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So, I've always played a little Chaos on the side, I've got a CSM cultist army, a decent Deathgauard force and a small Thousand Sons army. I've been interested in Daemons for a long time now, but never pulled the trigger on getting into the faction itself.

Seeing all the spillover you can do to soup some of these factions together, it got me thinking if it's currently templated in the best way. Currently we have CSM, DG, WE, TSons, and soon EC, as well as Daemons. What I was thinking though, wouldn't it be more thematic to instead to have them divided as CSM, Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh? Instead of having a solo Daemon codex, split them up into the four Gods and combine them with the legion specific chaos god factions? This would enable some more thematic lists and round out some of the smaller codices while allowing you to apply army buffs across both ranges for your specific God. So for example, all Nurgle units would get the Nurgle's Gift aura currently for DG, rather than it weirdly excluding the Nurgle daemons that you've allied in.

There would still be the ability to take a portion of your army from another deity, so you could still complement a Khorne force with some ranged units from another Chaos God if you wanted. Also with Detachments, you could still cater to a more heavily Daemonic or non Daemonic playstyle for each of the armies too.

What are your thoughts, I don't play any Deamons yet, just some thoughts I was having.

That would work, really depends what’s being done with minis and rules on the table.

Personal I think they should do a Deamons and cults codex.
Mortal units, some daemon engines and some stolen imperial stuff they can use and build.
All with some unique ways they all have synergy.
It sorts out some of deamons issues, and lets cults have somewhere they can shine on their own.

Then allow the marines to be expanded and borrow units as desired.

Slow down makes posting hard lol

i'm a big fan of splitting the gods into four books. it worked great for AOS, so i don't see why it wouldn't work for 40k

especially because the demons for an individual god can be rather light as a force of their own, but when supplemented by even a unit or two of their respective marines, really add up. plus, it allows the marines to have a bit more variety, especially for WE and (if the rumors are true), EP

I agree, its worked fantastically well in AoS.

Whilst its sad that you can't take a big 4 demon combined army, I think that's an acceptable loss in regular games for what 4 separate armies gives you.

Each of the demons has a very distinct style of models and having them split into 4 armies means that each demonic force has more room to add more models. It increases the gameplay creative space for the force considerably.

Personally I think 40K can even go to 6 armies.

Slaanesh, Tzzentch, Khorne, Nurgle, regular Chaos Space Marines, Dark Mechanicius/Warpsmith

Chaos Marines would be the one that pulls them all together like Slaves to Darkness does in AoS; whilst each of those separate themes can go its own way with unique models.




The big question though is if GW is going to make Chaos Demon armies the core and then have those as the backbone; or if GW wants to keep Chaos and Demons separate. That might well mean that, practically, we end up with 5 separate marine based forces and then still retain the unique Chaos Demon army.

 Overread wrote:
I agree, its worked fantastically well in AoS.

Whilst its sad that you can't take a big 4 demon combined army, I think that's an acceptable loss in regular games for what 4 separate armies gives you.

Each of the demons has a very distinct style of models and having them split into 4 armies means that each demonic force has more room to add more models. It increases the gameplay creative space for the force considerably.

Personally I think 40K can even go to 6 armies.

Slaanesh, Tzzentch, Khorne, Nurgle, regular Chaos Space Marines, Dark Mechanicius/Warpsmith

Chaos Marines would be the one that pulls them all together like Slaves to Darkness does in AoS; whilst each of those separate themes can go its own way with unique models.




The big question though is if GW is going to make Chaos Demon armies the core and then have those as the backbone; or if GW wants to keep Chaos and Demons separate. That might well mean that, practically, we end up with 5 separate marine based forces and then still retain the unique Chaos Demon army.

not sure if there's a need for DM yet (maybe someday!) but splitting it into five would be the best way forward, as far as i'm concerned. repeat the important stuff (ie, vehicles) between books but otherwise they can be different

as for the core, i think it should be a mix. ie, berzerkerz and bloodletters as the battleline for Khorne. i think they can have different niches within the books such that this will still be balanced

Please Dark Mech!
They could be SO COOL!

There's already a good chunk of mechanicus things that could splinter out into a Dark Mech army. So it very much could be a thing that would be fairly easy to make.

I think the only big hurdle would be if some manager came up with a policy that models must have the same stats no matter they army they are in (possibly prompted by not wanting to confuse/add more pages to instruction manuals) . Which would make it really hard to balance the core force as it would have stuff from all over the place brought into it; or would result in any shared models under-performing in their own book. Or just overshadowed.



So I very much feel that the cornerstone to this working is allowing varied stats depending on the army. Heck it might even just be varied point values just to account for the variation on how they'd perform in a different force.

ill argue that splitting books up is just GW double dipping our into wallets

No more than it already is. All non-Daemon Chaos armies can take Daemons and a Chaos Knight.
CSM can also take the Cult troops from the God Marked books.

None of these options are in any of those books so to get the rules you need to get those other books.

At least with the AoS model the God Marked books could have those Daemon rules already there.

I was kind of cool how 2nd edition did it, even if the daemons didn't stand out. Or the 6th edition WHFB Army List.
"Here's your Chaos Codex!", and leave it at that.
They could probably release pamphlets for each god, but that was your basic.

The issue with that approach is the difference in both game scale and model range from almost 30 years ago.
A Chaos Codex with everything isn't a usable gamebook when that encompasses six (soon to be seven) Codexes worth of rules.

Whilst I think GW went overboard (as they always do) I think this is also part why they pushed the removal of a LOT of upgrades in 10th.

Some units were getting very complicated and had elements that were vestiges of when they were once units that you took in multiple roles and kitted out for those roles with upgrades. Only today those roles have dedicated models for those specific purposes that are either as good or better in those roles.

Whilst I disagree with the removal of points on them (that's just whoever has a huge fetish for power-levels getting their way); and I dislike GW going for this "all close combat weapons are the same (esp in AoS and Tyranid Warriors); I do respect that some older kits were jack-of-all trades and were just not quite fitting into modern much larger army compositions.

In a sense with 40K I'd also say GW worked themselves into a bit of a creative corner in that they can't just release a new army - they have gone deep into armies they have released rather than gone wide with lots of armies. Which is basically the two choices designers have when maintaining army games long term over decades. Esp since existing army player still want new shiny models for their armies.

What is that in response to?

You point about not putting everything into one codex because it overloads it - same as how GW have stripped choices on a bunch of models because of overloading within one army.

Options being removed from Codexes doesn't have anything to do with my point though.

My point is that 40k isn't just Marines, Orks, Eldar, and Chaos anymore.
Within Chaos alone, there's CSM, DG, Tsons, WE, Daemons, Knights, and soon EC as well.
Each of these (except WE) stands as a full army in its own right.
40k is bigger than it was 30 years ago and we've seen with the 8th Ed Indexes that compendiums for "factions" don't work and inevitably cause the removal of options or any flavour to an army.

The removal of options in Codexes has to do with getting rid of older kits like Finecast or replacing them with new models such as Primaris or the whims of whoever is in charge in a given week.

In regards to new armies, since 7th Edition we've had Admech, Deathwatch, Custodes, Knights, Harlequins, GSC, Leagues, Chaos Knights, Death Guard, World Eaters, and Thousand Sons.
While some are expansions on themes and designs from previous armies such as CSM or Eldar, six had either no models or were updates to forces that existed in the time of Rogue Trader.

I'd personally like to see one giant Chaos book, with how you build your army done on kind of a table. On one axis, you have the three main types of subfactions--Champions of Chaos (CSM), Mortals of Chaos (traitors and dark mechanicus), and Daemons of Chaos.

On the other axis, you have the gods--Slaanesh, Khorne, Nurgle, and Tzeentch.

And depending how narrow you are on this table, you get specific benefits. For example, if you wanted an Undivided warband, you can pick whatever you want willy nilly and trade flexibility for somewhat less powerful individual units.

However, you could pick, say, Daemons of Chaos and pick from any daemon units, and get benefits of that. Or you could go with a Slaanesh warband and pick from any Slaaneshi units in Champions, Daemons, or Mortal roster, and get the benefits of that.

Or you could go super narrow and pick, say, a Mortals of Chaos army that features only Khorne marked units and recreate the Blood Pact. And you'd end up with the benefits of both a Mortals of Chaos only army and a Khorne only army.

And then have separate books for Tsons, EC, DG, and WE, with some overlap from the main codex but different gimmicks and expanded models limited to those specific factions.