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I'll start by saying I hate mech. I hate pushing around 6 metal boxes for half the game, measuring melta range out of them, or sitting in the back on an objective, in my metal box.

I'd like to ask anyone who thinks they have a good idea, what are the best/most viable non-mech lists?
Please don't say Necrons/Tyranids as those are pretty obvious

The only thing I have come up with so far is deathwing hammernators+cyclones. Pretty boring, but probably competitive.

Any ideas?

blob guard is amazing. you should be aware however that pushing hundreds of dudes around a table is also quite painful for both you and your opponent.

and dont think about bringing them to a timed tourney.

actually at the moment the more popular foot based lists are DoA blood angels. the lists are pretty much nothing but jump infantry. also some like to toss in devastators to change the list up a bit.

and you can always do thunder wolf calvary for space wolves. also an all biker list from vanilla marines...i could go on and on but the real question is, is there a specific codex your looking to use?

based on that answer the rest should be easy

If you aren't Mech then you either need to be fast enough without vehicles to close the distance or be so hard to kill that it makes no difference how long it takes you to get there. Alternatively you need to have so much long ranged firepower you really don't care about moving.

Jump Pack Blood Angels, Bike based lists and potentially some new Grey Knight builds fall into the first category, as do armies with non standard deployments like Daemons and Webway Portal based Dark Eldar builds. Thunderwolf Cav or Beastmaster heavy lists kind of fit in here, but leaving their troops on foot isn't ideal.

Horde/Kan Wall Orks, Nids, Power Blob IG and Terminator Heavy lists (Deathwing being the most obvious, but you can do FNP/FC Terminator lists with BA, Fleet Terminators with SM and Loganwing lists) fall into the second category. They are all hard to kill (or at least its hard to reduce their damage output) in one way or another.

Guard are the most obvious member of the last category, you can build a shooty infantry based list and still do pretty well without many or any vehicles. Tau also fit into this category, as do Necrons (by default, they are limited to shooting things to death but they still don't have enough firepower to be good at it). Some Marine builds also sneak in to this category, Loganwing/Missile Spam is the most obvious one but standard Marines can do pretty solid Gunlines as well.

Imo it largely depends how strict you want to be on the 'not a mech army' rule. Most of these lists work fine without vehicles, but particularly stuff like Tau will really struggle without ANY vehicles (no Piranha to block things, no Devilfish to keep scoring units alive).

Good point on the jump/bike armies, and also the other lists.

I guess I am trying to get an idea of any non-mech lists that are good, but I am also trying to think if there are any "standard infantry" by which I mean not all-DS/bike/jump.

TWC are cool I guess, but wouldn't you still need rhinos for all your troops units?

Guard are fine, but I actually already have them

If I had one goal for an army I wish I could make a non-mech of, it would probably be standard infantry MEQ or GEQ. In fact, assault based would probably be most interesting, but is that fundamentally flawed by being non-mech?

ph34r wrote:
I guess I am trying to get an idea of any non-mech lists that are good, but I am also trying to think if there are any "standard infantry" by which I mean not all-DS/bike/jump.
TWC are cool I guess, but wouldn't you still need rhinos for all your troops units?
If I had one goal for an army I wish I could make a non-mech of, it would probably be standard infantry MEQ or GEQ. In fact, assault based would probably be most interesting, but is that fundamentally flawed by being non-mech?

You don't have to take Rhinos, but in those types of lists the sole purpose of your troop units is stay alive and grab objectives, which means 99% of the time you want the Rhino/Razorback just to stay alive longer. Its a similar deal to Tau.

If you rule out jump packs and bikes that still leaves plenty of options, but if you narrow it down to being assault based it becomes very tricky. With pure MEQ there aren't any obvious options, a MEQ list without vehicles that wants to be assault based (and isn't Terminator heavy) is essentially trying to be a MEQ Horde army, which I'm not convinced is competitive (unless it has plenty of shooting) because your numbers/survivability for the points doesn't stack up. There might be an interesting build or two which pops out of the Grey Knight codex which could work like this though (everything in your army is nasty in assault to begin with and you can mix GEQ and MEQ to get enough numbers). For non Marines, Webway Portal based Dark Eldar could still work. Daemons and Nids are still stuck in this category by default (very limited shooting options) but can still be very competitive. Other than Power Blob Guard which you already have, the only other army I can think of which would work is Orks using a Kan Wall/Horde build.

Other than possibly a new Grey Knight build none of these options are going to be heavy on standard infantry though (or at least rely on them to do any heavy lifting). With DE you can do hordes of Wyches or Wracks coming out of a Portal, but its still going to be Beastmasters which do bulk of the killing. Similarly Daemons, Nids and Orks are all going to be relying on their Elites or Heavy Support more than the troops.

Yeh if you are using blob guard use movement trays where you can, otherwise its no fun.

If you want an all infantry assault oriented army I would suggest orks!

SW offers a good mix of FP & CC. 3 long fang missiles, 2 or 4 thunderwolf cavalry and a lot of grey hunters led by wolf guard.

Orks. Easily. Green tide!

I think that a lot of it depends on what kind of games you are playing. If you are going for a list true TAC tournament list, I think you will find that most non-mech list struggle a little to start. If you are mostly playing friendly games against people with non-optimized lists, than there are a lot of other options than can work, be fun to play, and win some games.


Here are a couple Ideas. They will probably not win tournaments, but they might still be fun.



1) Space Wolves, ie, wolves in space.

List looks something like this.

Canis
Wolf Guard in Drop Pods with Combi Melta
Grey hunters in drop pods, (min squads from scoring)
Fenrisian Wolves
Thunderwolves
Long Fangs (why not)

The Fenrisian wovles are I5 with a bunch of attacks which is great. Plus they can Re-roll morale if they are near Thunderwolves and LD8 if they are near Canis. You will have to make a lot of models, but it could be a kinda fun and different list. Wolf Guard, Long Fangs take out tanks, Grey hunters wait in reserves to capture objectives.

2) Shooty Black Termplar

List

Champion
Marshal in Terminator Armor W/ Terminator command squad.
Terminator Squads (all of the terminator squads are the shooty kind with Tank hunters and 2 heavy guns per 5 people)
Crusaders (5x guys with Lascannon and plasmagun)
Bikes (3x guys with 3x power weapons)

No vehicles, a bunch of terminators with tank hunting weapons. Either you get 4 S9 shots at 48" or 8 S7 rending shot at 24" against tanks. Not so bad. Crusaders can shot and shoot and do not cost many points. Bikes are there to take out whatever infantry is hiding or hurting you the most. It is similar to the Deathwing list, But your terminators so not score, but have a greatly increased shooting power. Also, Everything gets to re-roll to hit and is fearless in assault.

Chaos Daemon FateCrusher list

Most common base I see for it is (and have done personally)

Fate Weaver

Herald of Tzneetch on chariot, bolt, mast of sorc, we are legion X2

Blood Crushers (as many as possible, wound allocation shennanigans)

Troops= 5 PBs x2


and add any other goodies you want. Its pretty nasty and you couldn't mech even if you wanted to with Daemons