Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I got into the hobby at the tail end of 9th edition and never actually made an army with those rules, so I found the discussion about Force Organization Charts in the "11th Edition Core Rule Reactions" thread to be fascinating. I don't want to hijack that thread so...

If you were to use a FOC in 11e, what would it look like? Which FOCs worked better and why?

I happen to also think that armies are cooler with more balanced forces, and, after it was mentioned someone on the forum, I looked at the Squat army in the 2e Codex Army List book. There it imposed restrictions on Squat armies of up to 50% characters, up to 50% support, and at least 25% troops. Even that would shake up the composition of my (imagined) armies. I am not trying to propose a rule but consider a mechanism for fluffier armies. If those armies are also more effective, that'd be a nice bonus.

And how would you decide which units go where? What characteristics make a unit fill a particular role? The initial release of Leagues of Votann units had slots assigned to them in 9e, but everything that came later does not.

One thing that the FOC struggled with is support characters. A lot of them got punted to elites, which was generally a hotly contested slot. Which is why in some versions of the FOC it got extra space.

Elites was also one of the more fuzzy slots on what belonged there.

Troops are for holding ground.

Fast Attack is mobility

Heavy Support is generally slow firepower.

Of course, each faction had different opinions on what when where, and different competitive slots.

And you had issues with multiple FOCs, faction specific ones, slot swapping, etc. And the idea evolved over the years.

The idea of the old FoC was to create armies that had a certain composition.

At its most basic it allowed for more troops than anything else; with most other slots being restricted. You "had" to have a leader and at least 2 troops in a single FoC; after that there were upper limits on all things.

If you wanted to take 3 landraiders you could' but that would use all your heavy support slots up so you couldn't take any other heavy vehicles.



It attempted to balance the game and also make armies appear a certain "army" way instead of allowing unit spam or such.


The issue with the FoC was it was made in 2nd-3rd edition and worked ok there. However as armies grew the FoC didn't really grow to compensate. So you would up with, as noted above, things like the Elite slot where a LOT of specialist model were put.
Your psychers; snipers; support units; buff and debuf and so forth.

The issue is that quickly became very limiting.

For the longest time most armies were one FoC; then I think around 7 or 8th you could take several as standard. This is about when we almost wound up with paint being enforced as a subfaction defining element. Becuase you could take multiple FoC people would take the subfactions that benefitted units and build a close combat FoC for their army with the closecombat subfaction; then their ranged would be in another and so on. So 1 "army" might be 2 or 3 different subfaction armies at once.


It got messy and GW, instead of rebuilding a new FoC; did away with it. Eventually introducing the "rule of 3" and a few others as very light limits on unit army composition. This easily helped deal with armies having big and diverse model ranges; but also left the game open to a much wider variety of unit spams.

FOC sucked when they were first imposed and carried on sucking until they died with 9th edition. Just my opinion but I never liked them. Clunky, restrictive, units being shoe horned into slots, characters being rare and they ended up making rules that broke them. U couldn’t make fun armies they were there to stop competitive types spamming stuff.

I really liked the FOC and thought it was best implemented in 3rd-4th edition. This is for the simple reason that GW designed missions to interact with the FOC in those editions, which both made the FOC feel more thematic and encouraged balanced armies if playing a variety of missions. There were also FOC variants for particular mission types.

The example that sticks with me was a White Dwarf battle report with a 3.5th Chaos Iron Warriors list with a lot of heavy support... on the defence in a Bunker Assault mission. The Bunker Assault mission represented an attack on prepared defenses in a previously-quiet area of the frontline. As such, it was initially fairly lightly defended by troops and a HQ only, with the heavier hitting units in reserve moving in to stabilise the front.

The 3.5th Iron Warriors list was very strong in normal symmetrical games at the time. It got dominated in this bunker defense because it was very light on troops, and most of the heavy support units arriving from reserve could not fire the turn they arrived.

That said, even the standard symmetrical games had units deploying by FOC type in order, slowest first (so heavy support). That meant a force big on heavy units had a deployment disadvantage to one composed of fast units.

Basically, there was quite a lot of thought into how the FOC could be used as both a composition restriction and a thematic element.

It got watered down from there to become basically irrelevant in later editions.

Andykp wrote:
FOC sucked when they were first imposed and carried on sucking until they died with 9th edition. Just my opinion but I never liked them. Clunky, restrictive, units being shoe horned into slots, characters being rare and they ended up making rules that broke them. U couldn’t make fun armies they were there to stop competitive types spamming stuff.

Clearly it did not stop anyone spamming things.
Then GW went & intentionally altered the charts for specific forces.

As for the 9e charts preventing fun armies?
They did not. That was the players themselves refusing to spend CP to use the Elite/Fast/Heavy & extra charts.

And now here we are in 11e & the genius idea is to charge more pts for 3rd (sometimes 2nd) copies of something.
Guess what? Its not going to work.

It's not like the replacement system to the FOC isn't/wasn't also clunky and arbitrarily restrictive.

You can take anything you want!
Except you can only have three of any particular unit (unless having a different gun arbitrarily makes it a different unit - cry more, xenos!)
Or you can only have two, depending on the points level.
And you can only have two flying units total, regardless of how good they actually are.
Or you can have six if they've been decreed to be 'battleline' (largely unrelated to how common a unit is, or how it was previously classified).
Anything can take a dedicated transport. But you have to deploy inside it, because you're not actually supposed to give anything a dedicated transport.

Andykp wrote:
FOC sucked when they were first imposed and carried on sucking until they died with 9th edition. Just my opinion but I never liked them. Clunky, restrictive, units being shoe horned into slots, characters being rare and they ended up making rules that broke them. U couldn’t make fun armies they were there to stop competitive types spamming stuff.

Characters had nothing to do with the FoC that was just a different approach to characters. In earlier edition named characters were basically designed as boutique models. They were given pretty broken stats because they were designed to be broken powerful to really impact the game because they weren't designed to be in regular matches. You played them "with opponents permission" so you both went in knowing that at least one, or both of you, were taking silly overpowered stuff.

At the time regular leader roles were taken on by regular leader units.


GW just shifted characters from outside of regular balance to inside. That just means changing the numbers on them not anything that would have impacted the FoC.


As for spamming, you could; it was just restricted. For example some units like Leman Russ and Carnifex went from one per slot to being taken in groups. So now you could take 6 carnifex in three pairs. The difference is that it was a measured and controlled increase. Ergo in theory you could balance and check it and know it as an option. Yes you could still spam stuff, but what you could spam was more limited. In theory this improved the balance potential because it reduces variables. In practice it hit the wall that ALL structural systems hit with GW's approach to balance. Made worse in earlier editions because GW was much slower at creating codex and back then big updates online weren't really as much of a thing. So a lot of armies could fall out of date for a long while. Back then a new codex nearly always meant a good chunk of new models - as opposed to today where GW is happy to bash out codex much faster and give you just one new leader model and that's it.

I'll echo Haigus, it worked really well in 3e and 4e to have alternate FOCs for different missions with attackers and defenders. Instant feeling of narrative from the list planning stage, and different tactical challenges.

Back then you also just didn't have the absurd unit variety that exists now in the game, so it wasn't as overloaded with choices for the different slots. It was common to have armies that had 3 HQ choices including special retinue squads that were taken as part of the HQ, 2-3 Troops choices, and then 3-4 Fast Attack, Elites and Heavy Support choices.

I agree that later on, the Elite slot got overloaded mainly because they wanted to put Walkers in there a lot of the time rather than have them compete with full battle tanks in Heavy Support.

We did a fun map campaign back in early 4th where different territories on the map allowed for extra slots, I thought it was a lot of fun. And players playing different lists would target specific slots that were good for them - I remember wanting Fast Attack slots to fit more Warbikers into my regular Ork list because they were really good, whereas others wanted more Heavy Support.

The FOC started to strain in 5e when lots of new units started to get introduced and it essentially broke in 6e and 7e as the game continued to balloon outward. I was pretty disgusted by what the FOC became by 7e and dropped out of the game in large part due to that.

With modern 40K I feel that to have a reasonable FOC based approach you'd need to cull units from armies with really large rosters. Armies with more than 20 units would need to be consolidated down. I don't think this is impossible though - you can combine units by making loadouts options instead of being fixed, but that requires points costs for options and so on. It'd need a thoughtful redesign, which I think 3e was and then 4e was a refinement on that.

As an aside, I'm not opposed to the percentage based systems either, but I think it works better in Fantasy where "basic troops" is more of a meaningful term. The earlier and last editions of fantasy worked with percentages for characters, regiments and support. The middle editions of Fantasy had a slot based system which allowed more characters than 40K usually had, and also demanded more basic troops than in 40K. It then split units into Special and Rare, and generally you could have 4 Specials and 2 Rares at a standard game size. It allowed them to play around a bit too, small cheap units were often two for one slot, and specialist lists could move things around into different slots to create different army themes. It added a bit of an extra dimension to list building over "What is the most points efficient unit for this role, okay I am taking 3 of them" though of course this still existed to an extent.

I liked the FOC before formations in 7th. It is a simple mechanic to give structure to an army, which can be altered to enable specific themes.

I do think, however, that players should not be able to just play with whatever units/models they want to either. Armies should be subject to some kind of comp that at least tries to not break the immersion.

Personal example:
Having an army only consisting of Guilliman, 3 Captains and 9 Land Raiders is not something you should be able to field in a standard game. (Regardless wether or not the unit composition is problematic or underperforming)

I don't think you need to cull whole chunks of armies to make them work.

What you just need is a very different FoC that accounts for a larger force diversity in general. That was the main issue with the early one; it was only a few different unit types that got overloaded with too few slots. That the FoC tried to remain the same from 2nd to 7th edition just didn't work.
The structure needed a big overhaul. GW however decided to throw the structure out the wall. Considering that they've also tried to throw points out the wall and costed items we are generally seeing them try to simplify the game down a LOT. Mostly to allow more of a casual "take whatever you want" approach; whilst at the same time trying to appease balance people by doing rapid updates; monitoring even win rates and so forth. It's a strange situation.


Now I do agree that we are seeing some steady reduction in armies; but its mostly the likes of once toolbox units that had a billion parts to build units that could do any role; being cut down to fit only one or two roles.

Eg I can see logic in Tyranid Warriors dropping a lot of close combat profiles because there are other close combat medium weight units in the army now. Though of course GW tends to overcompensate and stripped them all out


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 a_typical_hero wrote:

I do think, however, that players should not be able to just play with whatever units/models they want to either. Armies should be subject to some kind of comp that at least tries to not break the immersion.

That's basically what the FoC was aiming to do. At the same time limits within squads allowed some degree of twisting on a model by model basis. Eg Tyranids being able to take more Carnifex in elite slots and in groups of two to allow for a "nidzilla" type list. Basically sanctioned spam that allowed thematic forces to be fielded; but always something intentionally put into the army.

 Da Boss wrote:
I'll echo Haigus, it worked really well in 3e and 4e to have alternate FOCs for different missions with attackers and defenders. Instant feeling of narrative from the list planning stage, and different tactical challenges.

I think the really key thing is that mission design didn't only interact with the FOC through which FOC was used.

As I mentioned above, the Bunker Assault mission only had the Defender deploying HQ and Troops, because the mission represented a quiet front coming under sudden attack. Compare to the Blitz mission with an otherwise very similar set up with an attack into prepared defences and a bunker line, and the Defender deployed HQ, Troops, and Heavy Support because it was a more expected, major attack, with only Elites and Fast Attack as a mobile reserve. Missions with the Sustained Attack rule allowed the attacker to recycle Troops specifically as the commonest units available to an army being thrown into the assault.

The standard missions deployed units in the following order: Heavy Support, Troops, Elites, HQ, Fast Attack, with units towards the end of deployment therefore getting a slight deployment advantage as they were better able to react to the opponent.

Back then you also just didn't have the absurd unit variety that exists now in the game, so it wasn't as overloaded with choices for the different slots. It was common to have armies that had 3 HQ choices including special retinue squads that were taken as part of the HQ, 2-3 Troops choices, and then 3-4 Fast Attack, Elites and Heavy Support choices.

I agree that later on, the Elite slot got overloaded mainly because they wanted to put Walkers in there a lot of the time rather than have them compete with full battle tanks in Heavy Support.

We did a fun map campaign back in early 4th where different territories on the map allowed for extra slots, I thought it was a lot of fun. And players playing different lists would target specific slots that were good for them - I remember wanting Fast Attack slots to fit more Warbikers into my regular Ork list because they were really good, whereas others wanted more Heavy Support.

The FOC started to strain in 5e when lots of new units started to get introduced and it essentially broke in 6e and 7e as the game continued to balloon outward. I was pretty disgusted by what the FOC became by 7e and dropped out of the game in large part due to that.

With modern 40K I feel that to have a reasonable FOC based approach you'd need to cull units from armies with really large rosters. Armies with more than 20 units would need to be consolidated down. I don't think this is impossible though - you can combine units by making loadouts options instead of being fixed, but that requires points costs for options and so on. It'd need a thoughtful redesign, which I think 3e was and then 4e was a refinement on that.

As an aside, I'm not opposed to the percentage based systems either, but I think it works better in Fantasy where "basic troops" is more of a meaningful term. The earlier and last editions of fantasy worked with percentages for characters, regiments and support. The middle editions of Fantasy had a slot based system which allowed more characters than 40K usually had, and also demanded more basic troops than in 40K. It then split units into Special and Rare, and generally you could have 4 Specials and 2 Rares at a standard game size. It allowed them to play around a bit too, small cheap units were often two for one slot, and specialist lists could move things around into different slots to create different army themes. It added a bit of an extra dimension to list building over "What is the most points efficient unit for this role, okay I am taking 3 of them" though of course this still existed to an extent.

I don't think culling is strictly needed if the 3rd edition approach is used. It is actually surprising how many modern units existed in some form in 3rd, only to disappear for several editions to be reintroduced later.

The reason the army lists didn't usually feel overloaded in 3rd was more due to the fact they were carefully divided up into multiple lists in the same overall faction, with overlap between lists but not full sharing of units.

For example, the standard Codex: Orks army list represented the common, mixed warband of Orks and the equipment they typically used. This essentially covered standard warbands without a strong clan affiliation and freebooterz. You could take large amounts of infantry, the list had some mechanised elements, it was fairly mobile.

Then the Speed Freakz army list in Codex: Armageddon adds a variant hyper-focused on those addicted to the Kult of Speed. No infantry that is not mechanised, some units are shifted into new roles (bikes as troops), the slow units are cut, and there are some new units unique to Speed Freakz- notably deffkopters and gun trukks.

Then Feral Orkz in Chapter Approved added a whole roster of new units, focused mainly around early Ork infantry like huntaz and trappas, with some retained examples like lobba big gun batteries, gretchin, warboss and nobz and so on. Mechanised units are essentially absent with the one example a neutered version of trukk boyz and they are replaced with beasts of burden- boarboyz and squiggoths.

Finally, Chapter Approved also added 6 variant lists for Ork warbands dedicated to a particular clan, but not addicted to a particular way of war like the Speed Freakz. These essentially reshuffled the relevance of the units in the main Ork army list, with some becoming troops but compulsory, and others moving to being more restricted. They also added a bit of unique equipment for each clan. The Evil Sunz got a unit from the Speed Freakz list (warboss on bike), and the Snakebites got some units from the feral Orks list (boarboyz, huntas), to show how these two clans tend to align with those specific forms of Orkiness a bit more.

Overall, you end up with a huge roster of Ork units and available army themes, but no single list is that big in options. Orks are probably the best example alongside Space Marines. Imperial Guard are close behind but moved to the Doctrines system which was a bit freer, and Chaos had similar variations once the 3.5th codex hit. Eldar also had similar, with a basic list, 5 "Craftworld" lists, and the extra Ulthwe list, all of which altered what units were available and added some new units, and you could argue Dark Eldar were an alternative eldar list at this early stage of their development (there was also an experimental Harlequin list in Citadel Journal).

Third also had restrictions on how often certain units could be taken, which I think also helped to shape lists thematically. I think the key thing is that GW then was not afraid to limit options, and say that, in general, forces use this equipment and organisation, not this other equipment and organisation, or that a particular unit was rare.

All of this taken together with the FOC and mission design pushed lists to be constructed in a way that was more thematic overall. That said, I think the poor internal and external balance, a persistent GW issue, combined with the tendency of many areas to default to a "tournament standard" where they only played the core missions hampered this thematic approach and meant there were a few obviously better lists rather than the true variety available. Also the very inconsistent availability and affordability of models... making a Space Marine variant list was generally fairly easy and relatively cheap, converting a full feral Ork army or unusual Imperial Guard force could be far more expensive, especially if relying on large numbers of metal models.

Just adding a FOC back in now wouldn't work, it was the overall intertwined system that made sense.

FOC was a good idea, as it helped encourage a theme to your army.

But, Codex to Codex and Edition to Edition? Some armies struggled with it.

The main example that comes to my mind is Tyranids. Sometimes, Warriors were Troops (2-6 slots) and so competed with Termagants and Hormogaunts, and sometimes Genestealers. Other times? They moved to Elites where they rubbed all six shoulders with a lot of other bugs. At the right (wrong?) time, this really forced your hand,

Essentially. It was all too easy for one or more Categories to be horribly oversubscribed. Add to that Rules and Points Wonk in a given Codex? Some units just never got a look in, and some thematic concepts just couldn’t be satisfyingly realised. And if you were really, really unlucky on an edition change? Your existing preferred army build just couldn’t be fielded under a single FOC.

So, a nice idea. And compared to 2nd Ed’s much less limited army building rules arguably necessary. But I don’t think they ever really nailed the application of it.

The main issue was sticking to a One Size Fits All FOC. That is, every Codex and every player had exactly the same slot options (1-2 HQ, 2-6 Troops, 0-3 Elites, 0-3 Fast Attack and 0-3 Heavy Support). Except, it never did really Fits All. Background wise, some armies have a preponderance of Elite Units. For instance, Middle Sized Tyranids and Aspect Warriors of all stripes. And so the FOC offered unfair restrictions on some Codexes.

Then there was the issue of not all Troops Units being equal in appeal. A Marine Tactical Squad for instance, by design, offered greater utility than say, Guardian Defenders. Space Marine Scouts (the cheaper option) brought more to the table than Grots (the Orks cheaper option).

This lead to the concept of Tax Units. That means units you only take because something has to fill your Troops slots, and you tried to save your points for the tastier stuff. And by no means did every army consider that a Tax. Space Marines of pretty much any stripe for instance. Whether Scouts, Taccies or CSM, you were buying a perfectly capable unit which stood a decent chance of really impacting a game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I’ve not played since probably 2012 or so, so I can’t and won’t offer an opinion on whether the current Rule of 3 is better or has ever been a partial solution.

But I do prefer it as a concept. It helps prevent unit spam (as does 11th’s multiple tax), yes. But one suspects the true benefit of that is still tied to the rules in your Codex. But it does at least offer Tyranids and Eldar the thematic options the old FOC all too often denied you.

Ask your opponent nicely to bring some basic grunts for your battles and do the same yourself. Don't build skew lists, if most of your list has T11 or T3 instead of a range of Toughness, you're doing it wrong. This creates gameplay where your army has different weaknesses and strengths and regardless of what you come up against you will be weak to some things and strong against some things. People broke the old system, people break the new system, trying to invent a system is silly if you and your opponent can come to a gentlemans agreement to play a fair game of 40k.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
It's not like the replacement system to the FOC isn't/wasn't also clunky and arbitrarily restrictive.

You can take anything you want!
Except you can only have three of any particular unit (unless having a different gun arbitrarily makes it a different unit - cry more, xenos!)
Or you can only have two, depending on the points level.
And you can only have two flying units total, regardless of how good they actually are.
Or you can have six if they've been decreed to be 'battleline' (largely unrelated to how common a unit is, or how it was previously classified).
Anything can take a dedicated transport. But you have to deploy inside it, because you're not actually supposed to give anything a dedicated transport.

Rule of 3 is very simple, rule of 2 is not any less simple. Battleline units were troops, if you could take 6 in 5th, you can probably still take 6 now.

Aircraft create a structural problem for the game, it's not a question of being OP, it's a question of creating bad gameplay. Even if the relatively overcosted ones are spammed, a flying circus in 8th-10th would not be fun to play against because of movement shananigans and not caring about cover.

Vehicle units with 1-3 break both the current and former system restricting how many of a unit you can take. 5th edition had units that could borrow slots from other units, not much different than splitting up datasheets to allow spam. But let's remember why datasheets have been split up, it was because of the casual crowd didn't want to do math and loved power level so now everyone has to play power level.

Dedicated Transports are dumb, but I don't see how that rule has anything to do with the newer editions. It is unecessary now and GW could have had that rule in 5th as well, would have been equally stupid.

I appreciate everyone chiming in so far. This has given me a lot to think about and is an interesting glimpse into the game's history.

Haighus wrote:I really liked the FOC and thought it was best implemented in 3rd-4th edition. This is for the simple reason that GW designed missions to interact with the FOC in those editions, which both made the FOC feel more thematic and encouraged balanced armies if playing a variety of missions. There were also FOC variants for particular mission types.

Haighus wrote:I don't think culling is strictly needed if the 3rd edition approach is used. It is actually surprising how many modern units existed in some form in 3rd, only to disappear for several editions to be reintroduced later.

The reason the army lists didn't usually feel overloaded in 3rd was more due to the fact they were carefully divided up into multiple lists in the same overall faction, with overlap between lists but not full sharing of units.

This sounds really cool, but I am having a hard time finding information about the 3rd-4th edition FOC. Would you or someone else be able to point me at some resources?

vict0988 wrote:Ask your opponent nicely to bring some basic grunts for your battles and do the same yourself. Don't build skew lists, if most of your list has T11 or T3 instead of a range of Toughness, you're doing it wrong. This creates gameplay where your army has different weaknesses and strengths and regardless of what you come up against you will be weak to some things and strong against some things. People broke the old system, people break the new system, trying to invent a system is silly if you and your opponent can come to a gentlemans agreement to play a fair game of 40k.

This is essentially what I am looking to do and why I didn't post this in Proposed Rules. I'm not trying to make anyone else bring whatever, so not a rule, but I would like to look at my army with some more nuance. FOCs seem like a way to do that while tapping into the game's history. I want other people to see what I deploy and say to themselves, "That looks like an army," or even just, "That looks like Warhammer 40,000," instead of a bunch of cheese.

In some ways, it feels like the current detachment system touches upon the spirit of the FOC but without going so far as to actually provide mechanics for it. For example, the LoV codex includes a bit of fluff about Graf01 being "the standard strategic designations employed by kindreds," and "Most kinhosts assemble into oathbands, adaptable formations capable of forging victory in many situations." It roughly outlines structures for oathbands, prospects, harvests, and forgebands. Unfortunately, oathbands, prospects, harvests, and forgebands can generally all bring the same things; what the oathband calls "Einhyr Hearthguard covenenants" the others call "Einhyr bonds." Though I am seeing some differences where not everything mentions Kapricus squadrons, Earthshaker grand batteries, or Steeljacks.

There are detachments for three oathbands, a prospect, a harvest (Delve Assault Shift), and a forgeband (Hearthfyre Arsenal). All are 2 DP. Then there are three 1 DP detachments (one boosts Sagitaurs, one boosts Hernkyn, one boosts Hearthguard) for augmenting those forces, which I figure is analogous to the little detachments in 9e that would add more units. There is one 3 DP detachment, Hearthband, which focuses on elites.

Maybe it could be as simple as treating each 2 DP detachment like a Battalion from 9e (or a better alternative from an earlier edition) with 2-3 HQ, 3-6 troops, 0-6 elites, and 0-3 each of fast attack and heavy support.
The 1 DP detachments augment that with 1 HQ and 3-6 of the appropriate units. Though Hernkyn do not have what I would consider an HQ option.
The 3 DP detachment is like a Brigade with 3-5 HQ, 6-12 troops, 3-8 elites, 3-5 fast attack, and 3-5 heavy support since it's all-encompassing.

In any case, a common complaint that I am seeing is that nobody brings enough troops to realistically comprise an army, so it sounds like I could go a long way towards a fluffier army by just bringing more Battleline units (Hearthguard Warriors unless I'm running the Delve Assault Shift which makes Beserks battleline) than is common. And I could add some self-imposed restrictions where, for example, a prospect doesn't bring Steeljacks and a harvest doesn't bring Hernkyn.

https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/40k-force-org-3rd-1998.jpg

This is a picture of the chart. How it works is that the army list is broken down into sections for each type of unit. Each unit chosen from that section takes up one slot on the chart.

HQ - Usually characters with retinue squad options. Often 3 or so choices per army - Captain, Chaplain, Librarian for example.
Elites - Units that are tougher or do more damage than other units. Usually but not always infantry of some sort. Terminators, Veteran Space Marines, sometimes Dreadnaughts depending on edition.
Troops - Your core units. Space Marine Tactical Squads, Scout squads.
Fast Attack - Highly mobile but usually lightly armoured units. Space Marine bikes, land speeders, assault marines.
Heavy Support - Units with a lot of firepower, often also a lot of armour. Space Marine Devastator squads (marines with heavy weapons), tanks of all kinds.

If you're looking at Leagues of Votan, they never fit into this scheme so you'd have to assign the units to the relevant sections yourself. It might help to download some old codices if you can find them and look at how they did it for ideas.

Not a fan of the FOC and prefer things as they are today.

With that said I feel Votann would probably be:

All characters: HQ.
Hearthkyn: Troops.
Hearthguard: Elites.
Beserks: Elites.
Melee Steeljacks: Elites
Shooty Steeljacks: Probably Elites as well if we say they are akin to Wraithguard
Yaegirs: Probably Elites. Could arguably be turned into Troops (like Eldar Rangers in certain editions) if GW decided "thy must always include 2-3 units of Hearthkyn to have a legal army" would be too restrictive.)
Pioneers: Fast Attack
Kapricus Defenders: Fast Attack
Hekaton: Heavy Support.
Thunderkyn: Heavy Support
Earthshakers: Heavy Support.

 Da Boss wrote:
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/40k-force-org-3rd-1998.jpg

The sacred texts!

I, for one, really like the 30k Rites of War system (take an overarching "theme" which allows you to "skew" your list, but outright prevents certain options/forces certain ways of fighting) - it would need to be made bespoke for *every* faction, and would require some pretty hefty penalties, but if people want themed lists which look like what they're trying to display, then I really liked RoW.

Somewhat controversially, I also really liked Formations. I did not like the buffs and arms race that also came with them. But the idea of "here's these building blocks of how this faction fights, fill them up with cohesive groupings of units which often fight together, there's your army". Again, would require a lot of customisation for each faction, but there's something very cool about actually taking a demi-company of Space Marines, complete with command staff and support elements.

That FOC actually looks really similar to the 9e one except the amounts vary. That one sits somewhere between the Patrol Detachment and the Battalion Detachment.

The initial Leagues of Votann range did have categories assigned to it.

HQ: Uthar the Destined, Kahl, Einhyr Champion, Grimnyr, Brokhyr Iron-Master
Troops: Hearthkyn Warriors
Elites: Einhyr Hearthguard, Cthonian Beserks
Fast Attack: Hernkyn Pioneers, Sagitaurs
Heavy Support: Brokhyr Thunderkin, Hekaton Land Fortress

The new stuff, of course, did not get anything assigned. Tyel's list seems like a good start... but I see what you all mean by some of the categories not fitting well. A Hernkyn Yaegir seems like a very different sort of Elite than a Steeljack; Yaegirs are softer than Hearthkyn Warriors and not very shooty, but they do have some special abilities.

It seems silly that four of the ten new units are characters, two of them named characters, that would all go into HQ. I don't mean characters going into HQ is silly. I mean it's silly that the release was that heavily skewed towards characters. That said, in addition to bringing more troops, really clamping down on the number of characters seems like another way to make a fluffier list.

What makes something a Dedicated Transport? Sagitaurs can carry six infantry models, but they are Fast Attack. Kapricus Carriers can carry five Yaegirs. Unlike a Sagitaur, it has firing deck but no special weapons, and I'm not sure why you would carry one without some Yaegirs to put in it.

Generally a dedicated transport is something that is only really good for transporting units and not much else. There's some wiggle room - both Rhinos and Razorbacks are Dedicated Transports even though the Razorback still has decent shooting ability.

I'm not well informed about League vehicles, but if you're thinking "I'd never take this without a squad to go in it" then it's a dedicated transport.

The Saggitaur falls into that category, and in terms of application is closest to a Razorback. But, you can (or could) take two to cart about a single squad. Whereas I’ve never heard of being able to do that with Razorbacks.

Also whilst I’m here and citing Votann units?

I note their vehicle names (Kapricus, Sagitaur) have their roots in Greek mythological words. And being essentially a lost colony of mankind? I’m now convinced it’s a nod to Battlestar Galactica.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
The Saggitaur falls into that category, and in terms of application is closest to a Razorback. But, you can (or could) take two to cart about a single squad. Whereas I’ve never heard of being able to do that with Razorbacks.

You can, in the sense that what you describe is what Sagitaurs, Immolators, Archaeopters and so on have because their passengers don't have the Combat Squads rule whereas the Razorback's cargo did.

Combat Squads came first, the unit-split was an attempt to compensate for not having it, rather than Space Marines lacking the Sagitaur trick.

Combat Squads are no longer thing, but then, I don't think Razorbacks have much hope in 40k either.

Personally I liked the idea of 7th ed Formations. Like IRL TO&E. Imagine a company of infantry looking like a company of infantry. Just its implementation and balance was poor. Like take three of the best units in your codex and get a power boost. Scrap those.

OldeSword wrote:

In some ways, it feels like the current detachment system touches upon the spirit of the FOC but without going so far as to actually provide mechanics for it. For example, the LoV codex includes a bit of fluff about Graf01 being "the standard strategic designations employed by kindreds," and "Most kinhosts assemble into oathbands, adaptable formations capable of forging victory in many situations." It roughly outlines structures for oathbands, prospects, harvests, and forgebands. Unfortunately, oathbands, prospects, harvests, and forgebands can generally all bring the same things; what the oathband calls "Einhyr Hearthguard covenenants" the others call "Einhyr bonds." Though I am seeing some differences where not everything mentions Kapricus squadrons, Earthshaker grand batteries, or Steeljacks.

There are detachments for three oathbands, a prospect, a harvest (Delve Assault Shift), and a forgeband (Hearthfyre Arsenal). All are 2 DP. Then there are three 1 DP detachments (one boosts Sagitaurs, one boosts Hernkyn, one boosts Hearthguard) for augmenting those forces, which I figure is analogous to the little detachments in 9e that would add more units. There is one 3 DP detachment, Hearthband, which focuses on elites.

Maybe it could be as simple as treating each 2 DP detachment like a Battalion from 9e (or a better alternative from an earlier edition) with 2-3 HQ, 3-6 troops, 0-6 elites, and 0-3 each of fast attack and heavy support.
The 1 DP detachments augment that with 1 HQ and 3-6 of the appropriate units. Though Hernkyn do not have what I would consider an HQ option.
The 3 DP detachment is like a Brigade with 3-5 HQ, 6-12 troops, 3-8 elites, 3-5 fast attack, and 3-5 heavy support since it's all-encompassing.

What you're describing sorta kinda vaguely sounds like the "decurion" style detachments we had in 7th. (So named for the necron version of this particular form of army building.) In brief, you basically built an army by choosing:
* At least one core formation. This tended not to have your tastier units and usually required you to bring a lot of troops (aka battleline) units.
* Some number of non-core formations that represented more specialized groupings of units.

Each formation gave the units within that formation some benefit or other (vaguely comparable to how detachments work today), and building your army in this way meant that you got whatever your army's "decurion bonus" was on top of the formation-specific benefits.

So an eldar army might have a core formation that required I take a million guardian units, and then I'd slap an aspect host formation on top of it that let me take a few aspect warrior squads.

People seemed to kind of like the high concept of this approach. A lot of codices included somewhat detailed breakdowns of what could go into each of these formations and lore on what a typical force of such and such type looked like, and it did a pretty good job of making you feel like you were defining the core of your army and then appending more specialist forces onto your core.

This kind of fell down in a few places though:
1. It was part of 7th edition, which suffered horribly from unclear core rules, poor balance, etc.
2. Formations themselves were kind of a problem for balance. They pretty much never came with downsides and didn't really use up an opportunity cost slot the way a 10th edition detachment does. So you were just piling bonus rules onto whatever units you took in the formation. Which then raised the question: do you assign a points cost to that unit under the assumption that it does or does not have the benefits of a formation? For instance, do you charge points for aspect warriors assuming they're hitting on 3s, or assuming they're hitting on 2s in an aspect host?
3. The charts for army composition just... kind of forgot that 40k was usually played at 2,000 points or less. So you'd have this big chart of all these formations a "typical" in-universe army might be composed of, and then you'd realize you only had enough points to fill out like, half a core detachment and one or two optional detachments.

And point 3 is relevant, I think. Often times when people talk about wanting the army they put on the table to "feel like a real army," I think they end up basing that on their mental image of their entire force on the planet; all the random battle line guys and every bit of support behind them, all in one place. But 40k battles are (depending on who you ask) really more of a smaller-scale conflict. Or at most, a zoomed-in portion of a much wider battlefield. Sure, the Salamanders chapter isn't 90% terminators, but if you're zooming in on the portion of the battlefield where 1st company launched a teleporter assault on the enemy headquarters, you might be looking at mostly terminators with minimal other support. or if you point your camera at the skirmishes happening outside of town, you might see mostly fast attack/elite units that specialize in recon/stealth duking it out.

It's fine to want your army to have a healthy number of troops and to prefer thinking of your army as one that strives to have a bunch of basic dudes at the heart of every clump of forces. But there's a tendency among some players (not you) to think that troop spam is the one true way to assemble your 40k army because, "Well, there are way more troops than specialists!" And I feel like this view really fails to consider the question of exactly what story is being told, where the camera is focusing, etc.

(It also fails to account for how poorly the old FOC represented certain factions, how the fluff of some factions suggests that certain units should be troops even though they typically aren't, etc. But I've been very good and avoided launching into my usual anti-FOC rant so far, and I'm trying to keep that up. )

In any case, a common complaint that I am seeing is that nobody brings enough troops to realistically comprise an army, so it sounds like I could go a long way towards a fluffier army by just bringing more Battleline units (Hearthguard Warriors unless I'm running the Delve Assault Shift which makes Beserks battleline) than is common. And I could add some self-imposed restrictions where, for example, a prospect doesn't bring Steeljacks and a harvest doesn't bring Hernkyn.

In Force Org editions, I sometimes brought as many as four Daemon Princes.
Now, with no Force Org, I take maximum allotted amount of Plaguebearers and never more than two Princes. With any points reduction making me drop the winged one first thing.

The goal should be for any given unit to be desirable in its own right.

 JNAProductions wrote:
In Force Org editions, I sometimes brought as many as four Daemon Princes.
Now, with no Force Org, I take maximum allotted amount of Plaguebearers and never more than two Princes. With any points reduction making me drop the winged one first thing.

The goal should be for any given unit to be desirable in its own right.

For sure. Theoretically, force orgs were sort of trying to accomplish a couple of main things:

A.) Prevent skew.
B.) Prevent spam (semi-distinct from skew in that it's more about taking the same unit a million times whereas skew is more about leaning into a certain type of profile to make it harder to deal with how durable or numerous that profile is.)
C.) Enforce a theme.

They largely failed at A (at least by the time I started playing in 5th, and continued to fail until the FOC went away) because they didn't actually target skew. If your army had a vehicle in more force org slots than not, you could field a skew list. You just also got screwed if you happened to want to field a bunch of different units that all happened to be Fast Attacks, for instance.

It technically succeeded at B for the most part (assuming you didn't have a very similar unit in a different force org slot or the ability to turn the unit you want to spam into a troop somehow.) But even so, I'd argue it didn't shut down spam much more successfully than the rule of 3 does.

It mostly failed at C because it failed to identify what theme it actually wanted to represent, failed to allow a bunch of canonical themes, and also allowed some armies to bend the rules and field their themes just because. Iybraesil fielding banshees as the backbone of their army? Only if you don't want to take literally any other elite slot unit! Saim-Hann wanting to field more than one unit of both vypers and shining spears? How dare you? Marines fielding endless bikes? Sure. Just stick a captain on a bike first, and then you can take you 6 bike squads plus some additional Fast Attack options while you're at it.

i feel like the later editions of warhammer fantasy had a good solution to the FOC issue. it just had its own issues due to WHFB's army building.

in WHFB 8th ed, your army building did the FOC by % of the total points, with the different categories having upper limits by %. you had to have a minimum number of units for HQ's and basic troops with the basic troops having a minimum % you had to spend, but had no max number of units in any catagory so long as you didn't exceed the max % limit for their type.
(they broke the army down into lords (1 mandatory, up to 50%), heros (up to 50%), core units (3 mandatory, minimum 25%, no upper limit), special units (up to 50%), and rare units (up to 25%),

the problem WHFB had was they didn't have any upper limits on the individual unit sizes. so you could take a block of infantry and two blocks of cav to meet your minimum, and just cram 200 figures into that infantry block to create a deathstar.

honestly when WHFB 8th came out i expected a similar way of doing the FOC would be applied to 40k when 6th dropped. where the fact that 40K's units had hard limits on the number of figures you could take per unit would have allowed for more flexibility than the 3/6/3/3/3 setup but avoided the "lump everything into one huge unkillable unit" issue WHFB had. it would also have let you keep the catagories, you could just tweak the %'s to limit the cheese some.

I'm not sure I understand the argument that the greater diversity of models in modern 40K is an issue for the force org chart. If you're going to assert that an army should be limited to no more than three tanks, then it shouldn't matter whether the codex has two tanks to pick from or ten.

Having said that, I've long felt that the FOC was a clunky solution and I don't think I'd like to see it return, but there were two things it did that I miss.

First, it helped ensure that any army was 'well-rounded', not all tanks or all bikes or all characters or skipping troops entirely. It was way harder to build a skew list with that limit of three Elites, FA, or HS.

(GW, in traditional GW fashion, then completely gutted this concept by spreading similar options across multiple slots and adding squadrons. The 5th Ed Guard codex allowing 9 Leman Russes broke the FOC as a concept)

The second was that it allowed GW to provide sanctioned alternatives to that 'well-rounded' archetype while imposing appropriate disadvantages. Armored Company is the classic example, where a list was written that did allow all tanks, but imposed a bunch of drawbacks to try to balance it.

In years since I have come to prefer something more akin to the WHFB model mentioned above, employing a more straightforward concept of how rare a unit is. Backbone units appear in every force, impossibly rare relics don't comprise three quarters of your army. Simple, and very easy to create bespoke exceptions to for specific themes.

But all of this is now pretty irrelevant because the gameplay context it was created for no longer exists. Skew is less impactful as the former differences between unit types are gone. Missions and objectives have been simplified, homogenized, and streamlined such that it no longer makes sense to have certain units deploying differently or uniquely able to carry out objectives. Army theming is out the window and the idea that you can't bring Gaunt's Ghosts, Death Korps Engineers, and Kasrkin in the same army would be met with uproar.

So what's the point? There aren't any problems that bringing back the FOC would solve- save a nostalgic desire to return to 3rd/4th wholesale.

Modern army selection is clunky and random, FOC is the true way to make armies from a more sophisticated age.

Missions determined the kind of FOC you could use, and may or may not change based on whether you were attacker or defender.

Many armies had some kind of sub-faction that changed the units available in different FOC slots, or changed the total number of FOC slots you could take (deathwing, ravenwing, saim han, etc).

The system worked, it worked for more than 15 years, it wasn't clunky, it wasn't broken. The only things that were broken were the same things that are broken now, GW pushing sales of new miniatures/kits so they get better points or rules or whatever, old units getting ignored for balancing or updates or more options for that unit because they don't want to sell those minis any more.

Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1. You could take 0-1 archon lord, the archon is jealous and won't fight along side other archons, you could have drachons or lesser wyches join you.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.