The 11th edition of Warhammer 40,000 is basically here now and I’m unlikely to fit in any more games of 10th, so this seemed like a good time to look back over all the games I’ve played, pull together the stats, reflect on my experience on different game modes and see whether there’s any useful conclusions we can draw from any of it.
In total I’ve played 55 games of Warhammer 40,000 10th edition, every one of which has had a battle report on this blog (almost – I still have three more to write up).
The Stats
I was curious to know both my overall win-rate and how it broke down amongst the various armies I play:
| Playing As | Games | Win | Loss | Draw | Win Rate |
| Necrons | 15 | 10 | 4 | 1 | 66.67% |
| Chaos Space Marines | 4 | 2 | 2 | 50.00% | |
| Tyranids | 9 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 66.67% |
| Orks | 14 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 57.14% |
| Space Marines | 13 | 7 | 5 | 1 | 53.85% |
| TOTAL | 55 | 33 | 16 | 6 | 60.00% |
I’m pretty happy with my overall >50% win rate, although it’s perhaps concerning that I seem to be getting worse rather than better over time:
I think the primary reason for this is largely that when I was a beginner I was mainly playing against other beginners (or, sometimes, more experienced players who didn’t want to go all-out on somebody relatively inexperienced). A decent grasp on the basic rules and perhaps some residual instinctive tactical awareness from the dim distant past of 2nd edition netted me a good streak of initial wins. Nowadays I’m playing more experienced people more often.
Another potential reason for the drop is that playing multiple armies is both a blessing and a curse – I’m probably better playing against armies I also play, but the flipside is that I don’t get as good playing that faction as I would if I just stuck with one army for all 55 games. When I switch between armies it can take me a little while to remember how best to play them.
But, still a 60% win rate is something I’m pretty happy with and I think a lot of the credit for that goes to this website. Writing up battle reports after every game helps solidify the lessons learned during that game and gives me something to look back on next time I’m going to be facing a similar circumstance. Especially in the early days I think it helped me stop making mistakes that I otherwise might have made over and over again.
Factions
Necrons and Tyranids are the armies I most enjoy playing on the tabletop and they also (coincidentally) seem to be the two armies I’m best at playing.
Neither of these are particularly high-damage factions, which is a positive so far as I’m concerned. I have fielded horrible super-damage combos in the armies that allow them (Hellblasters in SM, Chosen in CSM) but it isn’t my preferred play style. This is partly because I’d rather play the game at the table rather than at home, cackling evilly over a spreadsheet. It’s also partly because wiping their best unit in one activation can create a feels-bad moment for the person on the receiving end, and I hold the strange opinion that playing a game with somebody ought to be enjoyable for both of you.
I prefer the style of play that lets me win by out-maneuvering or out-scoring my opponent rather than just out-killing them. It is to the game’s credit that these approaches are at least partially viable, though I’d personally like it if they dialled down the killiness a bit more.
Tyranids are probably my favourite army for this reason; fun to play and fun to play against. Each of their units is adapted towards a specific battlefield role which makes them fairly straightforward to play, they have a range of useful utility units, big stompy monsters and fast little bugs which gives you a good multifunctional toolkit. They have suffered a bit in 10th by being the only codex GW released before they forgot they were trying to make 10th less killy, so they don’t do well on raw damage, but I’d argue this isn’t so much a problem with Tyranids as a problem with every other army in the game. Tyranids are where damage levels ought to be – most games I have with them have gone the distance and remained entertaining all the way through, mainly because they don’t just wipe the board and leave the rest of the game a tedious foregone conclusion.
The main problem with them is that they have basically no lore and no real possibility for individual characters or interesting POVs, which makes them problematic to play in narrative campaigns.
Necrons come in second place since, although they’re great to play, and I personally enjoy playing against them as well, I know a lot of people hate facing them. I get why – it’s annoying to kill something and then have it keep popping back up. I think the important thing to understand about Necrons is that they’re the Zelda Puzzle Boss of Warhammer factions. If you put the right weapon into the right targets in the right order you can find the metaphorical flashing weak spot and take them apart quite easily. I find that puzzle really entertaining. But, if you’re not familiar enough with their rules and you play like you would vs any other army, it’s going to be a frustrating experience.
I make a point of explaining this to opponents before a game and I don’t think I can really be held responsible that none of the dumb idiots actually take it on board. But, it’s probably fair to acknowledge that my win rate with Necrons is less due to me being particularly skilled playing the faction and more due to most people being particularly unskilled playing against the faction.
Lore-wise, they fucking rule.
Orks are always good fun to face on the tabletop, and they’re sort-of fun to play as, buuut… in both lore and gameplay terms they feel very one-note and get a bit dull after a while.
Their main problem is that 40k as a system is fundamentally incapable of supporting their rules. The Waaagh army rule gives them a rigidly-defined ‘go turn’ and means a lot of Ork units are effectively one-shot guided missiles. As an Ork player, most games boil down to whether you can do enough damage in that one turn to swing the game your way. But, whether you do or not, the other four turns, especially after the Waaagh turn, are dull as a rusty spoon. They should feel like a rampaging party mob, but instead 4/5th of each game is either set-up or mop-up.
Meanwhile, Ork shooting is perpetually FUBAR from a balance point of view, being built as it is around hitting on 5+. This means that any + or – to hit, or critical hit effect like Sustained or Lethal Hits, is usually an effective +-50% damage output. GW cannot balance this – they simply do not have the resolution within the system to do so. Consequently Ork shooting has swung back and forth throughout 10th edition between being the most overpowered and underpowered thing in the game.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest 11th will fix this.
Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines are fine, I guess.
They have a much greater variety of units and therefore playstyles than the other armies so they’re harder to generalise about. They don’t really play the way I thought they would, however. In lore they are one-man-army walking tanks; on the tabletop a basic marine might as well be made of toilet paper they die so easily. Having 2 wounds each now doesn’t really help since there’s enough 2-damage weaponry available to counter it, and everybody specs into this because fighting space marines is so common. They sell a power fantasy that they fail to deliver on on the tabletop, and there’s not – to me – much interesting to them outside of that. They do the character-unit-mega-damage-combo thing well, but as mentioned above that doesn’t particularly appeal.
They are also quite tedious as POV characters, and after trying to write interesting narrative for them I have a newfound respect for Black Library authors.
My CSM army fizzled out largely from a combination of my own bad ideas. Doing Non-Metallic-Metal trim on a whole army of chaos marines? Bad idea. Starting an army and doing a whole bunch of painstaking conversions to get the good weapon options just before the codex came out and removed those options? Bad idea. Transporting models covered in thin spikey bits in a foam transport case? Bad idea.
I might return to the army at some point and build it out to 2000 points but it feels like a lot of work right now to get them back on the table in a form I would be happy with.
Game Modes
(or, how I learned to stop worrying and hate Crusade)
| Mode | Games | Win | Loss | Draw | Win Rate |
| Chapter Approved | 10 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 70.00% |
| Crusade | 37 | 23 | 9 | 5 | 62.16% |
| Boarding Actions | 8 | 5 | 3 | 62.50% | |
| Misc (Homebrew) | 3 | 1 | 2 | 33.33% |
I’m mainly a ‘narrative’ player so, it makes sense that the narrative game mode, Crusade, is where I’ve played most games. It’s also a little dispiriting, however, because Crusade is kinda… bad.
Indeed, having played 37 games of it I can say with some confidence: Crusade is absolute fucking dogshit.
Why have I played 37 games of something I think is dogshit? That’s an excellent question that I should probably explore with some manner of therapist, but the short answer is that I like everything around Crusade; I love the community of weirdos that I play with, I like the shared campaign narrative that we build together and that forms a connecting thread between games. I like creative writing! I’m also not immune to the Number Goes Up dopamine hit of units gaining XP and abilities. But Crusade as a ruleset and game mode is complete garbage – low-effort, clearly never proof-read or thought through, wildly unbalanced, stuffed with poorly written and often completely nonsensical rules; abstract, boring and unfair missions; a huge amount of admin and extra bumf that makes games take twice as long and worst of all, in my experience, it doesn’t actually do anything to support or contribute to a narrative experience. All the fun I have with Crusade is in spite of rather than because of the actual rules.
So, I’m encouraged that 11th seems to have done away with it and replaced it with a new card-based system. We’ll see how well this new system actually works in practice, and I hope it won’t cause the community that built up around Crusade to disperse, but at least GW have recognised that the system needed an overhaul.
Meanwhile, Boarding Actions is the best game mode and I hope they continue to support it in 11th.
Player Counts
| Players | Win | Loss | Draw | Win Rate |
| 1v1 | 27 | 9 | 3 | 69.23% |
| 2v2 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 42.86% |
| 2v1 | 2 | 1 | 0.00% | |
| 1v1v1 | 1 | 100.00% | ||
| 3v3 | 1 | 100.00% | ||
| 3v2 | 1 | 0.00% | ||
| 2+vX Overall | 5 | 5 | 3 | 38.46% |
Now, look, it would be easy for me to point to the disparity between the 1v1 results and the multiplayer results and say simply that I’m great and whoever I was partnered with was obviously letting the side down. However, I think that was rarely if ever the case and I need to take my own fair share of responsibility.
By that, I of course mean; blame the game itself. While I enjoy the social experience of getting a bunch of people around one table, 40k as a system was not designed to accommodate this, and it shows. Even the ‘official’ White Dwarf multiplayer rules are so awful they’re almost Crusade rules. There’s a lot of downtime where you’re not doing much – a problem even in 1v1 games, but greatly exacerbated with more players. I think my real problem in multiplayer games is that I get disengaged and impatient, lose focus and start doing silly things. So, that’s sorta on me (but really GWs fault, obviously).
Despite multiplayer team games not really being something the game accommodates or is designed for, in practice it seems like a very popular way to play, and it would be nice if GW supported it with some better official rules.
Final Thoughts
My summary review of 10th edition is that it’s a good game, but fragile. There’s a narrow set of ideal conditions where the game really sings, but move too far outside that and it becomes a bit of a slog. Piling extra stuff on top like crusade rules, 2v2s and some army/detachment rules bend the game to breaking point.
I’m looking forward to 11th, but the rules changes seem like something of a mixed bag; making some definite improvements but also doubling-down on some things I enjoy less and not really addressing any of the more fundamental rough edges. I will reserve full judgement for when I’ve actually played a few games, however.
Now that I’ve conducted an extremely time consuming and expensive experiment to work out which armies I actually like playing I plan to focus a bit more on those ones during 11th – Tyranids and Necrons primarily.
I absolutely will not start any new armies. Except for maybe Genestealer Cults… Or Guard… Or maybe Votann…
Victory Pointless 
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