sgu97bjd:
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 14 which is below my target level of 20, and the consensus level was 88% compared to the average of 90% so overall I believe the results are not at the level of statistical significance as outlying responses will be skewing the data but hopefully it should still be interesting.
There are a number of things the data can tell us but as lots of people will I�?Tm 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�?Tm 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�?Tt 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�?Tve 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 Magma Cannon, K�?Tdaii Destroyer and Hellcannon. Perhaps some surprise though that the K�?Tdaii was only 5th highest scoring monster with the Hellcannon one place behind in 6th. The Magma cannon was the 3rd highest scoring war machine just behind the Trebuchet and the Casket of Souls. Infernal Guard being given a lower score than Hobgoblins seems very odd but they consistently scored the same or higher. Some of the choices that divided opinion most were the Dreadquake Mortar (which received scores ranging between 1 and 4), the K�?Tdaii Destroyer and the Lammasu (which got the full range of scores 1-5).
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). Only 1 army scored more than 1.00, the best score was 0.43. Chaos Dwarfs scored 0.56 which makes puts them in 8th place although there is not much separating the ones just above it. External balance is more difficult and I wouldn�?Tt read too much into it but overall Chaos Dwarf choices averaged 3.12 which puts them in 6th place (Ogres were top).
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
Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer Prophet 3.36 (91%)
Heros
Chaos Dwarf Infernal Castellan 3.43 (94%)
Chaos Dwarf Deamonsmith Sorcerer 3.36 (84%)
Bull Centaur Taur’ruk 3.21 (92%)
Hobgoblin Khan 3.00 (89%)
Character Mounts
Bale Taurus 3.21 (92%)
Great Taurus 3.15 (89%)
Giant Wolf (CD) 3.15 (93%)
Lammasu 2.62 (75%)
Core
Hobgoblin Cutthroats 2.93 (98%)
Chaos Dwarf Infernal Guard 2.64 (91%)
Special
Magma Cannon 4.50 (90%)
Deathshrieker Rocket Launcher 3.93 (84%)
Iron Daemon 2.71 (88%)
Bull Centaur Renders 2.64 (91%)
K’daii Fireborn 2.57 (94%)
Chaos Dwarf Infernal Ironsworn 1.64 (91%)
Rare
K’daii Destroyer 4.43 (80%)
Hellcannon (CD) 4.14 (86%)
Hobgoblin Wolf Raiders 2.93 (84%)
Dreadquake Mortar 2.71 (77%)
Chaos Seige Giant 2.00 (89%)
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�?Tm sure there are others out there like me that find this kind of thing fascinating.
Ben