Icebreaker vs Backswing

That’s right – it’s a DOUBLE MATH FRIDAY!. Since I failed to get a blog post out on Wednesday, I felt the need to get a second post out today. Also, I was playing around more with my spreadsheets and thought I would provide a similar chart for the options on one of my favorite infantry, Man-O-War Demolition Corps.

While the Man-O-War can’t receive focus, they do have an interesting choice when they attack: Icebreaker (gain an additional die of damage on the attack) and Backswing (get two attacks). Again, I knew there was occasions when one would be better than the other, so I wanted to find out when that would be. Boostrapping off of all the math from the previous table, it was pretty easy to put together a new one:

The thing I find most interesting about this chart is that it is independent of the defense of the opposing model. It only took me a moment to realize that this makes perfect sense – since attack rolls are identical independently distributed probabilities, two attack rolls doesn’t help you do more damage even if your opponent has a high DEF.

Looking into this a little further, I decided to ask my model a different question – rather that dividing up by expected damage, what is the probability that a model does at least one damage? This would be really helpful against single wound models, or models that are really close to dying, for example.

Here are the charts for the Demolition Corps and the general 1 focus model from my previous post:

It’s interesting to me that this chart tells a slightly different story, but that the main trends stay true. Namely, that two attacks is generally better for low DEF and low ARM models, boosted damage is better for high ARM models and boosted attacks are better for high DEF models. However, with the exception of the top and bottom rows, it’s very nearly symmetric between boosting the attack and boosting damage – so much so that they tie in the region where two attacks stops being optimal.

And now, I get to eat my own words… …Here’s the chart for the Argos with the Combo-Smite included:

Check it out – a use for the Combo-Smite! Specifically, if you are trying to get in just one last hit point against a high ARM model, use Combo-Smite. This is interesting because it means that Combo-Smite has a very niche use, namely, finishing off high ARM models or killing high ARM single-wound infantry. A neat trick.