a wider possibility of results. This every Ork player should know by heart. Rolling 20 dice for 6s, means that you statistically should score 3 1/3 hits and you generally do score 3, but you will find yourself quite often with results ranging from 0 to 6, and sometimes even more. A higher number of hits also inflicts the same statistical variation on armour saves. That is why, for instance, Hormagaunts were changed in the Tyranid list. 2 x 5+ CC is better than 1 x 3+, since the statistical output is the same (2/3 hits), but 2 x 5+ has the chance of inflicting 2 hits.

What I am trying to say is that a "hail of AT" can produce, and is probably statistically prone to, wider variation in both hits and armour saves. In the long run, hits and saves regress towards the mean, but in a single instance, "shocking" results are likely to occur. I had a game against Thousand Sons where I laid a MW barrage on Defilers, just for them to make 2/2 invulnerable saves. Later in the game, I assaulted a Warlord Titan with a flurry of CC attacks, just for the Warlord to flunk all saves, taking 5DC in a single assault phase.

I am not trying to argue against Matt's tables. We do not have that much else to go on than statistical average output when we measure a unit's capacity. But a "flurry of dice" will make for weird results, rather than mean results, going both ways. I remember a well fought game against Borka's Tau, where his Crisis Suits fired at my super-heavy tank company, making all MW hits, just for me to make all 4+ saves. This is the essential beauty of table top games, that luck is involved and you have to deal with lady Fortune and chin up, whatever happens.

/Fredmans

Sorry to say I am not going to add lance to the Tau list.

I will try and explain why, I am sure it won't be enough to stop people shouting and saying I don't know what I am doing but hey that is the lot of an army champ.

Lance is a new special rule for the list; I am very loath to add special rules unless I absolutely have to. Worse it is a fairly definitive by this point Eldar special rule that represents a fairly specific example of Eldar technology which has no background reason to be on a Railgun.

But why are people calling for it, not because it somehow makes the new Eldar Hammerhead fit background oh sorry that was meant to be Tau Hammerhead. People are calling for it because of a perceived weakness in the Tau list and a desire to fix that weakness using the Hammerhead.

Which is fine in theory, but is missing a fairly fundamental issue – I am sorry to say despite a great deal of gnashing of teeth at the Tau list and people deciding they don’t like how it works and won’t play it again. All evidence indicates the list is balanced, tricky to play sometimes and with a hard learning curve but still very competitive and powerful when used correctly.

So given that general level of balance why would it then make sense to fix a weakness in the list, a weakness that is part of that balance. Incidentally a weakness that makes list construction an interesting balancing act and also promotes use of crossfire and the co-ordinating fire rule.

Now I can understand that if all you play against everyday is Titan legions and all Russ armies it could be a little frustrating. Even so both fights are still winnable (from experience – we do sometimes fight these armies in the UK meta) they are just difficult (or at least you can content yourself with a hard fought draw thanks to the way objectives work).

Armies are defined by their weaknesses as well as their strengths and I often feel with Tau that people really like them and get a little involved when discussing them and just end up trying to fix every possible weakness or problem without actually worrying about overall balance.

Balanced armies lose that means sometimes when you (or I) use a balanced army you (or I) will lose (I know crazy!!).

Almost all armies in epic also have some bad match ups (and armies without any are probably a little overpowered). Working around these bad match ups is often part of the fun and tactical learning aspect of an army (even if sometimes again you (or I) will lose).

Having thought about it though I am going to trial a version of the Railhead with AT3+ at exactly the same cost as the current version of 4 for 200.

This is a straight boost and will move the Railhead from a reasonable choice to probably a strong one (maybe too strong), it will definately need testing.

A new developental draft of the Third phase list will be going up later today, it will have a number of changes most very minor but a couple are quite large and this version will probably need a fair amount of testing if it is to move to approved.

In the interim the 6.6 version will be fully available and the approved version of the list.

Your points are valid, but, and this may be a bit rude, that one of the signature weaknesses is that a high-tech shooting army struggles with taking out heavy armor with their main anti-tank gun is plain stupid.

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- Ulrik

Just to add some clarity on probability as it has been misrepresented a bit IMO.

Sorry, but 2 kills is not average for 5 hits on 4+ RA with inv save, full stop. It's true that sometimes things work out differently (that's the whole point), but that doesn't invalidate probability. It's fair enough to talk about potential (e.g. 5 hits can sometimes (rarely) result in 5 kills), but the average performance of 5 hits is 1.04 kills.

P(hit is a kill) = 1/2 * 1/2 * 5/6 = 0.208333333
Mean kills (1 hit) = 0.208333333
Mean kills (5 hits) = 1.0416666

You can reverse the maths if you want to look at how likely it is to get a certain number of hits, that's fine, but it's not reflecting average performance. For 5 hits it looks like this:

P(0 kills) = 0.310965204
P(1 kill) = 0.409164743
P(2 kills) = 0.215349865
P(3 kills) = 0.056671017
P(4 kills) = 0.007456713
P(5 kills) = 0.000392459

P(1 or less kills) = 0.72
P(2 or more kills) = 0.28

So each time you get 5 hits, you only have a 28% chance of getting get 2 or more kills. By contrast, you have a 72% chance of getting fewer, and in fact it is more likely (31%) that you will get none at all. The "most likely" result is 1 kill, which lo and behold is also the "mean average" (see above).

Thus, it really isn't a valid conclusion to say that "2 kills from 5 hits" reflects the average, nor is it a likely result. The above also shows that 5 kills is possible, but extremely unlikely.

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MASSED heavy armour with their main gun WHEN NOT USING MARKERLIGHTS, TERRAIN OR MOVEMENT
fixed that for you

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NetEA NetERC Human Lists Chair
NetEA Chaos + Black Legion Champion

You still need four hits for every kill on a Russ. That requires two hammerheads, if every shot hits, which they won't. The Russ has nearly the same firepower, but is twice as tough.

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- Ulrik

I want to know whether we have even decided whether we're tackling a list-balance issue here, or a fluff/background one?

in 40k, a hammerhead is (apparently) a sublime vehicle for blowing up enemy armour of all kinds, land raiders, russes and all the rest all die very easily

this isn't quite the case in epic, but when the Tau list has already been specifically and deliberately altered away from the stats it should have based on the 40k rules, to promote certain playstyles and prevent them essentially being another flavour of eldar, complaining that the epic hammerhead doesn't work the same as the 40k hammerhead isn't a great argument IMO

The stats arguments will go round and round, it's not uncommon for hammerheads to blow up more than the average number of tanks (heh in fact they only score average around half the time anyway) in the same way that a few weeks back, my EUK AMTL reaver sustained fire on a LR formation, scoring 12 hits, all of which were saved.... I don't think the turbolaser needs buffing, or the LR needs weakening, it's just what happened at the time, freak occurences do happen, and with the number of dice being chucked around in the average game, they happen more than you expect!

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Just some guy

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Army Forge List Co-ordinator

No more stupid than the fact in a modern (let alone sci-fi) setting a single Barracuda (or any aircraft) can't just shoot up a whole field of tanks and win the game. There are lots of oddities in the game.

The problem is more with the way RA works than because the Hammerhead doesn't have a very good anti tank gun (which it does).

Pluse the Tau don't struggle against a little RA they struggle only when a large percentage of the opposing army is RA while at the same time having limited infantry targets to go after.

Also it isn't a signature weakness (that is the lack of CC and FF) it is just a weakness that has to be worked around sometimes. For instance you can easily destroy Titans (take 2 x AX-1-0 squadrons and a Protector for support) it just forces other big issues and problems into your list. Finding the balance and learning what to do when you may be facing more than you have tools to deal with is one of the reasonas I really like the Tau list.

Agree that the problem is RA, but I don't agree that the Hammerhead has a good anti-tank gun, precisely because the Russ has RA.

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- Ulrik

No problem then as for less points than a russ co I can get 12 hammerheads, using ML (as in my experience over 90% of tau shooting is at markerlit targets) and terrain/skimming I should nearly always get 2 rounds of shooting before the russ can reply. So 24 shots on 3 (at4 stats) and 24 on 5. 24 hits, 6 kills broken russ co.

With how the armies play I don't think there is any problem with russ vs hammerhead, the fixes to this non-issue will be too good against anything but the supposed problem of large RA formations

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kyuss, the fact that freak occurrences do happen is why you can't go by anecdote to define stats, which leaves probability. We've talked about the over-reliance on mean averages before (there is a thread I started somewhere on probability), because both the maximum performance and the variability itself are also valid considerations (e.g. 5xAT6+ vs AT2+). IMO the ideal is to decide what you want the unit to be/do, and then pick the stats that accomplish it best within the other constraints. That's what the analysis in this thread is trying to do, broadly.

My impression is that the purported issue is not purely a weakness in the list (which is what yme-loc has perceived), nor is it purely about the HH being too weak for its point cost. And neither is it purely that it doesn't reflect the 40K unit, or that it doesn't match is supposed role. It seems to be about all four of these things, i.e.:
- The Tau aren't as shooty as they should be against heavy armour
- The Hammerhead isn't as good a pick as it should be
- The Hammerhead behaves differently (and negatively) compared to the 40K equivalent
- The Hammerhead does not behave like a MBT

Whether or not each of those is true is of course the subject being debated, as is the relative importance of each in considering whether an approved list should see a change.

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Thank you yme-loc for considering this. I play lots of scenarios not necessarily using either the full list or the tournament scenario so while I understand those people who consider its balance within that context I come down on the side of wanting the unit to be representative on its own merits.

If there was ever a more significant review of the list to take place I'd love to have the opportunity to contribute, although I do think its very good at the moment.

I thought you were just saying that every time while playing you personally roll a dice which hits that equates to a kill, to which I was nodding my head thinking yes that seems right .

As someone who plays against tau more often than plays with (especially since it appears that my hammerhead based tau army will be using the eldar list) I will again say that AT3+ is a bad idea. an increase in AT provides twice the benefit against nonRA vehicles than against RA ones. (again, +1AT gives an 11% increase in the ability to kill a chimera, but only a 4.1% increase in the ability to kill a russ) Tau do not need increased ability to deal with regular AV, they're more than capable of that right now. what they tend to find very difficult, disproportionately so, is dealing with Russ companies and their other heavy tank equivalents.

Noone, literally noone i saw, in this entire thread, has complained that the current 4+ with access to markerlits, is insufficient at killing light AV. the problem is against RA. particularly when they have to face a bunch of it at once. A problem not shared by the other tanks of equivalent role and survivability.

If someone says to you "Timmy has twice as many Apples as me" do you respond with "well here's an apple, now excuse me, I have to go give Timmy two more apples now"? Madness! why does Timmy need more apples? bugger has plenty of apples already!

I'm sure tau can win games, entire tournaments even. I'm sure that in the hands of a better than average player, they will perform better than in the hands of a below average one. I am not convinced that a better than average player will have equally better than average success with tau as they would with another army. I am also unconvinced that just because an army can win a game, that it means that all units in that army's available selection are sufficiently powerful.

If you added a 200 point unit to, say, the marine list with 5+ armour, 1 AP5+/AT5+ 45cm shots and a speed of 15cm, there would be no reasonable arguement that it was fine, because people can still win games using marines. Even suggesting that the unit is fine just because people can take one and still win a game is not pertinent. A unit can be underpowered and still be in a list that performs well.

And overall, tau do not perform all that well. even the eUK stats, the stats people are claiming as evidence against the statistical analysis and general dismissal of an entire continent, Even those stats, if we were to assume that the players taking it were average (maths shows not) or that they were taking enough hammerheads to be noteworth (lists shows not) or that the hammerheads were responsible for the wins (anecdotes and statistical analysis suggest not) they are still only winning 41% of their games.

If one group of people's high end tournament players are winning less than half their games with an army, and an entire other metagame has largely dismissed a portion of that army, that suggests that there's probably a problem

Even if our metagame is disproportionately RA heavy, that doesnt somehow invalidate the concern that this army, and in particular, its supposed tank hunter, does not handle it well. Should we simply ask our opponents not to take so many RA units? or just not play Tau and focus on lists that have the tools to deal with it? the Tau list has plenty of defining weaknesses already, and I support those. I do not think "cannot kill a leman russ company" is a weakness that tau should have, either in game balance, or in fluff terms.

12 tanks, shooting for two turns, vs an enemy formation that neither retaliates against the enemy tanks, nor their exposed and vulnerable markerlighting formation, nor recovers from blast markers, can, barring swings in luck, cause 6 entire casualties? that hardly seems like a fair trade to dedicate 900 odd points of your army for half to two thirds of a game.

If the premier shooty army's premier tank hunting weapon is not adequate to take on what is widely viewed as the most common standard to which to compare all other main battle tanks, seems to me that something is wrong.

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~Every Tool Is A Weapon, If You Hold It Right~