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Where's the point wall
Fri, 02/12/2010 - 04:36
This just arose from a discussion of really, really big armies. To give some context, I have encountered a number of people on the web who claim to have 100K or 150K armies. Those who have seen my army, its around 50K, so these are HUGE forces.
I generally tend to assume that they are amalgamated from a variety of forces. E.g. the entire force is not ultramarines, or cadians. My reason is that this size of any one force is almost incoherently big.
When you start to think about just how few points most armies actually come to, where does it become impractical for an army to keep growing. e.g an entire marine chapter is probably only around 50K. An entire IG armored Regiment (400 tanks based on Forgeworld charts) is only about 75K. The entire titan maniple on Vraks (22) is only around 30K.
Obviously, someone can build multiple chapters, multiple regiments, etc. but these are effectively multiple armies. Where do people think the upper limit hit for how far a single force can take you is?
Fri, 02/12/2010 - 14:38
#2
For armys like Tyranids, there really is no upper limit - they are not structured per say.
I would say the same goes for any army that is not organized into Earth style regimental / battalion / division limitations. In 40K, there really is no need for such structures, as the logistics and support tail of the army is completely hidden.
So, it really boils down to how many repetitions of the same model you want to acquire.
(Agreed, a Marine Chapter is most likely 50K range, depending on how many ThunderHawks you are willing to acquire.)
As for the 150K claims - I follow the 4Chan rules for that - no photos = it never happened.
Fri, 02/12/2010 - 14:50
#3
The armies that have the most difficult time getting one force to high point values are the Imperial ones. This is because they have defined structures. You know how many models are in a complete Space Marine chapter, but how many combat units are available on an Eldar craftworld? Or on a Tau Expeditionary Force? If you want to add more units to your Space Marine collection after you've collected the official chapter organization, you'll likely have to come up with some other organization to get them from.
The next thing to consider is access to inexpensive units with high point values. Apocalypse has lowered the points of super-heavies considerably when compared to the VDR and Imperial Armour versions, but they're still the most bang for the buck.
So, optimizing both the loose structure of the army and the access to inexpensive super-heavies, I have to say that the Eldar are the easiest to come up with big armies. Phantoms and Tempests are pretty common and you can just keep adding units to your heart's desire without breaking any army composition structures.
Loss of the cult armies means that a Chaos force consisting of World Eaters and Thousand Sons is still a "Chaos Space Marine" army. Adding Chaos Daemons to the army doesn't make it not a cohesive single army. Sticking traitor guard there too only makes it closer to how the Chaos invasions of the background are described as working. A Chaos army can therefore take advantage of the Armorcast Reavers and Warhounds, plus they can use units from three different books. I don't even know how many points of Chaos I have. I usually stick with the cult army restrictions in Apocalypse games anyway.
All of the other 40k armies (Tau, Ork, Tyranid, Necron) have no limit to what they can bring without breaking their army structure. The limiting aspect is that none of them have access to a back catalog of Armorcast stuff to fill in their super-heavies.
So, to specifically answer your question, I'm going to put the single army "wall" at around 15k-20k. It's not difficult to come up with 7k worth of super heavies and a really big regular 40k army can make it to 5k points. Concentrated effort to come up with Apocalypse-only units can probably bump that up some more, but after that it really becomes a chore.
My Eldar army is at about 25k and I am hard-pressed to come up with other things to add to it. I could certainly go for another Phantom or some more super-heavy tanks, but those won't make a big enough of a contribution to make it to 30k or 40k.
I'm at 10k-15k for each of my three Chaos armies and the thought of using them all at the same time doesn't sound like fun. In my next unlimited Apocalypse battle I'm going to try to bring all of my Chaos titans but the non-Apocalypse stuff from only one cult. I don't know how many points that will be, but I'm also interested to see how it plays.
Matt
Fri, 02/12/2010 - 16:51
#4
Somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 25,000 points, depending on the availability of high point cost / low model count datasheets available for the army.
A complete first-second-third company army of Dark Angels with appropriate characters, transports, and support would ballpark around that.
But that's essentially three apocalypse sized forces jammed together in one.
It stops being fun for me around the 15,000 point level (depending on the number of superheavies involved).
One of the reasons I decided that 2010 was the year of Chaos for me is that while I have a reasonably large size ork army (10,000ish points), I really don't want to mess with dragging any more models around beyond that. I can do something around 8,000 to 10,000 in chaos currently (without titans) and I don't have to have a moving van to do it, so logistics count on where that wall is too.
Wed, 02/17/2010 - 06:34
#5
Using the current guard codex a legal army maxes at 22750 maybe a little more depending on your war gear.
so that's 6 platoons which is roughly a company
so a full strength regiment would probably have 10ish companies plus then you would need regimental command structure (are there rules for this?) which would be a few k more.
I am unable to find my second edition codex which had some force organization charts so these numbers might be off but....
even without super heavies or titans a guard regiment could be over 200k points
If you disqualify the tanks and what not that may have been assigned from a different regiment the 6 platoons alone are 16440 points.
And that is just the troop choices.
So anyway, I'd say a marine army would be the only one that could max out around 1000 troops. That is if they conform to normal organization rules.
A guard army however could be unlimited with regiments combining as they do from time to time.
It all comes down to paint in the end, if it has 3 colors it is part of your army.
You are looking at it from a Army Organizational stand point. How about some of the non-imperial forces that do not adhere to a formal org. Can you really say there is an organizational limit to a full Tyranid hive swarm or the vastness of an Ork waggh? In these instances the player desire to grow his or her army is an exact personification of the army itself; Orks want more boyz to destroy more stuff and more boyz will flock to a warboss if he has a huge mob, is powerfull, and successfull 9destroying stuff). Nids will just continue to grow as long as there is stuff to eat: people, plants, animals, fungus, eachother, etc. And let not forget the demon armies of the warp. While we haven't see a realy huge army of these, how do you wrap your hands around the vastness of souls that have been commited to the warp since the dawn of time... One such army can grow to immense size.
BK