Firstly I just wanted to thank all who responded to this. In total there were almost 350 responses across all the forums which is a great response rate. I know that the reliability of this data will be questioned because even 350 responses is a very small number for this kind of survey. I will therefore try to give an indication of how reliable I believe the data on each forum to be based on 2 things, the number of responses and the consensus agreement of those responses. I.e. if lots of people respond and they all largely agree the data should be fairly sound, if I get few responses and/or there are big discrepancies then it is less reliable. The number of responses on this forum was 20 which is about what I was hoping for, and the consensus level was 89% compared to the average of 90% so overall I believe the results are on the borderline of level of statistical significance but any outlying responses could still be skewing the data. There are a number of things the data can tell us but as lots of people will I’m sure realise there are lots of things it does not and so just before getting into the results I just want to be clear that I am not trying to measure the power level of all of the armies as this is dependent on far more things than just the power of individual units. I cannot measure the impact of synergies, tactics, comp systems, match ups, local meta etc etc. I would also be careful about drawing too many conclusions from interbook comparisons due to the fact that I have only asked players of each race to vote on their own armies. What this tends to result in is power armies downplaying some of their more powerful options due to the fact that they are not 100% guaranteed win. I’m sure there was also varying interpretations of my guidance which may have created a few odd results, an example from these results is some people rating the Dreadlord a 5 due to the stubborn pendant combination but others giving him a 2 either because they didn’t realise I wanted magic items taken into account or because they do not use this combo themselves. Disclaimers out the way and onto the results. I’ve ranked all of the choices by army book category below with scores of over 4 highlighted in green and scores of below 2 highlighted in orange. In brackets following the score is the degree of consensus among all the responses as a % so this should give an idea of the reliability of the ranking. I doubt many people will be surprised by the fact that the most powerful choices according to this poll are Slann, Salamanders and Chameleon Skinks. The Slann was actually the highest ranked choice of any option in any book and only narrowly missed out on getting a perfect score of 5. Salamanders were the 4th highest ranked overall whilst the Jungle swarm got the 2nd lowest score of all. Skinks appeared twice in the top 10 infantry with Chameleon skinks at 3 and skirmishers at 8. Lastly the Scar Vet came in as the 3rd highest scored hero choice behind the warlock engineer and firebelly. There were some options where opinion was very divided especially Skinks (although this I think is due to confusion over whether Kroxigor affect the rating and if were to do this again I would probably separate out this option), Skink Skirmishers (which got the full range of scores from 1-5), Razordons and several of the character mounts also had low consensus. One of the key things for me was measuring internal balance of the books (i.e. were there a large number of extremely powerful / weak units or were they all of a similar power level). This was scored on a scale of 0-4 with 0 being perfectly balanced and 4 being entirely composed of extremes (character mounts are excluded from this). Lizards were last by a long way with a score of 1.07 (the average was 0.63) so internal balance will hopefully be something resolved by the rumoured new book. External balance is more difficult and I wouldn’t read too much into it but overall Lizardmen choices averaged 3.06 which puts them in 11th place (Ogres were top) but with the very poor internal balance it is obviously possible to make very strong armies by ignoring some of the very low scoring options. The thread on The Warhammer Forum will have all of the inter army comparisons and will also contain links to all of the other army specific forums so you can use this to view the results of all of the other armies. http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=115820 Lords Slann 4.95 (99%) Saurus Oldblood 3.10 (90%) Heroes Saurus Scar Veteran 3.95 (91%) Skink Priest 2.90 (90%) Skink Chief 1.35 (94%) Character Mounts Cold One (Liz) 3.53 (88%) Ancient Stegadon with Engine of the Gods 3.25 (73%) Ancient Stegadon (Mount) 2.65 (79%) Stegadon (Mount) 2.40 (77%) Terradon 2.05 (89%) Carnosaur 2.00 (83%) Core Skink Skirmishers 3.85 (79%) Saurus Warriors 3.75 (88%) Skinks 2.95 (76%) Jungle Swarm 1.20 (96%) Special Chameleon Skinks 4.25 (90%) Terradon Rider 3.40 (87%) Temple Guard 2.90 (90%) Stegadon 2.63 (92%) Kroxigor 2.35 (89%) Saurus Cavalry 1.95 (86%) Rare Salamander Hunting Party 4.70 (95%) Ancient Stegadon 2.95 (93%) Razordon Hunting Pack 1.95 (81%) If anyone wants a copy of the data please PM me and I will send it over (bear with me if it takes me a few days to do this). Thanks again for your participation. I know that some people will wonder what the point is of doing this as it cannot provide definitive answers but I’m sure there are others out there like me that find this kind of thing fascinating. Ben
Thanks for your excellent work, Ben. By Lizardmen standards, Bob the Lizardman is held to be somewhat of a numbers genius (as is demonstrated here: http://www.lustria-online.com/threads/cold-blooded-probability.10479/) and he gives you three thumbs up!
Thanks for your hard work! This is really interesting, I can't wait to get some time to compare the results between armies.