What Fourth Edition Changed at UK Clash of Kings: 2024–2026 Compared

UK Clash of Kings 2026 gives us something we have not had before: a very large UK field playing Fourth Edition. That makes the released lists useful for more than a normal tournament preview. We can put the 2026 field next to the 2024 and 2025 UK Clash of Kings reports and ask a straightforward question:

What actually changed when UK COK moved from Third Edition to Fourth?

I already looked at the current field in detail in UK Clash of Kings 2026: What to Watch in the Released Lists. That article focused on what players should expect this weekend: Orc pressure, Xirkaali, high-Unit Strength Ratkin and Goblins, specialist shooting, and long threat ranges.

Stepping back from individual pairings, Fourth Edition has clearly shaken up what armies people pack in their foam. But instead of the meta collapsing into two dominant armies, the real shift happened inside the lists themselves.

The basic comparison

The three pre-tournament reports contain 195 submitted competitor lists in 2024, 203 in 2025, and 160 in 2026. Those numbers should not be treated as verified event attendance. They are simply the usable released lists in each report.

The obvious number is 20 factions instead of 28 or 29. Fourth Edition reorganized the faction structure. Some Third Edition faction labels were consolidated, removed, renamed, or otherwise changed. Seeing 20 factions instead of 29 doesn’t mean nine player groups vanished overnight—Mantic just merged and cleaned up army lists. When you look at where players actually landed across those choices, the spread is surprisingly steady.

The field is a little more concentrated, but still broad

HHI is one way I measure faction concentration. Lower numbers mean players are spread more evenly across factions. The 2025 UK field had an HHI of 461.8. This year it is 569.5. That is a real increase. It is also not especially alarming when you look at the actual faction shares:

The biggest faction in 2025 was Ogres at 7.9%. The biggest faction in 2026 is Orcs at 8.8%. And the top five factions account for 36.9% of the 2026 field, exactly the same percentage as in 2024. So Fourth Edition UK COK occupies fewer faction buckets, but it has not turned into a two-faction arms race. The field remains broad, even if the menu is shorter.

More Unit Strength, more attacks

Where the data moves decisively is how those armies are built. Average Unit Strength increased from 24.45 in 2024 and 24.60 in 2025 to 26.22 in 2026. That is an extra 1.6 to 1.8 Unit Strength per army across a 160-player field. Over a six-turn tournament, that is a substantial increase in scoring power and scenario resilience.

At the same time, average attacks increased by nearly twenty per list: from 156.3 in 2024 and 155.5 in 2025 to 174.1 in 2026. Some of that is the edition’s higher point total (2,300 points instead of 2,250). But the attack jump is larger than a simple point scaling would predict. Fourth Edition lists appear to be packing more combat dice into each army.

Shooting and items took a step back

To pay for that extra combat power and Unit Strength, players trimmed two other areas: ranged attacks and magic items. Average ranged attacks fell from 38.5 in 2025 to 27.0 in 2026, a decline of nearly 30%. As I noted in the preview post, pure gun lines are down to seven of 160 lists. Shooting has shifted from an army-defining strategy to a secondary support tool for most players.

Magic item budgets shrank too

There is another quiet change that I think is worth watching. Average magic-item spend increased from 65.9 points in 2024 to 68.2 in 2025. This year it drops to 56.9. The median falls even harder, from 65 points last year to 45.

Some of that could simply reflect Fourth Edition item economics. Item costs and the surrounding rules changed, so I would not turn the number into a claim that players suddenly care less about artifacts. But it does fit the broader shape of the field. The 2026 lists seem to be putting relatively more of their value directly onto the table through Unit Strength and combat pieces rather than through item spend. Sir Jesse’s Boots of Striding are still everywhere, but the overall item budget is simply lower.

Diversity is really two different questions

I think the UK comparison helps clean up something I have been wrestling with in the Fourth Edition data. Faction diversity and list diversity are not the same thing. At the faction level, UK COK is still broadly distributed. Inside factions, there is more evidence that players are finding common cores.

About 25% of the 2026 UK lists contain four or more copies of the exact same unit and formation size. The comparable late-Third Edition figure in my broader dataset was 19.3%. That is an increase, but still well below the 34.1% rate from the earlier pooled 4E sample. I dug further into that question in Are Fourth-Edition Kings of War Lists Getting Less Diverse?.

UK COK reinforces the more nuanced answer. The tournament does not look like 160 people choosing from three armies. It does look like players within some factions increasingly agree on which units belong in the starting chassis. Those are very different concerns.

So what actually changed from 3E to 4E?

Fourth Edition didn’t kill army variety at UK Clash—it just forced players to care about different tools on the table. The faction menu is smaller. Orcs, Forces of Nature, Kingdoms of Men, and Xirkaali occupy much more of the field than their equivalent late-3E positions. Ogres, Abyssal Dwarfs, and Basileans occupy less.

But once those faction choices are made, the average list still contains about 14 units. Those units now bring more Unit Strength and considerably more attacks. At the same time, the average army brings less shooting and spends fewer points on magic items. That is a fairly coherent picture.

Fourth Edition UK COK looks like a field leaning harder into board presence and decisive combat. The results will tell us whether that is actually the right answer.

Other UK COK previews and where to watch

There is plenty of coverage available if you want something less spreadsheet-shaped before the weekend.

The two UK COK video previews shared with me are here: 2026 UK Clash of Kings preview video and a second 2026 UK Clash of Kings preview.

Mantic Universe Podcast also released Episode 211: MUP Kings of War — Clash of Kings UK 2026 this week. Matthias, Danny, and Menai talk through their plans and lists for Nottingham.

And if you are not there in person, the tournament livestream is scheduled here: UK Clash of Kings 2026 livestream.

I will come back to the data after the event. The question then will be much better than “what did people bring?” We will finally get to ask which parts of the Fourth Edition field actually worked.