How we score 40k units

What the letters mean

• Sthe army's best
• Astrong
• Bsolid
• Csituational
• Dweakest
• Bour estimate
• –not rated

A letter ranks a unit within its army, not across the game. An S Tyranid unit is one of the Tyranids' best; it isn't always better than a B Space Marine unit.

Crucible, Legends and Titanicus units are not rated: they have no letter.

Where the letter comes from

The letter is a weighted average of the creators' letters: full reviews and tier lists count more than a single list. We note where each creator put a unit in their free tier list, as our own letter, and weigh them together. Tap a unit's letter for Why this letter: how many creators gave what and, where we've written them up, what they liked and what held it back, in our own words.

Where no creator rated a unit, the letter is our estimate, and its coin is dashed: placed by SWORD and SHIELD only, at the letter the army's creator-rated units have at the same rank.

SWORD and SHIELD

These are our own dice math, against real top tournament armies. SWORD is the points of a top tournament army it removes per 100 of its own points each time it acts, picking its targets sensibly from a real list, with its melee counted by how often it gets into combat: the units it kills best first, damage carrying over from one to the next. SHIELD is how much of a top tournament army's turn it takes to wipe out 100 points of it, its own healing played between turns: each list turns its whole army on about 500 points of it, its best guns first. Each is averaged over 100 top lists from the last three months, leaving out the most extreme tenth at each end.

Both are shown scaled, so a typical unit reads the same from one run to the next: SWORD is 0.8832 × the points it removes per 100 of its own, SHIELD 2097.5 × the share of a turn it takes to remove 100 points of it, which puts a typical unit's SHIELD at about 333. A unit page gives each as its number, shown with where it ranks among the game's units of its kind (top 10%, bottom 20%): shooters beside shooters, melee units beside melee units, a unit built to support beside every unit. They're our own numbers: they don't set the letter of a unit creators have rated, and they place our estimate where none has. A character that must join a squad is scored with the squad lists put it in; a leader is scored alone, and its page shows what it adds to each squad it can lead.

SWORD has a switch. Whole meta, the default, is the number above, against everything top lists field, with a bar showing how those lists' points split by type of unit. Best target shows the type of unit it does most to, from our earlier model until the new one covers target types.

Which weapons

Where we know what lists take, the main number uses those weapons, with the best weapons the datasheet allows beside it. Where we don't, it uses the best weapons.

What isn't in a unit's numbers

Leaders and stratagems are not in a unit's own numbers. Each unit page's How we got these numbers names the detachment, weapons and rules counted, and shows what a leader would add.