Cold, Ghastly Arithmetic

I just played another game with the new Daemons, and I'm starting to come to some hypothesis about things that a smart Daemon player should keep in mind while building lists.  I used 16 flesh hounds, and they were easily the stand-out MVPs in the game, accounting for roughly half of my total kills.

With the sheer number of multi-wound models we have as Daemon players, I think it's useful to begin by looking at the points per wound in our armies.  This is important because it gives us a rough handle on our army lists's ability to absorb damage.  While other factors, such as toughness and ability to loose multiple wounds simultaneously through instant death come into play, as a rough baseline, I think that looking at the raw points cost per wound gives you a solid starting point for analyzing an army's durability.


Excluding HQs and vehicles, and ignoring (for the moment) toughness, we can easily come up with a points/wound analysis of the various units in the Chaos Daemons codex.

Elites:

• Bloodcrushers - 15 points/wound
• Flamers - 11.75 points/wound
• Beasts - 13 points/wound
• Fiends - 11.66 points/wound

Troops:

• Bloodletters - 10 points/wound
• Daemonettes - 9 points/wound
• Horrors - 9 points/wound
• Nurglings - 5 points/wound
• Plaguebearers - 9 points/wound

Fast Attack:

• Flesh Hounds - 8 points/wound
• Screamers - 12.5 points/wound
• Plague Drones - 14 points/wound
• Furies - ~ 6 points/wound
• Seekers - 12 points/wound

Now, if we combine all three of those lists and ordering them from lowest cost to highest cost, we can see the following:

• Nurglings - 5 points/wound
• Furies - ~ 6 points/wound
• Flesh Hounds - 8 points/wound
• Daemonettes - 9 points/wound
• Horrors - 9 points/wound
• Plaguebearers - 9 points/wound
• Bloodletters - 10 points/wound
• Flamers - 11.75 points/wound
• Fiends - 11.66 points/wound
• Seekers - 12 points/wound
• Screamers - 12.5 points/wound
• Beasts - 13 points/wound
• Plague Drones - 14 points/wound
• Bloodcrushers - 15 points/wound

 At the low end, Nurglings, Furies, and Flesh Hounds stand out.  Of those, the nurgling are most vulnerable to instant-death, being vulnerable to it at S6, and having each instant death attack removing three wounds.  Furies are interesting, but if upgraded with allegiance to one of the ruinous powers, their points/wound go up fairly significantly.  They are immune to losing models through instant death, but their ridiculously low leadership will, I believe, lead to them being crippled by daemonic instability.  Flesh Hounds, on the other hand, look like an interesting balance between wound cost and overall survivability.  With T4, they're reasonably resilient and only lose two wounds per instant death hit.  Add in their overall speed and hitting power, and they look like they've got amazing potential.

On the high end, bloodcrushers and plague drones look to be the least efficient.  The plague drones near-immunity to instant death, however, likely merits a second look.  However, I'm unsure if bloodcrushers are worth the cost, especially when compared with a similarly-pointed unit of bloodletters.  You do gain hitting power, speed, and the ability to charge with S6 power weapons, but overall negatives compared to utilizing bloodletters makes me hesitate to incorporate them.

This is just a start, however, because we also need to consider how the offensive capabilities of each unit figures into the mix.