First Game of 6th Edition - Finally!

I had a chance to play my first game of 6th edition, and although it was a little rough at some points - it was overall a great experience.  Before I go any further a mini rant...

I loaned out my new 6th edition rulebook to some other games while I was playing for a few minutes.  In that time they managed to smash the corners and peel off that nice outer lining.  I take good care of my things, and now my 6th edition book looks worse than my 5th edition/4th edition already.  If you borrow people's things, especially their $75 rule book, be respectful of them and return them in the same condition

...okay, that helped a little bit.  I was steamed all night about the book being wrecked but I tried not to let that get in the way of having fun.  I played a variant of the list I posted here for 1850 which was...

Charge Distances - Revisited

EDIT: These values were updated and validated on 7/18/2012.

With the help of some MatLab code that I wrote, I recalculated my charge distances and accounted for some additional factors as well.   I have these values in both tabular and graph form for quick reference.  First though, some information on how I generated this data.

Since this is a computer, I did an exhaustive enumeration of the whole space for each calculation.  For the layman, I did the equivalent of determining every single possible combination and then collected them to determine the probability of a successful charge.  I have evaluated 3 cases so far:

(1) Standard 2d6 charge
(2) Charge through terrain - drop the lowest
(3) Charge with fleet

Tactica: Pavane of Slaanesh

The new position based wound allocation and removal rules make proper positioning of your individual models far more important than ever before.  With the emphasis on actual model placement, any ability that enables the manipulation of enemy models is far more powerful than before.

There are only two abilities that put the power to position enemy models into your hands (technically three if you count Deep Strike Mishap - Misplaced) and both belong to Chaos: Lash of Submission and Pavane of Slaanesh.  Pavane has less potential power than Lash, but has some advantages:

Lash can be taken on Daemon Princes or Sorcerers marked with Slaanesh.  In contrast Pavane can be taken on a Keeper of Secrets, The Masque, Slaanesh Heralds and Daemon Princes w/ Mark of Slaanesh.  I am going to focus on tactics for enemy model manipulation using The Masque with a unit of Horrors and a unit of Daemonettes.  Some of these tactics become even more powerful when coupled with other units (I will note some cases where appropriate).

In this tactica I will discuss:
1 - Avoiding Look Out Sir!
2 - Special Weapon Range Snipes
3 - Special Weapon Terrain Snipes
4 - Assault Casualty Avoidance

Deep Strike, Charges and Fleet

With premeasuring in for this edition, I finally sat down with Excel and made up a few charts for deep strike guidance to determine exactly how risky any Deep Strike might be.  Remember, you need to include the width of the circles around the center you need to make after the initial model is placed and the 1" distance from the enemy.  A 3-d plot of this that accounts for the possible directional scatter of the dice is forthcoming once I get MatLab working for this data set.

These ranges work for a scatter dice with 1/3 hits and have remained unchanged over the past several editions.  More interesting is the contrast for charge ranges - the ranges for a standard charging unit have the same plot as the scatter distance from 2 to 12 (just normalize the probabilities!)

More interesting to me is the influence of Fleet on the charge range of some of my favorite Daemon units (Fiends and Seekers).  This calculation is conservative and based on enumerating the entire range of possible outputs assuming you always reroll the lowest dice result.

In actuality you might occasionally want to reroll both dice results (for charging 8" when one dice is a 1 for example).  I will incorporate the fully accurate ranges when I finish up with the MatLab plots (Excel is really pretty poor for these kinds of calculations).  I also plotted the old charge ranges with this plot for a unit with Fleet.

These are the probabilities when only rerolling a single dice to succeed a charge at 2", 3", 4" through 12".  The charge range for 5th edition is the standard 6" charge plus a fleet move.  For beasts/cavalry this remains accurate due to the change to a 12" move for those units.

The relative closeness of these curves demonstrates that the nerf to charge ranges is most pronounced in the 7" charge range (which is where you used to have a guaranteed assault).  Remember, these numbers are a bit conservative as well.

1000 points - Slaanesh in 6th Edition

I referred to a number of the changes made to the rules for 6th edition and their impact on Daemons here

For this army I want to head back to my roots as a purely Slaanesh player - partially because I think they have become really really good - but mainly because the reasons I stopped playing them have partially disappeared.  (you try rolling a 6, 6, 3+, 5+ to kill a moving vehicle for a few weeks and see how you feel about it).  The new Slaanesh list I am going to start with is:

Daemons - 6th Edition Overview

I still have the final battle report to post for the 4 player FFA tournament and I will try to get it up this weekend.  With all the 6th edition hype I have been spending my time reading, rather than writing until this point.  I think these thoughts are mature enough at this point to share as initial 6th edition impressions  These impressions are based on a careful reading of the new rules, as the game I had scheduled this week fell through.