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What is the Best Value Combat Patrol For Your Hobby Dollar?

I posted earlier about the best value Combat Patrol box, and the worst value Combat Patrol box for Warhammer 40k. You can read all about that here. In that article I broke down each box by unit, looking at the price of how much you’d have to spend if you bought each model/unit separately. 

But what I want to look at now is which Warhammer 40k Combat Patrol box is the best way to get into the hobby. Which Combat Patrol box will give you the highest number of points for your money? Essentially, which Combat Patrol box is the best Warhammer 40k value for getting started in the game? I’ve expressed this in the Combat Patrols’ points-per-dollar.

I went about this in the same way that I went about the previous post. I listed every unit in the various Combat Patrols and looked to see how many points each would cost on the battlefield. 

I’m going to break down the results and give my analysis, but first let’s look at the straight numbers. 

This was the chart of the best value, dollar-for-dollar. For more detail on this, read the other article. 

Best Value Dollar-For-Dollar

This was based all on the prices listed on Games Workshop’s website, even though we know we can get most of the boxes for cheaper than this if we buy them through third parties like Amazon or Element Games. 

I’ve already done a full analysis, but you can see that Space Marines are the best value and Grey Knights are the worst value. Of course, they’re all good deals–assuming that you wanted to buy all of the models that were in these boxes, even the Grey Knights will give you 127% return on your investment. So they’re all good. But some are wildly better than others.

Best Value Combat Patrols Points-Per-Dollar

This led me to think about something else. The Space Marines boxes are the best value when it comes to models per dollar, but what box gives you the most points per dollar?

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Games Workshop promoted a game called Combat Patrol, which was just the same as Warhammer 40k except that each side got 500 points. And, in all of my calculations, I came to the conclusion that these Combat Patrol boxes are supposed to be somewhere around 500 points per box. Some are more and some are less, but is the difference really that big? Honestly, I think it is. 

So let’s look at a new chart. I have now broken down all of the Combat Patrol boxes–from the Space Marines Combat Patrol to the Orks Combat Patrol to the Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and all the rest. I looked at the units in each of them and checked to see how many points each model was worth. 

So, the Space Marine Combat Patrol comes out on top once again (it was the best value as well). If you’re looking at starting an army in Warhammer 40,000, then the Space Marine Combat Patrol box is going to get you the biggest army for your dollar. 

The Space Marine Combat Patrol comes with:

Primaris Lieutenant…70 points

10 Infiltrators…240 points

3 Suppressors…100 points

3 Eliminators….75 points

1 Impulsor….110 points

Grand Total: 595 points

On the flip side, let’s look at the bottom of the list: the Adeptus Mechanicus Combat Patrol. It’s pretty pitiful.

The Adeptus Mechanicus Combat Patrol comes with:

Tech Priest Engiseer…55 points

Onager Dunecrawler…115 points

3 Kataphron Destroyers…120 points

10 Skitarii Rangers…90 points

Grand Total: 380 points

Now there is one caveat to this list, and it’s the Chaos Space Marines. The points for the Legionnaires are not yet updated in the Warhammer 40k app, so I wasn’t able to check their points and I had to substitute the old Chaos Space Marine point values. Presumably, they will be worth more points. 

Upgrade Sprues

I want to make a point about upgrade sprues because I highlighted them in the other article as being a money sink. And, sometimes they are here, and sometimes not. The Dark Angels, who I ragged on pretty hard for having very, very little in their Combat Patrol other than some Intercessors, a Primaris Chaplain, a Redemptor Dreadnought, and 3 Inceptors–a grand total of 10 models in this army box–turned out pretty good. Above average at 485. 

But when it comes to upgrade spruies really hurting, we need only look at the Thousand Sons, where $60 of their price is spent on Tzangor upgrade sprues. And you can see that it hurts them in points–they’re only at 430. 

Start Collecting Boxes

By the way, if you’re interested, I wrote about the value of the Start Collecting boxes a while back. That article is mostly obsolete, however. 

Combat Patrols’ Points-Per-Dollar

But I wanted to look at one last chart. We know how many points are in each box, and we know how much each box costs from Games Workshop ($150). So how many points do you get for each dollar you spend?

Here are the results:

I gotta say, although we all know that Games Workshop models cost a lot, this is where it really started to sting for me. Because this whole time we’ve been talking about the best value Combat Patrol box, but these points–yeesh. These models are expensive. 

Let’s start with the Space Marines. Their bog-standard troop is the Intercessors, which cost 20 points per model. At 3.97 points per dollar, that means each Intercessor is just over $5 per model. And that’s WITH the value you get from the combat patrol box. (Bought separately, you get 10 Intercessors for $60, so $6 per model.)

So what’s the cheapest model here? It’s none other than the humble Poxwalker, at 6 points per model. Death Guard are one of the best priced in this category, but it still means that a Poxwalker is $1.50.  (Poxwalkers made my list as one of the best units in all of Warhammer 40k, however.)

Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that the Grey Knights, whose box was the very worst value in the entire batch, comes in third in most points-per-dollar. What this means, essentially, is that Grey Knights are undercosted, if you can say such a thing about a Games Workshop product. If you’re getting 545 points in a box and it’s the worst value box, then that means that the Grey Knight models are very valuable. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, what does any of this prove? At best it gives you a guidepost if you’re planning on starting a new Warhammer 40k army and looking at the Combat Patrols as a good way to get you there. You can know that you’ll get the most bang for your buck with the Space Marines, both in the first category (buying models separately) and in the second category (points per dollar). 

And you can know that if you’re trying to launch an Adeptus Mechanicus army, the Combat Patrol isn’t going to get you very far.