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[i] Hey all, Hope your having a good day, i have quite a few friends who are in and or getting into 40k and I am heavily considering getting into it. To be honest I don’t know much except the basics and would love to “specialise” or learn more about a specific faction or hopefully my army. Now this may sound bad - but I would like to pick my army against what they have. Ie counter them…. Now some of you may disagree with this but inevitably I will pick what I think looks cool and has cool more but I am a naturally competitive person and would like help narrowing down what to play. Any advice would be very helpful and would mean a lot. The armies my friend have that I know are Astra Militarum, Ultramarines and Cult Mechanicus

Lot of shooting and lots of stuff that dies to anti troop. You could try to out shoot them with something like Tau or go heavy armor and see how much anti-tank they have. Of course, they can make similar choices so it kind of depends on what they play.

Well, pretty much any faction can play effectively against what you know your friends have.

My recommendation is to go onto GWs site, browse through each faction, and make a list of all the models in each that you like the look of.
Whichever faction has the longest list? Build that.

You can also read all the rules/stats for most armies on the community portion of the site under the downloads section (except for SM, Tyranids, Admech, & Necrons).