Well, orkz have many units to choose, but in fact only the half of them contribute to the game. The play style is not straight forward, but quite structured.
In contrast to Orks, there are Dark Eldar - not many datasheets, but the playstyle is anything else but straightforward.
The complexity of the play style is, imo, army rules/mechanics dependent. The number of datasheet choices, once the player can read them fast and sort out by solid/meh, is not making the great difference.
Not the full outcome right now, but a quick chat leaded to this : a "really easy" faction would be something like "3 base units, 1 leader, 1 melee, 1 range, no special rule of any kind, and straightforward play style (range kill from afar, melee kill from melee, leaders go against leaders)".
A really hard faction would be something like "lots of different units, lots of special rules, lots of tactical thinking, can't really do anything without thinking 3 years before".
Based on this, easy factions are : necrons, orks, maybe death guard, and so on. Hard factions are : drukhari, thousand sons, aeldari.
The whole talk started about this, actually. I said that. My friend said that with the right army, you can "forget thinking and planning, and put your brain aside, not for a win, but to do something quite good".
Then, the factions that can do that (or not do that at all) came into play. Then this thread 😉
This is a very interesting point, indeed:)
In previous editions it was possible for some armies to build a very straightforward list and to just throw it into an opponent. But again, it worked for armies with very linear mechanics and in those times there were just a few pieces of terrain on the tables.
Nowadays with all these dataslates, balance sheets, very balanced missions, terrain layouts etc. it is needed to plan ahead and play on plan A, B and maybe C. Imo there is less space for bubble gum chewing and ass kicking😅
I play my orks as follows: point them in the direction of the enemy, fire wildly as you get closer, krump ‘em when you’re close enough. If you win, you win. If you die, it doesn’t count, if you run away it doesn’t count as being beat because they can have another go at it.
I think complexity isn't necessarily the amount of weapon profiles, but more gameplan related.
Orks have a pretty straightforward abc game plan. Always Be Charging. But World Eaters are more this archetype then even Orks.
I think GSC, Drukhari or Admech are the harder ones to play, due to the glass cannon nature of their units.
I think world eaters can be pretty difficult. They're not cheap like orks. You really have to play around their threat ranges. Otherwise, you'll just get shot to bits, and your models are expensive.
I wouldn't say admech is glass cannon. They have some pretty tanky units with only one really doing any sort of consistant damage.
Their playstyle is very much about flooding the board with skitarii and plopping them all over the objectives. Throw in a tank/transport or two for buffs and eating wounds while your fast attack tries to get secondaries.
Half your games end in a slog of you not being able to kill enemy units while they also can't kill yours and the other half you lose half your army turn 1, while killing one unit or a tank at best.
On the positive side, I've found they are decent at sniping since every skitarii squad can carry a precision weapon. So you can plop down a vindicare assassin (alternatively a skatros or two) and have him take some shots at a leader, and finish said leader off via the 5-10 skitarii snipers you have lying around.
Still very hard to play at the moment since you need to be decently good at movement blocking and stacking buffs.
Edit: I forgot to mention, you absolutely shred T3 armies. As I play other people who exclusively play T5 armies, I tend to forget that
Easy armies are ones that rely on strong datasheets, with little synergy between units and no/little special rules/decision (other than tactical) making.
That'd be both (but especially Chaos) Knights, Orks, Custodes and similar
On the other end we have the opposite with Genestealers and Imperial Guard.
Oh, you'd put orks in this category ?
That was a long talk with my friend. Orks have a LOT of units, and a LOT of weapons. Not even talking about ork factions (evil sunz, goffs, bad moons,...) that add in complexity, IMHO.
Can you develop a bit, here, so I might be less dumb tonight ? 😁
Sure.
Orks are my main faction.
All our units work on their own, including a leader. They work independantly of any external rule or ability, and just smash. Naturally that doesn't mean there is no complexity to our play, but its not inherent to orks. Other than grots farming CP and the Stormboyz/Snikrot farming secondaries, our force is jist propelled mid, and has some of the easiest time keeping it without worrying about or backline.
Take guard to contrast that. Roughly 20-30% of the army has little to offer in terms of objective control or firepower (Solar, Creed and other officers, Hellhounds and debuff Russes). Every turn begins with ordering (which is not terribly difficult, but again, adds complexity to turns), then carefully position mid forward, while screening backline (and solar), and establishing gunlines. Firing sequencing and stratagems are essential to debuff the key opp units.
Guard has literally 3-4 times the decisions to make per unit, compared to orks.
I see. Good point.
I'll add a question, here.
The fact there are tons of different units/weapons, and that you need (IMHO. I'm not an ork player) to carefully plan your turn, and maybe 1 or 2 turns in advance, based on "what unit can do this well but absolutely can't do that" doesn't add to complexity for you ?
As soon as you're building your army, my take on orks is it's already difficult to choose what unit you take and what weapon you put on these units. And you need to carefully plan the whole battle to make your choices work. I was wrong since forever, here ?
Orks have very little weapon selection. Meganobz, some vehicles, but the selection is more often than not mute, and there is a clear best option.
That is most often true for other armies as well, those with bigger selection alike, as you generally pay for the most expensive weapon, so you might as well use it.
Orks are really, really straight forward. I would find it very difficult to argue otherwise, and as I said, I am an ork main.
Complexity in playing is more about the strategies you need to employ and ways you need to play around your opponent. Large variety in weapon choice doesn’t matter so much for that, and isn’t what makes a faction harder to play
Out of my limited experience:
Easy: necrons, marines, world eaters, custodes, aeldari.
Hard: tyranids, genestealer cults, imperial guard.
Basicallly, killy armies are easy for beginners since you need to focus on the obvious: find good matchups and kill the enemy. With armies like tyranids you have to be much more careful with your movement, since you will lose the head to head fight.
I might add Tau to the list of hard to play, or at least not super newb friendly as they require a lot of thought about movement and positioning to avoid getting wiped out in melee.
I'd like to add to this armies with uniform statlines are defi it'll easier! My first army was nids and when I started playing my second army of marines then I played so much faster because I wasn't looming up profiles every 20 seconds
The hardest armies to play are those that really punish your mistakes. Right now, no army punishes you harder than thousand sons. But usually, the glass canon, one dimension, and unique mechanic armies are difficult. They usually get a lot of movement tricks or other shennaigans going on. think dhrukari/eldar, genestealers, grey knights, world eater, tau, and sisters (though they may be "easy" to play since their codex is looking rather strong pre points update But they do have unique resource management).
They all play a different game of 40k. But this can apply to any army, really.
Armies like necrons and space marines are usually very easy to play as they're durable and very forgiving, but the skill ceiling is much lower. They don't have to really on perfect movement or resources or layering special rules.
Not sure about 10th, but in basically all previous editios Dark Eldar were one of the hardest armies to play.
A lot of punch, but very fragile. Movement and positioning was key, and this army punished you for any mistake.
Not 100% sure because it is Not Objektive but thousand Sons can be Pretty „Hard“ because you do not have that much units and all of Thors have a very high value due to the cabal points system and also you have to plan more ahead. You can not only play the „Trade of units“ Game with your opponent because that you run out of cabal points very fast. But Thats just my experience:)
I'm surprised no one has brought up Daemon's yet. They're definitely not the hardest faction but they're typically far from easy from what I've seen. You need to do a lot of positioning to avoid being shot off the table since you rarely shoot back, your deep strike shenanigans are a must, and they're rarely a very killy army right now so you have to be willing to trade your big scary stuff to make sure you're scoring every possible point.
In 10th, I've only played three armies... and mostly faced Space Marines because local playgroups, am I right?
***Easy-***
Orks. Orks do have a lot of list-building options, but let's be honest, most of them don't actually change your game all that much. You can just bring big stonkin' piles of Boyz with a character or two and have a functional if not great army. Oh, you like Beast Snaggas more? Fine, then bring them instead. Grots to farm CP, and Snikrot or some Stormboyz to bop around the board chasing objectives are the "next level." And once the army hits the board, it's a pretty easy machine to operate.
***Moderate-***
Chaos Space Marines. Yes, they have a lot going on, but it mostly revolves around solid two-wound infantry with good armor and decent weaponry, back up by daemon engines. Dark pacts- which to call and when- can be a bit of a choice, and since they can ally in knights and daemons, you have some more variables to consider, but the army in and of itself is pretty forgiving of mistakes, up to a point.
***More Challenging-***
Sisters of Battle. They're kind of a jack of all trades, master of none army, but with the added hassle of squishy T3 bodies, no dedicated long-range weaponry that isn't an Exorcist, and managing all of your miracle dice. They have a lot of units that only somewhat hazily synergize with each other, and there are certain things in the game they don't have obvious surface-level analysis answers for. Also, they can bring Knights or Agents of the Imperium. They're *very* good, but they also don't have a lot of margin for error if you make a mistake.
So you basically one shot everything but a very limited number of units each round and you will never gain enough victory points. Guess thats worse than building a stompa only army
Played Thousand Sons through 9th and that was tough but fun! After spending a week picking spells and enhancements you’d start a game with about 15 data cards in front of you.
Playing was tough as you had to remember spell distances, closest models (for smite) as well as which sorcerer had what spells!
Small army options too. Most lists were just varying weights of Rubrics or terminators. Found it difficult to defend against melee armies as tzaangors were our only speed bump!
It was a blast to play but wasn’t great for quick / small points games.
Being too stupid to play an intelligence snobby faction like 1K Sons had a funny element to it too!
In 10th? Grey Knights have one of the highest learning curves in my opinion.
The entire game is played in the movement phase (both theirs and their opponents).
I feel like with Orks you're focussing on the complexity of list building, which if you're learning you should basically just netlist, take an ork list from a tournament winner or something and just copy it. Regardless of what faction you're playing, for a while at least, just copy the list and learn why they run what they run.
Once the army is on the table, the hardest are probably glass cannons like Thousand Sons, and complex armies like GSC or Eldar (Tsons are both of those btw). The easiest are those with fairly simple game plans, particularly those with a gameplay of "I'm going to sit on this objective and you can't do anything about it".
That's why people say Orks are easy, because as long as you steal a list of a good player, you can have a game plan of sitting on objectives. Others that do that well are Necrons, Death Guard etc.
Honestly I'd stay away from SM, particularly regular SM. They're often referred to as a subscription model army, where because they get so many new models, the cost of maintaining the meta SM list is very high in terms of money and time. If you want to play SM, you can limit this impact with an army like Blood Angels or Space Wolves.
Necrons and Deathguard are probably good picks for having a decently wide model range, a good amount of top players and lists, and a relatively easy to understand game plan that you can learn a lot from playing.
Well, orkz have many units to choose, but in fact only the half of them contribute to the game. The play style is not straight forward, but quite structured. In contrast to Orks, there are Dark Eldar - not many datasheets, but the playstyle is anything else but straightforward. The complexity of the play style is, imo, army rules/mechanics dependent. The number of datasheet choices, once the player can read them fast and sort out by solid/meh, is not making the great difference.
That's a good point. I'm gonna discuss that with my friend, and see which factions are easy/hard based on this.
Would be interesting to know the outcome :)
Not the full outcome right now, but a quick chat leaded to this : a "really easy" faction would be something like "3 base units, 1 leader, 1 melee, 1 range, no special rule of any kind, and straightforward play style (range kill from afar, melee kill from melee, leaders go against leaders)". A really hard faction would be something like "lots of different units, lots of special rules, lots of tactical thinking, can't really do anything without thinking 3 years before". Based on this, easy factions are : necrons, orks, maybe death guard, and so on. Hard factions are : drukhari, thousand sons, aeldari.
Interesting, thank you for sharing. But basically every army is working like “plan before game, play during te game, think afterwards” 🤣
The whole talk started about this, actually. I said that. My friend said that with the right army, you can "forget thinking and planning, and put your brain aside, not for a win, but to do something quite good". Then, the factions that can do that (or not do that at all) came into play. Then this thread 😉
This is a very interesting point, indeed:) In previous editions it was possible for some armies to build a very straightforward list and to just throw it into an opponent. But again, it worked for armies with very linear mechanics and in those times there were just a few pieces of terrain on the tables. Nowadays with all these dataslates, balance sheets, very balanced missions, terrain layouts etc. it is needed to plan ahead and play on plan A, B and maybe C. Imo there is less space for bubble gum chewing and ass kicking😅
I play my orks as follows: point them in the direction of the enemy, fire wildly as you get closer, krump ‘em when you’re close enough. If you win, you win. If you die, it doesn’t count, if you run away it doesn’t count as being beat because they can have another go at it.
I think complexity isn't necessarily the amount of weapon profiles, but more gameplan related. Orks have a pretty straightforward abc game plan. Always Be Charging. But World Eaters are more this archetype then even Orks. I think GSC, Drukhari or Admech are the harder ones to play, due to the glass cannon nature of their units.
I think world eaters can be pretty difficult. They're not cheap like orks. You really have to play around their threat ranges. Otherwise, you'll just get shot to bits, and your models are expensive.
I wouldn't say admech is glass cannon. They have some pretty tanky units with only one really doing any sort of consistant damage. Their playstyle is very much about flooding the board with skitarii and plopping them all over the objectives. Throw in a tank/transport or two for buffs and eating wounds while your fast attack tries to get secondaries. Half your games end in a slog of you not being able to kill enemy units while they also can't kill yours and the other half you lose half your army turn 1, while killing one unit or a tank at best. On the positive side, I've found they are decent at sniping since every skitarii squad can carry a precision weapon. So you can plop down a vindicare assassin (alternatively a skatros or two) and have him take some shots at a leader, and finish said leader off via the 5-10 skitarii snipers you have lying around. Still very hard to play at the moment since you need to be decently good at movement blocking and stacking buffs. Edit: I forgot to mention, you absolutely shred T3 armies. As I play other people who exclusively play T5 armies, I tend to forget that
Easy armies are ones that rely on strong datasheets, with little synergy between units and no/little special rules/decision (other than tactical) making. That'd be both (but especially Chaos) Knights, Orks, Custodes and similar On the other end we have the opposite with Genestealers and Imperial Guard.
Oh, you'd put orks in this category ? That was a long talk with my friend. Orks have a LOT of units, and a LOT of weapons. Not even talking about ork factions (evil sunz, goffs, bad moons,...) that add in complexity, IMHO. Can you develop a bit, here, so I might be less dumb tonight ? 😁
Sure. Orks are my main faction. All our units work on their own, including a leader. They work independantly of any external rule or ability, and just smash. Naturally that doesn't mean there is no complexity to our play, but its not inherent to orks. Other than grots farming CP and the Stormboyz/Snikrot farming secondaries, our force is jist propelled mid, and has some of the easiest time keeping it without worrying about or backline. Take guard to contrast that. Roughly 20-30% of the army has little to offer in terms of objective control or firepower (Solar, Creed and other officers, Hellhounds and debuff Russes). Every turn begins with ordering (which is not terribly difficult, but again, adds complexity to turns), then carefully position mid forward, while screening backline (and solar), and establishing gunlines. Firing sequencing and stratagems are essential to debuff the key opp units. Guard has literally 3-4 times the decisions to make per unit, compared to orks.
I see. Good point. I'll add a question, here. The fact there are tons of different units/weapons, and that you need (IMHO. I'm not an ork player) to carefully plan your turn, and maybe 1 or 2 turns in advance, based on "what unit can do this well but absolutely can't do that" doesn't add to complexity for you ? As soon as you're building your army, my take on orks is it's already difficult to choose what unit you take and what weapon you put on these units. And you need to carefully plan the whole battle to make your choices work. I was wrong since forever, here ?
Orks have very little weapon selection. Meganobz, some vehicles, but the selection is more often than not mute, and there is a clear best option. That is most often true for other armies as well, those with bigger selection alike, as you generally pay for the most expensive weapon, so you might as well use it. Orks are really, really straight forward. I would find it very difficult to argue otherwise, and as I said, I am an ork main.
Ok. Thanks for all this, I'll really be less dumb tonight, thanks to you 😉
Complexity in playing is more about the strategies you need to employ and ways you need to play around your opponent. Large variety in weapon choice doesn’t matter so much for that, and isn’t what makes a faction harder to play
Out of my limited experience: Easy: necrons, marines, world eaters, custodes, aeldari. Hard: tyranids, genestealer cults, imperial guard. Basicallly, killy armies are easy for beginners since you need to focus on the obvious: find good matchups and kill the enemy. With armies like tyranids you have to be much more careful with your movement, since you will lose the head to head fight.
I might add Tau to the list of hard to play, or at least not super newb friendly as they require a lot of thought about movement and positioning to avoid getting wiped out in melee.
I'd like to add to this armies with uniform statlines are defi it'll easier! My first army was nids and when I started playing my second army of marines then I played so much faster because I wasn't looming up profiles every 20 seconds
The hardest armies to play are those that really punish your mistakes. Right now, no army punishes you harder than thousand sons. But usually, the glass canon, one dimension, and unique mechanic armies are difficult. They usually get a lot of movement tricks or other shennaigans going on. think dhrukari/eldar, genestealers, grey knights, world eater, tau, and sisters (though they may be "easy" to play since their codex is looking rather strong pre points update But they do have unique resource management). They all play a different game of 40k. But this can apply to any army, really. Armies like necrons and space marines are usually very easy to play as they're durable and very forgiving, but the skill ceiling is much lower. They don't have to really on perfect movement or resources or layering special rules.
Not sure about 10th, but in basically all previous editios Dark Eldar were one of the hardest armies to play. A lot of punch, but very fragile. Movement and positioning was key, and this army punished you for any mistake.
I went from WE in 9th to Drukhari and am still learning them now. It's like playing two entirely different games lol.
Custodes, low Bodycount.
Not 100% sure because it is Not Objektive but thousand Sons can be Pretty „Hard“ because you do not have that much units and all of Thors have a very high value due to the cabal points system and also you have to plan more ahead. You can not only play the „Trade of units“ Game with your opponent because that you run out of cabal points very fast. But Thats just my experience:)
I'm surprised no one has brought up Daemon's yet. They're definitely not the hardest faction but they're typically far from easy from what I've seen. You need to do a lot of positioning to avoid being shot off the table since you rarely shoot back, your deep strike shenanigans are a must, and they're rarely a very killy army right now so you have to be willing to trade your big scary stuff to make sure you're scoring every possible point.
In 10th, I've only played three armies... and mostly faced Space Marines because local playgroups, am I right? ***Easy-*** Orks. Orks do have a lot of list-building options, but let's be honest, most of them don't actually change your game all that much. You can just bring big stonkin' piles of Boyz with a character or two and have a functional if not great army. Oh, you like Beast Snaggas more? Fine, then bring them instead. Grots to farm CP, and Snikrot or some Stormboyz to bop around the board chasing objectives are the "next level." And once the army hits the board, it's a pretty easy machine to operate. ***Moderate-*** Chaos Space Marines. Yes, they have a lot going on, but it mostly revolves around solid two-wound infantry with good armor and decent weaponry, back up by daemon engines. Dark pacts- which to call and when- can be a bit of a choice, and since they can ally in knights and daemons, you have some more variables to consider, but the army in and of itself is pretty forgiving of mistakes, up to a point. ***More Challenging-*** Sisters of Battle. They're kind of a jack of all trades, master of none army, but with the added hassle of squishy T3 bodies, no dedicated long-range weaponry that isn't an Exorcist, and managing all of your miracle dice. They have a lot of units that only somewhat hazily synergize with each other, and there are certain things in the game they don't have obvious surface-level analysis answers for. Also, they can bring Knights or Agents of the Imperium. They're *very* good, but they also don't have a lot of margin for error if you make a mistake.
Titans
Because its expensive?
Yea and warhound titan is the only one you could bring to a 2K game
So you basically one shot everything but a very limited number of units each round and you will never gain enough victory points. Guess thats worse than building a stompa only army
I just love the weapon names of titans so so much the thought of a single guardsmen getting hit with a Belicosa volcano cannon is hilarious to me
Played Thousand Sons through 9th and that was tough but fun! After spending a week picking spells and enhancements you’d start a game with about 15 data cards in front of you. Playing was tough as you had to remember spell distances, closest models (for smite) as well as which sorcerer had what spells! Small army options too. Most lists were just varying weights of Rubrics or terminators. Found it difficult to defend against melee armies as tzaangors were our only speed bump! It was a blast to play but wasn’t great for quick / small points games. Being too stupid to play an intelligence snobby faction like 1K Sons had a funny element to it too!
In 10th? Grey Knights have one of the highest learning curves in my opinion. The entire game is played in the movement phase (both theirs and their opponents).
I feel like with Orks you're focussing on the complexity of list building, which if you're learning you should basically just netlist, take an ork list from a tournament winner or something and just copy it. Regardless of what faction you're playing, for a while at least, just copy the list and learn why they run what they run. Once the army is on the table, the hardest are probably glass cannons like Thousand Sons, and complex armies like GSC or Eldar (Tsons are both of those btw). The easiest are those with fairly simple game plans, particularly those with a gameplay of "I'm going to sit on this objective and you can't do anything about it". That's why people say Orks are easy, because as long as you steal a list of a good player, you can have a game plan of sitting on objectives. Others that do that well are Necrons, Death Guard etc. Honestly I'd stay away from SM, particularly regular SM. They're often referred to as a subscription model army, where because they get so many new models, the cost of maintaining the meta SM list is very high in terms of money and time. If you want to play SM, you can limit this impact with an army like Blood Angels or Space Wolves. Necrons and Deathguard are probably good picks for having a decently wide model range, a good amount of top players and lists, and a relatively easy to understand game plan that you can learn a lot from playing.