Wait, I'm confused.

How many figures represent a huge army?

And how many soldiers does a figure represent?

100+ fire warriors is huge to me, i also have 2 devil fish, 2 hammer heads, 3 piranhas, 8 battle suits 12 stealth suits, a commander suit, 20 kroot with four kroot hounds and an ethereal. Also 40+ drones (DEEP STRIKE!)

I have them in a few plastic bags around here somewhere...
Edit: One of my old friends had 500+ lord of the rings orcs, now THAT was huge.

The only dread you reeeeallly need magnets on is the new Venerable and Blood Angels ones
I only have AOBR ones anyway

Okay Asklar, let me get you some figures.

In 40k we live by the What You See is What You Get (WYSWIG) rule. That means that a single model represents a single trooper, equipped with the items sculpted on it. The only exception are "swarm" models, such as Rippers, which represent a few troopers on a single base, but are otherwise treated as if they all were a single trooper.

The minimum legal size for a battle is 500 points. With such, you can field, say, thirty marines or sixty orks, if we're talking about unupgraded units. If you went full horde, you could have a whooping 120 grots in 500 points. In the same way, if you were to go with an elite army, such as Grey Knights, you'd be deploying some 15-20 guys, but each would be worth several of your opponent's troops.

A 500-point battle is generally considered a small affair, and lasts for less than an hour. 1000,1500 and 2000 are proportionally bigger. 2500 is considered by many the "limit" of vanilla 40k, since some imbalances start showing at that point. Not to mention they take a looooooong time to finish, specially if you decided to bring your 600 grots to play.

Over 3000 points, you have to use the special Apocallypse ruleset. This entail battles in an absolutely humungous scale, which can take upwards of a day to be played and require several players to keep the armies managed. A 13000 point battle recorded in the chronicles of Dakka once required 10 people to spend a week playing nonstop.

So yeah "huge" depends a lot on which army you're playing. 120 grots is small, 80 knights is crazy big.

If someone explained me this before like Areku did now things would have been easier.

My last question, which is probably the longest one: what does a point represent?

PS: Thanks for the explanation, that left everything clear.

Sorry I always forgot that 40k can be confusing to those who don't play it

A point doesn't really represent anything, but certain types of models have a different number of points cost, as Areku said 500 points is the minimum for an actual legal battle. So to make up that 500 points we look at what models we have, then we go into the rulebook for that army (a codex) and we look to see how much points they are worth.

For example in the Space Marine codex a tactical squad of marines is 90 points, and consists of 4 space marines and a space marine sergeant. You also have options to upgrade the unit though, which adds points onto your choice, such as including up to 5 more space marines which costs 16points per added space marine.

There are also options for extra weapons, some of which are free and don't add extra points, like replacing one of their boltguns with a flamethrower
And just so you know on the more expensive side of the scale you have things like a Land Raider Crusader which costs 250 points
I hope that explained that :-/

Aaahhh, now I get it.

The points are like the "funds" for your army, right?

Exactly. You and your opponent agree on a starting amount of points, and you spend them selecting the troops you'll use.

Man, this game sound so interesting.

I could be asking a lot of stuff, but I don't like to bother it so I'll just google it, and if I still have doubts or comments I'll post here.

But damn, this game sounds good.

I don't play 40k, but If I did, I know exactly what I'd use.

Space marines. Mostly tactical squads with ten guys and expensive wargear, droppods as dedicated transports (I unno if that's just available to blood angels but I'd assume they're similar rules) and rely on super teched out dreads for heavy weapons support, and get droppods for them (dreads count as ten models, the capacity of a drop pod).

Deploy nothing.

Rain fire.

I unno if there's minimums for HQs and other unit types, but if there is, I'd max out their honor guard to total the squad up to ten and get a pod as dedicated.

Wouldn't really work. (that is, if it's completly legal to deepstrike everybody)

You'd be using the deep strike to make a swift assault on your opponent somewhere near the center of the board.
But you'd have to rely on them landing when and where you want them. That's the first flaw.
The second flaw is that tac squads aren't really that good in close combat, something they would get in if you deployed them with droppods.

A better idea would be to use lightly upgraded tac squads without droppods and walk them to objectives, while using droppods/stormravens to drop death company units and dreads straight into the heart of the enemy army. Destruction follows very quickly after.
The stormraven could then be used as a heavy weapons platform to take out tanks and stuff from the sky.


My current tactic would be described as: "victory through superior firepower"
I have 2 squads of standard guardsmen walking along one side of the board, supported by a sentinel(will be three when I'm done).
While the leman russ demolisher and chimaera roll along the other side. A basilisk is positioned in some sort of cover at the rear while happily pounding the enemy with it's earthshaker cannon.

This has been quite effective so far. While the guardsmen squads where usually an easy target for anything that could put up a fight in close combat, they are now protected by the armoured sentinel's heavy flamer and buzzsaw.(str 8 attacks)

The leman russ demolisher is the most dangerous variant with it's str 10 big blasts, obliterating everything from grots to baneblades.

This model looks absolutely stunning.

Anyway. Got a tournament coming around next month and the lowest point battle will be 1750 points. Right now I have about 1100 points in total and only half of them painted.

♥♥♥♥.

Well the point wasn't exactly to win, if I wanted that, I'd just either baseline Tau or go like melee heavy orks. I play warhammer exclusively for fun. I view it sort of like Picturewars, were yes technically you could legally kick the ♥♥♥♥ out of everyone just by nitpicking but that's no fun. I'd rather send my ranged imperial guard in a suicide mass over the top death charge into some tau batteries just to see that one dude who gets like six lucky rolls in a row and starts poking it for no damage. Also I'm pretty sure you can get assault squads droppods (I unno if jumppacks are defaults, if not, I wouldn't take them. The models look odd. I'd likely steal some ork stormboyz backpacks and paint them all ultramariney and make some fluff up about them improvising.)

Just recently had a game of 40k table top
Me playing My friends custom space marine chapter (they look like IG combined with SPESS MAHNREENS)
He had the biggest ♥♥♥♥ ork army i have ever seen (not many) He had like 30 bikes and even a gargant if i killed anything important
He raped us but i killed a Madboy so thats alright i guess

Does anyone know if the old style rhino is any different in terms of model size?