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For those who have an opinion, express it here.

I feel that Eldar are amongst the most complicated armies available for tournament play, depending on your army list/strategy.

DE, hard to win with anyway.

Due to Eldar's specialization it's hard to get units to work right. Redundancy can be put in other armies through duplicate units (duplicate tac/assault squads, etc.). But for Eldar this is less simple to do (mainly because our only effective way of getting melta weapons is through our elite slot). Though possible, it's difficult due to needing troops to get objectives (last turn objective grabbing is unreliable) as well as making the list horribly boring to play with and against.

Dark Eldar, though yes difficult to win with, are rather straight forward. Fill out the first thousand points with blaster/lance raider squads and ravagers with lances, while the remaining points are put into incubi, your commander, and wyches. Turn 1, kill as many tanks as you can (which is usually a lot of tanks).

Gray Knights are difficult as well since they lack anti tank. But with the ability to take allies (so long as people use the old codex, which seems correct until GW says otherwise) helps mitigate this. Again, they are hard to win with, but not necessarily difficult to use.

SoB present problems at certain point levels:

I've been giving myself a real headache for the forthcoming Dakka tournament in Nottingham where i know in advance that roughly half the armies will be horde and half will be mech. At 1000pts, I'm really struggling to fit in enough melta and flame to deal with both :(

At 1500-1750pts this isn't a problem, plenty of room for Immolator/Exorcist spam.

Anything above that and I'll actually struggle to spend enough points to make the limit

Another downside is that everyone knows how SoB play: Rush to 6"-8" range, cast DG, rinse and repeat. Having only one viable tactic makes winning with SoB at tournaments very tricky.

Hmmm...interesting point about the Sisters. I voted Eldar, mainly because they're like knives, forks, and spoons - gotta have the right tool to do the right job - rather than a Space Marine "spork" where one unit can do many different things adequately.

i think it would be necrons. the fact that they have very little amount of units seems like it would be hard to make exactly what you want with them.

Blitza da warboy wrote:i think it would be necrons. the fact that they have very little amount of units seems like it would be hard to make exactly what you want with them.

Really? I think their lack of versatility is made up by brute force. Necron lord with resurrection orb x2 + warriors + monoliths = win

Most armies have a certain persona to them that lend themselves to their strengths making them much easier to understand what works and does not work.

Space Marines on the other hand have so many different ways to be played making them the hardest to use effectively. Their are so many way to play this army it is hard it is hard to pick out the best way to play for yourself.

Think of all the Space Marines players their are and just how bad most of them are. Space Marines might be the gateway drug, but they are hard to master.

Most other armies have a certain persona to them that lend themselves to their strengths making them much easier to understand what works and does not work.

Its really hard to play with Blood Angels or Space Wolves because everyone whines about cheese. Imperial Guard are also difficult because people whine about all the templates...

MMmmmmmmm....wine

Space Marines. Cause I just can't bring myself to do it. There's just something wrong about playing Imperial of any sort. Eww.

As for most difficult, that depends somewhat. Any army is going to be tricky to play with as your just starting off, learning how things work, and particularly how they work togethor. And things will change a bit whenever a new codex comes out, and armies that were easy now have a bunch of new tricks up their sleeves.

DE, easy to win with (if you have alot of skimmers that is!)... I kid! I kid! They're certainly one of the more competitive codices out there, an obscure army, that plays very different than most... it face-slams MEQ's though.

Eldar can spam redundancy with the best of them. I think it is a common mistake that eldar require a skillful amount of synergy, you just take three~four different specializations and spam them like there is no tomorrow. (Just like 74.732034454839234543% of the other hyper-competitive armies out there...)

Sure, they do have some narrowly specialized unit roles, though that is what makes them easier to play then other broader units. You can easily look at it, and tell what you need it to do, and what it can do.

as far as brainpower:win ratio, I'm also going with necron. Their army is very limited in it's ability to make use of combined arms, and their guns, in general, suck. Plus, they're no more durable than marines against competent players, except they phase out.

Generally speaking, the older the codex, the more you've got to think about what you're doing in order to twist older codecies into newer rules editions. I don't think that any of the 5th ed codecies are necessarily more powerful so much as they are more rules-appropriate, and more straightforward, thus are easier to play.

I would say eldar. Even though it is true that you can just know what a unit can do doesnt make it easy to use. Eldar units are extremely fragile which means one wrong move and that unit is destroyed. And Eldar have a hard time building excess redundancy in smaller points so that it is possible to eliminate all of the units that can hurt you in one turn. Yes a player could choose 3 five man FD units in falcons but that costs a minimum of 600 pts which can be eliminated in a turn or two of shooting. And what happens if it faces a horde army. So the eldar army is, IMHO, the least forgiving army as you cant take a balanced list and still be able to recover from the loss of a single unit.

I voted demons. I have played demons for about six months now and have been pretty successful with them in friendly games, but they have their problems.

The previous two armies I played were gunlines, marines and tau. Going into a game with either of these armiesI knew what my gameplan was for the first couple of turns. Demons present a problem here, in that they always start in reserve and you only have a 66% chance to get on the half you want on the first turn. It's hard to balance dividing your army when you can't be sure which half is coming on first. Also there are always potential problems with scattering and mishaps. A demons general has to be able to adapt more so than most other army's generals do IMO.

I'm by no means saying that the demons codex is weak. On the contrary, I think it's a fairly strong army, but it's probably best suited to people who have played the game for awhile. It definatly had a frustrating learning curve for me, going from playing largely static armies to one that is very dynamic.

I think there is a critical difference between the difficult to play and the most difficult to win. What I mean by this is that if is relatively easy to make a space marines list whose concept of working with one another is fairly easy. Whether it is a uber killy kind of list or one that just synergies well is not very hard. Now on the opposite scale you have eldar, exceptionally specialized thus meaning that if the exact right unit doesn't do its job at the exact right time then the whole army falls apart. every unit in an eldar army is a lynchpin and that makes the army very very hard to even make work, let alone win.

Now to win that becomes very different. This requires tactical thinking. Eldar are highly specialized, making certain things apparent. It is very obvious how tank hunting works, you need fire dragons. Now take something like IG where tank hunting can be accomplished in multiple ways, and which way you choose makes other things not so apparent. If you use chimera melta vets then holding objectives becomes very difficult to do reliably. Thus I am not sure which to vote for. There are many considerations.

I like how guard has more votes than witchhunters.

MAKES SENSE TO ME.

IG were the #1 placing army in Ardboyz semifinals.

I'd go with necrons based on tournament statistics, allthough the randomness of Chaos Demons takes a lot out of the hands of the general giving you an uphill battle as you can't even deploy how you want to.

Necrons or SoB. Both are hard to win with due to lack versitaile units or the lack of enough units of a certain type in 1000 point games

I chose Tyranids with the disclaimer that there are some armies on the list I have NO experience or contact with. Reading through a friend's codex trying to help her with her army list made me realize I have no concept on how they should be run.

With their limited resources available at points levels below 2000, Necrons force the general to deploy exceedingly carefully. Against some armies, sure, it's a mere case of 'keep Deceiver hidden behind Monoliths, then sit them all on objectives and win by 1'. (Necrons snort at Long Fang Missile Teams.)

In other cases (especially if you dare to take Immortals, Flayed Ones, or, God help you, Pariahs), the general must have a good eye for ranges and a strong idea of how the other army's going to try to obliterate his Warriors. Deployment is key for Necrons. They're not getting across the board very fast unless they're Wraiths or Scarabs, and a poor guess will strand your troops from where they need to be. Destroyers must be hidden, lest they die from Deep-Striking anything or just a few measly heavy bolters, and your Lord has to be in the prime position to receive a charge/counterattack. Unlike Necron Warriors, I find that Destroyers and the Necron Lord point-blank refuse to pass We'll Be Back tests, and so they must be put in the perfect positions to escape enemy fire. Difficult to do without lots of LOS-blocking terrain.

Admittedly the Monolith is point-and-click, though it pays to figure out how you're going to block assaulters with it during deployment. Ditto with the C'Tan (which solves the mystery of why so many Necron players run 2 Monoliths and the Deceiver...)

Above all: Necron generals need to know how to play keep away with their Warriors. Phase Out makes it so that your relentless, millennia-old robot army will call it quits when a couple Warrior squads get swept, regardless of how much firepower you can still bring to bear against your enemy, or how close you are to finishing him off.

EDIT: I'm not done. List-making is frustrating for Necrons at lower points levels, largely because they can't have everything. Just like any other army, no? Nope, Necrons are special. At 1500 points, it's not a case of 'you only have one unit that can counterassault' or 'you only have one Bright Lance shot per turn'. Necrons will have a gaping hole in their army, whether it's counterassault, long-range firepower, or AP. Depending on what you focus on, you won't have a single shot that can travel 36" on some days, because taking one unit of Destroyers is ineffective and taking two units of Destroyers eats up 400-500 points. Often you will not have a single shot that's better than AP 4. Necron players trying to accomodate the above two issues will not have the points to take counterassault besides the single Necron Lord. You have starkly limited resources, and you have to use them carefully and in unison. You have to sacrifice the right units in the right order, otherwise you instalose during turn 4 or 5.

Having said all that, the Inquisition faces its own difficulties. And both sides of the Eldar mirror suffer from setbacks (although in the right hands, those setbacks are nothing, NOTHING compared to the amount of pain the Elves in Space can inflict). I'm glad that humanity collectively passed its Wisdom check and not 1 of 110 votes went to Blood Angels

As the poll is worded, I can't actually choose daemons. Daemons require some planning, it's true, but as far as I can tell the main thing you need with them is the ability to change your plans on the fly when things don't work the way you intended them to. (Even more so than with other armies, that it.)
Necrons it is, I suppose.

It was a hard toss up between Necrons, Tau, SoB, and Chaos Deamons.

Chaos Deamons are very random and very susceptible to bad luck, but they are solid army that is also very susceptible to good luck. A skilled Deamon player with average luck and a nasty list is a nasty opponent, a skilled deamon player on a hot streak with good luck will seem unstoppable.

Necrons have a lot of 5th edition weaknesses and a lot of difficulty against some armies, but the army it's self isn't' that hard to master. The troops are very durable, and necron tactics are easy to master. The real problem is anti necron tactics are also easy to master, and anti MEQ weapons/lists do very well against necrons. Necrons do very poorly at tournaments and high end competitive play, but necrons do very well in the hands of a new player playing against another new player.

SoB can be very difficult to play and depend a lot of luck based faith rolls, they fall on their face when luck fails, but they can also be very nasty when their luck doesn't fail them. SoB has some very nasty anti MEQ units, and they are such a rarely played army many opponents do not know how to fight them. Anti SoB tactics are not that hard to figure out if you've read their codex, but opponents who don't know the codex at all are likely to get rolled the 1st time they try to fight SoB. The real problem with SoB is they are difficult to play and they are a very expensive army to buy.

I gave my vote to Tau because they are easy for a knowledgeable opponent to counter, and there is little to nothing a Tau player can do to stop it. Tau can be a very nasty army, but once an opponent knows how Tau work and figures out how to counter Tau it's all over. Pathfinders are a tragic unit that can never be relied upon. Most Tau tactics are very easily countered by MEQ armies, and Tau weaknesses are easily exploited by skilled MEQ players. In most tournament play just about every opponent will have a very effective anti Tau battleplan that they have sucessfully executed with their army in the past.

The most difficult army to PLAY (not the mosty difficult army to win with) must be either Sisters of Battle or Eldar.

Whoever voted for Orks - You should be shot in the face with a hammer.

Serriously? Orks are hard to play?

anyway - Eldar are so highly specialised that it takes a great deal of brain power to make them work. Sisters of Battle require a great deal of forethought (since almost all Acts of Faith must be performed before the other player rells you what he's doing) and an understanding of probability.

Someone voted sisters of battle difficult to play...? really? you have a ton of rending flamers and one of the best tanks in the game. figure it out.

It doesn't take a lot of brainpower to play Eldar, and Eldar player just have to play slightly better than their opponent and they won't lose. It's does not take a rocket scientist to figure out how to use dire avengers or fire dragons. The problem with Eldar is it's really easy for your opponent to know how dire avengers or fire dragons are going to be used, and base his battle plans around that. If an Eldar's opponent is just a slightly better player the Eldar won't win.

Ok. If you think Eldar are fragile, unless you use foot elements... You're doing it 110% wrong.

How they're going to be used? That is the easiest part to learn!

I voted Daemonhunters/Grey Knights. The lack of reliable ranged anti-tank capability makes them difficult to use on the modern 40K battlefield. It is difficult to find the right mix of troops to Land Raiders to defeat any given opponent, and have a chance against ALL opponents.

There are really two different questions being asked here. "What is the most difficult army to play?" is not the same as, "What is the worst army?".

The most difficult army to play well in terms of generalship? Probably Tau or Eldar, both are pretty fragile and both require a lot of tactical consideration as faster, more assaulty armies will be on them like white on rice turn 2. Of course, Daemons are also tough to play well but that has more to do with the randomness of everything than with generalship.

NuggzTheNinja wrote:The most difficult army to play well in terms of generalship? Probably Tau or Eldar, both are pretty fragile and both require a lot of tactical consideration as faster, more assaulty armies will be on them like white on rice turn 2.

As a wise man once said...

Ok. If you think Eldar are fragile, unless you use foot elements... You're doing it 110% wrong.

Eldar have the most durable skimmers in the game, and they're fast skimmers! Stuff that up your tailpipe people who call eldar "fragile"...

Dark Eldar is who you're thinking of, they go down at a stiff wind.

I voted DE. I've played pretty much every army out there. Even assuming that your troops will be mostly raiders, you really must be aware at all times which units are disposable and maintain your focus on the victory conditions. It's simplistic to think that everyone uses Wyches for Elites. I don't and I still field competitive lists. You can field reaver jetbike lists, covens with Haemonculi bombs, and even Talos over Ravergers. You can opt for pinning lists or just or pure Raider spam. Thee is nothing simplistic about your deployment or play style although aggressive play is pretty important with DE. They are not a sit and shoot army.