This is what makes 10th exhausting to me

[brother_b]

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/kkqyzq5d/warhammer-40000-world-champions-tactical-insights-on-new-adeptus-mechanicus-units/
 

My first real 2000 point army was Admech which I took to the LVO in 2023. I had a great time and enjoyed playing the army. I still have kits to build and was thoroughly enthusiastic about continuing to expand the force. I even considered getting the stilt dude as he was so goofy it was a perfect model for the force.

 

Then 10th happened and my whole army got changed. I know this isn’t a unique thing and many people have gone through this. I just feel the strange unit locked abilities, coupled with forced army interaction rules like being next to skitarri for bonuses, etc. makes 10th feel so much more like a board game merged with a card game than a table top battle game.

 

To get up to speed for this edition I would have had to increase the number of battle line troops, add other models to units, etc.

 

Personally the idea of a vanguard with a sniper rifle just bothers me. Thanks box-locked units from 10th!

 

Now we have more new models and I must say I like them. I want to buy them and I want to collect them, so I will.
 

The point of this post though is not to lament the personal problems I have with 10th edition, but more a shout out to the community with how to get past some of my issues with the rules and back to loving playing with my toy soldiers with my buddies and rolling dice?

 

And be clear the joy of rolling dice is still there. I just played about a week ago. Had a wonderful game. The thing is, I used a different army and the slog of “updating“ my Admech feels daunting.

 

For the Omnissiah!

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DanPesci]

I had a similar situation to you, got admech when they first came out, and 10th massively changed how they played and went together - this wasnt an admech only problem, my other army (since 4th edtion) is space wolves, and with their update, despite new models being very nice, A LOT of how the army worked and wargear choices I used to have/were modelled, ceased to exist. Both my admech and my wolves especially have gone through major updates over the years

 

Updating admech

 

1. Update the models you have first before buying new ones. Unfortunately you've hit the nail on the head here where really you need battleline for the army to function properly. In fact this has been doubled down on recently where, you almost certainly want cawl in there too (this may change with the new detachment/character weve got). BUT ive found that you can still have a good list/game with 2-3 vanguard/rangers squads in there as long as you manage them ok and dont put them in the open T1 etc.

 

2. The vanguard with sniper rifles issue - i hear you. I used to have 2x 20 man vanguard squads and 3x 5 man ranger squads (with 2 snipers in each ranger squad). Way more thematic with the units feeling like they should be doing what they were meant to. 

 

It is now VERY annoying that you feel you are undermining yourself by not including things like snipers in the vanguard (when you are paying points for them).

 

I head-swapped some ranger/vanguard helmets on my snipers, which didn't take particularly long, but took longer to find the various plasma/arc rifles that everyone now 'needs'. Ebay helped here.

 

But ill also say that you probably arent going to win/lose a game simply because you havent put snipers in your vanguard squads either. Maybe try out a few friendly games proxying or not taking certain upgrades and see how things feel?

 

e.g. I had 12 breachers and two squads of servitors from back in the day when we got the fun 'servitor replacement detachment' thing (cant remember exactly when this was). My mates let me proxy 1 squad of breachers as destroyers (i just painted the arc rifles a different colour to keep track), and the servitors as the new kill team thing for a couple of games, so I could then decide wether it was worth even updating them model wise.

 

 

3. Ignore the new detachment for now unless you have lots of skitarii. It seems pretty good from what I've seen, but the Haloscreed detachment gives you a good set of tools which can buff most units that you might already have. The new models though are great and could give you a good kick for getting repainting admech again (and you dont need to be using the new detachment to run them)

 

4. Possibly wait for 11th before making any major updates/snapping arms off models. I doubt were going to see it...but theres a chance wargear options in some ways may come back.

 

 

 

My main takeaways from this edition/advice (for what its worth)

 

1. The ruleset, as someone coming from older editions, isnt great to me, and doesnt feel like a 'wargame' anymore. You arent alone here. Vehicle, wargear and terrain/LOS rules (or lack of) combined with L ruins and constant balance updates have it feeling more like turn based starcraft than 40k of old. But, there is nothing stopping you trying to play games using old edition rules (not all my group are down for this, but at least 2-3 people have shown an interest).

 

That said, I still do play 10th semi regularly, and fun can be had with it, but it is a very different feel than previous editions.

 

2. 10th edition balancing is a bit of a mess, even if on paper it looks good. My space wolves are constantly 'evaluated' based on people bringing 18xthunderwolves in a non-space wolves codex detachment, and admech are apparenty now 'ok' but only if belasarius cawl takes the field in every skirmish going. I gave up on chasing the meta

 

I still only model and paint units that I like - I don't care if my army isn't at the bleeding edge of competitive play, and would prefer my army to function as it would in my head and look good, over winning games

 

Its very easy these days with the amount of online content screaming about things being broken or not-competitive to feel like what you are bringing to the table is an auto-lose. It probably isn't. (unless all your mates currently play Ctan spam lol).

 

I find it much more rewarding to build a list around the models I own, take that to a game, and come a close (or even far) 2nd, than to take a netlisted '3x best thing right now' and get a win. The occasions where you DO then win with your list feel even better as you're doing it your way.

 

 

4. Crusade (although ive never tried it myself), could be a great option for rebuilding up the army as it will let you concentrate on smaller amounts of units at a time, whilst bringing in some of the customisation flavour that was in older editions

 

 

 

TLDR: You aren't alone in the way you feel about 10th edition, but a combination of finding friendly games, perhaps some older or different edition rule sets to play occasionally, and just concentrating on building/painting for the fun of it rather than being 'competitive' would be my suggestions - also silver lining that 11th looks like it might improve some of the ruleset with things like terrain and army based objectives making things feel a bit more thematic again.

[brother_b]

This is a great response to read right before going to work to get my hobby fix. I will come back and edit this post for some responses with you, and we appear to be extremely similar in our views, and what we went through for this edition.

 

And Cawl gets around! That gentleman is at every single battle in the universe!

 

[Magos Takatus]

I must agree with the sentiment here, and we are certainly not alone.

 

I noticed recently on Warhammer Community that they interviewed an apparently well-known competitive Admech player, Richard Siegler in reply to the new Admech Units:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/en-gb/articles/kkqyzq5d/warhammer-40000-world-champions-tactical-insights-on-new-adeptus-mechanicus-units/

 

Shortly after that they released the points values for these units, far higher than there is any reason for them to be. I recently saw a post from my favourite Admech Youtuber as follows:

 

 

The link in the image above is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_PdBs6LorNIz6pNHO2YYI6bZNFbUk81VOvreoENlK1s/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0

 

I have been reading through this list myself, and it's painful to see people who have been playing Admech since they first got an army through to new arrivals and how many of them were let down by the recent additions to the army. They mainly complain about the points costs, but they change at the drop of a hat. It's representing the models with rules poorly that frustrated me.

 

Hastarii Exterminators have a miniaturised version of the Eradication Beamer, a weapon capable of engaging smaller monsters, light vehicle, terminator equivalents and bulky cavalry. Why, then do Hastarii get what is essentially a heavy bolter with anti-infantry 4+? Why would that even be useful on that weapon? It's only going to affect a very small pool of units, so unless you cross your fingers and hope for a Terminator-heavy army or that you end up on the opposite side of a table from Paul is Bad at Stuff's Centurion army, it's a wasted rule, and it's not a rule on any other Eradication weapon. We get it on Radium weapons. that certainly doesn't look like a Radium grenade launcher to me. 

 

Add to that the decision to turn the long-barrelled Neutron Fusil into a 24" ranged weapon -which is outranged by a bolt rifle- and we have some very confused rules that just don't feel right for the models they are trying to represent.

 

I personally just stopped using my army in 10th and pivoted to Eldar and Orks for most of the edition, because playing an elite army of augmented cyborg warriors felt dreadful. Utterly miserable. 

 

I had my Skitarii units lovingly painted with decals carefully lined up so that my Rangers and Vanguard very designated neatly into squads... and then GW stripped away our ability to choose the weapon upgrades in our squads. I took time, effort and money to make my squads look just right on the tabletop, then GW threw a spanner in the works, making my basic infantry all "counts as" until I painted up replacement Arc Rifles and Plasma Calivers. I don't know if I'll even bother with the unit markings on the new squadmates, the trust is gone, I don't know if GW will just decide to mess with the unit composition again.

 

I like to stick the the mantra of "rules are temporary, miniatures are eternal", but so far 10th edition has seen us lose our ballistic skill unless we sacrifice movement in an increasingly position-dependent game, we have has a huge decrease in power and unit flavour, and to combat this they decreased our points until we became a toothless horde army, then decided to fix our army by giving Belisarius Cawl a very powerful ability so people rely on him to keep the army functioning. It's been mis-step after mis-step and the Thulia Ghuld and Hastarii release makes me believe that they are unable or unwilling to learn from past mistakes.

 

My continuation of this army is due to a love of the lore and the models, I am still purchasing and painting them even though the rules are just demoralising. When 10th hit I heard about Radzone Corps, which fit my army perfectly in theme-or so I thought. I hoped it would be boosting our Rad weapons and making our other weapons rad-infused. Instead we got tedious mortal wound book-keeping and a rule that incentivised World Eaters players to leave their deployment zones. Oh wait.... 

 

I just hope that 11th edition gives them a chance to rethink their approach to the army and not keep them as Astra Militarum with extra complications.

Edited April 6 by Magos Takatus

[brother_b]

It feels very AOS style with blob on blob design and bespoke special rules for every unit.I think they have Kow Towed to the tournament scene and influencers that makes up a tiny portion of gamers.

 

I was watching a podcast with mediocre hobbies and he was talking about how the focus of the game has so far moved away from narrative and army development to weird actions and objectives and secondaries etc. Not a perfect summary but hits close enough.

 

Ty both for the comments I don’t feel good that we’re all going through the same thing but I have hoped the focus will shift back to telling a narrative story that mixes fun competition and lets us build the background and history of our forces in a fun way.

Edit side note: I did read the * in one of the articles where it mentioned “* And opening up new possibilities for conversions!”

 

Thats the type of narrative customizing of miniatures brings and I think that officially it’s nice for GW to mention what used to be such a big part of the hobby.

Edited April 4 by brother_b

[Magos Takatus]

On 4/4/2026 at 3:53 AM, brother_b said:

It feels very AOS style with blob on blob design and bespoke special rules for every unit.I think they have Kow Towed to the tournament scene and influencers that makes up a tiny portion of gamers.

 

I was watching a podcast with mediocre hobbies and he was talking about how the focus of the game has so far moved away from narrative and army development to weird actions and objectives and secondaries etc. Not a perfect summary but hits close enough.

 

Ty both for the comments I don’t feel good that we’re all going through the same thing but I have hoped the focus will shift back to telling a narrative story that mixes fun competition and lets us build the background and history of our forces in a fun way.

Edit side note: I did read the * in one of the articles where it mentioned “* And opening up new possibilities for conversions!”

 

Thats the type of narrative customizing of miniatures brings and I think that officially it’s nice for GW to mention what used to be such a big part of the hobby.

I responded in a Youtube video yesterday talking about the narrative vs competitive tug-of-war for the game and they were quite critical of the "metawatch" thing they have going on. I don't care if our army has a 42% or 43% win rate, I care if my army feels fun to play. I don't care if I can fit 2 squads of pseudo-guardsmen or 3 squads of pseudo-guardsmen in my army. They look like cybernetically augmented post-human soldiers, but they don't feel like it anymore. Why does the Adeptus Mechanicus go to all that effort to cut apart and reassemble their soldiers when when Astra Militarum figured out giving a man a fancy hat and shouting at them gets them 75% of the way there?

 

Personally, I hope they restore the mechanics for Phosphor weapons. When they used to expose enemy units hit by them for subsequent units to capitalise on it made for unit synergy decisions, and it meant that taking a Phosphor Serpenta on a Dominus could be both useful and thematically engaging. He's literally marking intended targets with a weaponised flaregun! Now it's just ignores cover, which means pretty much nothing to these little single-shot Phosphor weapons littered throughout our army. I'd much rather have this as a simplified markerlight mechanic rather than this "stand next to battleline to make your units work properly" thing we have now.

 

Also, why our battleline? Our orders are sent from top-to-bottom, Adeptus Mechanicus is one of the most top-down armies in the setting, with Tech Priests practically possessing their Skitarii remotely. This is beyond issuing orders, this is control-freak levels of micromanaging, so it makes more sense than in any army (other than Tyranids and I suppose Thousand Sons) that our Tech Priests should be the beating heart of the army. I think having a circuit-like connection between our units would be cool. Orders originate from the Tech Priests, are sent through the Noosphere with data tethers acting as linking nodes. This means that if you want your Skystalkers to operate effectively, they don't need to be standing next to a unit of Rangers, they could instead rely on Dragoons scouting into enemy territory to broadcast data to them. Various Admech units have optional upgrades to have Data Tethers, so they could work in a mechanic where the more data tethers you are in range of, the greater the buffs they receive, or if that's too complicated, it could just build in redundancy. As it stands, making our units stand next to battleline to get buffs is like relying on Hormagaunts to spread Synapse coverage to control Tyranid Warriors, or Rubric Marines dictating if Thousand Sons Sorcerers get to use their fun rules, in my personal opinion.

[brother_b]

Adeptus Mechanicus is one of the most iconic factions in science fiction, let alone 40K.

 

Techno-savants sad at their own humanity that believe the Emperor in the form of the Omnissiah while creating a cult and religion to worship the machine spirit? Forgetting most of technology and destroying whole worlds just to regain the equivalent of a schematic? Mechanical function and process replaced by faith and tradition? Genius. Pure genius. Pass me the unguents gentle machines.

 

Yeah I love this army. Please bring back the army closer to what it was in previous iterations.
 

Damn your box-locked unit equipment!

#NoArquebusVanguard

 

[Magos Takatus]

Absolutely. Attention, Vanguard! submit your allocated Arquebus supplies, we are re-assembling the Ranger Transuranic Firing Squads! 

[Bouargh]

I went into AdMech because of the rule of cool. And also because I was angry by the fate of the SM when the Primaris stuff came out: seeing my whole army potentially phased out, even if the process is scheduled on a large period of time, has been a big hit for me after completing too many points of the latter (18k pts is too much). 

I have therefore decided to build smaller forces, more oriented in terms of tactics and with a target in mind - 4000 pts and that's all. OK, I am still failling with this last guideline and I end always above.

 

But back on the topic; contrary to what I read I have not been fed up or exhausted by 10th as far as AdMech is concerned. Exhaustion came for all my armies in 10th. Constant dataslates is a painful process as it invalidate balance between armies and within army. But it is less marked for most forces that it has been for AdMech has their fate though dataslates changed wholly the codex. Gamewise I haven't been that affected as I did not really rooled so many dices with my sociopathic cyborgs. And when I did, I was genuinely not updated with rules and my oponnents neither, so mutual ignorance made that rule changes did not affect us that much. So in the end, I am aware of the issue but not that affected due to AdMech being primary a hobbying projetc more than a gaming project, and as such remained confined in its closet most of time.

 

Yet AdMech cannot be only cool and characterful. It should find its place as a tactical archetype in the wide picture. And frankly, the lack of room in that sense is not recent. My very first opinion when they were released many years ago was something like "These are Guards but with different models". I am still more or less in that idea. The base models are just so close of  guardsmen; the Servitors stuff is under represented now; and the army being designed around Skitarium leaves aside what could be really Elite such as Battleline Priesthood and many Robots. And motorized options are too few to be weighting in the balance: for example, I always (almost) end up with Freeblade (Armingers) allies.

 

Whereas I respectfully disagree about the synapse analogy (for me some units are fully automated and others with a restrained level of autonomy and Priest can override the program) I mostly share the other comments.

Can we have ideas for this override concept?  Sure, Orders may do it. But again, AM does it already and we do not want Skitarii to be AM but red and with augmetics, do we? Other options for overrides would be a combination of a series of "bargain" stratagems and maybe a redesign of unit special rules that would impose a standard behaviour instead of favouring interunit synergies as it is currently the case. A la algorhythm from 40k Compendium for robots, but kept simpler (for example remember the Tarantula sentry gun rules ("shoot at the closest T>X target in LoS if you have Lascannon, otherwise do Y")? - well, something like that). And Priesthood based or led units would become the adjustement variable that would bring a 50 to 100% autonomy and patching/gap filling reliable unit. This is something that I might like: an army of automatons that never fall back and cannot be broken except to dust that would be be complemented by some units with leaders (secondary characters and/or major ones) guiding them from the front, Stratagems (Leaders leading for the Noosphere) and a selection of HiPo units designed from other branches of the Mechanicum that bring even bigger reliability. This is a concept I'd like testing.

 

The other option is a revamp of the datatheter that may lead to an army "learning" during the battle and stacking army wide bonuses as turns pass based on the gathering of specific milestones. Making the amry more resilient and strong while time passes and losses accumulate. This is another idea, not that far from @Magos Takatus's one.

 

But AdMech should not be only a cool looking army.

 

Edited Tuesday at 02:59 PM by Bouargh

[Nagashsnee]

On 4/7/2026 at 2:16 PM, Bouargh said:

But AdMech should not be only a cool looking army.

 

Hey they are already more then that. They are also hideously expensive to collect and impossible to transport, at least without breaking half the servo skulls and antenas on everything. 

Edited Friday at 05:57 AM by Nagashsnee

[Magos Takatus]

Yeah, I saw a video on Youtube about a guy buying 40k models for cheap, saying he never buys models for more than 50% of their GW price and that he'd got a load of Admech 2nd hand from eBay and I thought to myself "I can guarantee about 75% of the aerials and gun barrels were snapped off those models, weren't they? Admit it!"

 

I wouldn't dream of buying Admech second hand. I tried to get a Dominus for cheap the other day and every one going for a decent price had the axe snapped in half. I had to chase down a copy of a Hachette mag to get one. 

[brother_b]

I’ve got an old paint pot with some blue tac on it that I stick the broken bits onto so I can glue them back later!

 

It is a sad thing they’re so fragile. I definitely went away from foam after this and have magnet bases and trays.