An experiment...

Without using any calculation, post your best guess for the outcome of the following assault (win/lose/draw):

4 Assault Marine Units (3+CC 4+Arm) vs 8 Ork Warbike Units (4+CC 5+Arm)
- All units engaged; no supporting fire; no BMs.

What percentage of the time would you expect the marines to win? What's your guess if you add a BM to the Orks before the assault?

(i wrote a script to calculate the outcome so i'll post actual result up after some guesses)

Marines: 35/55/10 w/l/d

My gut instinct is about the same as Hena, marines win 1/3rd, orks 2/3rd. But I've got a feeling that the odds are a bit closer. With BMs on the orks it should be 50/50.

Without BMs or any inspiring characters on either side, and assuming all units are in contact, the Orcs should suffer between ~1-2 hits while inflicitng ~2 hits meaning they go into the resolution at +2 or +3. So they should win ~75% of the time, a draw ~15% and the Marines win only ~10% of the time.

With the Orcs on 1BM, the assault resolution slightly favours the Orks, who should win ~46% of the time, a draw ~14% and and Marines win ~40% of the time.

if you abstract armour out you get 8 marines vs 12 orks - so i'm going to guess orks 66% of the time.
An actual game situation would get a certain degree more calcualtion

Hmm mostly ~33% and one at ~10%, pretty good. Here's what I calculated...

Without BM
pWinA: 19.1%
pDraw: 10.4%
pLose: 70.6%

A single BM evens things up...

With BM
pWinA: 41.8%
pDraw: 13.0%
pLose: 45.2%

@Ginger: that was a scarily close estimate for the BM case!

I put the script here: http://traitor-legion.appspot.com/assau ... lator.html

Feel free to have a play...

Cool script! Going to play around some with that.

Now if it only had first strike, given how this debate started

Errrr, yes, i should add that...

@Adam - why thank you kind sir, though my maths is a little rusty. It is purely a case of considering the Assault resolution. In this case, the combat will end up on average with 0-1 difference in kills. This actually emphasises the point made by most 'veterans' that it is crucial to prep a target, and also why Inspiring Characters make such a difference.

In the end you can go into the dice off up to +/- 5 and it is a fairly simple thing to work out the probability in each case. Where you are likely to experience some variation, just take the average between the two extremes