KOW - Decision-Making: Brew of Sharpness

With me pulling the Rats out again, I have been looking at my list and trying to decide if I should make some changes.

To quickly summarise the list - 2x Slave Regiments, Slave Horde, 2x Shock Troop Hordes, Blight Horde, 2x Weapons Team with upgrade, 2x Death Engines - Vile Sorcery, Swarm-Crier with Lute, Warlock with Bane Chant and Talisman, Daemonspawn with Wings. Not a lot of Magic Items or spare points in the list.

I decided to do some analysis on whether it was worth giving Brew of Sharpness (+1 to Hit in Melee) to a unit of Shock Troops. These have 25 Attacks, CS1, Elite and Vicious standard. For the purposes of this i'll assume I always have BC potential.

The table shows the number of wounds "expected" at different levels of Defence. As I said I will assume that they will always be BC if needed, making then CS2.

So you can see that the +1 to Hit has an effect doing 4.7 extra "expected" wounds at De2-4, 3.8 extra at De 5 and 2.8 at De 6. Ok.....that is obvious. It is however getting the added benefit of Elite and Vicious - only natural 2s to hit missing as 1s are re-rolled hitting 2/3rds of the time.

But is it a good use of points?

To determine this I worked out the Wounds inflicted per Points invested in the Unit. The cost of a Shock Troop Horde is the very princely sum of 230 points, while the Brew of Sharpness is 45 points.

You can see from the final in the table the difference in Wounds inflicted per point invested and at all Defences the difference is positive. This means that Shock Troops with the Brew are a more efficient killing machine for their points than those without it.

But should I buy it?

Well it does look attractive, however there are some things to consider:

• Points are being concentrated which makes the Brewed ST an attractive target to the enemy.
• You are forced to choose which of the Shock Troops gets it - Murphy's Law says it will always be the wrong one!
• Where in the current list do the points come from?

Any thoughts appreciated.