Warhammer Underworlds - Analysis Series - Durability

 

Warband Durability in Warhammer Underworlds

Introduction: Why Durability Matters

In Warhammer Underworlds, victory is all about scoring Glory. To score, your fighters need to be on the battlefield, working towards your Objectives and engaging enemy fighters. Naturally, the longer your fighters survive, the more opportunities you have to score Objective cards, and the less Bounty you give away to your opponent. This is why durability, the time it takes for a warband to be removed from play,  is the subject of this article.

In this article, I will attempt to break down durability into a single, understandable variable: the number of successful attack activations required to remove a warband. This is a simplification, we are not simulating entire games, but isolating durability under a set of standard conditions.

To do this, we will first examine base durability, then explore how saves increase the number of required activations and finally see how multi-hit attacks reshape the picture again.

The Base Assumptions

For the purpose of this analysis, the following assumptions are made:

• Attacks always deal 2 damage
• Attacks always succeed (this allows durability to be converted into a single variable)
• Crits only count as successes, nothing more
• No weapon abilities are considered
• No warscroll rules are included
• All durability calculations are based on uninspired profiles

It is important to remember that this is not intended to simulate real games. The aim is to isolate durability as a single variable.

As the article progresses, some of these assumptions will be revisited and modified to explore how durability changes under different conditions.

 

What do I mean by Durability?

Durability is defined as the total number of successful 2-damage attacks required to remove all fighters in a warband. There are two key ways to think about this:

Base Durability

Assumes all attacks hit and all saves fail. This focuses purely on the Health and fighter count of a warband.

Save-Adjusted Durability

Accounts for each fighter’s saves, which can cause attacks to fail and force your opponent to spend more activations to remove your fighters.

By separating these two measurements, we can better understand how fighter count, Health, and Saves interact to determine how long a warband can stay on the board.

 

How do Health and Durability relate?

First, it is helpful to understand how Health determines the “time” or activation cost required to remove a single fighter. Returning to our base assumptions:

• Each attack deals 2 damage
• Each attack always succeeds

This produces the following results:

5 Health → 3 attacks to remove

4 Health → 2 attacks

3 Health → 2 attacks

2 Health → 1 attack

Durability does not increase linearly with Health. A 4-Health fighter is not significantly harder to remove than a 3-Health fighter but increasing from 2 to 3 Health represents a substantial jump in durability.

With an understanding of the time required to remove individual fighters, we can now consider durability across entire warbands.

 

How does Warband Size affect Durability?

Durability is influenced as much by the number of fighters as by their individual Health. Consider the following simplified examples:

3 × 5-Health fighters → 9 attacks required

4 × 4-Health fighters → 8 attacks required

5 × 3-Health fighters → 10 attacks required

Although individual fighters may be weaker, larger warbands often require more total attacks to remove. This helps explain why swarm warbands can feel surprisingly resilient despite low individual Health.

On average, warbands begin with roughly 16 total Health divided between their fighters. Under our assumptions, this means it typically takes around eight successful 2-damage attacks to remove a warband. However, durability varies depending on how that Health is distributed across fighters.

I have compiled a table showing the base durability of a range of warbands. 

Table 1: Base Durability

The Durability Baseline Across Warbands

In almost all cases, warbands fall within a very narrow range of base durability. Most require either eight or nine successful attack activations to be removed from the battlefield. In simple terms, most warbands in this edition are designed to survive for roughly the same amount of time once combat begins.

However, there is one clear exception to this pattern.

Zarbag’s Gitz sit well outside the typical durability range with a base durability of 12. This is a significant difference, representing roughly a 33 to 50 percent increase in the number of successful attacks required to remove the warband compared to most others.

My Gitz

The reason is straightforward. Zarbag’s Gitz contain nine fighters, and every fighter must be attacked individually. Each requires at least one successful attack to remove, and several require two. In practice, this creates a much larger activation tax for opponents than almost any other warband in the game.

The Gitz begin the game with 21 total wounds spread across nine fighters. Both the fighter count and total Health pool are unusually high. Other warbands either have fewer fighters and less overall Health. The Gitz combine both advantages, compounding their durability in a way few warbands can match.

This becomes especially significant when considering that Warhammer Underworlds is built around a fixed number of activations. Each player has twelve activations available during a game. Against most warbands, removing the entire enemy force typically requires eight to nine successful attacks. Zarbag’s Gitz often require the full twelve. In practical terms, this means an opponent needs to spend an entire game successfully attacking to completely remove the warband from the board.

This provides a significant advantage. The Gitz gain more time to score Objectives, reposition fighters, and force opponents into inefficient attack patterns. When durability is isolated as a single variable, the combination of fighter count and total Health creates a game breaking advantage that pushes the warband beyond normal expectations.

This does not mean other factors do not matter. Weapon profiles, faction abilities, and warscroll rules all influence overall power level. However, when durability is isolated, Zarbag’s Gitz clearly stand out as an extreme example of survivability.

With this established, we can now examine how Saves further influence durability.

 

How do Save impact Durability?

So far, we have assumed all attacks succeed. To examine how failed attacks affect durability, we need to consider that most weapon profiles use either two Hammers or three Swords. For this stage of the analysis, we assume each attack generates only one successful hit.

Updated Assumptions

• Attacks always deal 2 damage
• Attacks contain only one successful hit
• Crits only count as successes, nothing more
• No weapon abilities are considered
• No warscroll rules are included
• All durability calculations are based on uninspired profiles

All fighters in Warhammer Underworlds have a Save characteristic. If a fighter rolls an equal or greater number of successful saves than the attacker’s hits, the attack fails.

Saves, therefore, increase the number of attack activations required to kill an individual fighter.

Shield saves succeed on 3 faces of a die → 50% chance to cancel an attack

Dodge saves succeed on 2 faces of a die → approximately 33% chance

Multiple save dice increase the probability of cancelling attacks

Each save is applied per fighter rather than averaged across the warband. Even a single save increases the number of activations required to remove a fighter. As a result, most warbands are likely to have at least one fighter remaining on the battlefield by the third round.

For example, Slynk Skittershank is a 4-Health fighter with two Dodge dice. He requires at least two successful 2-damage attacks to be slain. However, his two Dodge dice will, on average, allow him to absorb three to four attack activations (assuming 1-hit in each attack) before he is removed. This is not because he is particularly tough, but because several attacks simply fail to deal damage.

 

Calculating Save-Adjusted Durability

To calculate Save-Adjusted Durability:

• Determine each fighter’s base durability
• Adjust each fighter’s durability based on saves
• Sum the results across all fighters

This produces the Save-Adjusted Durability, the average number of attack activations required to remove a warband under the revised assumptions.

 

Table 2: Save-Adjusted Durability verses 1-hit attacks

The most obvious outcome is that Save-Adjusted Durability increases the number of activations needed to remove warbands. This is expected, as saves cause attacks to fail.

As each attack is assumed to contain exactly one hit, every fighter has a chance to stop each attack. This increases Save-Adjusted Durability to over twelve activations for most warbands, meaning some fighters can theoretically survive to the end of Round three, and therefore, the end of the game.

Across a game, four failed attacks, either through missed hits or successful saves, should be sufficient to ensure at least one fighter from a warband survives to the end of the game.

Some warbands clearly survive longer than others. Larger warbands such as the Thorns of the Briar Queen and Zarbag’s Gitz benefit significantly, as do warbands with access to multiple save dice such as the Sons of Velmourn and Borgit’s Beastgrabbaz.

My Sons of Velmourn

You're not as tough as you look!

On paper, elite fighters with high Health look extremely durable. A 5-Health fighter needs multiple successful attacks to remove, which makes them look stable and reliable from a raw numbers perspective. However, if those fighters have single dice saves, they can lose Health very quickly once attacks start landing.

Elite warbands tend to concentrate a large portion of their total durability into just a few fighters. When one of those fighters fails a key save roll and is removed, the warband can suddenly lose a huge chunk of its staying power. That often creates the feeling that elite warbands are solid and in control right up until the moment they suddenly collapse.

In practice, elite durability is often concentrated into a small number of high-value models. Keeping those models alive is critical, because each loss represents a significant drop in the warband’s ability to control space and score Objectives.

 

They just keep coming!

At the other end of the scale, low-Health fighters with two save dice can end up being far more durable than they first appear. Individually, these fighters look fragile and easy to remove. However, every failed attack forces the opponent to spend another activation trying to achieve the same small result.

One failed attack might not feel like much, but when that happens multiple fighters, those extra activations add up very quickly. The opponent may still be removing fighters, but they are doing it less efficiently.

This is one of the main reasons swarm warbands often feel stubbornly resilient. Their durability does not come from soaking damage efficiently. Instead, it comes from forcing the opponent to keep trying and each failed attempt cost you another activation, the chance to score Objectives and gain Bounty.

You can think of this as distributed durability. Instead of placing all the warband’s survivability into one or two tough fighters, it spreads that durability across multiple smaller bodies.

 

I'm da' biggest, so, I'm da BEST

Another interesting pattern is that mixed defensive profiles within a warband do not simply spread out the durability. Instead, durability tends to cluster around specific fighters, often the leader.

Fighters with stronger saves and higher Health often absorb a disproportionate number of attack activations. They effectively become durability anchors, drawing attention and extending the warband’s presence on the battlefield. Meanwhile, fighters with weaker saves or lower Health usually fall quickly and contribute less to long-term survivability.

This uneven durability distribution creates some interesting tactical decisions. Opponents will often remove easier targets first, reducing fighter count but not necessarily reducing the warband’s overall durability in a meaningful way. On the other hand, removing durability anchors early can dramatically shorten a warband’s lifespan. For example, focusing attacks on Mollog, rather than collecting Bounty from the Squigs may be the trick to reducing the effectiveness of the Troggoth’s warband especially later in the game.

This helps explain why some warbands can feel inconsistent. Their durability is not evenly spread, it depends heavily on how long certain key fighters remain alive.

 

My Mollog and his mob

Quantity has its own Quality

Another clear pattern is that saves become more powerful as fighter count increases. Every fighter with a save characteristic introduces another opportunity for attacks to fail. As the number of fighters increases, so does the total number of chances for those failures to occur.

This scaling effect is especially noticeable in swarm warbands. A single Dodge die on one fighter may not seem particularly impressive, but when that same defensive profile appears across multiple fighters, the cumulative effect becomes significant.

This is part of what pushes warbands like the Thorns of the Briar Queen or Zarbag’s Gitz beyond expected durability levels. Their resilience is not just about total Health. It is about repeatedly forcing opponents to spend activations removing individual fighters who each have a chance to simply refuse to die.

 

More is better (Basic Orruk logic)

Saves do not just increase durability. They also increase variance, and variance brings unpredictability with it.

The simplest way to understand this is to think about how reliable it is to roll a particular result. Rolling one die gives you a certain chance of success, but it is very swingy. Sometimes you hit the result you need, sometimes you do not. When you roll two dice, your chances of getting at least one successful result become more reliable. 

In other words, more dice are more reliable, while fewer dice make outcomes more unreliable.

Durability Is Really About Time

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Save-Adjusted Durability is that survivability in Warhammer Underworlds is not really about Health totals. It is about time.

Every failed attack represents an activation that could have been spent scoring Objectives, repositioning fighters, or applying pressure elsewhere. Warbands that force additional attack attempts are effectively converting defence into tempo advantage. Even when fighters eventually fall, the extra time they spend alive can create scoring opportunities or force opponents into inefficient decisions.

This reinforces the idea that durability in Underworlds is best understood as an activation economy mechanic, not just a defensive stat line.

 

What Happens Against Two Successful Hits?

Up to this point, our assumptions have included attacks generating a single successful hit. We now modify this assumption to examine attacks that generate two successful hits.

Updated Assumptions

• Attacks always deal 2 damage
• Attacks contain only two successful hit
• Crits only count as successes, nothing more
• No weapon abilities are considered
• No warscroll rules are included
• All durability calculations are based on uninspired profiles

The following table shows how durability changes when each attack produces two successful hits:

Table 3: Save-Adjusted Durability verses 2-hit attacks.

 

Explaining the Maths Behind the Table

Take the Thorns of the Briar Queen as an example. This warband contains five fighters with 2 Health and two Dodge dice, and two fighters with 3 Health and two Dodge dice.

To remove them:

A 2-damage attack must land 1 hit on a 2-Health fighter

A 2-damage attack must land 2 hits on a 3-Health fighter

Each 1-hit attack has roughly a 55% chance of being cancelled by two Dodge dice. This means it takes more attacks than the base number to deal the required hits.

Without adjustment:

2-Health fighters require approximately 2.25 attacks

3-Health fighters require approximately 4.5 attacks

To keep results readable, these values are capped at twice the base hits. This results in:

2 attacks per 2-Health fighter

4 attacks per 3-Health fighter

Multiplying by fighter count produces a Save-Adjusted Durability of 15 attacks against 1-hit attacks, compared to a base durability of 9.

Against 2-hit attacks, it is far less likely that a 2 Dodge Save will stop the attack (11% chance). This reduces Save-Adjusted Durability closer to base durability — in this case, ~10. 

My (New) Thorns

Analysis of Two-Hit Attacks

As expected, Save-Adjusted Durability decreases for all warbands when facing multi-hit attacks. In many cases, durability approaches base durability.

When an attack generates two hits, single save dice effectively stop contributing to save-adjusted durability because they cannot roll enough successes to cancel the attack. Underworlds saves are all-or-nothing; the defender must roll at least as many successful saves as the attacker rolls hits. A single Shield or Dodge die can only ever generate one successful save, so against a two-hit attack the result is predetermined: the attack will always deal damage. So, fighters relying on a single save die gain no durability benefit when facing consistent multi-hit attacks. Their survival once again depends entirely on their Health characteristic, which is why save-adjusted durability often drops back to base durability in these situations. Only fighters with multiple save dice retain any defensive benefit against two-hit attacks, as they at least have a chance, however small, of rolling enough successes to cancel the attack completely.

 

Not All Saves Are Created Equal

Skittershank’s Clawpack contains several fighters with two Dodge dice, yet their Save-Adjusted Durability against two-hit attacks barely increases. This is because the probability of two Dodge dice cancelling two hits is low (approximately 11%). While saves still provide defensive value, they rarely increase the expected number of attacks required to remove a fighter.

Sons of Velmourn provide another example. Their 2-Health fighters are removed so quickly that even two Shield dice offer limited benefit. Two-hit attacks usually remove them regardless of saves.

Emberwatch demonstrates the opposite scenario. Their 5-Health fighters already require multiple hits to remove. If two fighters inspire and gain two Shield dice, each two-hit attack now has a 25% chance of being completely blocked. This increases the opponent’s activation cost, stretching removal from three attacks closer to four on average. The uninspired fighter still falls in three attacks.

The key point is simple: additional save dice only increase durability for fighters already capable of surviving multiple hits. Strong saves on low-Health fighters provides limited defensive value.

Immovable Versus Ineffectual

Two Dodge saves create a fascinating dynamic. Against single-hit attacks, two Dodge dice are extremely powerful. The chance of cancelling an attack is significant, forcing opponents to spend additional activations simply to make progress.

This effect becomes particularly pronounced in swarm warbands such as the Thorns of theBriar Queen. Fragile fighters with strong saves can survive far longer than their Health would suggest.

However, this resilience collapses against multi-hit attacks. When two hits are generated, two Dodge dice are far less likely to cancel the attack completely. Fighters that previously felt immovable can suddenly fall very quickly.

This volatility gives the Thorns their unique character. They can absorb numerous attack activations in one round and appear nearly unkillable, only to collapse rapidly in the next. I loved my Mournflight in first edition for exactly this reason. The tension of fragile models that could stubbornly refuse to die one moment and vanish the next made every game unpredictable and exciting.

The contrast between single-hit and multi-hit attack reliability explains this behaviour perfectly and captures the ethereal nature of these fighters.

When Do Elite Fighters Gain the Edge?

Elite fighters tend to gain the advantage when attacks become reliable enough to generate multiple hits. Once attacks regularly produce two hits, the defensive value of single save dice drops significantly. At this point, durability becomes less about how often attacks fail and more about how many successful hits a fighter can absorb.

This is where higher Health profiles begin to outperform swarm fighters. A 5-Health fighter still requires three successful attacks to remove, regardless of attack accuracy, while a 2-Health fighter continues to fall to a single successful attack.

As attack reliability increases, the activation tax imposed by swarm warbands decreases. The inherent toughness of elite fighters becomes more visible. Multi-hit attacks flatten defensive variance. Swarms rely on forcing attacks to fail, while elites rely on surviving attacks that succeed. When accuracy increases, surviving successful attacks becomes the more valuable defensive trait.

My Krushas

I'm Staggered

Fighters with a Stagger token can be hit more easily by opposing fighters. In game terms, fighters attacking a Staggered opponent gain a reroll on their attack dice. In practice, this often converts single successful hits into multiple hits.

As discussed earlier, this has important strategic repercussions.

Elite fighters, which rely on surviving multiple hits with their large Health pool, can often afford to become Staggered. Their survivability is less dependent on opponents failing to hit and more about ‘Tanking’ the damage

Low-Health fighters, especially, with two Dodge saves, however, cannot afford to suffer these multiple hits. Their durability relies heavily on attacks failing rather than absorbing incoming damage. Once Stagger improves the reliability of successful hits, their survivability drops dramatically.

 

What does it all mean?

When you strip durability back to its simplest form, most warbands in Warhammer Underworlds are far closer together than players often assume. Base durability shows that the majority of warbands require somewhere around eight or nine successful 2-damage attacks to remove from the battlefield. This suggests a fairly deliberate piece of game design, i.e. the average 16 Health cap. Warbands may feel wildly different in play, but structurally they are often built around a similar expectation of how long they should survive. The major outlier remains swarm warbands, most notably Zarbag’s Gitz, whose durability is driven less by individual toughness and more by forcing opponents to spend activation after activation simply clearing bodies from the board.

Once saves are introduced, however, things become far less even. When attacks only generate a single successful hit, saves begin to dominate durability. Fighters with multiple save dice can cause a huge number of attacks to simply achieve nothing, and when that effect is multiplied across five, seven, or even nine fighters, durability can increase dramatically. This is where swarm warbands and 2-dodge fighters start to feel almost immovable. They are not necessarily harder to kill because they have more Health, but because your opponent is constantly being forced to spend activations that fail to convert into damage. In a game where both players are working with a limited pool of activations, that inefficiency can be devastating when trying to score Objectives and Upgrade fighters.

Multi-hit attacks change the picture again. As soon as attacks reliably generate two or more hits, single-dice saves lose their defensive value. Many fighters effectively fall back toward their base durability because they simply cannot roll enough saves to cause the attack to fail. Only fighters with multiple save dice retain a meaningful defensive advantage, and even then the effect is far more modest. Multi-hit attacks therefore act as a leveller, compressing durability back toward the intended baseline and reducing the natural advantage enjoyed by swarm and high-save warbands.

What this means when choosing a warband is that durability is not just about how hard your fighters are to kill, but about how your warband interacts with the wider offensive environment of the game. Swarm warbands and high-save fighters thrive in the early game when single-hit attacks or inconsistent offensive output is more prevalent, as they can dramatically stretch an opponent’s activation economy. Elite warbands with higher Health but fewer defensive dice tend to perform more consistently and generally perform better into the later game when raw toughness matters as damage is put onto fighters.

Durability, therefore, is not a single number that determines how strong a warband is. Instead, it represents how much time your warband can realistically buy you on the battlefield. More durable warbands give you greater breathing room to score Objectives, position fighters, and control tempo. Less durable warbands often need to score faster, apply pressure earlier, or rely on disruption and positioning to avoid being ground down. Understanding where your warband sits on this durability spectrum is often just as important as understanding how hard it can hit, because in Underworlds, surviving long enough to execute your game plan is frequently the difference between scoring glory and handing it to your opponent.

From here, the next layer of complexity comes from weapon abilities and attack characteristics, along with Warscroll abilities, which can dramatically skew these durability relationships and, in some cases, allow specific warbands to punch far above what their raw profiles would suggest.

I’d love to hear what you think. Does this match your experience on the table, or does your favourite warband surprise you? What do you think should be my next topic of analysis?

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