50 is the meta average.
Not 50 out of 100 as a mark out of ten. 50 means this list buys roughly what the average competitive list buys for its points. Most real lists land somewhere between about 20 and 90. The space above that is headroom, not a target.
The score sits alongside a plain-English band — Weak, Light, Balanced, Strong, Extreme — so you never have to memorise what a number means. The bands are drawn from where the meta actually falls. "Strong" means this list has a stronger stat profile than roughly seven in ten lists in the meta. That is the whole claim.
What it measures
Six things, in plain terms:
- Damage OutputWhat the army is realistically expected to destroy, not what its weapons look like on paper.
- Threat ProjectionHow much of that damage arrives early, and how far into the board it reaches.
- Objective ControlThe army's presence for taking and holding ground.
- DurabilityHow hard the army is to remove, reading its whole defensive profile rather than counting wounds.
- Role DiversityWhether the list covers the core battlefield jobs, or leans everything on one.
- ReliabilityHow cleanly the list resolved, and how much confidence to place in the result.
These combine so that weaknesses genuinely drag the score down. A list cannot hide a durability hole behind one big gun, and a one-dimensional brick that soaks damage but cannot kill anything lands near average. That is intentional — it is the behaviour that makes the number worth trusting.
Each read-out is shown under the score, banded the same way as the headline. They tell you why the list landed where it did — two lists with identical scores can have completely different shapes, and the shape is what you act on.
Why it is useful
Because "is my list any good?" is normally answered by vibes, and vibes are expensive.
The Battle Index gives you a fixed reference point. It does not care which faction you play, what the internet thinks of your detachment, or whether your last game went badly. It measures the same things about every list, the same way, every time. That makes it useful for the things vibes are bad at:
- Comparing two versions of your own list. Swap a unit, re-run it, see which direction the number moved and — more usefully — which part of the profile moved.
- Sanity-checking a list you have stopped being objective about. Everyone has one.
- Reading an unfamiliar list fast. An opponent's army you have never faced becomes a profile you can act on.
- Seeing the shape, not just the size. The score is a summary. The breakdown under it is the actual product.
What it is benchmarked against
The meta average is not a guess or a designer's opinion. It is drawn from real competitive lists that have been played at tournaments, re-derived as the corpus grows and as balance updates land. When the field shifts, the anchor shifts with it.
That is the difference between a calculator and a benchmark. A calculator tells you what your list does. The Battle Index tells you what your list does relative to what people are actually bringing.