This distinction is something that's come up a few times recently in forum discussions, so I've decided to blog it.

There's a tendency for people to say that armies that are strong are easy to play well, and armies that are weak are hard to play well. That's obviously true in a certain sense and to a certain extent, because it's easier to win with strong armies than weak ones. However, it misses another way of looking at armies: that is, "did I get everything out of the army that I could"? In other words, to what extent did you avoid mistakes and play the army to its fullest. The question of how easy an army is to play well is actually a completely different question than how strong that army is when played well.

To give an example: I think Marro Drudge x8 would be a very easy army to play well. Sure, all the normal concerns of height advantage and common squad cohesiveness apply, but there's really no extra degrees of difficulty. There's no...