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If you are serious about playing, I'd say two or three.

If you have just one army, there will be periods of time where the current balance state/codex/core rules just makes your army not fun to play. Having different armies which focus on different aspects of the game will help with that. Having WE, orks and BT most likely not.

For most players who cycle through more than three armies regularly, they usually lack the practice to both learn their army and play them quickly. I have quite a few friends who own 10+ armies and they always lose to forgetting rules, using specialist units in the wrong way or bad army composition, all while continuously having to look up every weapon profile.

In addition, it's an absolute chore to keep up with that many rules changes four times a year.

That's why I think one army is not enough and four armies is too much unless you play multiple times a week.

One to first question and one to the second question. That is if I were to go by what I think and like. By GW ways of writing rules the optimal way is probably 2-3 armies in every core GW game, so you can jump around when ever the games get stale/unfun or you plain do not like the core rules of a given edition. God help the person with 10k pts in HH or High Elves, that does not like 3.0 or the "play HE as wood elves MSU" style of play. Who happens to have no other army.

There are very few armies where you can be sure there will be fun to play every edition for more then 2-3 months. At least in the modern 8th ed and later w40k, I know.

Currently Own:
Tau
Ultramarines
Black Templar
Thousand Sons
Black Legion
Homebrew Chaos Marines
Emperors Children
Tyranids

Previously owned and either sold or traded:
4th Edition Black Templar
4th Edition Tau
5th Edition Thousand Sons
6th Edition Imperial Fists
7th Edition Necrons
7th Edition Iron Warriors
8th Edition Guard
8th Edition Grey Knights

Karol wrote:
One to first question and one to the second question. That is if I were to go by what I think and like. By GW ways of writing rules the optimal way is probably 2-3 armies in every core GW game, so you can jump around when ever the games get stale/unfun or you plain do not like the core rules of a given edition. God help the person with 10k pts in HH or High Elves, that does not like 3.0 or the "play HE as wood elves MSU" style of play. Who happens to have no other army.

There are very few armies where you can be sure there will be fun to play every edition for more then 2-3 months. At least in the modern 8th ed and later w40k, I know.

Thankfully playing a static older edition solves all of those problems. i only play HH 1.0 and when i play our house 5th ed 40K the 5 armies i own i know inside and out because they never change and i have been playing some of them effectively non-stop since 3rd edition. even my "newest" army 7th edition admech i have had for nearly 10 years now.

It feels good not caring what GW is doing to the game currently or needing to chase the roller coaster.

I pass from ideal to unnecessary a long time ago. When I played frequently the ideal number was two - a main and a side - as that is what my budget and painting time allowed for.

Though I proxied a lot of other factions and had odds and ends from box sets so that it wasn't all coke cans and 'marine counts as' on the table.

These days my pile of shame has greatly surpassed my time and motivation and my most modern armies have never seen the table as they were panting projects.

 aphyon wrote:

Karol wrote:
One to first question and one to the second question. That is if I were to go by what I think and like. By GW ways of writing rules the optimal way is probably 2-3 armies in every core GW game, so you can jump around when ever the games get stale/unfun or you plain do not like the core rules of a given edition. God help the person with 10k pts in HH or High Elves, that does not like 3.0 or the "play HE as wood elves MSU" style of play. Who happens to have no other army.

There are very few armies where you can be sure there will be fun to play every edition for more then 2-3 months. At least in the modern 8th ed and later w40k, I know.

Thankfully playing a static older edition solves all of those problems. i only play HH 1.0 and when i play our house 5th ed 40K the 5 armies i own i know inside and out because they never change and i have been playing some of them effectively non-stop since 3rd edition. even my "newest" army 7th edition admech i have had for nearly 10 years now.

It feels good not caring what GW is doing to the game currently or needing to chase the roller coaster.

I'm with you; gave up chasing the 8th edition and went back to 5th and 5th is where I will stay.

-Guardsman- wrote:

how many armies?.

.

Since I'm getting back into 3rd-5th edition 40k and avoiding the newest edition (I really don't like keeping up with meta or updates or stuff). I personally want to collect 1 of each army.

Marines, Imperial Guard, Sisters of Battle, Gray Knights, Eldar, Dark Eldar, Tyranics, Necrons, Orks, Tau, Chaos Marines. I only really want between 1k-1500 points for each army. I'd like to be able to play small games against my children or other people who I can get interested.

I only have a Dark Eldar army ready so far, I have some Necron, Tau, Eldar, Ork, and Space Marine miniatures but not assembled/painted for a 1k army yet.

Currently I just am interested in like.... "cool idea" for battles, using different armies together in different ways for fun games, stuff like that. I like having good guys and bad guys for the good guys to fight against.

I have 2
Sisters of Battle and Slaanesh CSM
Both are HEAVILY outdated to the new rules though.

4 2500 is probably ideal.
Or 2 3000 and 2 smaller 1000-1500 armies.

Right now IF I get back in, looking at the new startee set and getting some marines (maybe dark angels successor, but I've also been drawn to the celestial lions, and orks.)

I need to preface this all with the exception that, this advice applied before GW started legending units like it was an Olympic sport. If you play in an area that is not all tournament all the time, the advice applies.

3 is ideal to me. One army can work if you collect it as an entire army, not a list or, series of lists, having 3+ of all options in your codex gives you real insulation to edition change.

Otherwise 3 armies keeps painting/modelling fresh avoiding hobby burnout with some (historical) insulation during edition changes.

Ideally it would be the three armies I play: Tyranids, Drukhari and GSC.

However, I keep buying and selling other armies...sometimes without building a single model in some bizarre need to do anything rather than actually finish painting the three armies above.

Technically I have two maybe 1.5

A partially painted Imperial guard army and a the beginnings of an inquisition army. The guard and inquisition kind of feel like allies.

I would probably like to have at least one more at some point but not sure what. Maybe something like night lords that’s very different to what I have.

For me, it was about having forces that complimented each other in one way or another. This went in two directions.

On the tabletop, I ran Guard and had a smattering of Inquisition and Marine units. It was always fun to have an allied detachment to add something interesting.

On the painting bench, I focused on Guard and Tau. The head canon for my guard regiment set their primary opponent as Tau. It was fun building opposing forces and sometimes mixing models (I made some really cool Gue'vesa a longgg time ago.)

...I'm not exactly sure how to count? I have eight piles of models I consider "armies" (Eldar, Tau, Inquisition, Custodes, AdMech, Dark Angels, Tyranids, Alpha Legion), but the Inquisition and the Tyranids are oldhammer forces that I don't know would be functional or even play-legal in 10th, the AdMech are all HH models that are definitely not play-legal in 10th, and the Dark Angels are probably not a functional force in 10th.

The only reason I've got so many models is that I've been accumulating them for about fifteen years, and if you've been floating around the community for fifteen years you'll often find opportunities to grab cheap secondhand models, trade up, or get ahold of cheaper proxies (most of my big Tyranids are 3d printed, for instance).

I think having 2-3 armies is reasonable, but I think if you're thinking about buying your third or fourth 40k army you should at least consider trying to get into another wargame. 40k has a big following, sure, but it's also expensive, awkward to store, uses a big play space, takes a long time, and blows itself up and starts over every three years. There do exist smaller, faster, and easier to play games out there that are probably going to be more interesting to someone who's already bored with three 40k armies than buying a fourth 40k army.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
...I'm not exactly sure how to count? I have eight piles of models I consider "armies" (Eldar, Tau, Inquisition, Custodes, AdMech, Dark Angels, Tyranids, Alpha Legion), but the Inquisition and the Tyranids are oldhammer forces that I don't know would be functional or even play-legal in 10th, the AdMech are all HH models that are definitely not play-legal in 10th, and the Dark Angels are probably not a functional force in 10th.

Your Inquisition, Tyrranids, & DA are both functional & play-legal in 10e.
Now how good of an army you can form out of whatever you've got....

HH AdMech :( So much cool plastic going to waste without Legends rules.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
I think having 2-3 armies is reasonable, but I think if you're thinking about buying your third or fourth 40k army you should at least consider trying to get into another wargame. 40k has a big following, sure, but it's also expensive, awkward to store, uses a big play space, takes a long time, and blows itself up and starts over every three years. There do exist smaller, faster, and easier to play games out there that are probably going to be more interesting to someone who's already bored with three 40k armies than buying a fourth 40k army.

If I can afford to build a 4th+ 40k army I can also afford to build a force for some other smaller game. I mean, smaller games only tend to cost about the same as 1 -2 40k units....
Hell, even a decent Bolt Action army can be done for about 1/2 the cost of a typical 40k/AoS army.

But do you know WHY I've built numerous 40k forces? It's not because I'm bored with the ones I already have. It's because I ALSO like the models in the next thing I'm building.
And sometimes I'm building something for a specific project/campaign. That's why I have a dedicated UM SM force - Back in 4e the players at the shop I played at at that time wanted to do a "Whole Company" shop project. So 10 of us drew straws to see wich COMPANY we'd build over the next year. I drew the 9th Co (Devastators). I went a step further & built some extra marines to swap into squads so I could actually field the 9th according to the old force org chart. 6 tacs, 3 devs, + HQs & transport vehicles. Did I need another SM army? No. I already had 3k+ of both SW & DA. I certainly didn't need another 150some blue SMs. Was I bored of them (or my Guard, or Eldar, etc)? No. I did this for fun.
My Custodes? They exist due to a challenge: Make a 2k pt force as cheaply as possible (no 3d printing). Not counting the case & foam they live in, I have about $250 invested & a decently playable force.
GW also typically has piss poor ally rules. Especially in 40k.
So multiple armies it is....

I've been playing 40k since 3rd edition, so I've collected a fair few armies over the years. I play a lot of narrative with my friends and in some cases inherited their armies when they left to hobby, so I have a lot of most of the factions.

I started with Space Marines way back in the day for 3rd, got into Necrons and Tau in 4th, Guard in 5th, Chaos in 6th, Tyranids in 7th which I took a bit of break after and came back at the end of 8th with a new philosophy of playing niche narrative armies, and went full on into Kroot which has been my primary army ever since, I picked up GSC and Imperial Agents in 9th, then back to more Kroot in 10th when the new models came out.

However, I never stopped collecting (often times second hand) models from previous factions that I played, so the longer I've owned a faction, the more models I tend to have for it. I have in recent years managed to pick up a large Tyranid collection and two large Space Marines collections for a surprisingly small amount of money.

Here's where I'm at at the moment:
- Space Marines (Custom Chapter) Aprox 20k pts
- Tyranids: Aprox 10k pts
- Necrons: Aprox 8k pts
- Guard: Aprox 5k pts
- Kroot: 3600 pts.
- CSM Aprox 3k
- Tsons Aprox 3k
- Tau, Agents, GSC: Aprox 2k
- Aeldari, Sisters of Silence, Sororitas, Grey Knights Aprox 1k. (Though I am thinking of selling my Aeldari, some of my Sororitas, and my Grey Knights armies to fund other armies instead.)
- I have a very small amount of Orks from Kill Team and will be at about 1k once I get the new starter set.

Of all these armies, the only ones I have enough painted to actually play a 2k game at battle ready are Space Marines, Necrons, Tyranids, Guard, Kroot, and Agents (technically Tau too if I ally in some Kroot). I'm a rather slow painter and my play group has never cared if models are painted or not.

So, why do I have all these armies? Well, that has kind of changed over the years. Back in the day, I thought between Space Marines, Necrons and Tau, I had everything covered , they were going to be my 3 armies and could between them cover pretty much whatever narrative I wanted. However, when 5th edition rolled around, I had a lot of friends leave the hobby for various reasons (none relating to the edition itself, just life stuff) and many of them just gave me their stuff as I had been the group leader and I wanted to keep playing. I inherited a Guard army from one friend, a Tyranid army from one, and a CSM one from another, as well as some additional Tau and Space Marine (Specifically Black Templar) forces. (Only one of them ever returned to the hobby, (the Black Templar player) and I did return their collection to them at that time.) Though occasionally the others will still come by for a casual game once in a blue moon and have a go with their old force, they just seem to not want to play or collect beyond that.

So that's how I ended up into so many armies up until 7th edition.

When I got back into the hobby at the end of 8th and started going to to more events, my gaming mentality had changed a lot in those intervening years. I played a lot of competitive magic and loved brewing decks and being on the cutting edge of the meta, brewing new decks that no one had thought of yet, some times they would crash and burn, and sometimes I fully shifted our local meta. I wanted to take the same philosophy to 40k, though that obviously takes a lot longer given the time it takes to build and paint armies. So I deiced to collect several more niche armies / subfactions that no one else played.

Near the end of 8th, I settled on my favourite race in the lore, the Kroot, and started building them up. I tracked down the old Legends models and stocked up on what I could for carnivores and other units. I was pretty over the moon when the Farstalker kit released. Even so, in 9th it was still very much a hybrid army, and while I could win with it, it's play pattern was pretty repetitive and got stale after a while. So, I started looking into other niche armies that seemed interesting to try and that's when I build up my Imperial Agents army. Fast forward to 10th and we got all the new Kroot models which I've spend most of this edition buried in.

Now that I've fully completed that army though, I'm looking to my next project for 11th, a full abhuman guard army. Starting with Ogryns and Ratlings, then I'm planning to do some conversions to standard guard models to turn them into Felinids so I can actually make a full 2k abhuman force, at least visually.

However, I always have some projects on the back burner and if I can find models at a cheap cost, I will pick them up. I'm currently also slowly accumulating:
- Sisters of Silence
- Tzzangors
- Guard Cavalry
- More Necron Destroyer units
- More Tyranid Warriors
- Possibly Speed Freaks?

My kids are now old enough to play and have been collecting armies of their own. (My oldest son Orks, my second son White Scars (his Uncle's favourite faction), and my daughter Tyranids.) Since we're playing more narrative games then ever, I'm glad to have so many armies to be able to play all kinds of different games with them to keep things fresh and interesting. I've even finally gotten my wife into the hobby and she's started collecting Tzeentch Daemons.

So yeah, bit of a long story, but that's how I've ended up with a rather comically large 40k collection. One day, when my kids are a bit older, I'd love to take a week of work, clear out the entire basement floor and have a massive apoc game with all the models in the house. It would be insane. XD

ccs wrote:
...Your Inquisition, Tyrranids, & DA are both functional & play-legal in 10e.
Now how good of an army you can form out of whatever you've got...

I believe it'd be technically possible to build a play-legal force out of any of those three, sure. I don't believe I could build a force that wouldn't lose 100% of games because all the models in them are absolute garbage in 10e, but I don't know, I didn't play enough 10e and don't really care to figure out whether a Tyranid list of only 4e-legal models would work at all. And I did try jumping through the hoops to work out whether I could technically run any of my Inquisition models, and the best I could come up with was "this is technically an awful Guard army with a squad of Deathwatch models in it."

Dark Angels I'm sure I could proxy as a working force, sure, but there are a lot of models/loadouts there that don't actually exist in 10e, and having some kind of argument with my opponent about whether using my Interemptors as Helblasters is "modeling for advantage" is not my idea of a good time.

I currently have,...

For Fantasy:

Lizardboys: sizable army, 3-4k
Ogres, my Lord: sizable army, ~3k

For 40k:

IMPERIUM: pretty big one, I always saw it as one big imperial soup, but grew bigger since then, divided in:
Astra Militarum/Imperial Guard: biggest chunk, 5k (currrently phasing out old Cadian for new ones, and new vehicles from Armageddon). Mostly Cadia, with some catachads. Used to be very Infantry heavy army, making it a bit more mechanized with artillery support.
Adepta Sororitas/Sisters: sizable army, 3k
Imperial Agents/Inquisition: ~2k, most is characters though. I use them as support, or for small 2v2 battles where i get 1k or less points.

I think ideally, you want 2 big armies, or 1 big one and 2 small ones. 2 big and one small perhaps, but that's pushing it. More, unless you play veeery often, you wont ever have the time to really test the waters and have fun with all. If you play a lot of 2v2 or more people, like I do, its not unreasonable to go further with very small more niche 1k armies (seriously considerring do this with Corsairs or only Harlequins). But for Standard 2k battles, i think having 2 3k-4k armies (to have build variety and options) is better approach.

I have 13ish armies collected over time starting in the late 90's. I don't play them all at once or even in every edition. Usually I play one or two armies in a year-long Crusade then switch to another pair.


Sisters of Battle - 4300 points - one of my favorite armies. Usually get them out for a campaign every edition.

Adeptus Custodes - 5500 points - just played them in the last Crusade, but they're probably back on the shelf for awhile.

Imperial Agents - 2500 points - mostly allied in with other Imperial forces.

Imperial Knights - 2900 points - another favorite, though largely just for painting.

Imperial Guard - 4500 points - been on the shelf the last two editions. I'll come back to them eventually. I played them a lot in 5th and 8th though.

Carcharodon Marines - 4100 points - Current Marine Chapter, mostly play them in learning games, but I'll be maining them in a Vespator Campaign next year.

Imperial Fists - 3200 points - my Dark Imperium/8th ed army mostly done as a painting exercise to learn yellows. They're a loaner army now and I haven't played them myself in 5 years+.

Dark Angels - 6000 points - my original army back in the day. I've been pruning all the post 3rd edition models from the army over time. Only break them out for 2nd and 3rd ed. games.



Tyranids - 3300 points - started with Leviathan. Mostly an NPC army for scenarios, though a buddy will be borrowing them as a main army for our next Crusade.

Genestealer Cult - 3000 points - maybe my best-painted army. Playing them in the next Crusade, though they didn't make the table more then a couple times in 10th since I really didn't like the rule changes for the army from 9th.

Aeldari - 7700 points - my largest force and one I play pretty regularly.

Necrons - 3400 points - my newest army. Playing them a lot this year, TBD how often they'll show in the rotation after that.



Word Bearers - 5900 points - only have one Chaos army, so they show up decently often because of that. Tons of fun for painting and conversions too.

Chaos Daemons - 1000 points - really part of the Word Bearers, but I have enough Daemons to field them on their own if I want to.


Having a bunch is fine - they accumulate over the years - but it's probably best to focus on a few at a time and not worry if one hasn't seen the table in awhile. I also have a fair few models from armies (and games) I don't play that I got for painting/display.

 Asmodai wrote:
I have 13ish armies collected over time starting in the late 90's. I don't play them all at once or even in every edition. Usually I play one or two armies in a year-long Crusade then switch to another pair.

This, definitely.
Typically in a year I'm in 1 Crusade + 1 escalation League at shop #1, & 1 Crusade at shop #2.
So 2 -3 "main" event armies per year. (sometimes I run the same army at both shops)

And then there's a rotating cast of 5-6 armies used for casual gaming throughout the year.

 Asmodai wrote:
Having a bunch is fine - they accumulate over the years - but it's probably best to focus on a few at a time and not worry if one hasn't seen the table in awhile. I also have a fair few models from armies (and games) I don't play that I got for painting/display.

Also this. I have A LOT of 40k armies. The running joke is that my goal seems to be to have a different army for each week of the year....
So it's only natural that some things can go for quite a bit between appearances on the table.
For ex:
DA & SoB, haven't seen play this edition.
SW - 1 game in 9th, only 1 game at the dawn of 10e, & next Thur they'll see the edition out.
Tyranids - only 2 or 3 games early in 9th. And it was only an odd 750pt variant/narrative list. Not the proper 2K+ horde.

My long term goal is 3.

I want to finish my Custodes....

And then wait for the Questoris Sinister Knight House to be released for 30k....

And if I get a financial windfall, I'd love to have a full on Ordo Sinister Psi-Titan.