Warhammer 40k Tabletop IX: "Mech is king? I never voted for it."

[Cheesegear]

Here's a list of Tiers - 1, 2, 3, 4 and (god help them) 5. Which armies do you think go where, and why? (Not asking for an essay, just naming a couple of key units would be great )

Mostly, the 'Tiers' are about how good the Codex is. Can you make 'bad choices' when writing your army, does the 'dex have its fair share of 'trap' units? Do its competitive builds stand up to the competitive builds of other Codecies? Its also not necessarily how competitive an individual build is, but, rather, how many competitive builds you can make.

Tier 1. Space Wolves and Blood Angels.

As long as you're not making obviously bad choices, if you can even find a 'bad choice' to take in the first place, these army will be rather good no matter what you take. It's actually kind of hard to make a truly bad list out of these Codecies.

Tier 2. Codex Marines, Chaos Marines, Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Imperial Guard

There's a couple of bad choices to make within each Codex, but, you can easily make almost any build you want perfectly well without them. There are even some competitive builds that make use of those 'bad' units, which, in particular lists, become quite good.

Note: Chaos Daemons is definitely a T2 army if you assume that the dice will roll averages. But, of course that's a rather generous assumption.

Tier 3. Eldar, Orks, Black Templars and Witch Hunters

Two, maybe three competitive lists you can build out of these Codecies. Even their 'good' units aren't really all that good when you compare them to higher Tiered Codecies with similar units. If you bring these armies to a tournament, there's a rather good chance that your opponent(s) will know exactly how your army works and be prepared to deal with it.

Tier 4. Necrons, Daemonhunters (), Tau, Dark Angels

Depending on who you ask, there is either one way to build a competitive list, or, the 'dex just simply isn't competitive at all. If you take these lists to a tournament, you kind of need to be really lucky and have the dice go your way...A lot.

A special note on Daemon and Witch Hunters;

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The Allies rules - if you have them - make both Codecies T2. The ability to include Infantry Platoons into your lists is rather good. Alternatively, you can take the minimum/cheapest and/or best things you can out of Codex Marines - or Imperial Guard - and then follow that up with as many D/W Hunter units as you can can make for some rather weird lists that a couple of lists around aren't ready to deal with.

Power Armour and Bolters. I can deal with Marines. Wait, you mean they've got Meatshields in front of them? Oh, that's different. What? Why are your Grey Knights in Chimeras?

If you wants to rank different Army Builds against others (Green Tide vs. Biker/Vehicle Spam) I'd love to see that too.

You might love to see it, but there's no way I can do it. There's just too many builds. Especially in the higher Codecies. Individual, competitive lists are completely different to a competitive Codex.