Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

The numbers don't seem high enough to represent that much data. There are a lot of ITC events going on every weekend.

This is only representing 1252 lists.
of which. only 12 were orks.
only 24 were mono IG
and only 9 played CWE/Harli/DE
Also - IK/AM combo is only winning 33%. Uhhh??? That list winning less than 50% is obviously erroneous.

it just doesn't seem complete

Its like the same 4 people that consistently say this doesn't represent what I want it to, so fake news.

ITC is a set of tourney rules.

If you don't like them, build your own, popularize them, and then people will talk about them, and not ITC.

I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

Reemule wrote:
Its like the same 4 people that consistently say this doesn't represent what I want it to, so fake news.

ITC is a set of tourney rules.

If you don't like them, build your own, popularize them, and then people will talk about them, and not ITC.

I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

But that is not how it works. If you build a monopoly or anything, then baring a cataclysm or war, the position is unshiftable. It is like telling someone that if they don't like google or twitter/facebook, they just can invent their own thing and make it work.

 Marmatag wrote:
I've seen the data behind best coast pairings and can tell you that the analysis done here is

(a) with a flawed data set and
(b) not the real picture

Fun fact: if you plug nonsense data into excel you get nonsense data out. Gg

Can you provide some actionable evidence of this? Grimgold said in a later post he has provided everything including his sources and methods for you to digest.

Otherwise, a claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

ERJAK wrote:

 Grimgold wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Wow thanks. I'm not really surprised by the faction line up. Except nids; how dominant were they for that 4 month span? Wow.

I think we can thank spam for that period, and the rule of three for the ending of their reign of terror. I expect they will rise again when genestealer cults comes out.

Nerfing the Flyrant by like 40+ points was what stopped Nids from being dominant. The rule of three is what took them from 'mediocre without flyrants' to 'What's a Tyranid?', Like it did with MOST of the armies that don't have soup options. The rule of 3 sucks and is a big part of why the top 30 armies, with 700 occurences between them, are all just slight variations on the same 4 lists.

Rule Of Three also doesn't fix broken units like some people think it does for whatever reason.

Reemule wrote:
Its like the same 4 people that consistently say this doesn't represent what I want it to, so fake news.

ITC is a set of tourney rules.

If you don't like them, build your own, popularize them, and then people will talk about them, and not ITC.

I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there is missing data here. I assure you in ITC play during that time from there were more than 12 ork armies played in the tournaments. I think this data set is just focusing on major tournaments or something. I could be wrong it just doesn't seem to add up.

 Xenomancers wrote:

Reemule wrote:
Its like the same 4 people that consistently say this doesn't represent what I want it to, so fake news.

ITC is a set of tourney rules.

If you don't like them, build your own, popularize them, and then people will talk about them, and not ITC.

I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there is missing data here. I assure you in ITC play during that time from there were more than 12 ork armies played in the tournaments. I think this data set is just focusing on major tournaments or something. I could be wrong it just doesn't seem to add up.

does it matter that much though? Unless someone really doctored the data, and droped stuff that didn't fit the end results, it seems like a large enough sample to draw conclusions on the ITC meta game.

 Xenomancers wrote:

Reemule wrote:
Its like the same 4 people that consistently say this doesn't represent what I want it to, so fake news.

ITC is a set of tourney rules.

If you don't like them, build your own, popularize them, and then people will talk about them, and not ITC.

I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there is missing data here. I assure you in ITC play during that time from there were more than 12 ork armies played in the tournaments. I think this data set is just focusing on major tournaments or something. I could be wrong it just doesn't seem to add up.

There were 30 ork armies, split between Mono Orks (6), Orks x Orks (16), and Orks x Orks x Orks (8). The sample size is also 1822, putting orks armies at just below 2% of armies in the sample. Prior to their codex orks sucked, so seeing them as rare but present is not an unexpected outcome. Since everyone is curious what events were included, I've added a tab to the spreadsheet to cover that, but for the spreadsheet adverse here si the list in image form


I'll continue adding tidbits to this post as I work my way back through the questions.

The Salt Mine wrote:
Are *Pure Army Lists* for sure full mono faction armies. Seems a little wonky and I have a hard time accepting 1ksons being at the top there. Or where those two wins pre warptime nerf. I ask mainly just because the few ITC events I have been too just classified armys based on their highest points detatchment.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh there were only 5 occurring 1ksons definately some scewed results there.

1k sons were the main faction 62 times, and were in 172 lists. This is a long table, because it's broken out by faction combinations. As for how they are performing, they are absolutely killing it, as long as we count magnus.

 Sasori wrote:

Can you provide some actionable evidence of this? Grimgold said in a later post he has provided everything including his sources and methods for you to digest.

Otherwise, a claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

The most interesting outcome from marmatags post is if he is being truthful, because for him to know it's wrong, that means this analysis has been done before, he had to have had access to it, and it was kept from us. Marmatag isn't part of FLG in any way that I can tell, so how did he get the data? Is FLG sharing the data selectively with certain clubs, did someone crawl the data like my source did, or was it taken directly without permission. Marmatags sudden circumspection in response is also unlike him, I've never seen him stop arguing even when he is demonstrably wrong, hell we had two pages of back and forth where he denied he said something that was literally earlier in the same thread. So is marmatag being weird (for him anyway), or did he spill the beans and is now at risk of losing his access to the data?

 Amishprn86 wrote:


I agree with this also, i would love data on non-ITC missions, as the meta can be completely different.

I wish GW would come out with a tournament packet for themselves.

Wish granted, added a sheet named Tournament results Non-ITC which excludes all of the tournaments using ITC rules. Your intuition seems correct, Ynnari do relatively worse without ITC rules.

1k sons were the main faction 62 times, and were in 172 lists. This is a long table, because it's broken out by faction combinations. As for how they are performing, they are absolutely killing it, as long as we count magnus.

Sorry I was looking at the pure factions part on my phone. I am super happy my faction is probably going to get nerfed though since Ahriman, 2 daemon princes, and magnus makes it into every chaos soup list.

The Salt Mine wrote:

1k sons were the main faction 62 times, and were in 172 lists. This is a long table, because it's broken out by faction combinations. As for how they are performing, they are absolutely killing it, as long as we count magnus.

Sorry I was looking at the pure factions part on my phone. I am super happy my faction is probably going to get nerfed though since Ahriman, 2 daemon princes, and magnus makes it into every chaos soup list.

User name checks out.

I hope Rubricae get buffed tho, especially to make up for that (And being kick ass models)

Sir Heckington wrote:

The Salt Mine wrote:

1k sons were the main faction 62 times, and were in 172 lists. This is a long table, because it's broken out by faction combinations. As for how they are performing, they are absolutely killing it, as long as we count magnus.

Sorry I was looking at the pure factions part on my phone. I am super happy my faction is probably going to get nerfed though since Ahriman, 2 daemon princes, and magnus makes it into every chaos soup list.

User name checks out.

I hope Rubricae get buffed tho, especially to make up for that (And being kick ass models)

Made this user name specifically for DakkaDakka. Salt seems to be the big commodity around here.

The Salt Mine wrote:


Made this user name specifically for DakkaDakka. Salt seems to be the big commodity around here.

Like orks and teef.

Made this user name specifically for DakkaDakka. Salt seems to be the big commodity around here.

You certainly aren't wrong. Must be rich at this rate.

 Xenomancers wrote:
The numbers don't seem high enough to represent that much data. There are a lot of ITC events going on every weekend.

This is only representing 1252 lists.
of which. only 12 were orks.
only 24 were mono IG
and only 9 played CWE/Harli/DE
Also - IK/AM combo is only winning 33%. Uhhh??? That list winning less than 50% is obviously erroneous.

it just doesn't seem complete

"The stats don't support my preconceived notions on the current meta, thus obviously this data is flawed."

Never, ever change, Xenomancers.

Reemule wrote:
I also wish GW would put out organized play rules. And I wish they would be exceptionally restrictive. No Forgeworld. No Allies, Nerfed CP. Limited Stratagems, perhaps lower points.
It would make it easier to balance.

They do put out organized play rules. It's called the Matched Play missions in the 40k rulebook and Chapter Approved. Just people seem to prefer the Steamroller-lite approach ITC has (everything symmetrical, placement predetermined and secondaries you can tailor) despite the fact that it's repeatedly shown that the ITC Meta is vastly different than the non-ITC meta and ITC completely changes how some armies are.

I think you might have missed the point.

GW supports matched play. As per the rulebook it is to have more balanced play.

Many casual players play Matched Play. THis is due to a huge number of reasons, that you can look into.

Competitive players also used Matched Play as its the highest detailed version GW has. And finding it a little short of true balance several other options have been developed like ITC.


The idea is that if GW made a Organized play, you could finally draw that true line between Casuals that happen to use Match Play, and Competitive Gamers, and make both more happy.

Reemule wrote:
I think you might have missed the point.

GW supports matched play. As per the rulebook it is to have more balanced play.

Many casual players play Matched Play. THis is due to a huge number of reasons, that you can look into.

Competitive players also used Matched Play as its the highest detailed version GW has. And finding it a little short of true balance several other options have been developed like ITC.


The idea is that if GW made a Organized play, you could finally draw that true line between Casuals that happen to use Match Play, and Competitive Gamers, and make both more happy.

I think everyone benefits from a more balanced ruleset, casual and competitors alike. Which is the reason I make post like these, because if we are to have a good conversation about balance it has to start with knowledge of how the current rules are performing. Too much time is wasted debating anecdote, and everyone on this board (including myself) has a horse or two in the race, and thus often have a difficult time being objective. This is why I try to make as few assumptions as possible and be crystal clear with my methodology.

To continue the conversation, In my next post based on this data set, I'm working out how many victory points on average would a faction combination require to bring them to a 50% win rate, and then I'll rank the factions from lowest value to highest.

Reemule wrote:
I think you might have missed the point.

GW supports matched play. As per the rulebook it is to have more balanced play.

Many casual players play Matched Play. THis is due to a huge number of reasons, that you can look into.

Competitive players also used Matched Play as its the highest detailed version GW has. And finding it a little short of true balance several other options have been developed like ITC.


The idea is that if GW made a Organized play, you could finally draw that true line between Casuals that happen to use Match Play, and Competitive Gamers, and make both more happy.

Now that I 100% agree with. In fact I think a lot of "Matched Play" rules really need to be like this as they are clearly meant only for tournaments, not casual games which happen to use points.

I'll be the first to admit that I have no comprehension of what these tables mean but, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it looks like out of all these lists only 1 had a grey knight component. IMHO that speaks volumes about GKs in general and GKs as either a main or secondary component of a competitive list.

Is there any other army (with a codex) that has less representation?

Leo_the_Rat wrote:
I'll be the first to admit that I have no comprehension of what these tables mean but, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it looks like out of all these lists only 1 had a grey knight component. IMHO that speaks volumes about GKs in general and GKs as either a main or secondary component of a competitive list.

Is there any other army (with a codex) that has less representation?

Grey knights were the main faction 27 times, and secondary components three times. My interpretation of this is if you are bringing grey knights it's because you love the faction and your going all in on them. People who are less devoted to the faction are hesitant to bring them as a secondary faction because they are expensive and also because there are much better secondary factions to choose from.

I told you that I couldn't read the tables. Thanks for correcting my numbers. I agree that you either play GK with maybe a little help or ignore them completely.

Personally I haven't played for a while and I'm waiting to see what GW does to help GK players. Yes, I've seen the CA rumors but until I see CA and the changes in total I'm still going to wait to play again.

I just want to thank for the data. It's always fun to see how things are going in the real world.

Spoletta wrote:

 Grimgold wrote:
Of the monofaction (Necrons, orks, Tau, and yes I'm including tyranids) tyranids are upper middle of the pack, Tau are the best monofaction, and Necrons are arguably the worst. Tyranids still place behind the better flavors of the three soups (Imperium, chaos, and Eldar). Though that isn't really a mark against them given the soup flavors seem as broken as the big three were back in the late days of 7th ed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
An interesting thing I noticed is that Ynnari soup wasn't all that high scoring, they did well certainly, but there were lots of soups that outscored them. This is despite being them being the top soup. Curious I decided to add the opponents victory points into the data, and it turns out that Ynarri are one of the best factions for denying your opponent victory points. So it makes me wonder, what are the best secondaries against Ynnari, because it seems like picking the correct secondaries against them could really up your chances against them.

Been saying this forever. ITC is the ideal rule set for Ynnari (and in general for Aeldari factions), the secondaries were made to reward theyr specific style of play.

But this shows the opposite of that. Ynnari don't seem to be all that high scoring, despite their popularity.

the_scotsman wrote:


But this shows the opposite of that. Ynnari don't seem to be all that high scoring, despite their popularity.

To win, you just have to score more points that your opponents, and Ynnari excel at a kind of denial game play that make them very hard to score against. Compare them to knights + Guard + supreme smash, who tend to be very high scoring, but whose opponents are also high scoring, and you can see the Yannari margin of victory is much higher.

I won't venture much further than that though, because my expertise with Yannari is limited. Someone who has more experience with them and fighting them would be undoubtedly better qualified to explain how the various aeldari traits are used with soul burst to limit your opponents scoring opportunities.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Even if they weren't undercosted, any army that has ready access to flying units that can move over 40" a turn and hold objectives will do very well in any mission that requires taking/holding objectives. Eldar on a mechanical level will naturally excel there. It'd be like being surprised that IG did well at missions that only score points on the last turn, that's their whole bit, to grind the opponent down in a battle of attrition. If you make a mission packet designed to reward not giving the opponent points and being mobile, eldar will do well. You can up their points costs, but that doesn't change the fact that their units are still very powerful in that kind of environment.

I still feel like ITC does a better job than most. I like that they focus on damage and objectives equally and you can build an army to do one or the other. My only issue is some of their terrain rules and little things here and there but for the most part it works. You'd have to do some very weird stuff in a tournament to not benefit eldar somehow, and you'd still hurt other codexes worse.

You'd need to do some 'very weird stuff' because Eldar don't have to choose. They can do everything at once, damage, speed, chaff, psychic phase, name it. Thanks to Phil Kelly's stupid buffs for 3 straight editions (remember how half of Eldar units had BS 4+ and their elite units that hit harder than SM were actually fragile and cost proper points?) even 8th editions slight nerf before they got codex didn't help that much. Add to that the fact for a lot of Eldar even their undercosted stats don't really mean that much (who cares if nerf will make your units more fragile when slapping -3 to hit or hiding them out of LOS is so easy, or less shooty/fighty when you have so easy sources of doubletap damage) and you have the army that needs serious rethink, and that based on the 4th edition book, not the accumulated garbage that came later, to make them 'specialist' again.

Imagine SM Devastators cost 5 points per model, missile launchers 15, signum granted ability to ignore all modifiers to hit, and every single Devastator could take heavy weapon - I am pretty sure we would see them on every Imperial table and you'd need to do a really weird stuff to a mission to stop them from excelling. Oh wait

Br0n50n wrote:
Am i correct in saying that according to this data, Tau are the best mono faction by a long shot?

Seeing pure Eldar appear to have double Tau win rate (unless I read table wrong) with both being internally souped, not sure how you reached that conclusion. Sure, single detachment Tau beat single detachment Eldar but both were so rare it was literally a single win difference. Give one Tau win to Eldar and the %s flip, way too small sample to say anything.

Also, funny how the ""OP"" Deathwatch is so invisible on the list. Single digit occurrences on the bottom of table during multiple months, so much for scary fables I heard here?

Dw lose when the enemy gets a turn.