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Hello guys, as my collecting continues I am now comfortable sitting on 2500 Points of Farsight Enclave Tau and am about halfway finished with my Imperial Guard army which I hopefully will be completing by the end of May. Now I am planning on getting a 3rd army as I love variety and honestly there has always been a part of me which roots for the Underdog and in the case of 40k that would be the Orks and Bugs it seems that have some of the worst time of it. Now I am not saying they suck or are bad armies, but compared to some books they do lack in some ways. I would want this army to have a different playstyle then my other armies so let me break them down for you:

-Tau: I run a pure Battlesuit army with lots of Crisis Suits and a Few Riptides backing them up. An Elite Heavy Infantry army (all Crisis Suits and Regular Riptide are magnetized for variety) that is pretty mobile and excels at medium to long range combat.

-Imperial Guard: Armored Company, with a total of x8 Leman Russes and a Superheavy planned with a few infantry this army will excel at long range engagements as well as slowly grinding their way across the table forming a wall of Armor 14.

Now based on the armies I already have what following ideas would you guys suggest to give me as much of a different play style as possible? Also with these armies ideas you guys have how and what would be the tactics utilized to run them? I should mention I am looking for strong lists that can hold their own but by no means am I looking for a tourney/cheese level list. Also I am a novice when it comes to both of these armies so any and all ideas, thoughts, comments are more then welcome and thanks for posting!

Based on your other lists I would go with orks then, and run some kind of green tide. A lot of competitive tyranid builds right now feature a few hard-hitting MCs; a lictor/flyrant list won LVO so infiltrating would give you a different playstyle as well...but you can already shoot well with both armies and deepstrike your suits. For the most different playstyle from what you have, I think putting 100+ bodies on the table is where it's at.

That said, I don't think anyone has ever tried to actually run 180 gaunts in a list, but it's generally perceived as a bad idea, mainly due to synapse problem.

I personally love Orks and I haven't really touched Tyranids, so I can say a few things about the gits from my opinion, but not much about the bugs. :c

Regardless, I gotta say that the Orks are fun to play with, and they do have some neat special rules to boot! And hell, with the price of the basic troops, you can most certainly play in a style that you haven't seemed to have tried yet:

GREEN TIDE! Or rather, run a horde-style army, which is basically swamping your opponent with boyz.

And hell, I'm sure there's plenty of other guys on the forums that can give you better advice and strategies with them.

Both would work.

Bugs work very nicely these days - flyers and monstrous creatures are the best stuff, although I have plenty of fun with termagants and tervigons.

Whilst you have a million warm bodies in both this and a green tide list, one is big unit X whilst the other is a million small units. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Nids offer a lot of varying play styles, but the most prevalent at the moment are the following:

MSU Tyranids with Lictors and Mawlocs - see Sean Nayden's Lictor shame list (which was much discussed after he won the LVO with it).

FMC Spam list - either Skyblight or Leviathan. Typically uses multiple Flyrants and possibly Skyblight for Crones, Harpies and respawning Gargoyles. This can be a very tough list for many opponents to deal with due to all the flyers, but sometimes suffers in objective missions due to lack of ground presence (Skyblight mitigates that with OS gargoyles, but is a huge time/money investment due to having to buy 2 Harpies and 30 Gargoyles, in addition to the more TAC Flyrants and Crone).

Living Artillery Node/Barbed Hierodule lists - a Tyranid gunline, basically. Hierodule and Biovores provide reliable long range firepower, and basically says "come at me bro." Probably too similar to your other armies.

Nidzilla - lots of MCs of all varieties, particularly Carnifexen, but also T-Fex, Exocrine, Mawlock and Dimachaeron. Sometimes runs with Tyrannocytes (i.e. Nid drop pods). This is a fun way to play Nids in a casual setting. Often saves points for MCs by running Rippers as troops for cheap scoring. Typically vulnerable to grav weapons, but has great board presence.

Swarm builds - using Termagants, Hormagaunts and Gargoyles. May include Tervigons. Not considered an optimal build anymore due to the nerfing of the Tervigon and its vulnerability to loss of synapse. Great scoring ability and can control the board really well with huge tarpits, but has a hard time dealing with armored targets.

With the exception of Lictor Shame, all of these builds rely on the Venomthrope and Malanthrope to give the army survivability and, particularly, the ability to survive an alpha strike. Nid armies usually want to go first so they can get their FMCs in the air, so you need some way of mitigating 1st turn damage in the even you are forced to go second. Venoms/Malans offer that.

ORKS! I played tau before orks, then after starting the orks I fell in love. Such different play style and more of a challenge.

There is also just the amusement factor while playing orks that I love.

Looks like a larger model count, up close and personal army is what your going for. Both Nids and Orkz will accomplish this. I am just biased to da greenies.

Either a close-combat-oriented Nid army or an Ork green tide would give you a nicely different play style.

Consider modelling issues too:
- Nids are potentially a lot quicker to paint (if you pick one of the simpler looks), mostly due to them not wearing uniforms
- Orks are individually more complicated to paint, and obviously a horde army has more figures which will take longer
- if you enjoy converting, orks are much easier to convert (plus they can loot leftover bits from your other armies), whereas Nids are relatively hard to convert well unless you're a green stuff whiz.

A local nid player uses a large number of gaunts and gargoyles as a screen. It's at least 100 of the things, though probably more. There are hard counters to them, and that's their biggest problem. You have to use your bigger bugs properly as support units for them, or else they're just tarpits. Orks tend to be more threatening, as the pack characters that can actually back them up and help against things that the rest of the boyz may have any use against. I think every nid army can use SOME gaunts, but every ork armys HAS to have a fair number of boyz.