Thought on the less efficient warjacks

Well the idea of spam is to just maximize what you get from that efficiency.

Casters like Kharchev and Harkevitch (the traditional spammers) gain little from the other jacks and cant really offer them anything in return as well.

They also cant iffer much in tge support for ranged options either because hark and karch tend to be very focus strapped. Tgey rely more on infantry for ranged damage support.

Casters like Strahkov 1, Irusk 2, old witch, and a bunch if others tend to enjoy more varied and niche jacks.

I think just about every jack in the Khador staple has its place (except maybe Berserkers). The more expensive specialized ones, though, you need to know why you're taking them and who you're taking them with, otherwise you're paying extra for bells and whistles you don't need. For example, the Grolar is pretty meh most of the time, but it has some serious assassination threat with Strakhov and works pretty well with one or two other casters.

It's all about two things:
1. Is there a role in my list that this jack can fill, and
2. Are there some synergies there that I can exploit

Okay this all makes a lot of sense. So it has less to do with the jacks being bad and more to do with what casters can effectively use. Strakhov1 has never seemed more interesting to me and that list you posted auraco is the list I have been trying to make work this whole time. Although I really want to use a demolisher because I think they are just about the coolest looking jack ever besides behemoth.

what about this?

Khador Army - 74 / 75 points
[Theme] Jaws of the Wolf

(Strakhov 1) Kommander Oleg Strakhov [+28]
- Behemoth [25]
- Demolisher [16]
- Grolar [18]
- Juggernaut [12]
- Torch [18]
Greylord Forge Seer [0(4)]
Greylord Forge Seer [0(4)]
Widowmaker Marksman [0(4)]
Battle Mechaniks (min) [3]
Kayazy Eliminators [5]
Kayazy Eliminators [5]

I have to disagree with other posters. Spam lists are about pushing the rules of the game to their limit. The reason they work, in general, is because PP hasn't designed the game to scale well, despite them claiming they have and that spam is ok.

Khador jacks are balanced around the idea that you have maybe 3 and on the outside 5, which doesn't leave room for infantry. But when you can spam 8 marauders and still get a full unit of something it stretches the game balance to the extreme. This doesn't mean the spam always wins, but PP does not have a good track record. Bane spam in MK2, Bradigus in MK2, Doom Reaver spam on MK2, Warder spam in MK2, EE in MK2, Mad Dogs in MK3, Ghost fleet pirate recursion spam in MK3. Need I continue?

The point is to overwhelm the opppnent to the point a normal, balanced list simply can't power through, or sometimes the revers where even in a bad matchup you have so much of something you power through enemy defenses.

This of course does not mean our other jacks are unuseable, just that spam has a specific roll in gaming the meta.

The list is solid, it might struggle with extreme arm spam, but then again high arm skew have always been one of Strakhov's weak spot. And when I say high arm Skew I mean something like arm 24 centurion or arm 22 and over colossals, just a list of arm 18 spam is ok for this list. I don't own a demolisher and have never used one in a game, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think it's a cool redundancy for the model to trigger overrun if behemoth bites it, I don't like relying on destroyers because they only have one shot and decimator can't deal with stealth, the demolisher doesn't have theses problems.

Plenty of people take the other jacks. Even your 'good' players.

But if you want to run a jack spam, then you can't be taking expensive jacks.

The other big consideration is that you can't actually fuel all your jacks, so they need to be able to do stuff with minimum focus. Marauders can go around slamming things without focus input and Kodiaks have both vent steam and chain attack. That means they can do a lot without any focus leaving you free to allocate to your character or juggernauts which actually do the majority of the work.

You could take all premium jacks, but you won't be able to fuel them. In fact juggernaut spam doesn't work for the same reason. Kodiak is just really focus efficient, which why you see a lot of it.

The exceptions to this statement would be the devastator (and to a lesser degree demolisher). Almost immovable Arm23 is a way tougher nut to crack than a marauder. I always include one in my Karchev tournament lists; they've won me games on scenario that a marauder would have lost and make a jack brick much tougher to pick apart with pulls and whatnot.

Whether it takes the same amount of resources to destroy a Devastator as 1.4 Marauders would be a much tougher question, and much more dependent on the enemy list. Skorne, Minions, and some Khador lists might not care about the extra arm at all.

Ran some buy or boost numbers:

2 fully loaded nomads or ironclads have a 77.2% chance to kill a marauder but a .4% chance to kill a devastator. It would take 4 nomads to get to 53.4%, or 5 to have a 84.9% chance to kill the devastator. There aren't many casters that can fully load that many jacks. Ironclads would be slightly more likely to kill the marauders due to crit knockdown but numbers would be unchanged vs devastator.

6 bane warriors a 70.7% chance to kill a marauder. That same min unit has a 9.5% chance to kill a Devastator; 10 models have a comparable 68% chance to kill the devastator but might run into difficulty fitting.

6 hunter shots have a 61.1% chance to kill a marauder. 9 have a 67.5% chance to kill a devastator.