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WhAt in your opinion is the easiest and the hardest armies to master or play for new and experienced players.


Hardest eldar in my opinion so many moving parts

Easiest most marine versions excluding deathwatch.

grey knights are a very easy army to play with. no tricks, no special combos that require multiple units to watch. number of units and actual unit choice is also small, so it is easier to learn and try them all out as they share the look.

I'll agree with you but custodes are even easier then knights I think.

Dark Eldar used to be hard to master but still...pretty good. Now they're just really good.

Competitively Genestealer Cults might be the hardest to master, but they can be truly terrifying in the hands of a skilled player. The army has a lot of moving parts and so is not for beginners, as you will be punished for making mistakes since the units are so fragile.

As for what's easy, I think Space Marines. Their units are more generalists and pretty well-rounded between offense and defense. They are sometimes hard to win with currently, but that is mainly because of balance issues. They aren't too hard to learn to play.

Easiest? Imperial Knights. You can have an army of 5 models on the table. Makes it really easy to keep track of everything.

Hardest? Probably Genestealer Cult or Drukhari. LOTS of little rules to keep track of, and they encourage you to have multiple detachments, each with their own abilities.

I would have thought the easiest would be world eaters. You judt sort of run at the enemy.

*Easiest does not mean best*

I’d say Marines are the hardest to master, as they play less to their own strengths as they do to the weakness of your opponent. So you have to learn your own strength / weakness and then learn how to leverage that against your opponent’s strength / weakness. The fulcrum is always changing depending on the opponent.

IG and Tau are always going to try to outshoot you. Their tactics may change slightly depending on the opponent, but not nearly so much as generalist marines.

Easiest is probably Knights, for reasons outlined above.

Karol wrote:
grey knights are a very easy army to play with. no tricks, no special combos that require multiple units to watch. number of units and actual unit choice is also small, so it is easier to learn and try them all out as they share the look.

Hey, congratulations on your 1st non-negative GK post!

...which is pretty much not true at all.

GK are no way a easy army to play at the moment. You have squichy elite units, you have important decisions wich psi powers you take and when to cast, you have few CP, and every use is important. You have to decide what to deepstrike and when, and you have very few units overall to keep objectives.

All in all, Playing GK is a lot harder that playing yout standard gunline shooting army or your normal "rush with everything forward" melee list.

There are absolutly no decisions to make. Heed goes on the NDK, gate gets cast, if something is coming out of deep strike and there is more then 5 SB in it you use the blessed ammo.

There is 1 warlord trait worth taking, and you always take it on the NDK. Draigo always drops with a unit of more then 5 SB to maximise the use of blessed ammo. You don't have to worry about relics, not even because they are bad or anything. It is just that the HQ are NDK and draigo, and those can't take them.

The army more or less plays itself. There are no tough decisions how to split heavy weapon fire, because there is no heavy weapon fire. Psychic powers are few, and most units are just casting baby smite . Stratagem are very simple and practicaly tell you when to use. Them like when your character dies etc there is no overlap combos like BAs have, there is no counter stratagams worth using. They have no trick units, no resurection, unit spliting, only buffed model is going to be the one targeted by heed.

Even knight and custodes armies, who end up with fewer models have more decisions to make. Both pre and mid game. With a ravellan for example it is important what to shot at turn one. Target priority for a BA smash cpt is important too. With GK there are no kill what ever you target units, so you target only the stuff you know you can kill or grind down. A whole army of GK can shot at a castellan and not kill it, for example. They also lack, good or bad as it maybe, any buffs to movment. Which means all their melee upgrades included in their profiles are much harder to use.

It really depends on what your describing by hard to play and easiest.

In terms of rules all of thr core rules without lots of special rules as easiest to play vanilla marines. But they arn't exactlly a easy army to get good results or even good games out of as you need to maximise the potential of the army to make it close.

If you mean small model count, knights & custodes, however they require you being able to control the game state and map and execute a game plan across multiple turns anticipating your opponents actions otherwise 1/5 of more of your army is just chilling out on an objective for 4 turns and you'll loose.

For actually requiring minimum skill and game knowledge, Astra Militarum, it's hard to loose when you have a model advantage and almost any unit is good enough for causal games.

There is no easiest or hardest IMO.

Every game is going to be different. And every army has its strengths and weaknesses.
One day your army will be nigh ustoppable in a game, and the next it will be like they're made of plastic.

The most important thing is learning what works for you. There's no point slogging away at building a devilishly strong army if you don't actually like the army itself. Some people can't stand Marines, others can't abide Eldar.

 Argive wrote:
I would have thought the easiest would be world eaters. You judt sort of run at the enemy.

*Easiest does not mean best*

How about a genestealer horde then? Lightning fast, so movement is easier, and rending claws means you have more freedom to go after heavier targets. Broodlords make morale a non issue.

Deathguard
they're so resilient and its a newish codex so relatively few choices and the optimal ones really stand out.

Soup in Nurgle for extra lolz

Hardest Harlies and easiest UM Marines.

The easiest army to play will always be one that has a single, fixed gameplan, that it executes no matter what.

Pure meat-slapping melee, or pure "OK I've deployed I'm done moving miniatures" gunline are pretty much the ultimate examples of this.

The hardest would be a mobile, non-durable army with expensive units.

I'd rank Genestealer Cult, Harlequins, Blood Angels, and Eldar as some of the more difficult armies.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I’d say Marines are the hardest to master, as they play less to their own strengths as they do to the weakness of your opponent. So you have to learn your own strength / weakness and then learn how to leverage that against your opponent’s strength / weakness. The fulcrum is always changing depending on the opponent.

IG and Tau are always going to try to outshoot you. Their tactics may change slightly depending on the opponent, but not nearly so much as generalist marines.

Easiest is probably Knights, for reasons outlined above.

This is quite an interesting take for me, I can see how if you're the middle of the road army you do have to give a lot more thought to what your opponent is weak against and how you will exploit that, rather than just identifying and maximising your own armies strengths.

Karol wrote:
There are absolutly no decisions to make. Heed goes on the NDK, gate gets cast, if something is coming out of deep strike and there is more then 5 SB in it you use the blessed ammo.

There is 1 warlord trait worth taking, and you always take it on the NDK. Draigo always drops with a unit of more then 5 SB to maximise the use of blessed ammo. You don't have to worry about relics, not even because they are bad or anything. It is just that the HQ are NDK and draigo, and those can't take them.

The army more or less plays itself. There are no tough decisions how to split heavy weapon fire, because there is no heavy weapon fire. Psychic powers are few, and most units are just casting baby smite . Stratagem are very simple and practicaly tell you when to use. Them like when your character dies etc there is no overlap combos like BAs have, there is no counter stratagams worth using. They have no trick units, no resurection, unit spliting, only buffed model is going to be the one targeted by heed.

Even knight and custodes armies, who end up with fewer models have more decisions to make. Both pre and mid game. With a ravellan for example it is important what to shot at turn one. Target priority for a BA smash cpt is important too. With GK there are no kill what ever you target units, so you target only the stuff you know you can kill or grind down. A whole army of GK can shot at a castellan and not kill it, for example. They also lack, good or bad as it maybe, any buffs to movment. Which means all their melee upgrades included in their profiles are much harder to use.

Dude, you stated multiple times in this forum that you only play GK with a very limited collection. Maybe your limited succes with GK comes from your attidude that GK "play themself" and have "no tricks", because that is simply not true at all. Just because you only have 2000points of one list and nothing else, does not mean these choices do not exist.

Dont get me wrong, we agree on the viability of GK pretty much,they are very lackluster, but the notion they are an easy army that play themself ist just ridicolously wrong.

Most difficult.
GSC. Tons of tricks but super squishy. Eldar as a close second but they have more defensive tricks to keep their frail army alive, compared to GSC.

Easiest.
Knights or Custodes. Few models, simple rules. Point and click.

stormcraft 773456 10398289 wrote:

Dude, you stated multiple times in this forum that you only play GK with a very limited collection. Maybe your limited succes with GK comes from your attidude that GK "play themself" and have "no tricks", because that is simply not true at all. Just because you only have 2000points of one list and nothing else, does not mean these choices do not exist.

Dont get me wrong, we agree on the viability of GK pretty much,they are very lackluster, but the notion they are an easy army that play themself ist just ridicolously wrong.

I wasn't basing my opinion on my own play expiriance, that would be mighty skewed. Stuff like number of psychic powers possibly casts, no over laping auras or stratagems, no usable relics, one warlord trait etc are observations other people made, smarter then me and with more play expiriance. GK are a non option army, the fewer options to take you have the easier something is. That is why something like wrestling or jiu jitsu are more complicated then hand slapping. Also the end out come of how the final army performs on the table, was not being put in question her. The question was what is easiest , and easy is smaller number of options and actions to take. That is why I gave an example why something like a mono knight or custodes army, could be a bit more complicated to play then GK. And I am assuming here we are talking about mono armies, because if we don't, then GK don't really have a good place in the easy or hard to play discussion. As they don't bring anything other armies can't bring with more options, and there for more compication in game play, which leads to more decisions and in the end harder game play.

To use a real army example. A IG+castellan match up vs eldar is a tricky one, for both sides. For GK specially if they are mono the match ups are easy, in that there are no suprises, save for some dice skew. But if we were account for that, then the army hardest to play is the one, whose opponent rolls nothing but +5 on his invs, hits and wound rolls.

I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade but low model count armies might be difficult with the whole area of denial thing. It can take a skilled player to realise these areas so you don't get people deepstriking behind you.

Just because an army wins a lot doesn't mean its an easy army. Ynnari is meant to be quite difficult to play.

I think it's important to point out that it's not just mastering an army, you have to understand the rules and victory conditions of the game/mission. Learning how to claim objectives and how to be tactical in deciding which victory points to pursue is as important as mastering an army if you're trying to win games.

Another consideration is who you're playing against most of the time. The number of different armies you're going to be playingg against most of the time probably isn't huge. How many different armies does your local shop have and how many games can you get in against them in a given year? Considering who you're facing, the easiest army to master might be one that counters what you see most.

I really disagree with anyone saying Custodes, Knights, GK or Marines being "easiest" to master/play

Easiest to collect and paint, sure. But due to their low model count, every action matters.
You really need to know the main rules, their rules AND your opponent's rules to be able to be successful with those armies.
You have to be able to anticipate threats and deal with them 1-2 turns ahead of time. If you do not, it becomes too easy for a skilled opponent, or even just a particular match-up to run over your list.
Every lost model represents a significant lose in power.

It may be easy to pick up and get the gist of those armies, but to truly MASTER them in most situations can be hard because they are not as flexible as you need them to be.

This is why Eldar have been consistently good edition to edition. They may not be that easy to learn initially because they contradict so many core rules, but once you get their quirks down and spam the current editions "it" units, Eldar have an emense amount of flexibility and can be "mastered" fairly easily.

-

After CA and beta bolter, I'm gonna say BA are harder to play than GK. Not a popular opinion, but BA are really, really rough.

Deathwing are the hardest army to play in 40k bar none, they pretty much have always been 40k on hard mode.

Okay, I can't argue with that.

Hardest to win with? Corsairs.

CA made it *substantially* easier, though.

What is the corsairs gimmick?

Eldar (now craftworlds) in 4th and 5th used to be a very hard army. those arguing for it after 6th are just kidding themselves. In 6th and 7th they were one of the easiest. In 8th they are less forgiving than Marines with mistakes, but are in the middle of the pack for difficulty.

As for most difficult armies probably Harlies for overall and hardest to play well I am thinking genesteeler cults but need more evaluation to make that call.

easiest I would say Imperial guard mono dex and Tau. set up your tiers of bubble wrap and just shoot the opponent of the table. If soup is an option here throw in Guard with Castellan and you pretty much can autowin against a lot of armies unless you make some huge mistakes.