Comprehensive Comparison: Ubi Vs Tg, Deployment redeems Ushabti?

Ok people. First of, this thread is inprired of Dbunibe's thread full of math-hammer-efforts found behind this link: Us vs Them
In that topic, among other things, he compares 8 ushabti (GW) to 29 halberd TG with a prince. (I think both are pretty common ways of fielding the mentioned units nowadays!).
In that topic, Dbunibe runs these units against three threads that we commonly encounter: 25 khorne warriors with AHWs(7 wide), 30 sauruswarriors (10 wide), and 10 chaos knights.
In that Topic, Dbunibe concluded that TG outperform ushabti on all fronts.

Lately, however, I have been thinking about the advantages of Ushabti over TG, and I want to redeem them somewhat by redoing the examples Dbunibe gave. This will take some reimagining of the situations, but I also found that Dbunibe was somewhat sloppy with some of the calculations.
I started this new topic because I hope to keep this analysis tidy and accesible in the first post of this topic. I will edit this post with new insights, your suggestions and continued analysis done at a later moment. I hope you will join me in this effort, your valuable input and suggestions are needed.

My considerations:
Characters; a sound that is often heard in the comparison Ubi-VS-TG is the fact that the TG unit ALWAYS has a prince/king included. This IS a realistic assumption, as the royal is pretty significant in the performance of the unit. However, if a player plays to the strength of his Ubi's I feel he should be able to get a necrotect ithin 12 inch of them as well. For my comparrison, therefore, I will asume a tect in range BEHIND the unit, and I will asume a prince with the TG as well of course.
Formation; it occured to me that before they get to strike, 2 ushabti usually die due to enemy attacks. that means that out of 8, only 6 (or less) will get to strike. Therefore, knowing and anticipating this, I propose to run 8 ushabti in a 3x3 formation. this will decrease their frontage, but as long as 2 die anyway, it doesn't decrease the number of attacks. notice that running ubi's 3 wide instead of 4 means that they receive only 30 khorne-warrior attacks instead of the 35 those guys deal to the TG. This, I feel, a player nees to do if he wants to play to the strength of the ushabti!
Points; one thing that also ALWAYS comes up at these comparisons, is pointcost of the compared units. at the one hand you want to compare realistic units, on the other hand you do not want to compare 200 to 500 points. 29 halberd TG plus prince cost you 477 points. 8 ushabti cost you 400. Ignoring command, that means the Ubi's could be argued to deserve a 9th guy, which they could easily fit into their new 3x3 formation. HOWEVER, I'm not doing that, as we are asuming a tect behind the Ushabti as well. therefore I say that in terms of points I will call the proposed units evenly matched in the light of the Ubi-get-tect-assumption.

Now, let's look what we get against khorne warriors with AHW. These guys have ws5 str4 T4, a 4+ armor save, 4 attacks per model (2+frenzy+AHW) and initiative 5. against ubi's, they hit on 3s, wound on 4s and the ubi's retain a 6+ Effective Armor Save (EAS). against TG they hit on 4s, wound on 4s, and the TG have no save left (halberds don't allow shields). for comparison, I included the battle for Ubi's deployed 4x2 as well:

(DISCLAIMER: results are given in terms of wounds done vs wounds received, additional combat res is not mentioned but could be important. Matchups are chosen based on Dbunibes thread for comparrison, they are not meant to be a comprehensive story. further, results are given in avarages; real analysts would probably like to see spread, but that's too much work for me . You know how to handle this defect in math-hammering, they be more like guidelines and so on...)
(If I made any mistake in excecution, such as I took the wrong nr of attacks for ushabti, tell me and I'll update this post)

VS khorne warriors
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8 ubis 3x3 vs 25 khorne warriors 7x3:
-warriors strike 30x, 20 hits, 10 wounds, 7 get through 6+EAS & 6+regen
-ubis strike 18x, 9 hits, 7.5 wounds, 3 stomps do one extra wound!
ubi's win with 8.5 vs 7...

8 ubis 4x2 vs 25 khorne warriors 7x3:
-warriors strike 35x, 20 hits, 10 wounds, 8.1 get through 6+EAS&6+regen
-ubis strike 18x, 9 hits, 7.5 wounds, 3 stomps do 1.3 extra wound!
ubi's win with 8.8 vs 8.1...

29 Halberd TG + prince 10x3 vs 25 khorne warriors 7x3:
-warriors strike 35x, 17.5 hits, 8.75 wounds, no saves
-Tomb guard strike ~21x, 10.5 hits, 7 wounds(2.3 KB), 6.2 get past 6+EAS(also due to KB)
Tomb guard lose with 6.2 to 8.75


So far so good for the ushabti. what do sauruses do? with handweapon and shield, these guys have ws3, s4, t4, 2 attacks per model, armor save 4+ and initiative 1. note that in their hoard formation, only 6 of them have base contact with 3x3 ubis!

VS saurus warriors
---------------------------------------
8 ubis 3x3 vs 30 saurus warriors 10x3:
-saurus strike 24x, 12 hits, 6 wounds, 4.2 get through 6+EAS & 6+regen
-ubis strike 18x, 12 hits, 10 wounds, 8.3 after parry, 3 stomps do 1 extra wound!
ubi's win with 9.3 vs 4...

8 ubis 4x2 vs 30 saurus warriors 10x3:
-saurus strike 40x, 20 hits, 10 wounds, 7 get through 6+EAS & 6+regen
-ubis strike 18x, 12 hits, 10 wounds, 8.3 after parry, 4 stomps do 1.3 extra wound!
ubi's win with 9.6 vs 7...

29 Halberd TG + prince 10x3 vs 30 saurus warriors 10x3:
-Tomb guard strike 30x, 20 hits, 13 wounds (3.25 KB), 11.37 get through 6+EAS
-Saurus strike ~29x, 14.5 hits, 7.25 wounds
Tomb guard win with 11.3 to 7.25

pretty even; though TG certainly kill 2 saurusses more, 3x3 ubi's lose less wounds and therefore win combat with 1 more. note that by deploying 3x3, ushabti saved a whole ushabti casualty without losing any real damage output.


intermediate conslusions
---------------------------------
Now, next time I'll continue this post. Then it's the turn of the chaos knights. I'm expecting that's where the TG will shine, due to their numbers and KB! More afterthought will follow then as well such as reliance on magic, reliance on characters, movement and deployment etc. For now, however, I hope I could show you these two things:
- when you play to you're ushabti's strengths, they would outperform TG against pretty scary units
- important, easy to implement inovation that saves lives: deploy 3x3!

thank you for reading

Fantastic read well done.

My math hammer is appalling so I won't even check your workings out.

As for TG vs Ubi choice, I think I still choose TG for the sole reason is they arnt limited to 1 healing wound a turn.

Yep but u are forgetting that u shld never do points for points cost.

who takes 29 tomb guard and a prince?

I have about 1000 points in my tomb guard and so far it has been destroyed once due to the guy shoving 2 hydra's, black guard and something else at them all on 1 turn and it was only because the stupid hydra's manged to kill so many with there breath weapon.

Tomb guard take less damange from shooting and magic due to being able to be healed much easier.
If u lose 12 tomb guard in 1 round its not too bad, loose 4 ushabti and u are screwed

Also u are forgetting people run khorne warriors with halberds and BotEF
So that is 28 attacks - 18 hit - 12 wound - 4 ushabti dead
Ushabti hit back with 12 attack, 6 hit, 5 wound + 1 from stomp = 6 dead
Ushabti lose by 6 (if we are generious and ignore ranks etc) and so basically 2 more go down

If we compare it to tomb guard with both in horde formation but the tomb guard have a prince
warriors have 50 attacks - 25 hit - 16 kills
tomb guard have 30 attacks - 15 hit - 2 kb and 8 wound - 7 die, then the prince attacks will hit kill say 2 guys

from combat res u loose 6 guys, so same combat res but more dead warriors + tomb guard can be healed back up again

I do quite often, especially at 2k...although if I'm only taking 29 Tomb Guard, it's usually because I fielded the Tricksters/Antarhak King. I prefer 39 + Royal or Necrotect (never both), but sometimes I just don't have the points for the beefier unit.

The 3x3 ushabti unit + necrotect does work pretty well, and is preferably supported by Pha's protection or speed of light. It does pretty well on it's own too, and that might be its nice, because ...

The TG will benefit greatly from all spells. Smiting: heal D3+1 and get +10A (cf +1 and +3). Protection: get 5+ ward, bigger bump than from a 6+ regen. Birona's: get ASF. Speed of light: strike before the blasted warriors. Cursed blades: KB on 5+. The list goes on.

Just thinking, if the TG are already at a ~70 point advantage, that's negated well enough by the Necrotect support. However, if you add the Prince, wouldn't that bump the 'cost' of the TG up enough to warrant another Ushabti?

My much, much simpler comparison.

TG have swords. Killing potential is turn 2-3 on, and it's decent.

My Ush have bows. Killing potential is turn 1 on, and it's decent.

Conclusion: Ush are more tactically useful.




Nice write up anyway.

@ jgascoine011: If one had 1000 points in Ushabti to rival your investment in your Tomb Guard, the results would need to be looked at again. 20 Monstrous Infantry can really let loose...especially if they have bows .

29 Tomb Guard with a naked prince is 477 points, 8 ushabti with a 'tect in the background is 470, he already considered the costs. I suppose it's mostly irrelevant, but against the toughest stuff you can have an ushabti ancient at a corner of the unit to soak up attacks as well, making it so you can at most suffer 3 wounds from that particular part (or heck, try to get a challenge going so you deny even more attacks your way, and a chance for underdog VP).

Admittedly getting this into the calculations would be a biiit troublesome I'd wager.

The price of the prince is included in the 477pts. It's just a naked prince and no command in the unit.

Yes, this is whip always suggest running both ubi and tg together. Ubi don't need magic support. TG do. Use them both and spank your opponent.

I've gotten away from both units recently, though both can be effective if you plan around them. Tomb guard shine with character support and buffs, Ushabti shine in larger units. Both are a big point investment and require that your opponent is coming towards you, so you need to also invest in magic and shooting so that your opponent does so. I personally prefer more mobile lists, which is why I've been not using either recently.

I hear great questions asked. the point raised by jgascoine011 and followed up on by others is a valid one: how do thigs scale up? I hope you will agree that it isn't very sensible to compare 1000 points of TG with 400 points of ushabti, But I think it would be sensible to do a upscaling comparrison. I'll add it to the to do list .

my initial approach was based on work done before. Veritas raises another good point: there's bows inn the world too!

magic needs a day of typing too, I'll surely get to that.

Dbunibes conclusion is one I'm somewhat expecting too: Ubis seem too do about the same, save for different accents, but they function more on their own, while Sleboda will agree that kings and tects can be removed from the TG unit, after which the unit is pretty much neutered.

Thanks for all your replies, you'll notice when the second part gets up ^^

I have been considering lately running a 3 unit attack force that would consist of 8(maybe 9 3x3 now) ubi in the middle with 2 units of 25 TG with prince (1 on eachside of ubi) my reasoning is that with a mobile Lp behind the units the bubble spells will net the same bonuses, but heal twice as many TG potentially. Were talking approx 900pts for combat troops, run 2-3 units of chariots on the flanks, put the rest in Monsters I think this could be a scary force