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I've had a lot of people tell me that AdMech is not competitive. But I can never really tell why they seem uncompetitive they have some really good units.
I guess its there movement mostly and no transports. But I feel like 8th comes down to killing power so much that I just don't see how they cant be competitive.


I'm a new player and I've watched a lot of battle reports and read a lot of codecs and tactics and been watching Warhammer for a year or so then 8th edition came out. I've really liked AdMech from the start I made the plunge when I finally found a place to play a league that started at 250 points and went up 50 a week. 3 Months later no one plays the league pretty much and now and I'm looking for new people to play with.

But I'm worried I will make a bad impression by playing my army AdMech That I have a hard time telling if it's competitive or competent or casual

The list is 2000 pts of AdMech

Forge world mars

Belisarius cawl 240

2x1 tech priest enginseer 94

6x5 man vanguard squads one with an arc rifle 244

2x1 Cybernetica datasmith 88

1x5 man infiltrators with taser goads and flechette blasters 110

3x1 dragoons with taser lances 204

1x4 kastelan robots with 3 heavy Phosphor blasters 440

4x1 onager dunecrawlers with 2 Cognis heavy stubbers and a neutron laser 580

total 2000 pts I have not gotten to play with the whole list yet but it seems pretty good.






In summary, I'm not sure what makes a list casual/competitive/competent And I don't really get why so many people say AdMech is uncompetitive.

what makes a list competative is what efficiency other armies get.

Anything in the necron index would be competitive, if it was only going to be played against itself... But it has to compete with guilliman, and indirect fire guard lists, and the like.

it sucks, but the only way to weigh things against each other if all your care about is competitive is to strip them down to their stats. How much something can do for how many points.

No one in my group plays ad mech, so I can’t speak to their competitiveness.

But I have a comment on these forums. I am starting to wonder just how many people here actually get games in, versus how many are just running their mouths.

Time and time again people say things that just run counter to what I see on the table. At first I thought it was because I didn’t play tournaments, but now I’m just not sure anymore.

Maybe I’m off base. It’s just starting to seem a bit strange, why are my games so different from these other, always salty and angry, players?

 argonak wrote:
No one in my group plays ad mech, so I can’t speak to their competitiveness.

But I have a comment on these forums. I am starting to wonder just how many people here actually get games in, versus how many are just running their mouths.

Time and time again people say things that just run counter to what I see on the table. At first I thought it was because I didn’t play tournaments, but now I’m just not sure anymore.

Maybe I’m off base. It’s just starting to seem a bit strange, why are my games so different from these other, always salty and angry, players?

People with complaints tend to be more vocal than people without.

Think about the last time something in your house broke down when you needed it. That thing was a piece of crap right? Now think about how long and reliably your front doorknob has been. Do you go around talking about how great of a doorknob it is?

so far what I've gathered from 8th ed is, every single codex and army is the weakest of them all, and GW is screwing them over individually and specifically

I also Ppay Ad Mech as my primary army I have to say yours looks more competitive then mine, though I am very casual and like to build and paint variety over effectiveness.
To understand why Admech is considered underpowered in the current game you need to know that right now what really makes an army powerful are large numbers of cheap models and statagem synergy. Two thing that Ad mech generally lacks. The first really helps in creating detachments that help to create command points as well as making it easier to control the board and most of the statagem available to Ad Mech are not that good or are too situational. I only really use a handful regularly: Elimination Volley, Protector Doctrina Imperative, Machine Spirit Resurgent, and Machine Spirit's Revenge. Wrath of Mars is good but I don't use the Mars Dogma. The Ad Mech is really more of a small elite force army that has problems in the new meta. And their special ability Canticles is really not that good unless you have cawl and are mars.
The big problem is that it as one of the early codex, I think it was fourth or fifth, and made before the writers really figured everything out and unlike the sace marines or deathguard that they really made strong to sell, the Ad Mech (also Grey Knights) have been hit by codex creep.

Are the Ad Mech competitive, not really. I still like them but they struggle.

Admech aren't actually that bad at the moment. Not top tier, but not bottom of the barrel. Mid-range. We actually do better than a lot of flavors of power armor.

The problem is we are very monobuild to work effectively, and we lack some tools others have. We can't put bodies on the table the way some factions can and our mobility is tied almost entirely to stratagems without transports or good native deepstrikers (infiltrators are okay at best). Our best power unit also relies on mars to work at maximum efficiency (both for cawl and the frankly ludicrous mars stratagem to buff kastalens), which makes it hard to get all the tools you want in a single list. Plus our melee game is almost entirely tied to dragoons and maybe vanguard.

Still, turtle up with Cawl, kastalens, and onagers protected by a vanguard and dragoon screen and you are fine. In fact, you can take on most codex armies and win more often than not. It's just rather hard to make builds outside that work, with some like stygies being alright so long as you mostly face enemy shooting armies for example.

 argonak wrote:
But I have a comment on these forums. I am starting to wonder just how many people here actually get games in, versus how many are just running their mouths.

Time and time again people say things that just run counter to what I see on the table. At first I thought it was because I didn’t play tournaments, but now I’m just not sure anymore.

Maybe I’m off base. It’s just starting to seem a bit strange, why are my games so different from these other, always salty and angry, players?

Local metas gonna local. If "the" meta says multitudes of cheap, disposable infantry is the hotness, then the counter to such is going to be considered good, but if, in your area, your opponents are only putting big gribblies on the table (for whatever reason), then obviously anything designed for anti-chaff is going to be a bit lacklustre and visa versa. What's good in high end tournaments isn't usually what's played in casual or even competative/casual games and as such, some of the units that are staples are going to be less effective when the thing they counter isn't on the board.

Now, granted, this is a forum, and as such, everyone is free to spew their nonsense here as long as they don't anger the mods and I know I've got a couple of people on my ignore list due to the rage-inducing rubbish that they post that has no basis in reality to any game that even remotely resembles 40k as I know it, but assuming that they aren't blatant trolls, they're simply reporting on what works for them in their meta, regardless of how insane it seems to the rest of us. Sometimes it's also that one player is much stronger than others and as such, they will be able to make bad units work even against a higher tier opposition army. The opposite is also true in that someone who takes the latest and greatest netlist but doesn't know how to use it and just isn't very good in general won't have the same success against a great general with a finely tuned and practiced list that's full of passable but not outstanding units.

Above and beyond that, there's certain elements of playstyle that come into it too. Sometimes a unit is pretty lacklustre unless it's played in a specific way or in a specific combo with other units. If you're seeing those units but they aren't being used in the way that makes them shine, or they're missing a key element of the combo then, again, results are going to vary from what gets thrown around here. Sometimes it's as easy as an opponent pulling out all the stops to remove [unit] before they can do their thing and if they're a bit of a glass hammer, well, there's not much you can do about it, dependant on terrain and dice.

Following on from the above, my local meta has a higher number of shooting armies than melee armies. Even the player with a huge ork army tended to bring far more shooting than one might expect. For that reason, Stygies always did really well for me. However, as some players moved more towards melee focus, often melee hordes, and tyranids got their codex, I found this a lot less effective and began running the mars build tournament players use.

Of course, I'm not sure if melee hordes even are/will be the tournament meta moving forward with horrors and that one R&H HQ whose name escapes me nerfed.

I will freely admit that I'm not currently a competitive player, I have been in the past so I'll throw some $.02 in on this.

So there are basically two types of competetive players: the meta-player (who builds to compete on the meta at the time), and the non-meta player (who builds lists which may end up so far contradictory to the meta that they win just because the meta can't fight them).

I honestly gravitate more towards the latter in my play style and list building approach, but that has set me up to get smacked around by meta armies that turn out to be hard counters to the way my list is built/played. It's a risky style that can either force a shift in the meta, or just get you basically tabled a lot.

That said, all list building generally falls under the TAC approach and tries to answer the same questions, the way they do so can end up being significantly different though.

Now while I can't speak for making a competitive Ad Mech list specifically, nor can I even speak for making a competent one, I can explain what my approach to list building has always been and why I do it this way.

The first thing for me is to answer what I want to be playing a specific army for. Is it a certain model like the Blight Hauler or Exorcist tank? Is it a certain rule or piece of wargear I really like?

Once I have the answer I first look at taking whatever that is and building my list around that. To run Exorcist tanks I took Rhinos to screen them and ran a rather successful Mech Sisters army, for the Blight Hauler I've looked at Poxstars or foot slogging Plague Marine lists or running the army in Rhinos to screen the Blight Haulers during the early turns of the game.

Basically my reason for getting into the army, the center piece as it were for that army that I'm running, becomes the basis for the theme of how I build my army and compliment the strengths and protect the weaknesses of the core choice for my army.

Once that's solved it's time to answer a few questions:

How do I plan on capturing objectives?

What's my plan for melee specialist units (example: Berserkers)?

What's my plan for shooting specialist units (example: Sternguard)?

How am I going to crack armour?

How am I going to thin hordes?

Can I snipe out characters?

Will I deal with flyers or ignore them?

What auras can I employ to buff my strategy?

ECT.

As I answer these questions the wargear of the units I choose begins to fall into place and I begin to make adjustments. Sometimes this means changing things around completely (say taking a maxed out horde unit and making it into two smaller units, or trading one HQ choice for another because it has better damage potential (Smite) or has better auras (CM over CPTs).

This isn't something you do overnight though, this is something you continually tinker with, play test and refine. Unless you have perfect understanding of how your army works in relation to the other armies you face (and such knowledge can be completely invalidated by a codex or FAQ changing everything as you know it) no army will be perfect upon inception. Sometimes your combos will fall short due to a lack of appropriate redundancy (using two Librarians to cast Smite every turn instead of one) or because the role you're trying to use the unit for doesn't match what they're best at on the table (running HB Devastators into combat every game just so you can try and club things to death).

Every game is a practice in analysis of what your army did well, what it did poorly, what it could do better, and what you did well/poorly or could do better. Better to lose a hundred games of practice to perfect a list than win one game by accident and decide it's perfect from the get go.

I have played a lot of admech in my local meta. We have a good mix of marines, necrons, eldar, guard and a few chaos players. Notably not many horde players.

Aside from our 3 super heavy tank guy I probably have more pure firepower than anyone else. In half my games I table my opponent.

That being said I have started to bring a detachment of scions for deepstrike mobility because the entire army is very much point and shoot. Aside from a few units our entire strategy is sit still and shoot things with almost no objective game.

I honestly enjoy my much less competetive Raven Guard army more because it seems more interactive and I seem to have more strategic control. I tend to get sick of my admech army bc it is the same thing every game.

I have got pretty good with positioning though out of necessity.

Cawl + Duunecawlers + Robots + Bubhblewrap

More competitive than marines IMO if we are just talking codex vs codex.