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As a Daemon player, I think Tau are the hardest to PLAY/WIN with. Daemons are harder overall, but the skill and creativity is more in list buliding than in playing.
With a Daemon army, every unit has a different role. A hearld is a 5 wound AT monster. Bloodletters, whatever the CC they die. Horrors get a metric $hitton of shots. They CAN be good at CC, CAN be good at shortrange, they can have a few long range powerhouses.
Don't underesitimate them.
Tau, you screw up once they die.
Simple enough.

Well, uphill battles:

Rhino based SM force against shooty IG army,

certain Ork, Tau, DE or Nids builds vs. mech Eldar.

I'd say I am the underdog in a daemons vs tyranids match up in general as we're both mostly assaulty armies. I really don't have anything that can instant death the MC's and have a hard time even wounding them in the first place. As I can't really do much on my deep strike turn, a smart nids player will be able to reposition his troops to assault me on his next turn or just assault me if I'm close enough.

Also all those nids models spreads out alot and can make me deep strike mishap easier. Usually a tough fight for me as they have as much assault as me and generally decent shooting as well as poisoned stuff along with possible respawning waves of things like gaunts which may be good if I played a nurgle list I suppose

ObliviousBlueCaboose wrote:I said Grey Knights. I mean it is soooo hard to play as them....

WHAT!? All I've seen from GK is excessive OP because they can just use all of their Wardian
crap to screw people up. ( I play Infantry IG with a couple Chimeras/Banewolves, so I really do hate it when
someone drops down a Stormraven in front of my platoons and says they're done with deployment,
because I can never get in range do o anything)

Kind of missed the sarcasm there, didn't you

He was joking

Or at least i devoutly hope he was

Ascalam wrote:Kind of missed the sarcasm there, didn't you

He was joking

Or at least i devoutly hope he was

Yeah he's joking

He posts stuff like that all the time guys, no need to panic

I have realized that it is a broad question but there have been some very satisfying answers. With all the thoughts that 6ed is coming out soon there might be a more obvious answer.

Dayvuni wrote:I have realized that it is a broad question but there have been some very satisfying answers. With all the thoughts that 6ed is coming out soon there might be a more obvious answer.

The only real question now is will there be any codices released before then? Because we still have 2+ months until the rule book...and GW loves to squeeze for money.

I voted for Daemons. I played them for 2 years before I recently traded them away for a Chaos Marine force. I loved playing the Daemons but after the 2nd tourney lost on the final table against armies that were dropping my monstrous creatures the turn they landed it was too much for me to handle.

Oddly enough I have a Tau army that I love to play and I have no problems winning with them. Tau is all about the way you setup your army and what you put in it. Then execute the plan.

Sure some builds of certain armies will shaft them to the point of stupidity but there are a lot of tournament builds nowadays that can be terribly exploited by Tau. Play Razorspam against me in a kill point mission. Please?

I may be biased (because I play daemons), but I feel that daemons are the hardest army to play as simply because there are so many factors that are completely out of your control. You can get the wrong wave, all or your things can scatter in the complete wrong direction, or your reserves can wait to come in until turn 5. Any of these things (especially when combined) can screw over a daemon player's ability to win regardless of the players skill.

While some of the other armies may be harder to win with, but I think overall Daemons are the hardest army to play simply because of all of the random elements.

I voted daemons. Probably should have voted tau. Oh well.

I voted Daemons as well. I finally won last night with my newly built Daemon army. Not getting my preferred wave showed just how challenging of an army it can be, not just by having an old codex but by sheer design. There's an incredible number of "what if" scenarios which must be considered based on how the rolls turn out.

By their design Eldar also seem to be one of the most difficult, if I'd played them first hand they might get my vote instead.

I think it depends on the type of eldar build. SOme mech'dar are quite easy to play as they are move shoot move shoot move shoot some more. Lots of MSU in there. The old eldar builds like footdar requires alot more finess and you have to position your exact units in the exact right positions to maximize effect.

DE are certainly not easy but I wouldnt mark them as particularly hard. Daemons have their whole wave and DS thing to get over and then some pretty limited options. If you lose a piece of your puzzle or it doesnt come in in the second wave at the right time you can have one hell of a tough game.

It may just be a lack of experience, but I am having real difficulty with my Dark Angels, even against Vanilla marines, and I believe the reason is my severely out of date 4th ed codex. I have less options (Deathwing can only be a squad of 5 max for example, no sternguard, no thunderfire, no LR redeemer, and my squads have to be either 5 OR 10, no adding individual models). In addition, I generally pay more points for the same thing. Ravenwing was stripped of the ``jink` save in favour of fearless, which I personally think was a poor tradeoff, etc.

Anyway, if Dark Angels wee up there I would vote for them, but I had to agree with consensus and put daemons as my choice.

Yeah I saw the comment about the BT's and SOB's not being on here. The BT's aren't that hard to play, they just are prone to being put into situations their commander wouldn't really like them to be in because of their almost ridiculous level of fanaticism. The SOB's though are a different story when it comes to level of skill it takes to play as them since they aren't necessarily good at long ranged combat, nor do they excel at close combat compared to other armies. They're almost like eldar, without the speed and for that reason I'd say they're one of the hardest. That or DE.

I would want to say Chaos Daemons but i think that is more of a skilled enemy dealing with them well than difficult to play on your end.
Dark Eldar are obviously fragile but i think their offense is pretty straightforward and BS 4 helps.
Probably something like Tau or SoB. A shooty army with t3 and a somewhat limited scope of shooting. Tau semi-reliant on marker lights (BS 3) and disruption pods and sisters... don't seem to have many advantages.
Any army can be a challenge though, depends who is sitting across from you.

Dark Eldar due to fragility.

I would definitely say Daemons, as they're one of the few armies that can kill their own units during deployment, and can actively mess with your battle plan before you even place a model.

I'd say nids or deamons.
First of all, they got terrible codex...

Imperial Guard are by far the weakest for 3 reasons:
1- Pretty much every battle report in the White Dwarf has been a loss for the guard (March 2009 doesn't count bc Space Marines saved the days)
2-They may pretty much swarm the opposition, but one small fracture in the line and the guard are dead. Their leadership fails them and their weapons do nothing on the occassion.
3- They are so brittle and fragile. Example: Vs DE they got their arses handed to them in the shooting, got wiped out by the dozens in combat. Their guns only took down a few DE at a time. The tanks are no better, one well placed grenade and their done for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Imperial Guard and used right they can be a worthy adversary, but I've seen almost every tactic employed using them and they have lost...

baxter123 wrote:Imperial Guard are by far the weakest for 3 reasons:
1- Pretty much every battle report in the White Dwarf has been a loss for the guard (March 2009 doesn't count bc Space Marines saved the days)
2-They may pretty much swarm the opposition, but one small fracture in the line and the guard are dead. Their leadership fails them and their weapons do nothing on the occassion.
3- They are so brittle and fragile. Example: Vs DE they got their arses handed to them in the shooting, got wiped out by the dozens in combat. Their guns only took down a few DE at a time. The tanks are no better, one well placed grenade and their done for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Imperial Guard and used right they can be a worthy adversary, but I've seen almost every tactic employed using them and they have lost...

The Imperial guard are either the second or third strongest army in the game at the moment. Just ask people like Joey. Compared to armies like the Tyranids, Tau, Chaos Space Marines, and Daemons, they are absolute murder machines.

Kain wrote:

baxter123 wrote:Imperial Guard are by far the weakest for 3 reasons:
1- Pretty much every battle report in the White Dwarf has been a loss for the guard (March 2009 doesn't count bc Space Marines saved the days)
2-They may pretty much swarm the opposition, but one small fracture in the line and the guard are dead. Their leadership fails them and their weapons do nothing on the occassion.
3- They are so brittle and fragile. Example: Vs DE they got their arses handed to them in the shooting, got wiped out by the dozens in combat. Their guns only took down a few DE at a time. The tanks are no better, one well placed grenade and their done for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Imperial Guard and used right they can be a worthy adversary, but I've seen almost every tactic employed using them and they have lost...

The Imperial guard are either the second or third strongest army in the game at the moment. Just ask people like Joey. Compared to armies like the Tyranids, Tau, Chaos Space Marines, and Daemons, they are absolute murder machines.

I agree with Baxter, everone who i have seen play guard in my local area get wiped very quickly. And anyone playing deamons goes and kills anything near by, although they won't play grey knights.

Tau and DE are very unforgiving; Tau perhaps moreso than DE thanks to being expensive AND not having the quantity of shots to go along with the quality (for example, DE get 12-shot BS4 gunboats for around the same cost as a Battlesuit that gets 6 shots at BS3) but DE are also exceedingly fragile; if we take an example and do DE vs Tau, where only four weapons are below S5 in the entire codex with two of them are Special Issue and rarely taken, and the third being a flamer, then it starts to look very bad for DE.

Daemons are also tricky to play thanks to all the deep striking, only having half your army on against your opponent's entire army, and having to chase everything around the board to reach CC.

Mechdar can also be quite unforgiving, especially if you get unlucky, but they're not as unforgiving as other armies and can be difficult for some to counter.

Tyranids require a lot of skill now, and against GKs, especially those with Purifiers, can be as much of an auto-loss as Daemons against Quake-spam GK. Force Weapons nuking your MCs before they can strike, Cleansing Flame wiping out your stealers, Aegis stopping your Zoanthropes casting or even hooding them. It's easier against other armies, but even then it can be an uphill struggle.

Although I have to say that the hardest army to play is exceedingly subjective; some people have amazing success with Tau or DE and rarely lose a match even against competative gamers, but could be handed a Blood Angels or Space Wolves army that they're unfamiliar with, and lose where someone who knows how to use it would easily win.

There's no real hardest army to play, it's more of a case of how hard it is to master your army. Even an imbecile can learn Physics if he's taught well and has enough practice.

baxter123 wrote:Imperial Guard are by far the weakest for 3 reasons:
1- Pretty much every battle report in the White Dwarf has been a loss for the guard (March 2009 doesn't count bc Space Marines saved the days)
2-They may pretty much swarm the opposition, but one small fracture in the line and the guard are dead. Their leadership fails them and their weapons do nothing on the occassion.
3- They are so brittle and fragile. Example: Vs DE they got their arses handed to them in the shooting, got wiped out by the dozens in combat. Their guns only took down a few DE at a time. The tanks are no better, one well placed grenade and their done for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Imperial Guard and used right they can be a worthy adversary, but I've seen almost every tactic employed using them and they have lost...

This was true before the most recent codex but now they're one of the strongest. I'd say that the Guard players you know probably aren't very good and/or are stuck in a 4th edition mindset. Once I unlearned a few of the "basic truths" about Guard in 4th I did much, much better. Mechanized Guard in its various builds are generally pretty solid but you can do well enough with infantry as well. You should check out this blog to see how IG can do well even with non net-optimized lists.

I think the hardest army to play as at the moment is probably Tau. It's an old book so the costs for things are way out of sync with everyone else.

Avatar 720 wrote:There's no real hardest army to play, it's more of a case of how hard it is to master your army. Even an imbecile can learn Physics if he's taught well and has enough practice.

That's a probably a thing that needs to be cleared up. To me the question as to the "hardest" army to play as means which army has the steepest learning curve to get where you're winning about 50% of your games against regular opponents.

faheykeyes wrote:
Tau, you screw up once they die.

I may be wrong here, but most armies screw up once they die...

Grey Knights are the hardest army to play as. My entire gaming community refuses to play against them. :(

Imperial Monkey wrote:

faheykeyes wrote:
Tau, you screw up once they die.

I may be wrong here, but most armies screw up once they die...

You are infact, wrong.

Most armies have leeway.

I.E. - You forget to move a unit, it'll probably be OK, or if you misjudge a distance etc, it's no huge thing, you've likely got something else to take up the slack.

With Tau, it's very much everything is reasonably precious, most things are relatively dedicated to their given role, most things are either Str5, 6, 7 or 10, and you ultimately don't have the weight of fire OR the accuracy other armies do, meaning you have to very carefully manoeuvre your force, judge your distances, carefully etc.

Units are ALL small and specialised, so you feel every loss quite hard. On top of that, your basic troop is more effective at taking out light vehicles than infantry.

Or look at it like this: Fire Warriors are Guardsman that cost twice as much, have a str5 ap5 gun, but can only be taken in squads of 6-12, with not special or heavy weapons.
Battlesuits are 2 wound marines, that cost 25pts that can be taken in squads of 1-3, with slightly better guns and the cc ability of a necron warrior.

Ovion wrote:

Imperial Monkey wrote:

faheykeyes wrote:
Tau, you screw up once they die.

I may be wrong here, but most armies screw up once they die...

You are infact, wrong.

Most armies have leeway.

I.E. - You forget to move a unit, it'll probably be OK, or if you misjudge a distance etc, it's no huge thing, you've likely got something else to take up the slack.

With Tau, it's very much everything is reasonably precious, most things are relatively dedicated to their given role, most things are either Str5, 6, 7 or 10, and you ultimately don't have the weight of fire OR the accuracy other armies do, meaning you have to very carefully manoeuvre your force, judge your distances, carefully etc.

Units are ALL small and specialised, so you feel every loss quite hard. On top of that, your basic troop is more effective at taking out light vehicles than infantry.

Or look at it like this: Fire Warriors are Guardsman that cost twice as much, have a str5 ap5 gun, but can only be taken in squads of 6-12, with not special or heavy weapons.
Battlesuits are 2 wound marines, that cost 25pts that can be taken in squads of 1-3, with slightly better guns and the cc ability of a necron warrior.

This was meant as more of a jibe at his phraseology. Once any army's soldiers/tanks/etc. die you screw up, as they are no longer functioning and so are useless. I understand your point, I was just being intentionally face-value-ish so that I could get my sarcasm in. If I don't let it out now and again it builds up inside until I become a big grren thing that hurts people with sarcastic lashes! Or I may be getting confused witha film I once saw...