Warhammer 40K: The Problem With Low Quality Troops
Let’s talk about the issues facing some of the less elite units in the game.
40K is a big sprawling game with tons of units and factions. Often you can categorize units, and sometimes whole armies, into a large grouping of horde, elite, and even super-elite. In an ideal world, all of these types of units would be balanced and viable. However, during the end of 8th Edition and into 9th elite units, in particular, have gotten some major buffs. This has seemingly shifted the balance around and less poor quality or horde units in a bit of a bind. Let’s take a look at what’s happened.
Hordes and Weight of Fire
40K has many poor quality or horde units, with several armies being primarily based on them. Within this rather broad category, you have a pretty wide range of units. Units like Grots and some Nids tend to be at the bottom, others like Guardsmen sit more in the middle, and others still, such as Ork Boyz, Eldar Guardians, and even T’au Fire Warriors in the upper range.
Ideally, these units balance out their poor quality, which normally comes in the form of weak weapons, bad BS/WS, and low toughness and armor by being cheap. This allows them to kill more elite units through sheer weight of fire, as enough bad shots can still bring down a large target. In return, they are protected by their numbers, with the more elite armies needing to bring dedicated anti-horde units to counteract their large numbers. This balance has been achieved and indeed mostly worked for a large part of 8th Edition.
Rise of Elites 
In the tail end of 8th Edition, Elite armies (and Space Marines in particular) started to get some major buffs. These started with rules like bolter discipline, allowing Marine units to get more shots at longer range. They were added along with Marine Doctrines and Shock Assault, giving Marines more attacks and AP. These combined to make Marines a more deadly army, with more attacks and more shots (we also saw some weapons, such as the Aut0-Bolt Rifle, get more shots).
In 9th, these armies have gotten more buffs, and they’ve extended out to include more factions. All Marines, classic, Primaris, and Chaos have had their wounds increased. A ton of units have gotten more attacks, as we’ve seen with the Death Guard previews. On top of that, these elite armies are getting more and better shots across the board.
Of the approximately 32 factions in 40K, some 15, or roughly half, are some variant of Marines and have been buffed by these changes. Overall they have made them more resilient and far more deadly on the offensive, able to put out more and better shots than before. At the start of 8th Edition, in the Index period, a Blood Angels Intercessors Squad would put out 10 shots at long range and get 21 attacks in combat. In 9th, similar units can not put out 30 shots at long range and easily get 41 attacks in Combat, more than doubling their damage potential. In general, these units no longer need dedicated anti-horde units or weapons to deal with large batches of enemies, and indeed the weight of fire now ends up in favor of the elite units.
Nerfing The Poor Units
On top of the buffs to elites, we’ve also seen the lower quality units get nerfed in 9th Edition. Many lower-end troops saw points increasing, with poorer quality troops such as Conscripts, Guardsmen, Cultists, and Gretchen seeing far larger percentage increases in point costs than most elite units. This was for no additional increase in usefulness or ability. Indeed new rules, such as the blast rule, actively hurt larger horde armies. Some other rules have been more mixed.
The cap on hit and wound modifiers made it so that low-quality troops won’t ever be totally prevented from hurting or hitting an enemy unit, but that also means that you are limited in how much you can buff them to make them better. Also, the change to detachments also took away a primary use of cheap/low-quality units, filling up detachments and getting you CP and access to other units. Now trying to take a bunch of cheap units might even cost you CP in the long run.
The overall effect has been that not only do you get fewer models, but they are less useful than they were before. With the massive jump of 2 wound models, going from sometimes showing up to be the norm for half the units in the game, you’ve effectively halved the offensive power horde units. A Tactical Marine only went up 2 points, but it twice as hard for a poor quality unit to kill. At the same time, the poor quality units got weaker to elite units.
What Are They Good For
I’m honestly at the point where I struggle with finding a real use for lower quality troops in 9th Edition. In the past, you really could use the weight of firepower to kill your enemies. Enough lasguns could take down Marines, but it wasn’t easy, and you needed a lot of shots. Now in a stroke, GW has doubled the number of lasguns shots I need against a huge number of enemies, while points jumps are giving me fewer shots overall. Nor can I count on just having enough models that the enemy can’t kill them all.
The sheer number of shots or attack Marine and now CSM armies can put out means poor quality units will get killed. Sure low quality and horde units have good decent board control and can camp objectives, but it doesn’t really matter when you’re losing units at a lighting fast pace and giving up secondary objectives at the same time. You’re average Marine unit these days can pretty easily kill one or more enemy units a turn, while the same is rarely true of lower quality units.
We can see these issues reflected in the meta as well. The 9th Edition meta has skewed heavily towards elite and hyper elite armies, which relatively few horde armies or armies based on poor quality troops making it into the top 4s of the limited number of events. In 9th edition, as far as I know, no T’au, Astra Militarum, or Craftworld Eldar armies (all of which can count as having “poor” quality troops) have made it to the top 4 in an event. While Nids, GSC, and Orks have had better successes, they are still limited and tend not to be taking the poorer quality troops as much, with Orks boys being the most notable exception (though we might debate if they are poor quality). Overall it is pretty clear that something needs to be done to make these units and several armies relevant again. The question is, what.
Let us know how you feel about these kinds of units down in the comments!
