Editing Battlefleet Gothic Armada (section)

==Terminology==
The tutorial for the game is… a bit sparse quite honestly. There are a few things that don’t get explained properly or at all, so here is a rundown on the way some of the crunch works:

'''Armour''': The flat percent chance that an attack that hits you will be negated. The numbers are front/sides/back. For example if a ship had 75/50/25 armour then this is a 75% chance that any attack fired at the ship from within its front arc will do no damage, 50% chance against attacks fired at a ship from within its side arcs and only a 25% against attacks taken from the rear hur hur hur. Armour provides no protection against ordinance (so bombers and torpedos). If a skill says “Treats armour as 25” or some variation of that it means regardless of the actual value the armour of this ship is treated as 25. Attacks with this value are very useful against Space Marine ships, as most of them have impressive 75 all around them but less impressive hull points pool. Armour also (to some extent) mitigates damage received from passing though asteroids fields. Lastly, the thickness of your metal hide plays a role in calculating ramming damage, both dealt and received.

'''Assault actions''': Comes in three flavours: Lightning strikes, boarding actions, and what I call “ordinance launched boarding actions” (because I am incapable of coming up with good names) which are boarding action launched through boarding torpedos, Thunderhawks etc. All three both do basically the same thing: deal a small amount of damage but have a high chance to deal critical damage (see below). In the patch that introduced the Space Marines the mechanics got tweaked somewhat: assault actions have a much higher chance of dealing critical damage to the sub-system you are targeting on an enemy ship (click the enemy ship in battle and you will see buttons to target specific places) rather than just rolling equally against all the critical hit options.

If you use this skill a lot you will notice that often you will see a message saying “(boarding action/lightning strike) failed”. A ships troop value is its flat percent chance to resist boarding actions. So a ship with a troop value of 60 has a 60% chance to not take any damage from an assault action. However, for every turret a ship has left this value is raised by 1 against boarding actions only. So a ship with a troop value of 60 and 9 remaining turrets has a 69% chance to repel boarding actions. Keep in mind though that a lot of ships will have upgrades that increase the number of assault actions that are launched per use of the skill (Orks for example have a skill called More Tellyportas which causes 2 assault actions to take place per use of the lightening strike skill), so you overcome this resistance by sheer number of boarding tests you will force a ship to make. Ordinance launched boarding actions have to actually hit the ship (so they can be shot down by turrets or just plain old miss) and then are rolled against the troop value. Teleporter assaults can only cause temporary critical damages, fires, or hull-breaches (which deals 25-100 damage to the hull), while boarding actions can cause permanent crits, fires, or breaches. In the event of, say, an enemy ship attempting to warp out, chances are best to use teleporter assaults, but really, this just depends on your ships and how you have them set up. No one-size-fits-all.

'''Critical hits''': Critical hits have an additional effect when an attack isn’t negated by armor (see above). Critical hits (usually) only occur when an attack hits the actual superstructure of the ship, not its shields. All weapons have a critical hit chance that generally hovers around the 1-5% mark. While this may seem low, remember most weapon batteries fire 5 to 10 shots per salvo, all of which have a chance to crit. There are also weapons that have a *much* better chance, with some going as high as 30+%, for example the SM bombardment cannon with a maxed out master gunner crewman (nothing will make IN gamers like me cry harder than a battle barge with Master Gunner, Master of Armory, four bombardment cannons, and a means of killing shields easily. Nothing. Sodium levels WILL intensify). There are two types of critical hits: Temporary, which are shown in yellow and go away when you use the emergency repairs skill, and Permanent, which are colored red, visually blow up a part of the ship, and are… well ya know. (If for whatever reason you have an unpatched version of the game, all crits are Permanent) A non-exhaustive list of critical hit effects are:

* Generator damaged: A ship can’t use any skills which have Affinity: Generator (there are too many to list but the biggie is lightning strikes, look at the skill description to see what affinity a skill has) and loses the ability to regenerate its shields/holofields. A destroyed generator also doubles time needed to make a warp jump/faction equivalent. A lost generator can be a death knell in certain cases; if you lose this against Space Marines or Tau...just get out, because if you don't, when your ship takes too much damage and needs to get the hell outta dodge, it's not going to warp out in time.
* Weapon Destroyed: Does pretty much what you expect. The most common to suffer, and perhaps the least crippling individually...but then, a ship with no guns ends up just being a glorified battering ram.
* Hull breach: Deals 25-100 hull damage; used to disable emergency repair skill, but now it's only if the ship is Heavily Damaged.
* Fire!: We didn’t start it, it was always bur- oh no wait we totally did start it. Deals a small amount of damage over time for its duration and multiple instances stack. 3+ fires at once are no joke, even on the largest ships.
* Bridge destroyed: Disables special orders. On smaller ships this isn't ''usually'' that big of a problem, but on major ships that are the centerpiece of your strategy, this can tip the balance at a crucial point and cost you the match.
* Engines damaged: This can be a catastrophe of the highest order...or it can just be "meh, whatever." "Fortress" fleets like some of what the IN or SM can field won't be too terribly affected if you know how to "circle the wagons", but if you're playing Orkz, a ship with broken engines is a completely useless ship, because your days of ramming anything other than the most tarded of reres are over. This is also a death sentence for Eldar. Tau couldn't really care less, and Chaos will find it problematic but not disastrous, as long as you know how to get good.