How to Guide:
Building an Army List - Balanced

Over the past two weeks I have talked about slowly getting into wargaming hobby. I’ve talked about figuring out what kind of player you are, what you want to get from the hobby, and finally what kind of army list you should build. Today I am going to write my last introductory piece, before I will get into more game and army specific tactics and tendencies. For now though what follow bellows is my attempt to guide you into building the most versatile, but also the most difficult to create army list out there; the balanced list.

A balanced army list is what most players attempt to make. The idea of it is that you have the flexibility to defend against whatever else your opponent may throw at it, while still having the ability to punch back effectively. Every army in every game has the chance to have a balanced force. At its most basic core, when someone makes a balanced list the player should be able to say, “With the selected units, I will be able to fight against Heavy Armor Tanks, Light Armor Tanks, infantry, and everything else they might throw my way.”

It’s a great ideal to aim for when constructing your army and figuring out what models you need to buy and paint to accomplish your chosen strategy. The difficulty of this takes on many different forms. First and foremost, it’s just really hard to find that balance just by reading your army’s rule set or codex. You need to actually go out and play some games, because what seems like a solid take on all comers kind of army, can sometimes be exploited and flawed. Factors that can live into this are the survivability of certain units, point costs of certain units.

Point costs are really the biggest hurdle to overcome. While every army can have a balanced list, they don’t all accomplish this at the same point value. So while a Tyranid force can accomplish a balanced army list at 1500 – 1750 points, the Blood Angels may need 2000 points to become balanced and take on all comers. These are just random examples, not concrete fact. So please all of you new Blood Angels players, stop e-mailing me.