I am trying figure out the probability of rolling hits from both proton torpedos and focus tokens, assuming you are attacking at range 2, can anyone give me a hand? Also, I want to make sure I am reading the rules correctly, if I use a focus token then it changes all of the focus results, on my attack dice, and not just one of them?

Normally you have a 4/8 chance of hitting with a single attack dice.

Rolling 4 dice, your average hit rate is 4 * 4/8 = 2 hits.  This doesn't take into account how the target will evade.

You have a 6/8 chance of rolling a hit when using focus, because two of the faces are the focus eye.

Rolling 4 dice with focus, your average hit rate is 4 * 6/8 = 3 hits.

Again, how the target evades determines the success rate here.  Other abilities like a pilot being able to reroll blanks increases the average hits even more.

And correct, using a focus token changes ALL focus rolls into hits.

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I guess I can include my evade analysis too.

With an evade token and 3 evade, average TIE evade roll is 3 * 3/8 + 1 = 2.125

With focus and 3 evade, average TIE evade roll is 3 * 5/8 = 1.875

Abilities that allow rerolling of evades or rerolling blanks of course increases this number.

Pygon said:

Thank you, but that doesnt really answer my question. I will try to clarify, assuming you are attacking from range 2, which hasa higher probability of hitting, a proton torpedo, or a standard attack from an xwing with the assist of a focus token.

I would suggest PMing ShadowJac on this. His acumen with the O&P of this game is rather staggering to say the least.

atmsalad said:

The two charts that follow are simulated probability density functions. They indicate how often each possible result happens. "Strikes" just means the sum of hits and critical hits--it's hard to distinguish the two in a single meaningful graphic.

(They were developed from empirical simulations--I told a piece of statistical software to roll attack dice, roll defense dice, and then tell me the total result. That means the percentages aren't exact, although they are highly reliable; you can use algebra of random variables to solve the problem exactly, but it's slower and less fun and I don't have the right software.)

Here's your torpedo:

And here's a primary weapon attack with Focus:

As you can hopefully see, the torpedo misses about 20% of the time, and the Focused attack misses about 28%. Also:

• The mode (the most frequent result) is 2 for the torpedo, and 1 for the primary weapon attack.
• The average damage for the torpedo is 1.6, and the average for the primary weapon attack is 1.2.

However, it's also important to note that this doesn't include the effect of your target having either Focus or Evade, which cause fairly large changes (I haven't posted those images, to save space). What you really want to do is have someone force the TIE to spend its defensive bonuses and possibly doing a point or two of damage, and then launch the torpedo for an almost guaranteed kill.

[EDIT: Images were broken. Hopefully they can be seen now.]

Awesome, now what I gather from this is that Torpedos are better at range two, but tons better at range 3! So I plan on trying to only use my torps at range 3 from now one :)

I saw this thread yesterday but was too busy to respond. I use a method to do the calculations that gives exact numbers apart from rounding to 3 digits. Vorpal Swords' numbers are pretty much the same which shows how accurate statistical methods can be.

Here are the charts I came up with:

To make them easier to interpret, I turned them into graphs:

As we can see, when rolling against the same number of defense dice (such as at Range 2), the difference in average damage (when not taking into account crit text) between the two attacks is about 0.5 or less, which isn't worth the cost of the torpedo.

Here is a graph showing what happens at range 3 when the primary weapon needs to roll against an additional die but the torpedo doesn't:

Here, the primary weapon is rolling against an additional die so 1 needs to be added to the numbers at the bottom to know how what the defense is. The difference in average damage between the two attacks is about 0.85 or less, which still isn't enough to justify the cost of the torpedo.

In summary, Proton Torpedoes suck.

ShadowJak said:

Oh yeah, tell that to the designers of the Death Star!

Is there some reason we're looking at this as an either/ or kind of deal instead of an and type situation? In other words, what's the numbers on a Focused Proton Torpedo strike? 

Also, as I've only just found out tonight reading the rules questions forum here, being secondary weapons, PTs wouldn't gain an extra die at range 1 (not that you can fire them at range 1 anyway, of course), however what had eluded me is the fact that if you fire PTs at a ship range 3 away from you, they don't get the extra defense die for the same reason.

magadizer said:

I think they knew. That's why they made the ship vulnerable to Proton Torpedoes. Who in their right mind would be using them?

Cid_MCDP said:

And torpedoes actually don't benefit much from Focus. Since they already convert the first eyeball to a crit, Focus can only help you if you rolled two or more eyeballs, which has only a 26% chance to happen. To me that's not a gamble worth building a list around.

(Concussion missiles are the opposite: Focus has a huge benefit for them, since if you have it you can only fail to generate a hit if you roll multiple blanks. It's one of the reasons Vader is so good, and if you're careful you can even execute the same trick with a Tempest Squad Pilot. I'm looking forward to Squad Leader in a build with 2-3 A-wings…)

Dig it. Fair enough. 

I hear ya on the A-Wing. I mess around with TIE Advanced here and there and Focused Concussions can be fun. Can't wait to use them with the good guys!

It seams that with the new wave protons, and now missiles, will definately be getting some consistent play with the rebs. It is going to be really interesting to see how the meta for Rebs is going to change around. :)

atmsalad said:

I take that back when it comes to protons, and it is still to soon to see how missiles do, lord knows i like them though :)

atmsalad said:

I take that back when it comes to protons, and it is still to soon to see how missiles do, lord knows i like them though :)

magadizer said:

They came to the same conclusion but from the opposite direction.