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The prevailing wisdom - at least, what people on this and RPGnet seem to believe - is that hybrid armies fail. By "hybrid," I mean armies that combine mechanized and footslogging units. I've noticed that a lot of things about 40k - like the weakness of the Tau, the OPness of the Blood Angels, and so on - tend to get overstated on the internet. Therefore, before I commit to "hybrid armies fail," I'd like to start a discussion about why they fail. Are they just harder to play? Are they fine, just unpopular? Or is there something wrong with them that I don't understand.

Don't fail me, wise dakkanauts. Arise!

Well that depends on what you mean by hybrid. Perhaps a better thing to say is that 'mixed armies with no coherence' fail.
Like a partly mechanized list might have (for SM) something like this:

HQ: Captain

Elites:
Dreadnought (MM/HF)

Troops:
2 x tac w/flamer missile launcher
1 x tac w/ MM melta-gun w/rhino

Fast Attack:
2x squad assault marines

Heavy Support:
1 x Pred w/TLLC
1x Vindicator

So on the front it looks kinda okay, but there's a major problem. This army's speed is all over the place, and not in a good way.
By having one squad in a rhino, and the other two foot slogging, there's already a major issue. One squad will move up far quicker than it's brethren, and be an exposed tendril of the army. It will take Anti-tank focus, while the infantry get hit on the way up. The Assault squad are fast and will be at the enemy quickly, too, but unsupported. They'll end up dead unless they deep strike, where the chances of them coming on the board before your tacticals on foot are in position is also high.
The dreadnought of course, is slow enough to cover your tacticals some, but still too slow to aid your forward units.
Meanwhile your vindicator and predator, though potent units, are not enough to keep an entire enemy army at bay.
This is a typical example of a fairly common and quite damning mistake. What we have here is a list with two speeds, the foot speed and the mech speed. Now, instead of launching a coordinated force against your opponent, your launching two under-powered waves. By the time they reach the enemy they'll be done (and 2 waves of 750 pts should not be able to really dent a 1500 pt force.)
So I guess the real issue is that hybrid lists are usually different speeds, and armies need to be cohesive and strike at once.
That being said, lists can be hybrid, I suppose, and match speed hypothetically, but these are less hybrid and more 'coordinated'

I think the other big issue is that each vehicle you have in an army tends to be more powerful as you add more vehicles to the army. In the language of economics, the marginal utility of adding a vehicle is often increasing in the number of vehicles. This is simply because it becomes harder for your opponent to kill them as you add more.

This effect weakens a bit if you're adding vehicles that have a different AV from what you already have. Adding Scout Sentinels to a Chimera heavy IG force won't see the full effect, as weapons that can't scratch AV12 can often damage AV10. If Sentinels could take weapons that addressed a serious weakness in the original list, they might still be worth it. In practice, I hear that they aren't, probably because a 3x Melta or 3x Plasma Vet squad in a Chimera with hull Heavy Flamer can handle pretty much any target type well.

I think the fact that spam is really common boils down to this increasing marginal utility. As a general rule, when marginal utility is increasing, you tend to see what we call "corner solutions", that is, solutions to a choice problem that do not include a mix of all possible goods. One possible way to change this would be to make unit prices non-linear, but that's probably too complicated to be reasonable.

It is much more about coordination than anything else. The army has to work well as a whole. The higher the synergy, the higher the effectiveness. I'd say that is different from "hybrid" more often than not.

Because the game is not well balanced, there are always star units whose effectiveness is significantly higher than most other units in an army. That may be because of exceptional ability at common cost, or common ability at exceptionally low cost. Either way, a highly effective unit that is also cheap for what it does tends to be the usual target for spamming. In many cases, the spamming itself adds synergetic value, e.g. by target saturation and increased overall durability. The final result is a highly homogeneous list, which overall is very effective. So, observers point to it and say "see, spamming lists are strong!"

Furthermore, homogeneous lists are much easier to play than hybrid lists, because all you need to do is learn how to use one unit or combo of units really well, and then just iterate and scale up. By comparison, much more knowledge about the game is needed to make heterogeneous armies work together cohesively. My unpleasant suspicion is that the average player is just not that good, and is perhaps a bit intellectually lazy, so they fall into that groove and are successful because of the strength of the spam list and their own decent skill with it. If they do try something different, they have to learn fast or lose, so either way they perceive it as difficult and less effective. So, they point to the list and say "this thing is weak sauce". And they go back to the spam list.

I think a complex fragile army like Eldar is the perfect example - you cannot just spam one unit. You have to build lists with combinations of units that must work together. If you unbalance the list, you quickly get in trouble. Compare that to just spamming chimera vets.

To recap, IMO hybrid lists are not inherently weaker. They are just more difficult to play, so people perceive them as weaker since they do not build them and use them well.

The other posters are correct. While hybrid armies aren't an automatic fail, they do tend to be harder to play than other more homogenous armies.

It's easy to just take 5 units of melta vets and a CCS in Chimeras, and rush them at the enemy.
It's easy to take as many Long Fangs as you can and shoot endless missilles at the enemy.

It's why armies like Eldar are considered much harder. As was said, spamming one unit doesn't work well for Eldar, you need hybridization.

Another army, I'll be honest, that works well with hybrdization, is the Imperial Guard. In fact, Hybridization helps make the Guard awesome. While you can just spam Chimelta Vets, you can carry fewer Vets, and take some Lemans, Hell Hounds, or Manticores alongside them. Heck, the army I run (powerblob Guard with tank support) does quite well, thanks to its hybridization. The infantry and Lemans can advance at similar rates, and even if the infantry pull ahead a bit, the long range the Lemans have allow them to continue to support the infantry.

In the end, I just have to repeat what was always said. Hybrdization fails when people try to combine two smaller armies built for different things into one. Hybridization succeeds when a larger army is built from the ground up with multiple prongs of attack, all mutually supporting.

I always run either mixed or footslogging Eldar (mostly because I can't afford a load of waveserpents), and so far I haven't lost a single game since June 2010.

I play mostly against CSM and played a Necron player a couple weeks back. I don't think that hybrid lists automatically fail, I just think they're harder to use and require more technique than razorspam lists or Mech equivalent.

I think that hybrid armies can be very effective with Guard, more than other armies. The cheap unit costs allow you to get decent numbers of both infantry and tanks, where other armies may not.

My current Guard army list is a hybrid and I have been doing quite well. I have gone for the classic "hammer and anvil" approach. The large infantry platoon holds an objective or corner, protecting the manticore or the leman russ. Most armies tend to rush it and try to silence the long range fire power. That is when the CCS and a couple of meltavets in chimeras, a demolisher, a vendetta and some sentinels come on from reserve for a counter attack.

I find that whilst a homogenous army can have some synergy and target saturation, it is always at the expense of one aspect. All infantry armies just can't move well enough and mechanised armies are not great in defence. Obvious I suppose but sometimes people get too hung up on how good a unit's firepower is and forget about battlefield tactics as a whole.

Lanchester's square law comes in when you spam units.
Its a mathematical formulae for calculating the relative strengths of a predator/prey pair or military forces.

For instance, consider a mech Eldar army based on Serpents and an opposing conventional Space Marine army. The law basically says that if the Eldar force doubles (times 2) the number of Serpents, the Marines needs a four-fold number (times 2^2) of heavy weapons to take them down.


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Marginal utility: For example, if you were really thirsty you'd get a certain amount of satisfaction from a glass of water. This satisfaction would probably decrease with the second glass, and then even more with the third glass. The additional amount of satisfaction that comes with each additional glass of water is marginal utility.

How does it relate to Lanchesters square law?

I'm with Mr. Economics & Wuestenfux.

Especially if you add to Mr. E's post that adding infantry without transports to a mech army has the same weakening effect as adding vehicles with different armor values. It gives those lower-strength weapons a target.

I've noticed this effect both with using infantry blobs in a mech IG army, and also with adding bikes to a mech Eldar army.

If you plunk down 12 AR11 vehicles (like some sisters armies) all your opponent's str4 and less weapons have no target that they can affect at all, and the str5 weapons are mostly nerfed. But if you also put some seraphim or arcoflagellants on the table, they're going to get shot by every heavy bolter on the table.

By diluting your lists effectiveness in 1 situation or another, you are weaking it overall. What you want is for the army to have a "function" that the entire army is built towards, while the choices you make for it will be a greater part of that philosophy.