Remember that crazy math post a while back by Nikephoros? Hopefully you do now. Anyway, over the past couple of weeks Nikephoros has been looking at lists which did poorly at the NOVA open (0-4). This gives us a great basis for comparison against the good lists (4-0) and there are some obvious conclusions we can draw.
First here are the links to each army:
Tyranids
Chaos
Chaos
We're still waiting on the fourth 0-4 army but we can already see a trend. Before we look at the numbers let's look at the overall army lists and what we think of them.
Tyranids
The Tyranid list actually looks alright. T-Fexes, good gaunt support with a Tervigon and a nice buffy HQ which can support the army and deal with things in combat. But uh...where are the Hive Guard? Or any sort of shooting Elite. Dropping a Tyrant Guard and a Trygon would have done worlds of wonder for this list and we can see the impact the lack of any Elites has in the metrics.
The list has decent shooting for Tyranids against infantry but eh close combat ability which combined hurts the list. How do you kill infantry reliably? However, the ability to deal with mech, even factoring in the effect five MCs has in combat, is pretty low. Compare the 37 DRPG to 70-80+ of other lists and you see the impact of no Hive Guard. The DLRPG is low as expected, no meltaguns does that but it's the low ability to deal with normal mech that really hurts this list.
Chaos List 1
We have an overpriced and do nothing HQ, three way overpriced Troops which have no ability to deal with tanks and three Land Raiders who don't have good combat units in them, no power of the machine spirit, no MM and are basic Land Raiders. Oh and a Daemon Prince. There are very few units on the table, minimal survivability outsider of AV14 and minimal ability to kill an enemy en mass. Let's look at the metrics...
Pretty poor across the board. The ability to kill Marines from shooting is high which one would expect - 30 rapid firing AP3 bolters will do that but the ability to kill Marines in combat is very low and the ability to deal with AV14 is nearly non-existent. Even the ability to deal with light mech/Rhinos is pretty poor, even worse than the Tyranid list above at 27.03 and that all comes from the Land Raiders (tiny bit from the Daemon Prince). If you can deal with the Land Raiders (multiple meltas? no problem) this list has nearly no anti-tank ability, no combat ability and is great at shooting down Marines in the open. Not a recipe for success.
Chaos List 2
Better than the previous list with a decent HQ in Kharn and heavy support which is going to actually support the army but the Troops and Elites leave something to be desired. Chaos Terminators are meh and putting them in a Land Raider (which is also meh) just makes them more expensive. Sure they'll kill some light units but they don't have the bodies, survivability or attacks to really scare a lot of units at once. Add in a Dread with no shooting and small Troop squads which are combat based and we again have the problem of dealing with mech at range. Let's see what the numbers say.
Pretty much the same. Based on the numbers this is the best list of the lot so far and we can thank the three Oblits for this. Not only do they provide over half of the ranged anti-infantry but 1/5th of the anti-mech at range. Who said Oblits aren't key to a decent CSM list? Unfortunately that's where the good news stops. The list has very little shooting power in ability to deal with infantry or tanks outside of the Oblits and most of the anti-tank comes from Kharn himself. Whilst the DRPG of 45 is up there, considering where most of it is coming from (3 Oblits + Kharn in combat) it's still pretty weak in comparison to the 4-0 lists and has severe limitations.
Conclusion
From this we can see there is a definite difference between the proposed good lists that went 4-0 at NOVA and the bad lists which went 0-4 at NOVA and this difference didn't always revolve around the ability to deal with Rhinos. It's important to not take the numbers at face value as well. The Numbers tell us the 2nd Chaos list is the best of the bunch but I'd rather face it than the Tyranid list. Whilst the Tyranid list has less ability in terms of anti-mech, the list itself is more balanced and the simple addition of three units of Hive Guard would go a long way to making it competitive in both tabletop and number terms.
What this also tells us is Nike's system does have some application. You may still need to use your brain and apply what you know about 40k to extract the most information possible but there do seem to be obvious differences between bad and good lists. Is there a difference between the really good lists and just good lists? I'd hazard a guess at no. We might see higher stats for the really good lists but I doubt the difference would be significant. We'll see though ^^.
