Let’s face it, this is an expensive hobby. The amount of money a person will willingly fork over for a few ounces of molded plastic or pot metal is staggering, for new players especially.
Inevitably, the sticker shock starts to wear off and before long you don’t see anything wrong in plunking down $50+ for a few sprues worth of army men, and after that it’s not long before you’re taking out a second mortgage to score your next hit of the “plastic crack.”
But it’s not just a matter of which units are the most and least expensive — any nerd in their right mind would be willing to pay more for a squad of Terminators than a squad of Grots. You have to balance the units cost in real money with their effectiveness. And luckily, there’s at least a somewhat agreed-upon mechanism for roughly measuring a unit’s effectiveness: its points cost.
The result is a metric called points per dollar, or ppd, and it’s fairly easy to calculate. Simply take the points cost of a model, and divide by the cost in dollars of buying that model.
For example, a Chaos Plague Marine is 23 pts, and a box of seven runs for $35, or $7 apiece, so a Plague Marine is 3.29 ppd (23pts / $7). That means that for one dollar, you’re paying for roughly 3.29 points, so a 1000-pt army of nothing but Plague Marines would cost you roughly $303.
Now, before you run to grab your slide rules and graph paper, you should know that I already compiled the points per dollar of every unit in Warhammer 40,000. Now this is a pretty big mountain of data, with a lot of potentially interesting findings lurking within, but the first thing I knew I wanted to find out was, which units have the highest (best) ppd, and which units have the lowest (worst)? Well, here they are:
The Winners: Highest Points per Dollar
- Space Marines Terminator Chaplain – 8.67 ppd
- Chaos Khorne Berzerker – 8.40 ppd
- Space Marines Terminator Captain – 8.24 ppd
- WH/DH Callidus Assassin – 8.00 ppd
- Chaos Sorcerer – 7.55 ppd
The Losers: Lowest Points per Dollar
- Tyranid Gargoyle – 0.73 ppd
- Imperial Guard Rough Rider – 0.83 ppd
- Tau Kroot Hound – 0.91 ppd
- Eldar Support Weapon Battery (Shadow Weaver) – 0.91 ppd
- Space Marines Razorback – 1.14 ppd
As you can see, Tyranid Gargoyles are the absolute worst investment as far as turning your allowance into nerd gold, followed closely by Rough Riders, Kroot Hounds, and the rest.
The best choices are the gorgeous Terminator Chaplain model and the ubiquitous Berzerkers, which are a steal at 12 for $30.
Well that’s all well and good, but let’s make it simple: if ppd is all you’re interested in, what army should you play? Obviously the ROI for Troops choices is pretty important here. So let’s check out some of the best Troops choices:
Top 10 Best Troops Choices by ppd
- Khorne Berzerkers (Chaos Space Marines)
- Bloodletters of Khorne (Chaos Daemons)
- Daemonettes of Slaanesh (Chaos Daemons)
- Necron Warriors (Necrons)
- Thousand Sons (Chaos Space Marines)
- Plague Marines (Chaos Space Marines)
- Tactical Marines (Space Marines)
- Hormagaunts (Tyranids)
- Noise Marines (Chaos Space Marines)
- Chaos Space Marines (Chaos Space Marines)
The winners are pretty apparent here — all 5 Troops choices available to Chaos Space Marines are in the top ten!
But Troops aren’t the whole story either. I won’t bore you with the details (in case you want them, in which case leave a comment), but here are some highlights:
- 7 of the top 10 highest ppd HQ models are Space Marines
- 4 of the top 10 highest ppd Heavy Support choices are Imperial Guard vehicles (all Leman Russ variants)
- All five Assassin types are in the top 7 highest ppd Elites choices
- The Razorback, Rhino (Loyalist and Chaos), and Drop Pod are the three lowest ppd Transport options
Does this mean you should always take a Terminator Chaplain, and never ever take Gargoyles? Well, only if your wallet is your only concern. But that’s never the whole story. Lest we forget the first rule of Mathhammer: while it is a useful tool in estimating things, it should never be considered in a vacuum. The second you roll the dice — or in this case, pull out the checkbook — all the statistics in the world go straight out the window.
A note on methodology: When at all possible I considered the lowest-points-cost option with no upgrades of any kind, against the lowest-dollars-cost model, from games-workshop.com. Army deals and Assault on Black Reach were not considered, nor were any discounts. Army list choices that didn’t have models were not considered, nor were Special Characters (they might end up in their own post). Units like Havocs and Devastators that are just regular Marines with upgrades were not considered. Seriously, this is an estimation of the cost-effectiveness of a unit, and is not meant to be scientific in any way. If you have any questions, please leave a comment telling me I’m stupid or something.
