In other news, I solved the problem I was having trying to calculate the probability of exact numbers of wounds. After banging my head against the proverbial brick wall for hours trying to come up with an algorithm to solve the problem, I realized the sanest solution: just write a script that takes the target die numbers and uses a random function to resolve the attacks one hundred thousand times, then print the percentage of each wound number out of the total! Brute force: IT'S THE IMPERIAL WAY!
The results are accurate to within about one percent.
Just for shiggles, let's see what it churns out for the vendetta vs. broadside fight:
Lascannons:
0 wounds: 5%
1 wound exactly: 26%
1 wound or more: 94%
2 wounds exactly: 44%
2 wounds or more: 68%
3 wounds exactly: 24%
Heavy Bolters:
0 wounds exactly: 71%
1 wound exactly: 25%
1 or more wounds: 29%
2 wounds exactly: 4%
Rest are within the margin of error from zero.
Two Broadsides with shield drones (the script doesn't handle vehicles, but we'll just consider it to have a save of 4+ (50% chance of save), since on a damage of roll of 4+ it's a wrecked or exploded result (50% to die), also, ignoring glancing hits because I'm not quite sure how to represent them here, I assume they'd add about 10% or so to the kill chance) would have a 44% chance to kill the vendetta. Two broadsides with target arrays would have a 51% chance to kill it. There's a higher chance they'll immobilize it or destroy a weapon, but this script doesn't handle that at the moment. It probably will, at some point, but that's just more work I don't feel like doing right now.Two Broadsides with shield drones:
One miss: 27%
Two misses: 14%
One shaken: 6%
Two shaken: .2% (less than roughly estimated margin of error, but consistent through several runs, if rounding (up) to the nearest tenth)
One stunned: 13%
Two stunned: 1%
One weapon destroyed: 13%
Two weapons destroyed: 1%
One immobilized: 13%
Two immobilized: 1%
Wrecked: 16%
Exploded: 30%
In cases where a Wrecked or Explodes! result occurred at least once, no other results were counted for the set, with Explodes! taking preference as it overrules the others. When I feel like fixing the script further, giving it sane input with regex, and expanding the number of options (to accommodate squadrons, rending weapons, etc), that'll be made smarter (only doing it when there's a reason to know what else might have happened, for instance). Also note that the percentages won't add up to one hundred, due to overlap and rounding.
I've never lost to Tau, but then I suppose I've only played a few games against inexperienced players, whereas I've won practically every IG game I've had time to finish (games can take so long on vassal they occasionally don't get finished :/ ).
Edit: Increased the script to handle attacks on vehicles, don't know if it provides good numbers, but I see no reason for it not to, since it's just running through the steps to calculate an attack on a vehicle enough times to get statistically solid numbers from it.