How to play Warhammer 40,000 skillfully

[Left of West]

Foreword

The purpose of this article is to describe the means by which a player can make decisions in the middle of the game without relying on a plan or context-specific "tactics." While plans and tactics can help guide players towards the moves which will most help them win, no advice and no plan will cover even a significant portion of the situations which may arise during a game. It is the ability to make decisions on the fly which separates skillful players from unskilled players, and it is this ability above all others--above any plan or any piece of advice--which will most help you win games.


What does it mean to play skillfully?

One might think that it’s easy to define a skillful player. Surely,
if a player wins a lot of games (significantly more than he loses,
say) that player must be skillful, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t so
simple. We can see this by considering three things:

1 – Counting wins doesn’t account for the random elements of the game.
A player with less skill can beat a player with more skill by getting
lucky. The amount of luck necessary certainly goes up as the
difference in the two players’ skill increases, but the fact remains
that luck has the potential to swing a game almost without regard to
matchup. After all, if I roll nothing but sixes and you roll nothing
but ones, it would require stupendously bad play on my part to allow
you even a draw.

2 – Counting wins doesn’t account for the quality of one’s opponents.
If a player plays exclusively against better players or worse players,
his win/loss record isn’t really indicative of his skill. He could
still be unskilled, just playing against even less skilled opponents.
He could be very skilled, just playing against even more skilled
opponents. Even limiting the count to games played in “competitive”
environments doesn’t count. Tournaments aren’t solely the province of
skilled players.

3 – Counting wins doesn’t account for differences in army
construction. Some armies are better than others. A skilled player
playing against another skilled player might lose consistently simply
because he plays a worse army than the other player. You might be
inclined to say that part of a player’s skill is his ability to build
a good army. I would agree, but would stipulate that I’m not really
talking about that part of being skilled in this article. Skill in
army-building is different than skill in playing. Writing an article
entitled “How to build Warhammer 40,000 armies skillfully” might be a
worthwhile endeavor, but that article is not this one.

Given these considerations, you might be wondering just how I plan to
write an article about playing skillfully if I can’t define skill as
the ability to win consistently. To this end, I propose a different
definition:

A skillful player, then, is one who plays skillfully, and

To play skillfully is to consistently make decisions which are
conducive to winning.

By utilizing this definition, we can call a player skillful if he
makes good decisions, even if those decisions are thwarted by fickle
dice, skillful play on the part of the opponent, or even the
superiority of the opposing army.



How do you make decisions which are conducive to winning?

If playing skillfully is consistently making decisions which are
conducive to winning, the next step is to determine how to make those
decisions, and it is here that the meat of this article lies.

To begin, I have one simple and important rule. It is from this rule
which all of my other suggestions will stem, and from this premise
that they will be supported.

1. Before deciding on any in-game course of action, a player should
gather as much information as he can, but should consider neither
information which is irrelevant nor information which comes from an
unreliable source.

I hold this rule to be self-evident, and I won’t go into much depth in
an attempt to explain it further. Instead, I will instead list five
rules which come as a consequence of this first rule. These rules
aren’t comprehensive—they don’t fully define or describe the means by
which one can make decisions which are conducive to winning. They
are, however, the rules which I think are the most important and most
universally applicable.

2 - Before deciding on a course of action, consider each of the following:
- The capabilities of every unit in the game. This includes their
attributes, equipment, wargear, and special rules.
- The position of each unit on the board relative to each other unit,
each piece of terrain, and each objective. If a unit is in reserve,
consider where it could end up if it were to enter the table.

This information is both relevant and comes from reliable sources: the
rules, the codices, and your own observation of the board. As such,
it should be considered.

3 – Before deciding on a particular course of action for a
particular unit, consider all of the consequences of that course of
action and each alternate course of action.

To do this, you should be relying exclusively on the information you
gained by following rule two. The goal isn’t to anticipate particular
consequences, but to catalogue all of the possible consequences of a
particular course of action.

Note that I’m talking about the consequences of both your actions and
your opponent’s actions. If refraining from moving your unit allows
it to shoot at an enemy unit, but leaves it within the charge range of
a second enemy unit, both the results of the shots at the first unit
and the results of being charged by the second unit are possible
consequences of the course of action which is refraining from moving.

4 – Before deciding on a particular course of action for a
particular unit, assign a value to each potential consequence of each
of that unit’s possible courses of action.

To do this, you should be relying on the catalogue of possible
consequences assembled by following rule three, as well as a sound
knowledge of probability and statistics. Essentially, you should look
at each possible consequence for each possible action, determine how
much that consequence hurts or helps your ability to win, and weight
that value by the probability that of that particular consequence
occurring, should it be pursued. Then, you can determine an aggregate
value for each possible course of action, and compare those values to
the values of other possible courses of action.

There are two important things to note:

First, this exact advice only gives you a value for consequences in
the immediate game turn (your turn and your opponent’s next turn).
Usually, these consequences are the most important, and they should be
the ones on which you focus. However, it is a good idea to routinely
extrapolate the process a few turns ahead. Consider, for each
potential course of action, the courses of action that might be
available to that same unit in the next turn, and the courses of
action that might be available to that same unit the turn after that.

This extrapolation tends to create a multi-tiered possibility tree,
which can become unmanageably large if it goes more than a turn or so
out. In general, it is only a good idea to extrapolate several turns
down the road if there is some task or objective of such overwhelming
priority that it is possible to trim off branches which don’t lead
towards the completion of that objective, and refrain from
extrapolating those branches at all. Essentially, you want to look
for branches which lead to irrelevant results and prune those without
pursuing them, or for branches which are separated only by irrelevant
distinctions, and merge those together.

Second, you should not be trying to guess at what your opponent will
do. The reason for this is simple: any guess you make about what your
opponent will do is inherently unreliable. Thus, taking it into
consideration is in violation of the first rule. Consider: if you
guess at what your opponent will do and take steps to counter those
courses of action of your opponent’s, you opponent is free on his next
turn to simply do something else. In fact, if you do effectively
counter one of your opponent’s potential courses of action, his
analysis of his options on his next turn will almost certainly
convince him not to take the course of action you acted to counter.
Why? Because by acting to counter it, you’ve made it a worse course
of action!

You should act to counter some of your opponent’s potential courses of
action. You should do this, though, not because you think you know
what your opponent is going to do, but because you want to dissuade
him from taking that particular course of action. You can dissuade
him by choosing courses of action for your units which leave that
particular course of action a poor choice, but even if you think
you’ve identified a course of action to which your opponent has
committed himself, you should never count on him sticking to that
course after you’ve effectively acted to counter it. This leads into
my next rule, which is:

5 – Don’t commit to any course of action before it is time to
actually take that course of action.

If you commit to a course of action ahead of time, you’re effectively
making a decision without first gathering all the information you can.
If you decide this turn what your unit will be doing next turn, you
will have made that decision without knowing what your opponent will
do in the turn between. If you wait until next turn to make that
decision, you will be able to first gather the information about what
your opponent did in that intervening turn. Plans which encourage you
to commit to specific actions ahead of time encourage you to violate
the first rule by making decisions without first gathering as much
information possible.

6 - When deciding on a course of action, don’t engage in mind-games.

This rule is very simple, very important, and it applies to a wide
range of activities which are common among gamers. Following this
rule comes down to two things:

First, never decide on a particular course of action because you think
it might confuse, disorient, intimidate, or otherwise upset your
opponent. The workings of the brain, the endocrine system, and all of
the other bodily bits which affect the mental state of the average
human is extremely complex. Professional psychologists acknowledge
that the results of psychological manipulation are often unreliable
and can vary significantly from person to person. If you are not a
professional psychologist, your ability to psychologically manipulate
your opponent will certainly be unreliable and, as such, should not be
considered when making decisions.

Second, ignore what your opponent has to say about his army, your
army, or the game in general. It seems a common practice for players
to “play up” or “play down” their units or use commentary about the
course of the game to influence other players’ decisions. Unless you
are absolutely convinced that your opponent is genuinely trying to be
helpful, you should consider your opponent to be an unreliable source
of information and you should therefore refrain from considering any
information you get from your opponent when making your decisions.

I’m not necessarily saying that you can’t attempt to manipulate your
opponent psychologically. Just remember that your in-game decisions
are not a good vehicle for that sort of manipulation, and that, if
your opponent follows my advice, nothing else you do or say will
affect his in-game decisions!



Summary and Conclusion

This article is, by intent, brief and uncomprehensive. Its purpose is to lay out some simple rules which, if they are followed, will help you make better decisions during the course of your games. These are rules which are universally applicable: no matter what situation you face, applying these rules will ensure that the decisions you make are made well, and result in courses of action which are conducive to victory. They will keep you from making basic mistakes, or taking courses of action for reasons which do not correspond well to the goal of achieving victory.

But, they are not all that can be said on the matter. The mechanics of evaluating possible courses of action are often complex and demanding, the task of extrapolating these evaluations several turns out even more so. Were I to have attempted to describe that process in detail, this article would have been interminable. If there is sufficient interest, I may consider writing more articles on the same subject which expand some of the rules I've discussed in this one, but, for now, I suggest that you consider these suggestions at face value and try putting them into practice. Though it may take some effort to become skilled at on-the-fly decision-making, there is no other skill which will help you more in your games.

[Red Archer]

Hey there, my good Left of West!

I appreciate everyone's effort who writes up tacticas to help inexperienced players catch on to the game faster and easier. Yet I fear this article as such will not achieve the goal of helping inexperienced players.


Criticism

To be frank, the information given is too abstract for it to be of any value to those who have not yet grasped the concept you are trying to convey anyways.

Rules 1 through 4
Rules number 1-4 cover nothing else than the implicit mechanics of the human decision-making process. It is inherent to each and all of us, and everyone tries - voluntarily and involuntarily - to base his decisions on the steps you mentioned.

The reason for inexperienced players often failing at making decisions that are cnducive to winning is not because they do not know that they should base their decisions on all the information they can get or that they should should consider every units capabilities or that they should consider the possible consequences of any potential course of action (in short: that they do not know what steps 1-3 are) but rather that they have not (yet) mastered how to best cover each of the first three steps of decision-making you mentioned or that they fail to assign representative values in step number four.*
More specific advice concerning the implementation of those steps instead of the steps per se would thus be by far more valuable. Examples would be to give advice on how to learn to more accurately assess distances on the battlefield, or how to calculate the odds of covering a certain distance when moving through difficult terrain and so on.

Rule 5
Your rule number five is sound and good advice, though my main reasons for following this rule differ from the ones you have named.

Rule 6
I can't agree to your rule number six. I happen to be one of the professional psychologists you mentioned. And I such I know that human behaviour is random. (This is why I happen to know and like statistics.)
But randomness is no reason for leaving something out of consideration! Dice rolls are random and unreliable too, but statistics give us an instrument to predict which results are the most likely ones and we can weight possible outcomes by their corresponding probabilities. This is equally true for human behaviour.
You can not ever rely on anything that is random. You can not rely on having first turn even if you won the die roll to decide who goes first, because your opponent could succeed to steal initiative. You can not ever rely on making a save with your terminator, because you could roll that 1. You can not ever rely on your opponent to take a certain course of action. But in all those cases you can be sure of some outcomes being more probably than others, and this weighting of consequences with their corresponding probabilities is an important part of assessing situations more accurately and - based on that - making decisions that are more likely to actually turn out to be conducive to victory.
My opinion is therefore that the psychology of the game is a very important factor that should never be left out of consideration. Mind tricks very viable, and it would probably be more useful to players showing them how (good) mindtricks (as opposed to "hey, my unit A here will rock the heck out of your army" or "my unit B here totally sucks, its a total waste of points, I shouldn't even have it in my list") work, so that they are able to apply them as well as avoid falling for them.


Summary

• The concept you are conveying in rules 1-4 is inherent to us all, the information on this level of abstraction therefore without value as for the most part it does not contribute to helping players make better decisions.
• Your approach of basing decision-making on reliable sources only (though you - which is somewhat odd - rule some random events as reliable and others as unreliable, but since probabilities of one random event -dice rolls- can be assessed accurately without much practice, while the probabilities of the other random event -the opponent's course of action- are much harder and take much more practice and experience to accurately assess, I can very well understand where you are coming from) to yield a purely logical decision that is not biased by psychological influences can easily be elaborated by pointing to decision making theory, the minimax approach and bayes approach being the most popular logical decision-making theories.
  (Of which, by the way, neither is today considered to be representative of human decision making as both fail to predict human decisions in certain situations correctly and more modern models to reflect human decision-making have been conceived, but these aren't based solely on logic anymore and thus fail to suggest the best courses of action in every circumstance and is therefore useless for our purposes.)
• I can not agree on your advice to refrain from using mind tricks. They can be very effective. Playing the game with a fixed plan in mind is the worst you can do. Playing reactively to your opponent is a lot better, but by far not the best way. The best way to play is having a plan, but adapting to your opponent reactively on the fly, while also taking measures ("mind-tricks") to provoke certain courses of action from your opponent, therefore dictating his actions to some extent.

"Mind-tricks", on a further note
The most promising "mind-tricks" to use in games of Warhammer 40.000 are not those that try to lure your opponent into taking one specific course of action for you to exploit, but those that pose a dilemma for your opponent.
For example: instead of deploying a devastator squad onto your home objective to defend it you can instead deploy it a good distance away with clear line if sight to the objective and any approach routes to it. The opponent now has to decide whether to go for the objective and have the devastators blast away at him the whole time, or to go for your devastators, diverting important resources from his assault force.
Such psychological dilemmata conduce win-win situations, and these are the ones you should aim for.


*) While everyone does assign values, no matter if they read your article or not. We do that implicitly and would otherwise be unable to make any decisions at all.
A lot happens in the non-conscious part of the mind, a popular demonstration being the question of what to do if your bike is losing balance and falling to the right. Most people can ride a bike and instinctively do the right thing in such a situation, but if you ask them what they would do most people say to lean to the left - what would in fact be disastrous. What we do in such a situation is steer to the right to regain balance, but this process is implicit and non-conscious and therefore most people don't consciously give the correct answer when asked for the first time...

[Left of West]

Hey there, my good Left of West!

I appreciate everyone's effort who writes up tacticas to help inexperienced players catch on to the game faster and easier. Yet I fear this article as such will not achieve the goal of helping inexperienced players.

Criticism

To be frank, the information given is too abstract for it to be of any value to those who have not yet grasped the concept you are trying to convey anyways.

I definitely see what you're saying, but I think you're being too absolute. Let's go on further

Rules 1 through 4
Rules number 1-4 cover nothing else than the implicit mechanics of the human decision-making process. It is inherent to each and all of us, and everyone tries - voluntarily and involuntarily - to base his decisions on the steps you mentioned.

The reason for inexperienced players often failing at making decisions that are cnducive to winning is not because they do not know that they should base their decisions on all the information they can get or that they should should consider every units capabilities or that they should consider the possible consequences of any potential course of action (in short: that they do not know what steps 1-3 are) but rather that they have not (yet) mastered how to best cover each of the first three steps of decision-making you mentioned or that they fail to assign representative values in step number four.*

I actually really disagree. It seems like this would be the case, yet after conversing with people about their games and reading battle reports and other articles, I am entirely confident that there are a significant number of people who actually don't try to make decisions in the way I've described.

Let's consider an example:

I watched a game in which the one player deployed a Leman Russ far to one side of the board. Each of the first three turns of the game, he moved that Leman Russ moved up that side of the board, either moving too far to take shots or taking poor shots through terrain or at poor targets--targets which he chose because his decision to keep his Russ far to one side of the board restricted his lines of sight significantly. By the end of turn four, he had basically lost the game--his guard had met up with the marines in the middle of the other side of the board and gotten beat. His Leman Russ did nothing important all game.

After the game, he commented to another observer, "I was running this Leman Russ up the flank." He said it not in realization that his Leman Russ had spent the entire game poorly placed, but as if there was some intrinsic value in "running up a flank" which had made it a good decision even though it prevented his Russ from doing anything important.

This is exactly the sort of thinking I'm trying to stem. This player did not use the type of decision-making I described. He pretty clearly wasn't even trying.

Instead of looking at the board, weighing the benefits and risks of each possible course of action and deciding the on the one the best one based on an analysis of those risks and benefits, he made his decision because he thought that putting his unit on a "flank" automatically made its position a good one.

It didn't, and anyone, looking at the board, would have seen that. His reliance on an irrelevant concept caused him to make a bad decision.

I see things like this all the time. People in articles say, "Make a spearhead and rush down the center of the board!" or "Bring your fast units up a flank," or any number of other bits of advice that are, in effect, urging you to make decisions without looking at the board, cataloging your options, weighing risks and benifits, and making decisions accordingly. Not only do people routinely advise each other to pre-make their decisions like this, people routinely do make their decisions through methods which don't resemble the method I've described at all--which, instead, hold as fundamental tenets things like "being aggressive," "being defensive," "being mobile," and the list goes on.

Every time someone exhorts you to play aggressively, or defends a course of action by saying, "I was just playing aggressively," they have clearly failed to make their decision in the manner I've described. More than that, they've clearly failed to even try. Whether or not a course of action is "aggressive" has nothing--ever--to do with whether it's a beneficial course of action.

So, no. I don't agree at all. I think that there's more than enough evidence to suggest that a lot of people do, in fact, make decisions in other ways--ways which are worse in terms of producing solutions which are conducive to winning. I think that at least some of these people both are smart enough to understand what I've written and have not really considered the manner in which they make their decisions thoroughly enough to come to the conclusions I've presented here.

More specific advice concerning the implementation of those steps instead of the steps per se would thus be by far more valuable. Examples would be to give advice on how to learn to more accurately assess distances on the battlefield, or how to calculate the odds of covering a certain distance when moving through difficult terrain and so on.

This is certainly true.

Rule 5
Your rule number five is sound and good advice, though my main reasons for following this rule differ from the ones you have named.

I'd be interested to know what your reasons are.

Rule 6
I can't agree to your rule number six.

This is an argument I want to have with you, but I don't have time for it now. Look for another post on this topic in the future.

[Red Archer]

I see things like this all the time.

Wow. I'm pretty much speechless.
I didn't know players of this skill level existed in significant number. I find it hard to imagine, though, that if they give no thought to what they do on the battle-field, they will come here on search for advice, which is very unfortunate.
But anyway, if you have observed such behavior on a regular basis I can't argue with that and will withdraw my opinion that hardly anyone can draw profit from your tactica. And all the while I will consider myself to be happy playing with a group of established players who actually know what they're doing and put thought into their actions, even if they still do make decisions non-conducive to victory here and there...

People in articles say, "Make a spearhead and rush down the center of the board!" or "Bring your fast units up a flank," or any number of other bits of advice that are, in effect, urging you to make decisions without looking at the board, cataloging your options, weighing risks and benifits, and making decisions accordingly.

I cannot support this view.
You can read me using such expressions too, but I (and others, most probably) am certainly not urging people to take action without previously giving good thought to it. When I give such advice it is intended as a mere suggestion of one possible way to reach a certain aim (which will definitely be stated along with that suggestion of "rushing up a flank", etc), and it is up to the player utilizing my advice to consider whether the given suggestion is on the one hand the best way to reach the intended aim or whether another course of action were better, and on the other is non-beneficial in the rest of its consequences in the given situation (meaning the specified course of action may be the best way to reach a certain aim while it might at the same time create vulnerabilities that maybe outweigh the initial aim).
So when I use such phrases (e.g. "make a spearhead and move it up the center of the board") I also state what to accomplish with that and why (e.g. "to take the fight to the enemy deployment zone and try to distract and take pressure off your firebase"). I then assume that the recipient of the advice is able to grasp the spirit of the maneuver and decide for himself if the need of distracting and taking pressure off his firebase is a good thing to do in his specific situation, and whether doing it by forming a spearhead and running up the center of the field is the best way to accomplish that goal, and that he sees for himself how to best form such a spearhead if the former two apply...

Giving thought to one's actions like that is common sense to me. This is also why I considered your tactica to be of little help to anyone, because I was implying that most players do not lack this form of common sense.
But you seem to prove me wrong on this with your considerations, and therefore it may be wise to be careful with expressions like "run a mobile force up your opponent's flank", keeping in mind that there are players who just proceed to do that whatever the situation and the odds without consideration...

I'd be interested to know what your reasons are.

This is actually quite quickly explained. I just didn't state because it has nothing to do with the core truth of this advice in rule five (which is said is very sound).
A more important reason to not take an action before it is due than not having gathered all the possible information (i.e. not having waited for your opponent to make all his moves until your course of action was due), is the fact that taking action prematurely gives this course of action away to the opponent, supplying him with certainty where he could only make assumptions, and possible giving him time to prevent your course of action from succeeding or exploiting any vulnerabilities your course of action provides...

This is an argument I want to have with you, but I don't have time for it now. Look for another post on this topic in the future.

Looking forward to it! I'm a little short on time myself, so I'm glad to postpone...

[pilot00]

Well archer youd be surprised as to how many ppl are doing actions and think second.

First exampleldar vs marines.

A group of howling banshees does not assault the foot sloger templar squad(10 marines and 2-3 scouts left)of a friend of mine to stop them which by they will get their hands on the dark reapers and instead run to catch helbrecht and his scout retinue(btw even if they rolled maximum in their dice they need 2 turns to reach him)!!!!!Needless to say the marine squad chopped up half the eldar armie.The cherry on top?Ulthran did not use a single psychic power!He said later he forgot it!!!

I am not a strategy guru,after all i am new to the game but there are some mistakes which cannot be made.

Example number two:Grey knights(6+1 justicar if memmory serves)teleport in the midst of an Imperial guard army,reaction:Fire em with the ogrins and charge em with the command squad btw,only the commisar had a PW!!!!

And the list goes on...Common sense can be the first line of logical filtering and parameter calculating,but you must also heed the abilities of your units and their wargear.

Also a vital part in your analysis of decision making seems to have been overlookxperience,whatever if i have 3 baneblades but i dont have the emprience to use them ill loose which bring us to example number 3:

Loyalist vs traitor marines apocalypse game.The chaos player has a titan(reaver me thinks)The other guy gets lucky with his rolls and deepstrikes 2 tactical squads near the titan.Void shields down,and a few shots from the land raider and titan down.

[Left of West]

I can't agree to your rule number six. I happen to be one of the professional psychologists you mentioned. And I such I know that human behaviour is random. (This is why I happen to know and like statistics.)

But randomness is no reason for leaving something out of consideration! Dice rolls are random and unreliable too, but statistics give us an instrument to predict which results are the most likely ones and we can weight possible outcomes by their corresponding probabilities. This is equally true for human behaviour.

Randomness is a reason to leave something out of consideration. I think that needs to be one of the fundamental tenets of the decision-making process.

I would never advise anyone to try to predict the dice, or to make decisions based on presumptions about what will happen.

What I did say--and I would stand by it--is that you should take into consideration the probability of that a particular result will come from a particular action.

It's important to note the difference between the two. Dice are unreliable. Well founded probabilities are not. The notion that the probability of rolling a three or better on a d6 is 2/3 is founded on solid mathematics and mountains of statistical data which describe the properties and behavior of dice.

In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find probabilities as reliable as those which describe the outcomes of events which are sets of dice rolls.

Which brings us to the distinction between dice and psychology. The probability of rolling a three or better on a six-sided die is 2/3. I can say that with confidence. I can make a similar statement with similar confidence about pretty much any event using any set of dice. Obviously there are some exceptions, weighted dice, for instance, but those exceptions are basically illegal and can be ignored. Further, I know exactly what data I need about the event to determine the probability of a particular outcome.

What is the probability that any given person will react in a particular way to a particular stimuli? What do I need to know to find out? As a professional psychologist, could you tell me the probability of an individual reacting in a particular way to a particular situation for any person? Even one? Could you do it reliably for every stranger with whom you happen to play a game? For every stimuli and every possible response?

I'm going to take a guess, here, and presume that the answer is no--that there is, in fact, not enough data or understanding to make calculations about people which even approach the standards of reliability you have in probability calculations for dice events.

I said you should ignore unreliable data. The sorts of calculations you do to determine the probability of a particular outcome from a particular event are very reliable. The sorts of calculations (if, in fact, psychology is anywhere near the point where that term has any meaning when applied to it) you would do to determine the probability of a particular response from a particular individual in a particular situation are not reliable.

Or, at least, I'm pretty sure they're not. If you honestly believe otherwise, let me know. But, frankly, if psychology can't produce a statement as reliable as, "the probability of rolling a three or better on a six-sided die is 2/3," then your objection has little ground to stand on.

You can not ever rely on anything that is random. You can not rely on having first turn even if you won the die roll to decide who goes first, because your opponent could succeed to steal initiative. You can not ever rely on making a save with your terminator, because you could roll that 1. You can not ever rely on your opponent to take a certain course of action. But in all those cases you can be sure of some outcomes being more probably than others, and this weighting of consequences with their corresponding probabilities is an important part of assessing situations more accurately and - based on that - making decisions that are more likely to actually turn out to be conducive to victory.

Again, there is a difference between probabilities which describe dice and probabilities which describe the psychology of humans. If the latter were as well-established and reliable as the former, I'd agree completely. The former, though, is very well established and reliable, while I really just don't think the latter is very reliable at all. If you want to toss out some math, statistics, and examples, then I might be swayed, but I'll bet that most people, if asked, would presume that the field of psychology is no-where near being able to produce a model which can say, "x person in y situation has q probability of reacting in manner z." The burden of proof is on you, there.

My opinion is therefore that the psychology of the game is a very important factor that should never be left out of consideration. Mind tricks very viable, and it would probably be more useful to players showing them how (good) mindtricks (as opposed to "hey, my unit A here will rock the heck out of your army" or "my unit B here totally sucks, its a total waste of points, I shouldn't even have it in my list") work, so that they are able to apply them as well as avoid falling for them.

I would agree that it is important if I felt that it could be applied in some sort of reliable way. I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that they can be, however.

As for good mind tricks, I only see where you've suggested one, and I really just don't classify a fork as a mind-trick.

For example: instead of deploying a devastator squad onto your home objective to defend it you can instead deploy it a good distance away with clear line if sight to the objective and any approach routes to it. The opponent now has to decide whether to go for the objective and have the devastators blast away at him the whole time, or to go for your devastators, diverting important resources from his assault force.
Such psychological dilemmata conduce win-win situations, and these are the ones you should aim for.

Let's look at what I actually said in my first post:

"never decide on a particular course of action because you think it might confuse, disorient, intimidate, or otherwise upset your opponent."

The value of a fork doesn't lie in confusing, disorienting, intimidating, or otherwise upsetting an opponent. The value of forks lies in the fact that they leave your opponent with no options which are particularly good responses to them. They're valuable regardless of how your opponent reacts, even if he reacts with perfectly calm, rational, deliberation. (And, really, any player who would react to a fork with surprise or confusion, who would be intimidated or upset, is probably a bad player anyway.)

Forks are fine. They just don't support your objection.



Lets go a step further, too:

My rule six was not just a suggestion that you refrain from trying to trick, confuse, or surprise your opponent--it was a suggestion that you refrain from engaging your opponent's attempts at manipulating you. If you see psychological manipulation as a worthwhile endeavor, then you should certainly recognize the value of this advice.

It basically comes down to two simple tenets: don't take anything your opponent says or does into consideration when making your decisions and don't try to guess what your opponent is going to do.

Every single mechanism for surprising you, fooling you, or confusing you will rely on you either paying attention to your opponent's commentary on the game, or guessing at what your opponent is going to do--you opponent will either attempt to affect your decisions through communication, or attempt to convince you that he intends to do something other than what he actually intends to do. Every single mind-trick I've ever seen suggested falls into one of these two catagories.

The latter is the easier to avoid. Just don't bother to guess at what your opponent is going to do. Any guess you make that that effect has little or no value, anyway, since, even if your opponent does have some moves in mind, it's easy for him to change his mind and do something else after he sees your moves. Just don't bother guessing at his intentions, and you'll never be surprised by what he does or tricked into countering something he wasn't going to do anyway.

Instead of guessing at what your opponent is going to do, simply evaluate what he could do. Evaluate his options as well as your own. If he has an option which would have a significant, likely, and negative impact on your ability to win the game, then act to counter that option. Don't presume that he will do it--whether or not he actually does it is irrelevant. Focus on identifying the things that you particularly want to prevent and act to counter those. Then let your opponent figure out what his best moves are with the restricted board position you've left him. At no time are you forced to guess at what your opponent will do in order to make good decisions.

The first part is only marginally harder. When your opponent expresses an opinion about his units, your units, or the state of the game, just ignore him. Either his opinion is accurate, in which case you should be able to easily come to the same opinion through a rudimentary analysis of the unit in question or the state of the game; his opinion is inaccurate through error, in which case you don't want to give it any weight anyway; or his opinion is inaccurate because he's actively trying to trick you, in which case you definitely don't want to give it any weight. The only reliable method of determining whether your opponent's commentary is accurate gives you all of the relevant data you'd get from his commentary, anyway--presuming it is accurate--so why bother considering his commentary at all? Do your own analysis, every time.

That's the other half of not engaging. Mind games simply do not work on you if you refrain from engaging them. And, the methods I've suggested (look at the board, catalogue possibilities, evaluate the impact of those possibilities, weight for probability) basically mean that you're not engaging your opponent's mind games. If you do your own analysis, only taking into consideration objective data about the game, your decisions will not be affected by your opponent's attempts to trick, mislead, confuse, or surprise you.

I haven't always played the way I do now, but it has been years since I've been surprised by an opponent's decision, or tricked into making a poor move (I've made some bad moves, but it never had anything to do with my opponent). The closest it gets is being amused when an opponent makes a particular bad move, and I think we would all like that to happen more often.

A lot happens in the non-conscious part of the mind, a popular demonstration being the question of what to do if your bike is losing balance and falling to the right. Most people can ride a bike and instinctively do the right thing in such a situation, but if you ask them what they would do most people say to lean to the left - what would in fact be disastrous. What we do in such a situation is steer to the right to regain balance, but this process is implicit and non-conscious and therefore most people don't consciously give the correct answer when asked for the first time...

This is a good point, and probably something I should have stressed more clearly in my post. In fact, this really addresses a core principle of my advice which, had I expressed it at all, could have easily been, "always make decisions consciously."

The subconscious can have an enormous effect on a person's behaviour. But, with some mental discipline and concentration, that effect can be mitigated or done away with almost entirely, and that's a big part of why my advice is good advice.

If you think about each move, do the analysis of your options each time, consciously, you really don't leave yourself susceptible to the pressures of your subconscious self, or the pressures that others can exert on you subconsciously.

Essentially, that's what I'm telling people to do. Make sure you think about every move. By analyzing it in a rational matter, you drastically reduce the impact your subconscious self has on you decision and you can narrow down the set of factors which influence your decision to those which are really relevant.

[winginson]

I would like to pitch in with my thoughts on 'mind games'

I agree that we can't say what an opponent will do in the same way as we can say the probabilty of a three or more on a d6 is two-thirds. While you cannot rely on how they will react, you can rely on them to react in some way, and you should be able to work-out in what ways they can react.

If a chimera full of flamer vets moves close to enemy squad in cover on a objective, I know the enemy will react. Usually this will be destroy it, or run away and counter attack. By looking at the enemies forces, I can take this into account in the decision making.

Certain units can be relied upon to force the enemy to act in some way or lose something vital, and you should be able to work out in what ways the enemy can react and prepare for them.

Also, I play an eldar player who constantly comes up with weird and unexpected ways of using his units, some even seeming poor moves but are not. Games against him always surprise me.

[Red Archer]

Wow. No responses in this thread for weeks - but be gone on vacation for three days and suddenly there's heaps of replies!

As I do not have much time at my disposal right now I will only make a few important statements without going through quotings in detail...


To pilot00
I would've read your reply even if you'd only posted it once! But I guess that's a nasty glitch and not your intention.
Though you have made a good point at proving that there seems to be a great number of players who act without giving thought to the consequences of their actions you still kind of missed my point. Which is that those players are probably not the ones who surf the internet (and therefore LO) for tactical advice, because those players obviously don't give thought to what they do.
So though there are more players who could need Left of West's advice than I thought there were, I still fear that those players won't find it. They probably wouldn't understand it when they read it either...


On the tactica
Since there obviously are by far more players that could possibly benefit from your advice here than I imagined I once again say: good job for writing up the process of decision-making! Hopefully the players in question find your post and understand it and benefit from it.
I still think, though, but going into detail a little more, telling players not only what to do but how to do it would be more of a help...


On conscious decisions
This would actually be some very useful advice you gave there! You should include it in your tactica. This is the sort of detailed advice I have suggested you should give. Now you started not only stating what to do (go through these and those decision-making steps) but also how to do it (try to do it as consciously as possible). Etc...
And still you and your opponent will both be influenced by subconscious judgements. I promise you. You can try your hardest to be a machine, but you just aren't. And that's good, because this subconscious judgement has evolved over millions of years because it turned out to be helpful. If it were a hindrance we wouldn't have to live with it...
I remember many times when I knew the answer to something without consciously being able to grasp how I got to my conclusion. And these were situations with infinite numbers of possible answers, not yes/no problems or something like that which can easily be answered correctly by guessing. In the end, after having the problem explained to me, I did see how you could figure out the correct answer, but obviously my subconsciousness could do it much faster and reliable than my consciousness...


On psychology, or on dice and people
You seem to be misunderstanding or underestimating the science of modern psychology, Left of West! But I don't blame you as I have had arguments like this with non-psychologists many times. Society seems to be stuck with believing psychology is still what it used to be in the first half of the 20th century...
Human behavior is just like a die. The only difference is that we assume that dice follow the LaPlace principle (the probability for each side of the die to face upwards being the same, which is - in fact - entirely false, and more so even with unmanipulated dice than we think, I have already told you about my experience with the Chessex dice and I know you have read so from other sources) and every outcome's probability can be attained by adding up the probabilities of the dice rolls favorable for this outcome (every side of the D6 is 1/6, 3+ is therefore 4/6, etc), while we can't as easily judge which building blocks are the components of the outcome of a human decision (like the 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the 3+ die roll above).
But empirical psychology can give you a probability for a person to act in a specific way just like you have the probability for rolling a 3+ on your D6, yes! I can calculate the probability of someone being able to distinguish two slightly different colors in a specific lighting. I can calculate the probability of someone saying that a more voluminous ("bigger") object is heavier than a less voluminous ("smaller") object with the same mass. I can calculate the probability of someone taking longer to pronounce the word "red" when reading it in yellow writing than when reading it written in black letters. I can calculate the probability for someone forgetting an item from a list he learned previously, and I can calculate the increased probability of not remembering this item if I cue the list items in a specific way, etc... And decision theory in particular is one very well-researched field of psychology as it was a very important factor throughout the cold war and still is in today's business world.
You seem to be hesitant to use the word "calculation" when talking about psychology, but really this is all I do! I calculate all day, I work with statistics exclusively. What else could one work with in an empirical science anyway?
The problem of course is that I don't really know the probability for a person to act in a specific way for sure, when facing a specific situation in a game of Warhammer 40.000. But this is kind of a moot point, because I am pretty sure you don't know all the probabilities for the dice either once things get complicated (as they are with people). Let me give you an example: if you want to know what your odds are to successfully gate a unit of Space Marines behind an Imperial vehicle to shoot bolters at its rear armor and keep it from moving in its next turn you would have to consider the probability of passing your psychic test, scattering within an arc and range that let's you take shots at rear armor but not suffering a deep-strike mishap or landing out of range or line of fire to rear armor, the probability for losing a model while traveling through the warp, the probability of hitting and glancing with a certain number of shots and then rolling a crew shaken or immobilized result, etc... I'm pretty sure you won't have an exact number! Much more probably - because it's the best you can do at the table - you will go with the averages (33/36 for passing the psychic test, scatter odds assessed as explained in my scatter tacticae, average to hits, average number of glances, etc) and decide if the average is something you will want to go with or not. Consider the opponent having an inquisitor with psychic hood that could shut down your power and the vehicle's rear armor being in cover so that it could make saves... the exact probability is impossible to assess at the gaming table while it could easily be calculated if you had the time. Same goes for people's decisions: I can't possibly know the exact probability for a specific decision at the gaming table and have to work with estimates (he's more likely to act this-and-that way because otherwise he would be exposing a huge vulnerability here, etc...), though the exact probability could actually be assessed outside the setting of a game given the time.


On mind games
Engaging in mind games on the receiving side as well as on the giving side is still a very viable tactic.
The devastator fork given above is a mind game, though you refuse to recognize it as such. One of the options (going for the devastators or going for the objective) will be preferable by mere maths. Let's assume it's going for the objective in our case. A machine would go for the objective no matter where you place the devastators. But a player will be torn inside whether to do one thing or the other, and this psychological pressure will cause some people to lose focus. Even though the majority of players would make the right (the machine's) decision, some are bound to fall for the trap and waste their time going for the devastators. It's because people aren't machines and can be influenced. A machine will always take the most beneficial course of action no matter how many alternatives there are. But load up on alternatives and let a human decide and you will see that with increasing numbers of alternatives - even if all are less beneficial than the "correct" decision - will cause an inreasing number of players to fail to make the right decision.
Since you don't like that example I will give you an entirely different one: my opponent deep-struck a monolith amidst my mobile force in turn two, knowing full well that I could just move away and leave it stranded, but also knowing that if I did so he had enough back-up options to cope for that and draw benefit from it anyway. Since he thought everything would be fine one way or another he decided to go for it and hope that maybe I would be stupid enough to think that I could benefit from him dividing his forces and would concentrate on the unsupported monolith, wasting my time trying to destroy it while the rest of his army would go unharmed. Though it would have been logical to move away (to steer clear of that threat and keep the number of casualties as low as possible) I instead stayed put, tried very hard to minimize troops casualties while at the same time presenting appealing targets and taking a few shots at the monolith to give my opponent the illusion I was actually really going after the monolith. Since I continued with this until turn five he failed to take action as he had planned with his back-up plan, because he thought he wouldn't need it - I seemed to be falling for the monolith trap, didn't I?! So he appeared to be winning over the entire game, remaining unharmed and destroying many of my units until I claimed objectives on turn five with my troops and suddenly won the game.
Even though he certainly knew that he should have prepared for that possible course of action in the way you describe in your tactica, he didn't. Because he was mind-gamed into not doing so. He was just human and was made to believe that me taking this course of action was very improbable, because obviously I was stupid enough to fall for his monolith trap. This sort of mind games works on people. Not always, but then you don't always succeed at a 3+ either. It is easy to judge strength, but if you don't show your strength in an obvious way your opponent does not know what to judge. This is but one trick...

Sorry for the poorly prepared post, as I said: little time right now...

[Left of West]

On conscious decisions
This would actually be some very useful advice you gave there! You should include it in your tactica. This is the sort of detailed advice I have suggested you should give. Now you started not only stating what to do (go through these and those decision-making steps) but also how to do it (try to do it as consciously as possible). Etc...

I should. When (if) I get around to re-writing it, I'll make sure to stress this.

And still you and your opponent will both be influenced by subconscious judgements. I promise you. You can try your hardest to be a machine, but you just aren't. And that's good, because this subconscious judgement has evolved over millions of years because it turned out to be helpful. If it were a hindrance we wouldn't have to live with it...

True enough. that influence can be mitigated and minimized to a significant degree, though. Further, you can train your subconscious to behave in certain ways or not behave in certain ways. I'm not going to say it's impossible to manipulate me psychologically. I stand by the assertion, though, that it hasn't happened, and I can't imagine a means by which it could be done, to me, reliably.

You seem to be misunderstanding or underestimating the science of modern psychology, Left of West! But I don't blame you as I have had arguments like this with non-psychologists many times. Society seems to be stuck with believing psychology is still what it used to be in the first half of the 20th century...

Human behavior is just like a die. The only difference is that we assume that dice follow the LaPlace principle (the probability for each side of the die to face upwards being the same, which is - in fact - entirely false, and more so even with unmanipulated dice than we think, I have already told you about my experience with the Chessex dice and I know you have read so from other sources) and every outcome's probability can be attained by adding up the probabilities of the dice rolls favorable for this outcome (every side of the D6 is 1/6, 3+ is therefore 4/6, etc), while we can't as easily judge which building blocks are the components of the outcome of a human decision (like the 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the 3+ die roll above).

Alright, that seems about right. Our basic assumptions about dice are not exactly right, but you have to admit that, even for the notoriously poor-quality chessex dice, they're pretty close.

But empirical psychology can give you a probability for a person to act in a specific way just like you have the probability for rolling a 3+ on your D6, yes! I can calculate the probability of someone being able to distinguish two slightly different colors in a specific lighting. I can calculate the probability of someone saying that a more voluminous ("bigger") object is heavier than a less voluminous ("smaller") object with the same mass. I can calculate the probability of someone taking longer to pronounce the word "red" when reading it in yellow writing than when reading it written in black letters. I can calculate the probability for someone forgetting an item from a list he learned previously, and I can calculate the increased probability of not remembering this item if I cue the list items in a specific way, etc... And decision theory in particular is one very well-researched field of psychology as it was a very important factor throughout the cold war and still is in today's business world.

Alright, I'm game. What's the probability that a person, presented with a fork like the one you described above, will make the wrong decision? What is the probability that he or she will be confused or be thrown off balance by the situation?

I'll even accept a description of the methodology you'd use to come to those numbers, in lieu of the numbers themselves.

You seem to be hesitant to use the word "calculation" when talking about psychology, but really this is all I do! I calculate all day, I work with statistics exclusively. What else could one work with in an empirical science anyway?

Good point. I'm not sure I was 'hesitant' to use the word calculation, but it is true that I couldn't envision the calculation which you would use. I think I get it now, but that's why I asked the question above.

The problem of course is that I don't really know the probability for a person to act in a specific way for sure, when facing a specific situation in a game of Warhammer 40.000. But this is kind of a moot point, because I am pretty sure you don't know all the probabilities for the dice either once things get complicated (as they are with people). Let me give you an example: if you want to know what your odds are to successfully gate a unit of Space Marines behind an Imperial vehicle to shoot bolters at its rear armor and keep it from moving in its next turn you would have to consider the probability of passing your psychic test, scattering within an arc and range that let's you take shots at rear armor but not suffering a deep-strike mishap or landing out of range or line of fire to rear armor, the probability for losing a model while traveling through the warp, the probability of hitting and glancing with a certain number of shots and then rolling a crew shaken or immobilized result, etc... I'm pretty sure you won't have an exact number!

A fair objection. I could come up with a pretty accurate number, though, given a little bit of time. I would need a little more information--the calculation would vary depending on exactly where, in relation to the vehicle, the edge of the board, and other potentially relevant terrain features and models. The only inaccuracy would come in when deciding how far down to subdivide the possible scatter angles. Moreover, with that information, I could do the calculation sitting at my computer.

Even more importantly, I could give you a useful estimate at the table.

I can tell you off the top of my head that the probability of you passing your leadership test for the power is 11/12. I can tell you for any given placement of the first deep-striking model whether you're looking at a majority of scatters that leave you in a position to shoot the back of the tank with all your models, and give you a fair estimate as to how significant that majority (or minority, as the case may be) is. I can then do a quick expected returns calculation (20 shots, say ,thirteen and a third hits, two and two ninths glances, and a 5/9 probability of stunning or immobilizing it with two glances). That isn't a probability, but it's a pretty good indication that the probability is a little over 50% (which is true, the probability is actually 52.99%).

Let's talk about the scatter, then. To be fair, scatter is the most complicated calculation you will ever have to do on the table top. The most complicated one. Still, you can take a reasonable stab at it. consider this picture:

It turns out that I have no idea how to insert a picture. Let's try this instead:


eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
-------------------------------------------
-x-----------------------------------------
--x-x--------------------------------------
-x-x---------------------------------------
--x---x-----------L----------BB-----------
-----x-----------------------BBB----------
--x----------------------------BBB--------
-x-------------------------------BBB------
----------------IIIIIII-------------BB-----
----------------IIIIIII---------------------
----------------IIIIIII--------------------
----------------IIIIIII--------------------
----------------IIIIIII--------------------




the line of es is the edge of the board. The exes are imperial guardsmen, the assortment of bes describe the footprint of a building and the block of is is the target tank. The L is the Librarian, the -s are empty table.

You have three potential threats to your librarian and his squad: the tank, the guardsmen, and the edge of the table. You'll be denied shots if you deviate out of the tank's back arc or behind the building.

You're about six inches from the tank. That gives you about a thirty-degree arc in which you deviate into the tank (or to within an inch of it) with rolls greater than four. That gives you a combined probability of 2/3*5/6*1/12 that the tank will ruin your day in that way. That's that's 5/108 for those following along at home. A little under 1/20.

If the table's about seven inches away, you can figure you've got a sixty degree arc in which a roll of eight or more sends you off the table, plus a bit on either side where a higher roll could do it. I'd be inclined to fudge this and go with a straight-up 2/3*15/36*1/6 for the probability of going over the edge. Going a little wide on the angle and leaving out the very high rolls will be pretty close in the net. That's actually 5/108 again.

The same can be done for the probability of running into the guardsmen, falling out of arc, or landing behind the tiny portion of the building which isn't out-of-arc anyway.


Can you do anything like that for the probability of a player making the wrong decision when faced with the fork you described earlier?

Much more probably - because it's the best you can do at the table - you will go with the averages (33/36 for passing the psychic test, scatter odds assessed as explained in my scatter tacticae, average to hits, average number of glances, etc) and decide if the average is something you will want to go with or not. Consider the opponent having an inquisitor with psychic hood that could shut down your power and the vehicle's rear armor being in cover so that it could make saves... the exact probability is impossible to assess at the gaming table while it could easily be calculated if you had the time. Same goes for people's decisions: I can't possibly know the exact probability for a specific decision at the gaming table and have to work with estimates (he's more likely to act this-and-that way because otherwise he would be exposing a huge vulnerability here, etc...), though the exact probability could actually be assessed outside the setting of a game given the time.

I really should have just read your whole post before typing my responses. This is twice now I've gotten down to a new paragraph and seen that you've pretty much pre-empted my responses to your earlier posts. Maybe you really are a psychologist =P.

Still, I'm not going to go back and delete them now, as I think there's some worthwhile objection stuck up in there, somewhere.

I still don't believe that you're able to produce nearly as accurate a result about your psychological assertions as I can about my mathematical ones. I described how my table-top estimation would work, how would yours?

On mind games
Engaging in mind games on the receiving side as well as on the giving side is still a very viable tactic.
The devastator fork given above is a mind game, though you refuse to recognize it as such. One of the options (going for the devastators or going for the objective) will be preferable by mere maths. Let's assume it's going for the objective in our case. A machine would go for the objective no matter where you place the devastators. But a player will be torn inside whether to do one thing or the other, and this psychological pressure will cause some people to lose focus. Even though the majority of players would make the right (the machine's) decision, some are bound to fall for the trap and waste their time going for the devastators. It's because people aren't machines and can be influenced. A machine will always take the most beneficial course of action no matter how many alternatives there are. But load up on alternatives and let a human decide and you will see that with increasing numbers of alternatives - even if all are less beneficial than the "correct" decision - will cause an increasing number of players to fail to make the right decision.

Okay, I can buy that. I still basically need a probability, or some reasonable estimate, or some reasonable method by which I can get an estimate of the probability of its success. After all, having the devastators off the objective is an innate disadvantage--while they're on the objective they contest it. While they're off it, they don't. The difference between the quality of shots they'd have in either location could be an issue, too. There has to be at least some way to gauge how likely your ploy is to produce the desired results if we are to weigh it against the obvious advantage of leaving the devs where they can contest the objective.

Since you don't like that example I will give you an entirely different one: my opponent deep-struck a monolith amidst my mobile force in turn two, knowing full well that I could just move away and leave it stranded, but also knowing that if I did so he had enough back-up options to cope for that and draw benefit from it anyway. Since he thought everything would be fine one way or another he decided to go for it and hope that maybe I would be stupid enough to think that I could benefit from him dividing his forces and would concentrate on the unsupported monolith, wasting my time trying to destroy it while the rest of his army would go unharmed. Though it would have been logical to move away (to steer clear of that threat and keep the number of casualties as low as possible) I instead stayed put, tried very hard to minimize troops casualties while at the same time presenting appealing targets and taking a few shots at the monolith to give my opponent the illusion I was actually really going after the monolith. Since I continued with this until turn five he failed to take action as he had planned with his back-up plan, because he thought he wouldn't need it - I seemed to be falling for the monolith trap, didn't I?! So he appeared to be winning over the entire game, remaining unharmed and destroying many of my units until I claimed objectives on turn five with my troops and suddenly won the game.
Even though he certainly knew that he should have prepared for that possible course of action in the way you describe in your tactica, he didn't. Because he was mind-gamed into not doing so. He was just human and was made to believe that me taking this course of action was very improbable, because obviously I was stupid enough to fall for his monolith trap.

See, this just goes to support my overall point: the mistake he made was in making a guess about what you were likely to do. If he hadn't bothered to guess about what you were likely to do in the future, he would have just put the rest of his army into motion and your ploy would have been a waste of time. He made a mistake, but it wasn't falling for your "mind game," it was in bothering to think about what you were likely to do in the future at all.

You can assert that your otherwise poor moves in that one round caused him to make this mistake, but I just don't see any way you can demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship there. Correlation does not imply causation--it is (or should be) the maxim of every statistician. The fact that he made the mistake after you made a particular set of moves shouldn't imply to you that your moves were the cause. Personally, it looks to me like he made a more fundamental mistake than the one you accredited to him, and that mistake is far less easy to presume to be in a cause-and-effect relationship with your earlier actions.

This sort of mind games works on people. Not always, but then you don't always succeed at a 3+ either.

I'll believe it works on people sometimes, but nothing you've suggested so far indicates that your knowledge of its mechanics anywhere approaches my knowledge of the mechanics of the probability of the outcomes of dice events. You still need to work on that.

It is easy to judge strength, but if you don't show your strength in an obvious way your opponent does not know what to judge. This is but one trick...

Your opponent would know what to judge if he'd read my article--and he wouldn't be judging your strength at all. This is one of the reasons it's a silly trick. It simply isn't one that a player making decisions in the right way will engage at all. If he had not been trying to judge your strength in the first place, he wouldn't have been tricked by your ploy, and since trying to judge your strength at all is a mistake, your ploy only works if your opponent makes two mistakes in a row--misjudging you preceded by bothering to judge you at all. The probability of both mistakes would have to be factored into the probability of your ploy's success--and we would have to have a pretty good estimate of the probability of its success, if we were to try to compare it against the obvious disadvantage that comes with making intentionally bad moves.

Sorry for the poorly prepared post, as I said: little time right now...

No problem. Mine has gotten pretty rushed near the end, here, too.

[Red Archer]

First off: please don't try to lecture me on scatter odds. I find this kind of insulting. I consider myself something like the father of scatter odd calculation, as people claimed to have never seen it worked out before I published my first post on it years ago. And though that doesn't mean that no one else ever figured it out for themselves, the fact that I have written up whole tacticae on that issue should suffice as proof that I know how to deal with that topic.
Please!
Same goes for correlations and statistics. I am an empirical scientist. My working tools are statistics. You can safely assume that I do know the basics.

description of the methodology you'd use to come to those numbers

Set up a Warhammer 40k game in a lab and invite a bunch of Warhammer 40.000 players to play. Half of them would face the devastator fork, half of them wouldn't. Then it all depends on how you want to operationalize your variables "making a mistake" or "being confused". For the former we could assume that not going for the objective but for the devastators instead is what we would deem a mistake, for the latter we could measure the time the players take for their decision. We could then assess the number of times our "mistake" was made in the two different experimental groups and compare it, or assess the mean decision-making times in both groups and see if there is a significant rise for one group (t-test, or a simple one-way analysis of variances, etc). We could then even back this up by questioning the players after the game whether they felt confused by the devastator fork, tempted to go for the devastators, etc... Though if all other variables are controlled for or balanced out it is safe to assume that an eventual correlation between devastator fork and a rise in decision-making time is in fact a cause-and-effect relationship even without the questionnaire.
Also keep in mind, please, that the devastator fork's purpose is not only to lure the opponent to go for their position. But I will come back to that again later on...

I'm not sure I was 'hesitant' to use the word calculation, but it is true that I couldn't envision the calculation which you would use.

Well, you stated this: "The sorts of calculations (if, in fact, psychology is anywhere near the point where that term has any meaning when applied to it)", and that is either ignorant or insulting.

It turns out that I have no idea how to insert a picture.

You load the picture onto some webspace and then link to it in your post using the img-tags - [ I M G ] and [ / I M G ] without the spaces - and insert the URL of the image in between.

Can you do anything like that for the probability of a player making the wrong decision when faced with the fork you described earlier?

Let's be honest. You use rough estimates to base your decisions on if confronted with complicated situations. This rough estimates do not even fully apply to the environment (rolling inaccurate dice on a far from perfect surface). And yet you cherish these estimates as if they were the foundation of our known world, while you reject any other rough estimates that don't concern dice.
Now let me ask you this: how do you weigh off - to stick to our example - the ability of the devastators to hit the chimeras approaching your mission objective in side armor and being safe from being tied up in close combat (unless by units diverted from the enemy force attacking your objective, which benefits you again) against the the devastators not having these boni but contesting your objective instead? Do you have hard numbers on that to base your decisions on?
I presume you don't. You can make rough estimations again, based on some quick calculations, presumptions about what your opponent's options are in general, your experience and - in the end - your gut feeling. Your tent is collapsing...
This is just what we do when we decide. We can use exact calculations and numbers wherever it's possible. But there are some things that must be judged without doing maths. Because you can't do maths on everything once you leave theory. We wouldn't need statistics if we cared to combine all the variables necessary to calculate the outcome of the dice roll. Initial speed and direction and spin of the die, its exact mass structure, the exact structure of the surface it will hit, the height it is dropped off from, the movement of the air the die falls through, etc. In theory this is all possible. In praxis it is not. In theory you could calculate through 5-7 game terms of the most relevant game moves and outcomes to calculate whether it would be better to place your devastators on the objective or off to the side where they can engage side armor and sit in safety, but it is just not practicable, so you just make a judgement as best as you can.

I really should have just read your whole post before typing my responses.

Yes, please.

I still don't believe that you're able to produce nearly as accurate a result about your psychological assertions as I can about my mathematical ones. I described how my table-top estimation would work, how would yours?

Well, estimating how many models will fall if they are shot at by this unit in that situation (considering line of sight, range, cover, etc) is quite easy to do and I don't argue against that this yields better results than estimating the probability of somebody falling for a certain trap within the game.
But as I said, there are decisions you have to make without those quite accurate estimations like deciding where to put your devastator squad. And you'll have to do this in a similar way as I would estimate the odds of an opponent falling for a certain trap. I base my estimations on experience. If a certain trick has worked on 3 out of 5 opponents of a certain level of expertise I would expect this trick to work with a chance of about a good 50% on opponent number six of a comparable level of expertise. This isn't accurate at all, but I will and do go with it. Just like you will have to go with a simple judgement not backed by specific numbers on the placement of your devastators.
The latter is because you just can't compare apples and bananas. You can calculate how your odds improve to stop the chimeras hitting them on side armor instead of front armor. But you don't have a hard grip on the probability of your devastators being tied up in close combat (especially since you never want to consider the probabilities of your opponent's moves anyways) and if you want to quantify that or the benefit of the devastators contesting the objective you will have to just assign numbers by experience and gut feeling and maybe some quick but very dirty calculations. You don't get around assigning numbers in a more or less seemingly arbitrary way when making some of the more important decisions.

Okay, I can buy that. I still basically need a probability, or some reasonable estimate, or some reasonable method by which I can get an estimate of the probability of its success. After all, having the devastators off the objective is an innate disadvantage--while they're on the objective they contest it. While they're off it, they don't. The difference between the quality of shots they'd have in either location could be an issue, too. There has to be at least some way to gauge how likely your ploy is to produce the desired results if we are to weigh it against the obvious advantage of leaving the devs where they can contest the objective.

No. You don't have accurate numbers for the other things you are considering either. So why do you claim to need accurate numbers for the opponent's probability to make a move for your devastators? It's just another factor you will have to estimate. And you won't get around doing those estimations for a lot of things...

I just don't see any way you can demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship there.

Well, in fact I do. I know this player very well and I was pretty sure that he wouldn't have made the mistake he made if I had acted in a more logical way. And since we discuss games a lot from hindsight (a thing which you perhaps do not consider as you seem to try to ignore your opponent wherever possible) I am very sure his mistake was caused by my "trap" because he told me it was so. He explained how my trap had him considering himself on the safe side and made him refrain from thinking further action was necessary, something that he certainly wouldn't have thought if further action had very obviously been necessary indeed.

I'll believe it works on people sometimes, but nothing you've suggested so far indicates that your knowledge of its mechanics anywhere approaches my knowledge of the mechanics of the probability of the outcomes of dice events. You still need to work on that.

Not really. I am fine with those events being less accurate to predict. Instead you should accept that you can not possibly play a game by basing decisions solely on dice events. There is a lot else to consider which isn't primarily based on the dice (as indicated in the example I have given above) in your decision-making process, and since all that is acceptable, one more rough estimate from guts and experience is fine too - especially if your estimations turn out to be quite accurate most of the time...



Making mistakes is what makes the difference between a victory and a defeat. And it's most often not a single one that decides the game, more probably both players will make one or even two or three small mistakes throughout the game, and it is the sum of them that slowly dips balance. Thus, provoking those mistakes and thus increasing the odds of them happening is a very viable tactic, and as long as the risks you take are small enough and the potential benefits and the odds big enough you're very well off!
Now if everyone played the way you tell them too, the game would - in a simplified way - basically come down to who is blessed with the better dice rolls. No one pays attention to their opponent, everyone just looks at the game table and always makes the best decision, but if the opponent always makes the best decisions too this will result in decisions being very conservative and no side taking great risks in order to potentially yield great benefits. That would be pretty boring and result in draws or minor victories and defeats at the very best - depending on the dice rolls. That's not my cup of tea! My fourth edition record (where victories and defeats were still classed by severity) was not at all full of solid victories and draws, instead I ended slightly more games with a victorious slaughter than with all the other possible outcomes combined. Crushing victories and solid defeats were the next most prominent outcomes while there were almost no draws or solid victories for me. This is because I take risks in order to attempt to be granted great benefits. I lure the opponent into making mistakes which - in the sum - turn out to be game decisive. Sure, sometimes I lose because my attempts backfire. But if it works it pays off and I go home with not only a minor victory but a very considerable one.
You keep saying that you think you can not be influenced. This is just plain wrong. If you merely hear a girl's voice (assuming you are male and heterosexual) the testosterone level in your spit increases by 30%. That has an impact on your behavior, even if you deem it inconceivable. Our brain just works in a specific way, and neural networking in our semantic memory, mental scripts, etc... all those things are present in every healthy human and they help us a lot, but unfortunately they also cause us to be susceptible to influence. If I show people pictures of blood and ask them to name a vegetable far more of them will say tomato than if I didn't show the picture. It's just the way our brain works. Blood and tomatoes are both very heavily semantically linked to the color red in our brain, and the activation of the item "blood" spreads activation to the item "red" and from there to the item "tomato", priming us to think of tomatoes when asked about vegetables. If it were a mistake to answer the question with "tomato" most people could keep themselves from replying with "tomato", but some couldn't - more than if the picture of blood hadn't been shown. I am sure you know games like a conversation where no one may ever ask a question. It goes well for the first few minutes while everyone is still fully attentive, but as you speed it up and get into it you can very easily lay out traps for your opponent to fall for and it will work at one point or another, because it requires extensive training not to. After two hours of such conversion within a group the whole group will probably have managed to completely absorb the spirit of the game and they will not fall for traps anymore. But until then they do, because not asking questions is not a natural thing to do for them, normally they don't have to think much about whether to ask a question, they are used to just doing so if a situation comes up with a trigger for a question.
So effective mind games turn something an opponent usually does or can usually do without giving much thought to it into a trap and lure him into falling for it. To be effective you just combine your skills here, including fast talk at the table. Maybe you, Left of West, are immune, I don't know, I can't judge. But I know people in general aren't - at all. Vigilance is very fragile in humans, and perfectly concentrating over a larger period of time - like a game of Warhammer 40.000 - is very hard for most of us. Thus we are vulnerable to making mistakes. And a wise opponent is able to evoke them and steer them into a certain direction, where he can best exploit them.