Earlier today, I made the claim that I felt like “[Bloodcrushers are] more resilient than Bloodletters.”  3+/5+ vs. 5+.

I took a moment to doodle out the math.  I don’t fetishize Mathhammer or anything; there are a lot of factors that it can’t weigh (and likely just as many factor’s I’m too lazy to try to include), and it’s sloppy statistics.  It’s inevitably built around flat percentages, no accounting for standard deviation, &tc.  It’s another tool in the toolbox, though.  A quick and dirty way give you an idea of whether something’s better, or worse, or about the same… even if it doesn’t immediately appear that way.

Anyway, the numbers:

For starters, 1 Bloodcrusher clearly cannot eat as many bolter shots (as good a metric as any) as 8 Bloodletters.  But he’s 2/3rds as resilient for less than 1/3rd of the cost.  Still, I was wrong about that.

Bump it up 2 ‘Crushers, though, and they’re still considerably cheaper and we’re talking something much more resilient… even before factoring in Would Allocation Shenanigans (which I have no doubt can be calculated, but it’s been a few years since I took a discrete math class).  They’re also possibly killier (another claim I probably need to verify).

I think that, instead of running 3 ‘Crushers in my list from earlier today, I’m probably only going to run 2 in a single unit, just in the interests of kill points.  The points left over from not buying the third will go towards Icons and Fury on some models, I think.