Author: @ScatterDieGuy
31/03/2025 16:57
I played my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battles around the age of 10. 5th Edition had just launched and my parents bought me the starter box for Christmas. From there it was a hobby I was passionate about throughout much of my adolescence and I played throughout 5th and 6th Editions. However, like many young players, I subsequently fell away from the hobby as I grew older, life got busier and I had other demands on my time.
Roll on two and half decades and I found myself starting to think about whether my own kids would enjoy Warhammer. But when I headed online to check out what's current in the game I discovered that my beloved childhood hobby was no more. Warhammer 40K was still very much a thing and this Age of Sigmar game looked kind of cool, but for classic rank-and-flank Warhammer enthusiasts I was shocked to discover that, somewhere since I had last battled it out against my school mates in early 2000's and the present day, Games Workshop had literally blown up their entire fantasy setting and consigned the Warhammer Fantasy Battles game system to the annals of history (I know I was probably a bit late to this particular party, but was saddened none-the-less).
But not all hope was lost. Not long after I discovered the devastating fate of the Old World, rumours began circulating...
If you're reading this blog then there's a good chance you know what has happened since, with Warhammer: The Old World finally bringing classic rank-and-flank Warhammer fantasy back to the tabletop in early 2024.
As a returning player, at a very different point in life to when I was last seriously invested in the hobby, it's funny how different things grab you. Re-immersing myself in a fresh, yet simultaneously familiar ruleset, I found myself fascinated by the mathematical mechanics of the game.
The basics of Warhammer maths (or "Math-Hammer") are relatively simple - there's a lot of dice rolling, and for every die roll you have an equal chance of rolling each value. But when you start to chain large numbers of dice rolls together within a complex set of rules interactions, simple foundations rapidly lead to a far more interesting and exciting whole. In one sense, a very large part of the rules to any Warhammer (or similar) game come down to manipulating the probabilities of different outcomes; and a very large part of the skill of playing Warhammer is about leveraging those rules interactions to your effective advantage over your opponent.
Now don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate that most players don't explicitly think like this when they look at the game. But beneath the hood, we're all doing it, even if we don't realise or acknowledge that we are. If you are playing to win (whether that be at the competitive tournament level or just a casual game with a friend), every decision you make - from putting together your army list, to deployment, to in-game tactics - is ultimately an attempt at improving your odds of victory.
In my day job I am engineer, which means that I solve technical problems using maths, so perhaps it is unsurprising that I find myself naturally drawn to thinking about Warhammer in this way.
Shortly after The Old World released I launched a YouTube channel where I make videos about Old World maths problems. Some of my videos are very generic, for example I made a series about dice mechanics, whilst others explore very specific scenarios. One common theme to all of these videos to date is that they have taken an analytical approach, directly solving the mathematical probabilities for specific different situations. But what if there was a more general solution?
This question is the seed of what is now the Old World Calculator.
The Old World Calculator is a general purpose combat calculator for Warhammer: The Old World. You feed the details for two units into the calculator, and it uses a method known as a Monte Carlo Simulation to determine the range of possible outcomes and their relative probabilities. To achieve this the calculator simulates the combat (following exactly the same process as you would go through on the tabletop) an extraordinarily large number of times. It's a bit like playing the game and gaining experience in real life, except that the calculator can play each combat tens of thousands of times in a fraction of a second.
You can check out the launch video for the calculator below, which includes a quick run through of how to use it. I'll be adding some more formal tutorial videos soon, though in practice it's pretty self-intuitive.
At the time of writing the public release is 'v2.0.5 Beta'. I ask users keep in mind that this is a beta release - the site is fully functional, but it is an ongoing endeavour. I can't guarantee you won't encounter bugs and I am fully aware that there are features which still need to be developed to enable modelling of the full range of Warhammer combats.
If you do encounter bugs then please let me know. Send details of the input which resulted in the bug and a description of what appears to be going wrong to support@oldworldcalculator.com and I'll find a fix as soon as possible. If you help highlight a genuine bug in the code I'll even credit you as a tester (if you want to be) as a small thankyou.
That's all for now. I hope you find the Old World Calculator useful. Keep an eye on this blog and the @ScatterDieGuy YouTube channel for further updates and new feature announcements as they are added.
Designed by ScatterDieGuy © 2025
Icons by Icons8 and Font Awesome
