Comparison Shopping
In case you missed it, I've been comparing each of my potential new armies in a variety of ways to find which one would be the best fit for me. Here's a brief listing of my comparison articles. I've looked at how much damage each one might do, how resilient each army would be, how much each would cost, how well each fits into the Water Army concept, and finally I took a look at the intangible thoughts and feelings that can impact this decision. Now before you go all link-crazy, I am going to sum it all up for you. I'll break it down in the order of the articles first. If you want to have a look at each of the lists, or the thoughts that went into them, check out DeathWing, Space Marine Bike Force and Chaos Space Marines.

Damage
I took a look at each of the armies and came up with the damage that each could do in shooting and assault. Taking the average of their shooting and assault, this is how the armies stack up in terms of Dead Space Marines: DeathWing 12.485, Space Marine Bike Force 13.265, and Chaos Space Marines 14.3. While there is a clear winner here, it's not by much of a margin. Using the high score as 100%, that gives us 87% for DeathWing and 93% for the Space Marine Bike force.

Resilience
Next, I looked at the resilience of each army in terms of being able to take damage. I used an average damage based on a solid Space Marine shooting army. Here's how the armies stack up in terms of how tough they are (in terms of the number of squads' shooting it would take to wipe out the army): DeathWing 52 squads, Space Marine Bike Force 46 squads, Chaos Space Marines 45 squads. Again, using the winner as 100%, that gives us 88% for the Space Marine Bike Force and 87% for the Chaos Space Marines.

Cost
After their combat capabilities, I had to take into account the cost for each army. While the first two categories were pretty close, this one was pretty far spread. DeathWing would be free since I've got all the parts, Space Marine Bike Force $130 and Chaos Space Marines $209. This one is a little different, as the smallest numbers are the best. I'll look at it as the difference between the cost of each. That would make the Space Marine Bike Force 62% and the Chaos Space Marines 0%. While I'm not entirely happy giving the Chaos Marine list a zero in one category, this category _is_ very important and it is a huge difference.

Water Army Capability
When I started putting together ideas for my next army, I was (and still am) very interested in being able to use this flexible, cerebral style of play. So I wanted to rate each of the armies on how well they might fit the style. (Given that I've never played it, I have to rely on my understanding of what is important to the style and how it works best, so this isn't necessarily a perfect score. It's the best I've got, however.) DeathWing: 1587.5pts. Space Marine Bike Force: 1782.5pts. Chaos Space Marines: 1042.5pts. Following the same principles as before, that gives us 100% for the Space Marine Bike force, 89% for the DeathWing and 58.5% for the Chaos Space Marines.

Intangibles
After comparing the lists in a bunch of different fashions, I tried to put down on paper (or electrons, I suppose) the more intangible elements that will have an influence on this decision. While I can't put a number down for any of these (otherwise they would be tangible) I can list the most important of them. For DeathWing, almost all of my thoughts were positive. For the Space Marine Bike Force, on the other hand, most of my thoughts were negative, but not badly so. The Chaos Space Marines had a positive comment, but also a really negative one. (That it doesn't fit the Water Army Concept nearly as well as the other two, and that's a very central part of what I want out of this new army.)

Score
Okay, so how do they all stack up? Chaos Space Marines won the Damage Competition, DeathWing won the Resilience competition and the Cost competition and the Space Marine Bike Force won the Water Army Quotient competition. I tried to set up my comparison numbers here so that the difference between the places was reflected in the scores. That way if an army didn't win a single category, but came in close in all the categories, it might actually win overall. DeathWing got 87+100+100+89 for a grand total of 376. The Space Marine Bike force got 93+88+62+100 for a total of 343. The Chaos Space Marine got 100+87+0+58.5 for 245.5pts.

The Winner!
Well, the winner (by a fairly small margin) is DeathWing. That is kind of the direction I was leaning anyway, but I'm glad that the numbers back up my gut feeling. While I may still get a Chaos army at some point, it won't be for this army. It will be interesting to get back into playing Deathwing, as it's been a long while. What will be even more interesting will be trying to play a Water-style army. I'll definitely have to do some more research on that, so I can make sure I've got it all together while I assemble my army.

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