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Does your best army list fit in?

I am curious to see how different peoples armies fit into this army list building development system that my Dad created. He used to spend more time making lists than actually playing... literally, it would take 3 days for him to make a 1500pt list. Anyway; how does this work?

Divide total point value of army by 9. So for example in an 1850pt list you have nine 205 pt "sections" and a 5pt floater.

First Place 4 "sections" (820pts) into troops.

Then 1 "section" (205pts) in each of your Heavy, Fast, Elites and HQ sections.

This leaves 1 "section" that you may do what ever you want with. For example an Imperial Guard army might put it into Heavy Support.

IMPORTANT: This is a general guideline, not a strict rubric. It is aimed at balancing the list to deal with as much as possible while keeping it effective and spam-free.

Now, I had no idea what this was until finally my dad explained the system. Then I went and counted out my competitive DE army into it and found that I was almost spot on! I was very successful with the list that fit in to the "law" and have had trouble moving away from it ever since. I find it is a nice tool to keep things interesting while keeping focused on what matters, good number of troops, some fast units, firesupport and elite units. Of course keeping the HQ cheap so as to not sink too many pts into it.

Anyway. I challenge all of you to try it out! And let me know what you think.

Cheers!

I think it falls apart with certain armies, especially ones that have a heavy reliance on Troops or Elites. Like orks or Tau.

an Ork army can spend a massive amount of their points in Troops while Tau will squeeze every avaliable point into their Elites to mak out on crisis suits.

it also doesn't work for armies that almost completely leave a certain FoC slot alone, like Speeder-less Space Marine lists or just about any Chaos Space marine army(do they have ANY Fast Attack worth taking?)

So what you are saying Iago is that you are suposed to spend some points in troops, and some points on heavy suport, HQ, elite and fast attack?

I must say I am not so impressed. It is a very neat formula to say something very obvius. You are trying to be a rainmaker here (for the people who know the expresion or have seen The Wire where they use it.)

This would not work in smaler games where you do not have enough points to divide it up in 9 parts.

It will not always work for each codex:

For instance chaos has a reputation for having bad fast attack.

For space wolves you would spend around 205 points on 3 fast attack slots in the form of landspeeders. Regular marines could probably take 2x2 attack bikes since this is easy multimelta.

To take the space wolves example further they usualy take grey hunters, enough to camp objectives and melta things, multi meltas in the fast attack and long fangs in the heavy suport since it is the only slot with long reach. Probably one wolf guard squad and a HQ.

What your father is saying is that you should try to have a balanced army.

Edit: In the book Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown he talks about how he is on a course on how he is suposed to learn to speed read a book. What they instruct him is to read the index, and then read a little from each page and you can now magicaly know what is in the book and they took a very big amount of money in it. Mr. Brown pointed out that this is not a magical formular but something one usualy do when orientating in a book and considered it money badly spent (but he got a good story out of it.) I do feel that this formula is sort of the same. It is fearly obvius, with the exeptions of armies with exeptions.

Your formula does also not work very well with the winning armies in my local tournament scene.

Iago wrote:First Place 4 "sections" (820pts) into troops.

Then 1 "section" (205pts) in each of your Heavy, Fast, Elites and HQ sections.

This leaves 1 "section" that you may do what ever you want with.

Help me with the math there. 4+1+1=9?

In general, though, people tend to spend way too few points on troops. At least, those people who tend to lose games do. My rule of thumb is to get the HQ and troops choice of your army kitted so that they can basically handle anything on their own, and then garnish it with redundant copies of one other unit that is able to handle the rest. Only when you start getting up by 1850 pts way and you can't take more duplicates do I start branching out.

For reference, my 1500 points lists are usually between 70% - 100% troops and HQ. At points levels below 1000 I've been known on more than one occasion to just take from those two slots.

Fancy toys may be nice, but it's the core of the army that wins the games.

Ailaros wrote:

Iago wrote:First Place 4 "sections" (820pts) into troops.

Then 1 "section" (205pts) in each of your Heavy, Fast, Elites and HQ sections.

This leaves 1 "section" that you may do what ever you want with.

Help me with the math there. 4+1+1=9?

1 each in heavy, fast, elite, hq, plus one floater. That is 4+1+1+1+1+1=9.

4 sections of Troops.

1 Heavy section, one HQ section, one elite section, one fast attack section

then one extra.


Not one Section for heavy, HQ, fast attack, and Elites to share.



Edit- Ninjad by IIedwey

Ah.

In that case, I've never followed this rule. Three elites, three FA, or three HS are all better than one of each.

One of each ensures you don't have redundancy, and before the "rule of 9", there is 40k's golden rule: if it's a threat, it will be destroyed; if it's not it will be ignored.

It's not a bad approach for starting a fresh list, assuming that all factions are perfectly balanced; However, in the current environment, most competitive lists are all about maximizing the best entries in the codex and supporting it with whatever your remaining options are limited to.

Ailaros wrote:

Iago wrote:First Place 4 "sections" (820pts) into troops.

Then 1 "section" (205pts) in each of your Heavy, Fast, Elites and HQ sections.

This leaves 1 "section" that you may do what ever you want with.

Help me with the math there. 4+1+1=9?

Notice he said 1 in EACH slot, not one split between all 4 of them, its 4 in troops then 1 in Heavy, 1 in Elites, 1 in Fast and 1 in HQ + 1 spare = 9. Its essentially using the Fantasy percentage based system with 40k (which by itself is a viable idea and something I could see them introducing in 6th) but as it stands it doesn't really work because the increased number of slots in 40k.

The huge flaw with this method is that it assumes firstly that all armies can be built the same way/using a common formula (which is simply not true, for starters not all armies play the same way) and its clearly going to fall over at lower point levels (where a 100pt Elite and Fast allocation doesn't buy you anything). Secondly it assumes that every army has equally competitive units in every slot, which again is not true at all. For many armies being forced to spend points in certain slots is a massive limitation as they have units in other slots which do the same job better (the Fast slot in many older codices being a good example). For example a Nid player which is limited in the number of point they can spend in Elites is going to be seriously handicapped since so many of their important/competitive choices are and an Eldar or Tau player or anyone who can make non Troop units scoring does not want to put huge chunks of their army into Troops. With highly flexible codices like DE and IG you can possibly get away with it, since every one of their slots has options to cover all 4 of your main requirements (long/short AT, long/short anti infantry), but Nids or Orks with 1 Elite slot will be crippled as will a host of other armies. Many builds for certain armies are no longer possible as well, Air Cav IG, Dread heavy lists and a host of other themed armies.

Generally the key when building lists is to ensure that you have certain roles covered, you need enough anti tank (usually split into long range suppression and reliable short range killy) and anti infantry (long range, short range and assault) + the ability to get to and hold objectives reliably. By itself this method does nothing whatsoever to ensure this, so you could very easily build some incredibly terrible lists.

Funnily enough, if I move the FA points (since I don't have any FA troop) to HS, my DE 1.5k list falls into the break down too XD

Ok, so to all you who do not fit in . Make a list that does, post it. I challenge you to come out of your gaming bubble .

For orks,

6 troops, a warboss, a Big Mek with Kustom Force Field, and a DeffKopta with Missile Launcha.

9. I like it!

My blood angels list I built -

- 125 into HQ

- 215 into elite

- 705 into troops

- 290 into fast

- 415 into heavy

KINDA like what you were talking about, my troops and HQ are light, but my fast and heavy are a bit over.

Cool idea.

Ailaros wrote:
Fancy toys may be nice, but it's the core of the army that wins the games.

Well, that's only true for a small percentage of armies: IG, Space Wolves, GK Henchmen, etc.

It's certainly not true for some other armies. Any Eldar or Tau army composed entirely of Troops and HQ will not win 10 out of 10 times.

Weird take on it, I thought the rule of nine just applied to flamers and meltas.


Wait for it...

I play Tau

Even if I were to take every FOC slot of maxed Fire Warriors, I wouldnt reach 800 points without doing some stupid useless upgrades

If anything, this rule seems likely to generate the sort of lists GW features on its website. A little bit of this, a little bit of that is a recipe for a crappy list.

Niiai wrote:For space wolves you would spend around 205 points on 3 fast attack slots in the form of landspeeders.

And give up Thunderwolf Cavalry? Never!

I still think you are just saying something easy with some hard words. It probably fits for my list but I have not done the math:

1750 points.

Rune Priest, Tactical Dreadnought Aarmour, Living Lightning, Storm caller 120

5 Grey Hunters, 1 Meltagun, Wolf Guard w. Cimbi-Melta w. Drop Pod 138
5 Grey Hunters, 1 Meltagun, Wolf Guard w. Cimbi-Melta w. Drop Pod 138
5 Grey Hunters, 1 Meltagun, Wolf Guard w. Cimbi-Melta w. Drop Pod 138
5 Grey Hunters, 1 Meltagun, Wolf Guard w. Cimbi-Melta w. Drop Pod 138
5 Grey Hunters, 1 Meltagun, Wolf Guard w. Tactical Dreadnought Armour, Cyclone Missile Launcher, Powerfist w. Drop Pod 188

5 Scouts, Meltagun , Wolf Guard w. Cimbi-Melta, 108
Dreadnought w. 2 Twin-Linked Autocannons, w. Drop Pod 160
(Wolf Guard Squad spread trhough the ranks.)

Land Speeder, Multi Melta, Heavy Flamer 70
Land Speeder, Multi Melta, Heavy Flamer 70
Land Speeder, Multi Melta 60

Predator 60
6 Long Fangs, 5 Missile Launchers 140
6 Long Fangs, 5 Missile Launchers w. Razorback, Twin Linked Lascannon 215

1743

I'd say instead of using 1 slot for HQ, FA, HS and Elites each, use 4 slots for them four altogether. Not everybody uses all of them. For example, my DE list has no FA units. Honestly, for what those things do, I'd much rather take an extra Warrior or Wych squad on a Raider.

It all looks good. Seems like people are getting the idea.

Iago, the numbers are way off. :-)

You my friend, is a rain maker.

The numbers are there to make people think out of the box. Rain does get made.. but its what we do with it that really matters.

The rule seems helpful. When I first got into wargaming I didn't really understand what I needed in a list. Its a good conservative rule. Although it has been pointed out that this doesn't apply to certain armies.

I don't know why anyone mentioned Tau though.

Works somewhat well.. However it has issues with the new cron codex. You need to make sure you allocate any royal court choices into the points of the unit that it is ending up in, and not the points allocated for HQs

Last 2k list I pointed out came out as follows:

Law of 9: 222 (1998 pt list)

HQs: 410 (left over from troops/HS here)
Elites: 228
Fast Attack: 450 (floater here)
Troops: 730
Heavy Support: 180

As you said it's a guideline, but it seems to work. Though if I followed it perfectly there would be another troop choice and one less HQ. However, due to the way the new cron codex functions 2 HQ choices is near mandatory in high point games.

For the most part I think it's a good building point. Use the system to build a basic idea, and then refine that idea to amplify the effectiveness.

That said though, the ratios are pretty obvious after you've played the game for a while (my last 10 or so lists all more or less match your 'law'), but its definitely nice for newer players to see it in an easy to follow formula I think

It was designed with 1500-1700 pt armies in mind. But as you see, works well in balanced lists. Making it a great way to move away from the netness of certain army builds and showcasing other aspects of armies.

If you plan to only have two duplicate slots in HQ/elite/FA/HS, I think you are planning for failure.

its not slots... its points

don't associate the division of points as "each unit must have x points"

Its more troops needs to have 4x points, and the others must have x points with one being 2x points.

For example in my last list it only has 3 troop choices but was allocated the 4 sections of points. Similarly the HS slot has only one allocation of points but 2 HS choices.

Thanks for the comments, as always.

I will try to put up a series of lists (I aim to make one for each army) that fit within the Law's parameters. These will serve as food for thought.

Cheers!

WanderingFox wrote:its not slots... its points

don't associate the division of points as "each unit must have x points"

Its more troops needs to have 4x points, and the others must have x points with one being 2x points.

For example in my last list it only has 3 troop choices but was allocated the 4 sections of points. Similarly the HS slot has only one allocation of points but 2 HS choices.

Same problem. Having the same points in elites/fast/HQ/heavy is arbitrary and for most good lists does not apply.