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I got to wondering, what makes a faction competitive or not?

Are there any factions that have competitive units but don’t have the ability to field a competitive army?

What I mean is are there cases where the faction rules and the units themselves have the potential to be competitive, but it’s not possible to make a legal army that is competitive due to army building restrictions and the like as opposed to the units and faction rules themselves being the limiting factor?

If the rule of three didn’t exist, or the detachment system don’t allow for a competitive build?

Without going for something entirely outside the realm of possibility like only HQs or something, are there any factions that are in a position where it’s close but if only this or that specific army building restriction was slightly different

No.

All of the Chaos factions have an issue with pie-in-the-sky combos that need a lot of things to go right for them to be as good as they're supposed to be and don't come together into a full list anyways.

For an example of why Rule of Three is still relevant today... Remember when Razorwing Flocks spam was briefly a competitive meta list in the Index era? Imagine that but with ObSec Scarabs.

Gotta agree with ccs here. "Competitive" necessarily involves a shared context, and divorcing individual units from that context means there's insufficient points of comparison. More over, your question implies that spam is beneficial, but in the modern mission layouts you actually need to diversify to accomplish secondaries and avoid giving your opponent easy secondaries.

An army like Tau struggles because the sum of its parts don't mesh with scoring; taking veteran Crisis suits without restriction would help the army, sure, but they're still held back by being unable to take objectives efficiently.

 DarkHound wrote:
Gotta agree with ccs here. "Competitive" necessarily involves a shared context, and divorcing individual units from that context means there's insufficient points of comparison. More over, your question implies that spam is beneficial, but in the modern mission layouts you actually need to diversify to accomplish secondaries and avoid giving your opponent easy secondaries.

An army like Tau struggles because the sum of its parts don't mesh with scoring; taking veteran Crisis suits without restriction would help the army, sure, but they're still held back by being unable to take objectives efficiently.

I take your point regarding shared context. I suppose I was speculating that if a specific faction were given an exemption or two from the detachment restrictions ( not unlike DE) if that would make a significant impact.

Perhaps it wouldn’t, I was asking mostly out of idle curiosity to be fair rather than with a particular scenario in mind.

Edit-
Regarding spam being beneficial or not, I was wondering whether or not it would be beneficial rather than suggesting that is the case.

So if list building restrictions don’t really alter the competitiveness of a faction, are they even necessary?

Aash wrote:
I got to wondering, what makes a faction competitive or not?

Are there any factions that have competitive units but don’t have the ability to field a competitive army?

What I mean is are there cases where the faction rules and the units themselves have the potential to be competitive, but it’s not possible to make a legal army that is competitive due to army building restrictions and the like as opposed to the units and faction rules themselves being the limiting factor?

If the rule of three didn’t exist, or the detachment system don’t allow for a competitive build?

Without going for something entirely outside the realm of possibility like only HQs or something, are there any factions that are in a position where it’s close but if only this or that specific army building restriction was slightly different

Tau Empire and Genestealer Cults are made worse by army building restrictions but they still wouldn't be great if they had more freedom I don't think. Craftworlds would probably be pretty good without Ro3 since they have put up some good showings in soup, I think they just lack enough good units, but maybe they lack specific kinds of good units that only Drukhari and/or Harlequins can provide as points currently stand. 100 ObSec Scarab bases supported by 3 Chronomancers would be impossible to crack for a lot of armies.

Aash wrote:Regarding spam being beneficial or not, I was wondering whether or not it would be beneficial rather than suggesting that is the case.

So if list building restrictions don’t really alter the competitiveness of a faction, are they even necessary?

vict0988 wrote:100 ObSec Scarab bases supported by 3 Chronomancers would be impossible to crack for a lot of armies.

Basically this. There are degenerate edge cases. A few armies would have no trouble running through 100 ObSec Scarabs, but it (or a build like it) would become a gatekeeper for most factions in the game. List restrictions means there's an outer bounds for most kinds of skew lists, and ideally the designers can balance factions within those limits. The skew lists that are allowed to exist can be given specific weaknesses that are generally exploitable, rather than demand a particular army composition.

I should clarify, a spam list like the scarabs would not often win tournaments. Spam armies don't have a lot of variables, so their match-ups become pretty binary. Armies that can beat it, will. And of those, the ones with the best match-up against the rest of the field would actually go on to win tournaments. Spam lists would cull the first couple rounds of unsuspecting bad match-ups, then hit exclusively armies that can already deal with them. So I'd argue that's not "competitive" since it isn't going to win.

I was going to say Tau or thousand sons, but they have some core rules and unit issues that aren't related to not being able to field the good stuff.

I think the detachment system in 9th is flexible enough that outside Lords of War, you can field enough of a good unit.

Yeah, there are some armies that would be better if army building restrictions didn't exist, but I can only imagine that these restrictions are also holding back even MORE potent versions of armies that already are considered to be riding high on the competitive wave.

Like, if you could take an army of just Thousand Sons Daemon Princes... that'd probably be pretty good. Still not something I'd like to see though.

An army of just Ctans would be pretty disgusting.

Yes, most codex would get more competitive because without the rule of 3 or any restrictions, you could just spam the best models in the book over and over, like (as previously mentioned) all Daemon Princes, or all Hive Tyrants (anyone remember that non-sense at the start of 8th) etc. The rule of three is one of the better rules. What is needed is every faction to get their 9th edition books, that will help.

Also, one of the reasons raiders are so broken is exactly because as a transport they are not subject to the rule of 3. If Dark Eldar lists were limited to only 3 raiders (I am not suggesting that as transports and troops should be exempt from rule of 3) some of the most oppressive DE lists would be really ham strung.

I am not sure if the point of this thread was to argue to get rid of the rule of 3, but I am totally against that.

I think its more exploring "what would be the hive tyrant spam in underperforming factions".

Because you look at say Hive Tyrants now, and it would be... 225 points for wings and 4 brainleech devourers? I feel in the current standard that's kind of "meh". An army of say 9 (one without wings) would be interesting perhaps... but its hard to believe it would dominate the meta. Although it might warp it.

Because people say Tau and I'm a bit "uh... wut?" If I played on TTS I'd love to explore a 6 commander, all kroot list. But I'm not sure its breaking the meta either. I'm at a loss at what unit you'd spam which is obviously ahead of the curve.

Tyel wrote:
Because people say Tau and I'm a bit "uh... wut?" If I played on TTS I'd love to explore a 6 commander, all kroot list. But I'm not sure its breaking the meta either.

It's impossible to be sure. I used the Kroot Hound + Commander spam list when it was legal and remember it being obnoxious.