I sadly do not know which army is easiest to play for new players. But my recommendation would be to go with one you like the look of. To be honest you will likely spend more time painting than playing.
Tau models have lots of large, smooth surfaces. Using an airbrush will certainly give everything a smoother look than brush strokes with a traditional brush.
You could also use spray paint to prime and base coat the models with similar smooth effect. But airbrushes are much easier IMO and are easier to control and get a nice smooth finish.
I see, ill have to put that in consideration. My plan is to prim in grey seer. So with an airbrush, ill at least be able to see good coverage.
I know using a brush with white is difficult. Tried it with a battletech figure and came out rough.
Admech is a very expensive army to collect, their rules arent very good right now and the units are very cheap in points which means you need to get a lot of models to make an army.
Tau get a reputation as a hard to play army because they aren't a melee army. Their battlesuits are good at moving, shooting really hard and falling back so their playstyle is usually more about secondary objectives than taking and contesting primaries. This has changed a bit now with the Kroot range being refreshed, Kroot are much more viable melee units. Tau was my first army too and it wasn't that hard to learn, so I would say if you're interested in Tau go for it.
The most common advice you'll get when choosing your first army is to go with the one you like the model range of most, because rules will always change but you'll be more motivated to paint and play models you like looking at.
This question gets asked 10x a day and the answer is always the same. You pick the army you personally like the most. Its a waste of your time and money to buy and paint an army that is not your favourite.
Building and painting takes lots of time. You can easily learn game rules and army rules long before having even 1000 points of army just by reading them between painting sessions or when you wait for shade/varnish/primer/layers dry. Game is balanced for 2000 points and it is "official" game size, most competetive and most used on tournaments. By the time you will reach 2000 points you will know nearly all your armies datasheets with all details.
Do not bother with army you dont like just because it is considered easy.
Seconded because this is super fresh for me. I started painting a few months back. Knew I wanted to play Orks. Also knew I was going to try to force some friends to play with me so I bought a starter set and started painting. It's taken me almost two and a half months of painting at least 2 hours every other day to get 80% finished with the space marine combat patrol portion of the starter set. Tyranids are 80% primed (damn citadel can ran out before finishing). The ork combat patrol I bought a few weeks back before it sold out is barely assembled. Probably will be another month or two before I even paint the orks. Granted I had never painted anything in my life before these first minis, so I was really slow in the beginning and got a bit faster but it's still a huge time sink to paint 2000 points. At my current pace it'd take me 6 months more to have a 2000 pt space marine army, not to mention the cost of a ton of different paints I probably will never use fully because I'm switching wildly between armies.
I don't regret my order though, I don't care a ton about how the space marines or tyranids look so it's been good to practice without stressing it looking great. But I underestimated how long it'd take to paint everything and if your goal is playing, go right for what you know you want to run long term. I like all these factions mechanics so I'm fine but I understand that isn't the norm for everyone.
To be fair, with Tau you generally omit two things that can be quite difficult to master and learn - psyker powers and melee combat. You're either not very good or don't have access to them at all, so as a new player you shouldn't try to worry too hard about mastering them and instead learn to play the ranged and movement games as best you can.
So, I would say it *is* a simpler army to start with, but it's not necessarily the easiest army long term - in fact, unfortunately, in 10th they have a reputation for being very tough to play at higher levels due to needing to support one another and being quite fragile. However, if you're a good sport and don't care too much about carrying the win every time but just want to play casually, then just go with it. It's easier to tack on the other phases later than to try and master everything at once. :)
It might be a good idea to research a bit about the playstyles of factions just to get a good idea for how they work in the current edition, as I think that might be a big factor if you're going for playing more than painting and collecting.
Alright then I'll look into the tau a bit more I was disappointed to hear about the no melee phase fights for the tau.
I wanted a faction that does shooting and melee with a very tech based lore.
Unfortunately, the Tau are quite limited in that aspect. You have things like battlesuits which can do melee decently, but the majority of your army (unless the majority IS battlesuits) will not want to get stuck in and you don't really have any truly 'dedicated' melee like other armies do (except maybe Farsight...). That said, however, they *are* fun, you just have to take the good with the bad and enjoy them obliterating things at range.
The Adeptus Mechanicus in that respect are better as they do have some good melee units (dragoons and fulgurite electropriests come to mind), but unfortunately they're on the whole *also* somewhat better for ranged warfare. Where they do quite well is being able to *resist* melee, so being able to use units up close is not as big a factor.
AdMech also has the unfortunate distinction of being quite complex and being very expensive as they've been turned from an army of 'between a space marine and guard' machine men with toys that allow you to customize them to your liking to a mostly horde army. That *may* improve in the next balance pass, however, so you may wish to wait and see what the dedicated AdMech players say later on.
At the end of the day, again, my recommendation is to do a bit of research on the armies and their playstyles - there's plenty of posts on the individual subreddits for each faction, and you can probably find reviews and tactics articles for them. Aim for a balance of 'I like how this looks' with 'I like (in theory) how this plays', as ultimately if you hate how it looks then you will not have a good time painting and won't enjoy seeing them, and if you hate how it plays then you will not be interested in continuing to actually play and they'll just be on a shelf.
In theory, I'd say Tau could be up your alley if you lean more on your battlesuits - they might not be ideal right now, but codexes come and go, and they *generally* should be quite good in melee. A blend of battlesuit and some infantry + vehicles will give you a decently balanced army.
Other factions might be Space Marines (they have everything and can do anything, but I avoid recommending them for new players anymore because of the sheer amount of profiles); Necrons (quite balanced, a little slow, but regenerate instead, *very* easy to paint because it's mostly just a metal colour); Custodes (can do everything well, but their unit list is tiny and I hope you *really* enjoy gold because that's 90% of what you'll be painting); Votann (also balanced, but lean on shooting more than melee, their visual style is hit-or-miss with people and I hope you like flat panels); Eldar (have specialist tools for every role, fast, but very fragile so can be unforgiving and some of the models are old).
If you run Kroot you get some decent melee options. You can build a solid army if you grab the outgoing combat patrol and new combat patrol, Kroot Hunting Pack, and then add some Crisis Suits.
Admech has a decent mix of melee and range. It's more like 70% shooting and 30% melee which seems like a lot in favor of shooting but even melee based armies like Blood Angels and Drukhari take a good amount of shooting. I'd honestly pick AdMech, I'll admit it is one of the difficult armies to play but if you're enjoying it you'll be more interested in getting better at it.
I would say just stay away from ad mech. For no other reason than the army barely got any love this edition, and the models are insanely expensive.
Other than that I think any faction is decent. I went with SM because if figured worst case scenario I could sell them. But then after started collecting orks.
Tau are cool and one of the easier armies, I wouldn’t say there’s even anything bad or wrong about starting with admech they’re just the least beginner friendly. Maybe genestealer cults are equal. If you’re set on having melee but don’t like kroot I’d give up on tau. If you’re really into techy guys, iron hands and iron warriors are cool
Ofc ofc I was memeing, I like the concept of them luring in daemons into machines, I like most legions because they all have something i find cool about them.
I just don't like one, the night lords.
I agree with everyone else. You should pick something that you're interested in. But I'll add another opinion here.
1. This is a complicated game. Every army will be hard to play for 5, 10, 20, 100 games potentially. People are usually answering that question from the perspective of running the army *well*.
2. No army is especially difficult to play if you don't bite off more than you can chew (in this edition at least). Start with combat patrol or 1k points and don't buy one of every unit right away. Play small games, play with fewer units, temporarily skip rules that are too confusing (the starter sets used to have rules encouraging this, I don't know if they still do). Watch YouTube videos about getting started (and make sure the video is about 10th edition or you'll get confused af).
Ya the dice roles and the stats are hard to grasp.
How do I know what I should Target with my units strength if I don't know an opponents toughness for each unit?
Exactly. And the only answer to that is to ask your opponent, slowly memorize units, and eventually you'll also figure out the toughness for "types" of units on average. Really comes down to experience most of all, though.
When I first started playing, my first army was Tyranids (granted, it was my university 40K club’s community army, but still) and I found them pretty easy to play. Orks (another of my first) are also pretty good to start with in my experience.
Granted, I’m in the US and my particular college town has a pretty big tabletop community that is really into 40K. But yeah, GW could be better with offering their stuff to wider audiences.
Obviously space marines ? You can chose whichever flavor you think looks the coolest and if you don't like that playstyle, you can still use them as a proxy for any other faction. Pretty much all major playstyles are represented by SM factions, so if you're not sure it really is the best place to start IMO.
If you like swarmy/spammy armies then orks & tyrannids
If you really, really just like shooting then T'au, but honestly SMs can do that too and they have the advantage above.
Space marines are the designated newbie army and intended to be very forgiving.
That said, they are boring. Pick the army you want to collect and paint, because rules change but art lasts forever.
*That* said, Adeptus Mechanicus are absurdly expensive to collect. Go for Tau. They are almost entirely a shooting army, although they have Kroot for melee screening.
SMs are designed for new players, it's a more or less balanced army that does a bit of everything, unlike say tau that have to no melee. Also they are the most updated and maintained faction.
Custodes are probably the easiest and cheapest to collect - it's an elite army that requires less models.
You've probably already gotten this advice earlier in the comments, but ignore the meta. Do not concern yourself with which army is easier or harder to play, it's all about what toy soldiers you like the best.
I started collecting Tau in 2019 (having been in the hobby since 2006) and in that time, Tau have gone from being useless, to decent, to broken, to useless, to decent again. The difficulty of armies fluctuates constantly between editions, and nowadays editions last for four years max.
In fact when I was building my crisis suits in 9th edition, the rules encouraged you to have diverse loadouts on each suit though points discounts. Now the new 10th ed codex makes any suit which doesn't have very specific, preset loadouts a legends unit ineligible for tournament play and no longer supported with new rules.
Considering how much the rules fluctuate you should shove the idea of what's strong and what's weak way to the back of your mind, and think purely about what you'll enjoy painting.
Depend:
Starting the hobby ? Pick a patrol box. They have their own format that's supposed to be balanced, and you can pick what your heart want.
On PURE GAMEPLAY standard, custodes. No hesitation.
Tanky, low model count, good overall stats and they have lowest stat to hit on 3+. It's a very good army in casual play, even a bit too much.
To learn how to play, with a lot of fun rules, you can go grey knights, who are also elite but have a lot of teleport shenanigans, so it's really fun and can get you engaged in the game once you get the ropes of it.
Orrrkkkks is the best!!!!!
(With good friends, you will learn quick. I would chose an army that looks fun and that you are into. Orks are good as they live to fight so losing is also winning. This is the sort of attitude you want to develop for your preferred army)
I am new and am starting with the Ultramarines.
They aren't my fave, but the starter set includes tools and paints for their color scheme, so for me it was a good way to see how much I liked assembling and painting.
Ultramarine also seem fairly easy to paint, so that helps my learning curve.
Go with the models you like really then weigh up how much you enjoy the models with how much you enjoy their playstyle maybe?
I main Aeldari but they're kinda a toolbox army in that if I want a tanky stompy force I can lean heavy into Wraiths, if I want a fast force then Hawks, Spiders, Spectres (totallyliegitebayonestotallyfromforgeworldcough) and bikes, if I want to go rule of cool monster mash there's Avatar, Yncarne, Wraithknights and Lords.
A lot of armies don't have that versatility I've found (ignore Space marines of all stripes here), however, with the freeblade rules Imperium armies do have the option to soup in big and/or small knights as well as agents. For example, I love the Sisters aesthetic but find the army a bit too objective based and lacking killing power but I can shore that up with some sisters themed armigers, also gives you some centrepiece models to go with the smaller infantry.
Don't forget as well that some armies are also easier to paint and model than others...so I guess my real advice is go for looks first then worry about ease of painting and modelling then competitiveness last. You can houserule casual games, you can't houserule the ease of the models hobby wise.
Custodes are cheaper money wise, and aren’t to hard to figure out. Tau are pretty simple but cost more per model. I recommend custodes if it’s your first army, but don’t be afraid to follow your heart
I know there's all sorts of recommendations flying around for armies you didn't ask about, but none of them seemed to consider you expressed an interest in a technology dependant army, so I come bearing The Leagues Of Votann, for your consideration.
You know, depending on how you like Space Dwarves That Live Near Galactic Center And Talk To AI.
Of the two you mentioned, though, the T'au have cool battlesuits, and no real melee phase, so you may find yourself not learning very many melee combat rules and interactions, but you will be learning about mobility and positioning.
I don't actually know how AdMech plays , other than people talking about it in social medias, but the general consensus seems to be that they're not great, and way too expensive, monetarily.
A dude at one of the stores I went to said it best. "I have been doing this for 15 years. I'm still not 100% sure I know how to play this game correctly."
I hope that helps. Just do the best you can and depending on what you want, you can pick the army that has the highest competitive wins, the one you like the most, but this shit has changed so much just in the 2 years I have been in it that I get the impression that you should just get what makes you happy and fuck everyone else's opinion on it.
I have had one person say some messed up stuff as a joke about one army and then talked about how amazing their favorite one is.
I got into Admech when forgebane came out and I was not ready for the pain. The baby Knights were a good addition but the glaring issue with admech is skitaari just aren't up to the task. And this bums me out cause I love the Skitaari ranger model.
I sadly do not know which army is easiest to play for new players. But my recommendation would be to go with one you like the look of. To be honest you will likely spend more time painting than playing.
Thanks it's gotta be the tau then, i like factions that depend on tech a lot. Never got around to liking the necrons tho.
Buy a cheap airbrush (Gaahleri) and compressor. I’ve heard with Tau it’s so much easier to paint with an airbrush.
Is it because of the white? Thats what ive been seeing a lot. I have an airbrush. Just havent used it in awhile!
Tau models have lots of large, smooth surfaces. Using an airbrush will certainly give everything a smoother look than brush strokes with a traditional brush. You could also use spray paint to prime and base coat the models with similar smooth effect. But airbrushes are much easier IMO and are easier to control and get a nice smooth finish.
I see, ill have to put that in consideration. My plan is to prim in grey seer. So with an airbrush, ill at least be able to see good coverage. I know using a brush with white is difficult. Tried it with a battletech figure and came out rough.
You can paint them whatever colour you want! Don't stick to the GW colours.
Admech is a very expensive army to collect, their rules arent very good right now and the units are very cheap in points which means you need to get a lot of models to make an army. Tau get a reputation as a hard to play army because they aren't a melee army. Their battlesuits are good at moving, shooting really hard and falling back so their playstyle is usually more about secondary objectives than taking and contesting primaries. This has changed a bit now with the Kroot range being refreshed, Kroot are much more viable melee units. Tau was my first army too and it wasn't that hard to learn, so I would say if you're interested in Tau go for it. The most common advice you'll get when choosing your first army is to go with the one you like the model range of most, because rules will always change but you'll be more motivated to paint and play models you like looking at.
This question gets asked 10x a day and the answer is always the same. You pick the army you personally like the most. Its a waste of your time and money to buy and paint an army that is not your favourite.
Building and painting takes lots of time. You can easily learn game rules and army rules long before having even 1000 points of army just by reading them between painting sessions or when you wait for shade/varnish/primer/layers dry. Game is balanced for 2000 points and it is "official" game size, most competetive and most used on tournaments. By the time you will reach 2000 points you will know nearly all your armies datasheets with all details. Do not bother with army you dont like just because it is considered easy.
Seconded because this is super fresh for me. I started painting a few months back. Knew I wanted to play Orks. Also knew I was going to try to force some friends to play with me so I bought a starter set and started painting. It's taken me almost two and a half months of painting at least 2 hours every other day to get 80% finished with the space marine combat patrol portion of the starter set. Tyranids are 80% primed (damn citadel can ran out before finishing). The ork combat patrol I bought a few weeks back before it sold out is barely assembled. Probably will be another month or two before I even paint the orks. Granted I had never painted anything in my life before these first minis, so I was really slow in the beginning and got a bit faster but it's still a huge time sink to paint 2000 points. At my current pace it'd take me 6 months more to have a 2000 pt space marine army, not to mention the cost of a ton of different paints I probably will never use fully because I'm switching wildly between armies. I don't regret my order though, I don't care a ton about how the space marines or tyranids look so it's been good to practice without stressing it looking great. But I underestimated how long it'd take to paint everything and if your goal is playing, go right for what you know you want to run long term. I like all these factions mechanics so I'm fine but I understand that isn't the norm for everyone.
To be fair, with Tau you generally omit two things that can be quite difficult to master and learn - psyker powers and melee combat. You're either not very good or don't have access to them at all, so as a new player you shouldn't try to worry too hard about mastering them and instead learn to play the ranged and movement games as best you can. So, I would say it *is* a simpler army to start with, but it's not necessarily the easiest army long term - in fact, unfortunately, in 10th they have a reputation for being very tough to play at higher levels due to needing to support one another and being quite fragile. However, if you're a good sport and don't care too much about carrying the win every time but just want to play casually, then just go with it. It's easier to tack on the other phases later than to try and master everything at once. :) It might be a good idea to research a bit about the playstyles of factions just to get a good idea for how they work in the current edition, as I think that might be a big factor if you're going for playing more than painting and collecting.
Alright then I'll look into the tau a bit more I was disappointed to hear about the no melee phase fights for the tau. I wanted a faction that does shooting and melee with a very tech based lore.
Unfortunately, the Tau are quite limited in that aspect. You have things like battlesuits which can do melee decently, but the majority of your army (unless the majority IS battlesuits) will not want to get stuck in and you don't really have any truly 'dedicated' melee like other armies do (except maybe Farsight...). That said, however, they *are* fun, you just have to take the good with the bad and enjoy them obliterating things at range. The Adeptus Mechanicus in that respect are better as they do have some good melee units (dragoons and fulgurite electropriests come to mind), but unfortunately they're on the whole *also* somewhat better for ranged warfare. Where they do quite well is being able to *resist* melee, so being able to use units up close is not as big a factor. AdMech also has the unfortunate distinction of being quite complex and being very expensive as they've been turned from an army of 'between a space marine and guard' machine men with toys that allow you to customize them to your liking to a mostly horde army. That *may* improve in the next balance pass, however, so you may wish to wait and see what the dedicated AdMech players say later on. At the end of the day, again, my recommendation is to do a bit of research on the armies and their playstyles - there's plenty of posts on the individual subreddits for each faction, and you can probably find reviews and tactics articles for them. Aim for a balance of 'I like how this looks' with 'I like (in theory) how this plays', as ultimately if you hate how it looks then you will not have a good time painting and won't enjoy seeing them, and if you hate how it plays then you will not be interested in continuing to actually play and they'll just be on a shelf. In theory, I'd say Tau could be up your alley if you lean more on your battlesuits - they might not be ideal right now, but codexes come and go, and they *generally* should be quite good in melee. A blend of battlesuit and some infantry + vehicles will give you a decently balanced army. Other factions might be Space Marines (they have everything and can do anything, but I avoid recommending them for new players anymore because of the sheer amount of profiles); Necrons (quite balanced, a little slow, but regenerate instead, *very* easy to paint because it's mostly just a metal colour); Custodes (can do everything well, but their unit list is tiny and I hope you *really* enjoy gold because that's 90% of what you'll be painting); Votann (also balanced, but lean on shooting more than melee, their visual style is hit-or-miss with people and I hope you like flat panels); Eldar (have specialist tools for every role, fast, but very fragile so can be unforgiving and some of the models are old).
If you run Kroot you get some decent melee options. You can build a solid army if you grab the outgoing combat patrol and new combat patrol, Kroot Hunting Pack, and then add some Crisis Suits.
Admech has a decent mix of melee and range. It's more like 70% shooting and 30% melee which seems like a lot in favor of shooting but even melee based armies like Blood Angels and Drukhari take a good amount of shooting. I'd honestly pick AdMech, I'll admit it is one of the difficult armies to play but if you're enjoying it you'll be more interested in getting better at it.
The best option is always the one with the coolest models
I would say just stay away from ad mech. For no other reason than the army barely got any love this edition, and the models are insanely expensive. Other than that I think any faction is decent. I went with SM because if figured worst case scenario I could sell them. But then after started collecting orks.
Tau are cool and one of the easier armies, I wouldn’t say there’s even anything bad or wrong about starting with admech they’re just the least beginner friendly. Maybe genestealer cults are equal. If you’re set on having melee but don’t like kroot I’d give up on tau. If you’re really into techy guys, iron hands and iron warriors are cool
Iron hands are cool, and perturabo has always pissed me off after reading his book lol.
that’s kinda the fun of the iron warriors but I get if you don’t like it lol
Ofc ofc I was memeing, I like the concept of them luring in daemons into machines, I like most legions because they all have something i find cool about them. I just don't like one, the night lords.
Whaaat night lords are so cool I play them what’s not to like
Lorewise they just seem like cowardly murder hobos, Conrad atleast has a sad backstory
That’s the fun of it, they’re in a way very straight evil cowardly villains but do have a depth to them if you look
Hmmm I guess it wouldn't hurt to check the lore out a bit more.
I mean everyone in the setting is pretty extremely very evil so I wouldn’t draw the line at being tactical retreat pussies lol
I agree with everyone else. You should pick something that you're interested in. But I'll add another opinion here. 1. This is a complicated game. Every army will be hard to play for 5, 10, 20, 100 games potentially. People are usually answering that question from the perspective of running the army *well*. 2. No army is especially difficult to play if you don't bite off more than you can chew (in this edition at least). Start with combat patrol or 1k points and don't buy one of every unit right away. Play small games, play with fewer units, temporarily skip rules that are too confusing (the starter sets used to have rules encouraging this, I don't know if they still do). Watch YouTube videos about getting started (and make sure the video is about 10th edition or you'll get confused af).
Ya the dice roles and the stats are hard to grasp. How do I know what I should Target with my units strength if I don't know an opponents toughness for each unit?
Exactly. And the only answer to that is to ask your opponent, slowly memorize units, and eventually you'll also figure out the toughness for "types" of units on average. Really comes down to experience most of all, though.
Damn, well it still might be fun as hell to see my units bullets ping off a Terminator armour lol.
When I first started playing, my first army was Tyranids (granted, it was my university 40K club’s community army, but still) and I found them pretty easy to play. Orks (another of my first) are also pretty good to start with in my experience.
Damn you had 40k club? Godammmit GW let the Indian audience get their hands on them models.
Granted, I’m in the US and my particular college town has a pretty big tabletop community that is really into 40K. But yeah, GW could be better with offering their stuff to wider audiences.
Obviously space marines ? You can chose whichever flavor you think looks the coolest and if you don't like that playstyle, you can still use them as a proxy for any other faction. Pretty much all major playstyles are represented by SM factions, so if you're not sure it really is the best place to start IMO. If you like swarmy/spammy armies then orks & tyrannids If you really, really just like shooting then T'au, but honestly SMs can do that too and they have the advantage above.
Space marines are the designated newbie army and intended to be very forgiving. That said, they are boring. Pick the army you want to collect and paint, because rules change but art lasts forever. *That* said, Adeptus Mechanicus are absurdly expensive to collect. Go for Tau. They are almost entirely a shooting army, although they have Kroot for melee screening.
I’ve heard knights are since your using fewer models it’s easier to keep track of. War dogs are in stock pretty regularly at least now.
They might be a bit difficult to paint without an airbrush though. But knights/Gargants are probably the cheapest army to build.
Play the army you like the models for the most. You will learn how to use any army over time, you can't learn to love models you don't like.
Adeptus Mechanicus is one of the most expensive armies to collect
SMs are designed for new players, it's a more or less balanced army that does a bit of everything, unlike say tau that have to no melee. Also they are the most updated and maintained faction. Custodes are probably the easiest and cheapest to collect - it's an elite army that requires less models.
Pick an army you like. Their rules and play styles can change. And you are likely to spent more time assembling and painting than playing
You've probably already gotten this advice earlier in the comments, but ignore the meta. Do not concern yourself with which army is easier or harder to play, it's all about what toy soldiers you like the best. I started collecting Tau in 2019 (having been in the hobby since 2006) and in that time, Tau have gone from being useless, to decent, to broken, to useless, to decent again. The difficulty of armies fluctuates constantly between editions, and nowadays editions last for four years max. In fact when I was building my crisis suits in 9th edition, the rules encouraged you to have diverse loadouts on each suit though points discounts. Now the new 10th ed codex makes any suit which doesn't have very specific, preset loadouts a legends unit ineligible for tournament play and no longer supported with new rules. Considering how much the rules fluctuate you should shove the idea of what's strong and what's weak way to the back of your mind, and think purely about what you'll enjoy painting.
All I hear about AdMech is how expensive it is to actually make an army. And Tau just got a box of Kroot…
Depend: Starting the hobby ? Pick a patrol box. They have their own format that's supposed to be balanced, and you can pick what your heart want. On PURE GAMEPLAY standard, custodes. No hesitation. Tanky, low model count, good overall stats and they have lowest stat to hit on 3+. It's a very good army in casual play, even a bit too much. To learn how to play, with a lot of fun rules, you can go grey knights, who are also elite but have a lot of teleport shenanigans, so it's really fun and can get you engaged in the game once you get the ropes of it.
AOS 4th ed is where I would start, 40K 11th ed is where I would start.
A 30K one.
Orrrkkkks is the best!!!!! (With good friends, you will learn quick. I would chose an army that looks fun and that you are into. Orks are good as they live to fight so losing is also winning. This is the sort of attitude you want to develop for your preferred army)
I am new and am starting with the Ultramarines. They aren't my fave, but the starter set includes tools and paints for their color scheme, so for me it was a good way to see how much I liked assembling and painting. Ultramarine also seem fairly easy to paint, so that helps my learning curve.
Nighthaunt
Go with the models you like really then weigh up how much you enjoy the models with how much you enjoy their playstyle maybe? I main Aeldari but they're kinda a toolbox army in that if I want a tanky stompy force I can lean heavy into Wraiths, if I want a fast force then Hawks, Spiders, Spectres (totallyliegitebayonestotallyfromforgeworldcough) and bikes, if I want to go rule of cool monster mash there's Avatar, Yncarne, Wraithknights and Lords. A lot of armies don't have that versatility I've found (ignore Space marines of all stripes here), however, with the freeblade rules Imperium armies do have the option to soup in big and/or small knights as well as agents. For example, I love the Sisters aesthetic but find the army a bit too objective based and lacking killing power but I can shore that up with some sisters themed armigers, also gives you some centrepiece models to go with the smaller infantry. Don't forget as well that some armies are also easier to paint and model than others...so I guess my real advice is go for looks first then worry about ease of painting and modelling then competitiveness last. You can houserule casual games, you can't houserule the ease of the models hobby wise.
Custodes are cheaper money wise, and aren’t to hard to figure out. Tau are pretty simple but cost more per model. I recommend custodes if it’s your first army, but don’t be afraid to follow your heart
I know there's all sorts of recommendations flying around for armies you didn't ask about, but none of them seemed to consider you expressed an interest in a technology dependant army, so I come bearing The Leagues Of Votann, for your consideration. You know, depending on how you like Space Dwarves That Live Near Galactic Center And Talk To AI. Of the two you mentioned, though, the T'au have cool battlesuits, and no real melee phase, so you may find yourself not learning very many melee combat rules and interactions, but you will be learning about mobility and positioning. I don't actually know how AdMech plays , other than people talking about it in social medias, but the general consensus seems to be that they're not great, and way too expensive, monetarily.
A dude at one of the stores I went to said it best. "I have been doing this for 15 years. I'm still not 100% sure I know how to play this game correctly." I hope that helps. Just do the best you can and depending on what you want, you can pick the army that has the highest competitive wins, the one you like the most, but this shit has changed so much just in the 2 years I have been in it that I get the impression that you should just get what makes you happy and fuck everyone else's opinion on it. I have had one person say some messed up stuff as a joke about one army and then talked about how amazing their favorite one is.
Thanks that does put things kinda into perspective
Imperial knights
I got into Admech when forgebane came out and I was not ready for the pain. The baby Knights were a good addition but the glaring issue with admech is skitaari just aren't up to the task. And this bums me out cause I love the Skitaari ranger model.
space marines i think