Greetings, fellow Verka Serduchkas! Once again I find myself doing more mathammering in response to (some of the) comments from my previous article on the much maligned Tactical Squad.

In this iteration, I (finally) tackle how Guardsmen perform when Morale is factored in. I also look at how cover and negative to-hit modifiers affect the equation. In the conclusion, I also adress some of the points brought forward with regards to the balance between Tactical Squads and other Troops as well as the possibility that chaff troops are too good and its them that need to be nerfed rather than Marines being boosted.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Morale

So after much tinkering, I think I finally figured how to account for Morale. If you’re curious about the process, it goes like this:

First, you must determine how many extra casualties a squad would suffer for each extra “normal” (shooting or assault) loss, on average.

Then you add the cost of the Morale casualties to the that of the normal casualties and average out.

When you’ve done this for every single additional casualty, you average out the weighted model cost.

For example, an Infantry Squad starting at full strength that suffers 4 casualties will lose on average 1 additional model to Morale: the D6 roll added to the 4 casualties and with the Ld 7 of the Sergeant subtracted gives us 0, 0, 0, 1, 2 and 3 as possible results, which averages out to 1. Adding the cost of that extra casualty to the 4 other “normal” casualties and averaging them out gives us a weighted model cost of 5 points, which then needs to be averaged out with other weighted model costs.

Here you have the table with all the different values for each additional casualty:

When you average out the weighted model cost, you get a value 4.76 points per model. That may not seem like a big difference at first glance, but in reality, it’s an 18% jump in cost per model. Basically, it’s as if your 10-man Infantry Squad was only really 8.4-man strong (I guess one of them is a midget? :P).

Compare to the same table for the Tactical Squad (here we’re going to run the numbers on 5-men squads as that’s how they are almost always run):

Averaged out, we get a value of 13.08 pts per model. That’s a tiny increase for the Tacticals (not even a full extra 1%) so yes, Morale affects Guard in a big way where Marines by and large don’t care about it.

That said, when we go back to our initial comparisons, we still find them largely in favour of the Guardsmen: the Tactical Marine suffers about 9% less WPP when shot by the Cultist autogun, but 3% more from a Chaos Marine Boltgun and a massive 83% more from a Scion Plasmagun. On the damage front, the Guardsmen does more damage to the Predator (3% more), to the Chaos Marine (37% more) and the Guardsman (55% more). So, it’s a bit closer than my initial math suggested, but the overall discrepancy is still massive.

Cover

A lot of folks have brought up the fact that Marines in cover are hard to shift. That makes sense given that the bonus to armour saves has a much greater impact on units that already have a good save than on ones that don’t. For example, a Marine squad will suffer 50% fewer casualties when in cover while an Ork Boz Mob will only take 20% fewer. Ergo, it makes sense to suggest that when factoring in cover, Tacticals will shine (or at the very least, not seem so bad). And in practice, cover DOES help:

In cover, the Guardsman will suffer 0.59 WPP from the Cultist Autogun, 1.05 WPP from the Marine Boltgun and 2.64 WPP from the Scion Plasmagun. This factors in Morale losses.

In cover, the Tactical Marine will suffer 0.36 WPP from the Autogun, 0.72 WPP from the Boltgun and 3.88 WPP from the Plasmagun. This also factors in Morale losses.

In other words, the Tactical Marines suffer almost 40% less casualties from the Autogun and more than 30% fewer losses from the Boltgun, but still over 46% more from the Plasmagun. That is a vast improvement over the results from outside of cover. Still, that is meager consolation given that a) it only makes things sort of balanced (less vulnerable to small arms but still more vulnerable to weapons with good AP) instead of giving Marines a clear edge in something b) it confines you to sticking to cover and c) it does nothing for the Tac’s anemic damage output.

Stealthy things

Speaking of damage output, another point that was raised is that given Marines’ superior Ballistic Skill, they are less affected by things like the Alaitoc/Raven Guard/Alpha Legion Traits. That is certainly true, but is it enough to really make a difference? Well…

A Guardsman will cause 0.03 WPP to an Alpha Legion Cultist, 0.008 to a Raven Guard Devastator and 0.0039 WPP to an Alaitoc Wave Serpent.

A Tactical Marine will cause 0.02 WPP to the Cultist, 0.006 WPP to Devastator and 0.0042 to the Wave Serpent.

So the good news is that the Tactical DOES indeed do more damage to SOMETHING (9% more to the Wave Serpent). The bad news is that it trails where it matters more: the Guardsman does over 20% more WPP to the Raven Guard Marine and more than 35% extra WPP to the Cultist. This is factoring in the Morale cost for the Guardsman and the Tactical outlined above.

Conclusion

So now we’ve got Morale factored in (which was a biggie, truly), we’ve witnessed that cover helps a bit (but is not a panacea) and that negative to-hit modifiers reduce the gap a bit but does not negate it anywhere near completely (not even close). Again, all this math is in no way providing us with a complete picture but with the above covered, we do have a fairly large part of it.

I’ll preempt a comment I’m sure will pop up again: yes, it’s possible that there are worse Troops choices than Tacticals. For example, I fully agree that Eldar Guardians are garbage, and highly likely worse overall than Tacticals. That said, this is not and either/or scenario: there’s nothing preventing GW from fixing Tacticals AND Guardians.

Another comment I’m sure we’ll see is that perhaps it’s Guardsmen (and other chaff troops) that need to be nerfed rather than Tacticals boosted. To that I’ll simply reply that it would do nothing for the Tactical Squad itself because it would still be a garbage choice within the Space Marines codex; Scouts would remain the default Troops choice, just as Rangers are the default Troops choice for the Eldar. What would likely happen is that Conscripts and Infantry Squads would simply stop being used by Guard players in favour of Scions.

Thoughts?