I wrote a piece on picking your first army and I was wondering if Dakka had any input or anything I've missed? The link's below, and it's probably better to read the original format as it includes pictures to break things up, but I thought I'd include the full text here anyway.
https://chazsexington.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/choosing-and-starting-a-warhammer-40k-army/
If you are completely new to
wh40k and have yet to pick your army, I hope this will spare forums and yourself some hassle while helping you pick an army which will hold your interest for longer. I have split this blog post into two parts, choosing your new army and starting the army you picked. I used to play a little
wh40k in the early noughties/late nineties, with my Sons of Medusa, but I came back in early 2014 to pick a new force. Armed with my prior knowledge, I ended up playing Alpha Legion with Fallen Angel allies (using a variety of codices) and later Arkhan Confederates, Imperial Guard modelled on the Confederate States of America.
In picking your force, I’d consider 4 main topics. Fluff, aesthetics, playstyle and other. Hopefully my approach will allow you to get a much better idea of what you want to play!
Fluff
To start off with, the fluff, or lore, behind an army can be very important to both aesthetics and playstyle. I strongly suggest you go onto either lexicanum or warhammer wiki to research the armies that appeal to you. For example, you might find the Blood Angels to be too reminiscent of a certain Romanian of the Transylvanian persuasion, but you really enjoy some of their descendants’ stories, like the Flesh Tearers’ (probably) doomed fight against the Black Rage, yet fierce loyalty, or the Lamenters’ staunch resilience in the face of total annihilation. I favourited all the pages of the armies whose lore I liked and put them in a folder in my browser until I finally decided on the Alpha Legion, yet I considered everyone from the Night Lords to Orks to Eldar Corsairs.
In
wh40k, there are certain armies that have clear real world inspirations behind them which might also appeal to you, be it the Catachan Jungle Fighters (Vietnam War), Praetorians (Colonial Britain), Death Korps of Krieg (WWI Imperial Germany) or Space Wolves (Vikings).
As a last note on fluff, remember you can always make up your entirely own fluff!
Aesthetics
Colour scheme, models, and room for conversions are all aesthetic reasons that might make an army appeal to a player. Maybe you really like the Space Marine models and the want purple and gold marines, but you do not feel confident in your converting skills, especially if you are a newbie, so you pick the Soul Drinkers. Or maybe you feel like painting a variety of different colour schemes, so you pick Biel-Tan Eldar with loads of Aspect Warriors, or even you feel like doing some minor conversion work and decide to pick Eldar Corsairs and glue on their wings and pick your own scheme! Whatever appeals to you and you feel you can do justice is what you should pick. When picking my first army I decided to not overestimate my converting skills nor my painting skills.
Playstyle
When considering how you want to play, you really want to think how you want your tactics to be. Does a fast, small, hard-hitting army appeal to you? Then Eldar or Dark Eldar, or maybe Tau, might appeal. Do you want to overwhelm your opponents in close combat? Then your first choices might be Tyranids or Orks. Even within the different codices there is a plethora of playstyles available, especially with the introduction of Unbound armies; the different regiments of the Imperial Guard is a great example of this. The Elysian droptroopers, the mechanised Armageddon Steel Legion, the Catachan Jungle Fighters etc. all offer a great variety of playstyles. Bear in mind a lot of people enjoy fluffy playstyles; if you play Thousand Sons you are likely to want to take Rubric Marines and Sorcerers, regardless of whether Thousand Sons are considered a good choice from a play-to-win mentality. Fritz (see below) put it this way: I don’t care how it plays, I love the Changer of Ways.
It is also worth bearing in mind with Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines you can use a variety of codices to represent your army. As an example, the Alpha Legion players use codices as varied as Sentinels of Terra, Chaos Space Marines, the Lost and the Damned, Space Marines and Imperial Guard represent their, in addition to the various dataslates available. As long as your miniatures are What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWG), your codex does not matter and it will be tournament legal.
It is obvious, but you do not need to stick to the fluffy style of play most typical of your force. There is nothing stopping you from playing a foot-slogging White Scar Terminator army, or a Biel-Tan force without Aspect Warriors!
Other issues
There are a few other issues to consider when picking an army. Not everyone wants to play Ultramarines, contrary to Matt Ward’s beliefs, so maybe you want to rock up at your local
GW or LFGS with an obscure (or homebrew) Space Marine Chapter or a lesser-known Craftworld, or maybe even just make your own Chapter, Chaos Warband, Eldar Corsairs etc. This is also known as homebrew. There are a few pitfalls here; certain things have become clichéd, like Loyalists from Traitor Legions etc., which is thus worth looking out for.
Let us be honest;
wh40k is not the cheapest hobby around, but I do not think price should deter you from choosing an army, even if it is a ForgeWorld or a horde army. There is always eBay as well, so you can often get people’s unwanted miniatures there significantly lower than RRP! If your army’s cost per unit is expensive relative to your economic situation, this should encourage you to take even more care with painting them to ensure they are painted to the highest possible standard. This will ensure longer time between each purchase, making it less expensive, and making them look even better!
As you are starting out, I would also suggest playing Kill Team until you get a decent grip on the rules. Kill Team is probably the best way to learn the rules, as there are fewer models on the field (less mistakes), it takes less time to play a game (learn to use your models faster), you get to use the ones you have painted rather than the more frowned-upon grey plastic armies prevalent at certain tournaments, and gives you more time to paint up a full army while still giving you a nice mix of both playing the game and painting. Trust me, a fully painted army looks a lot better than just the grey plastic soldiers.
I would strongly suggest not picking the “best” army from the current tournament netlists; armies drop and rise through the tiers rapidly, even more so with
GW’s new(ish) release schedule. It is much better being happy with your army’s playstyle (which you can control) than harbouring a Win At All Costs-mentality (
WAAC). A good example is when flyers were being introduced and not all codices had anti-air or flyers themselves, giving them a handicap against armies with flyers. This updates constantly with the release of each codex and edition. Whether your army is “good” or not does not matter one bit in the long term. At the time of writing this, Chaos Space Marines have gone from being powerful due to receiving the first flyer early on in 6th edition, but are now arguably the weakest codex.
Just a quick note on
WAAC; if you only want to win and you are willing to spend considerable amounts of money, who I am to judge? Do what you enjoy, not what anyone says is the “right” way to play. However, my humble opinion is that most armies will go through good and bad periods, and the more you play, the better you will get. More on this in the starting your army section.
So once you have picked your army, I have a few suggestions for choosing units. Some older and more experienced readers will recognise a fair bit of Stillmania, named after Nigel Stillman (see below). My first piece of advice is to design a general strategic plan; are you going to batter them with superior firepower or are you going to chop their heads off and use them as hats? As an example, my fluffy Alpha Legion aims to ambush and take out parts of the enemy armies piecemeal, while mobs delay the rest of their units, so I take Infiltrating units and Cultists. To this end, I have Cypher to Infiltrate 1-3 units of Chosen, with either melta guns, plasmaguns or powerswords, depending on what I am up against. I also have Huron to Infiltrate D3 units. I Infiltrate large parts of my army into cover, then try to take out as much as possible while my Cultists tar pit the rest. I’m currently working on a Mayhem Pack (that’s three Deep Striking Dreadnoughts), a squad of Terminators (I’m waiting for ForgeWorld to hopefully release Lernean Terminators), and a squad of
CSMs to put in a Dread Claw drop pod, all while working on a small Lost and the Damned detachment to complement my force!
Now you have an idea of how you want to play, you pick the units. Pick units you like and feel are suitable for your style of play, then build an army list of 1000, 1500, and 2000 points. Build up your forces to 1000 points, and then buy the next 250/500 points or unit, and keep going. Also, never, ever, buy 2000 points worth in one go. The amount of plastic sitting there is
One of the first mistakes I see when building units is exemplified with the Dark Vengeance boxed set. 10 man Cultist squads. Cultists are sub-par guardsmen with low leadership. You want to take, in my honest opinion, 35 Cultists. This is to make them somewhat useful on the battlefield as tar pits (low-cost units capable of keeping high-cost enemy units busy), where their size prevent them from running away from taking a few wounds, and dealing a little bit of damage before that. On a side note, I actually take 70, split in 2 squads, with a Helbrute in a Helcult formation, making them Fearless (fixes weak Leadership scores), and that they gain Hatred (re-roll missed to hit rolls in first round of combat) if the Helbrute dies. I have rolled over Iron Hand biker command squads and killed Terminator charges with the 35-man Mark of Slaanesh,
CCW squad with a little bit of sorcerous help (Endurance)! But I digress.
My point is if you are going to take a unit, don’t half-ass it. Even my squads of Chosen have extra Chosen to soak up a few wounds or add a bit of firepower. Bumping it up will make it a lot more effective, it will allow it to take more wounds before rolling a Leadership test, and makes it very difficult for smaller units to do much to it. You want to hit so hard the enemy cannot hit back. However, certain units can function very well with low numbers, an example being the Deep Striking melta gun-wieldingTerminator suicide squads. The idea here is to Deep Strike your Terminators behind enemy armour, blow it up, and then get slaughtered, but you’ve still made the points cost.
Remember, this is not the end-all of collecting. This is compiled from my experience and tips and tricks I’ve read on the internet, and should not be taken as anything more than guidelines.
Other sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PXaEUwAZSc – MiniWarGaming’s “Where to start with Warhammer
40k”
I’d also like to recommend a few pages to follow
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGUiN6uLh5r_KQfHrGutjtg – Fritz
40k vlogs about
wh40k, D&D and some X-Wing.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2mQ7x6K74NBfmxBoMwZCnw – Miniwargaming do fun Battle Reports and guides to various things.
http://givemlead.blogspot.no/2014/09/a-quest-for-stillmania_5.html – Nigel Stillmann is a legend in the wargaming community due to his unique approach to gaming.
Share this:
WAAAGH!!!
~3000 (Fully Painted)
Coming Soon!
