With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
It's not a bad thing, but having multiple codices to draw from is an inherent advantage over drawing an army from a single codex. If there is no downside to doing it, there is no reason to play an army from a faction with the option to soup using only a single codex.
If you pick Chaos Space Marines as an example, there is no reason not improve your army with more powerful psykers from the Thousand Sons codex and more powerful troops from the daemons codex. You gain nothing from playing pure CSM instead.
From the way they worded it, they might even attach a price tag to mixing and matching sub-factions from the same codex, so you can't attach the perfect army trait to every unit like orks or space marines do without a drawback.
I think it's fine that armies that are mono codex get some benefits compared to soup armies, as long as soup is still a viable option.
And yes some have more options than others. An Imperial player has a wide depth of options, whereas Tyranids or Necrons for example don't have as much choice.
I think it's a historical thing too. There used to be far more limitations on taking allies than there are now. With more freedom comes more potential abuse. I think GW are at least partially responding to player feedback, some of which just want to use their mono codex army against just one other codex.
ArcaneHorror wrote: With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
Prime example of the balance issues caused by Allies, my mono knights list that GW gave a special rule to give them half a chance at building a playable pool of CP became uncompetitive when their best strategums were increased in CP cost because bring 180 points of guard gave you the same amount of CP as over 1000 points of knight's.
The Changes to the CP system isn't punishing allies it's giving them 1 downside compaired to the 8th edition model of all upsides and nevrr a downside.
It is impossible to have codices with meaningful strengths and weaknesses if you can simply obviate the latter by allying in the best stuff from another book; all armies just end up consisting of the best units they can skim off any number of allied factions.
Not all of the factions have the same access to allies, and I think the extent to which factions cooperate on the squad level is overstated.
I've always enjoyed playing against a mixed army, to a point. Like you said Cheese is the downfall of that. Cherry picking super units should be discouraged. We all agree on that I'm sure. I don't mind a small boost to "pure" army lists either.
But I'm curious to see how 9th will treat soup as there are plenty of lore/fluff reasons for soups.
Strangely enough GW seemed to hit it out of the park with allies in Age of Sigmar because even if you do see occasional allies they are not as overbearing as they can be in 40k.
My biggest problem with soup was how free form it was in 8th. It basically meant that if you wanted to play a mono-codex you were actually shooting yourself in the foot unless you were a Space marine codex, which has a built in mechanism to boost itself without allies.
Each army was designed with specific strengths and weaknesses in mind. Soup is a crutch for people who can't play their armies. It only came about couple of editions ago.
Some armies, like Inquisition, are naturally Soup armies and stand outside the general hierarchy. Most armies were never intended to be Soup and some, like Orks, are specifically harmed by Soup armies as they have no Souping available. Unpopular opinion is Primaris armies being Soup as people take the newest face-smashing units and combine with the older specialist face-smashing units, thus avoiding any balancing of the army.
While I understand both sides of the debate, impo, Soup hurts the game more than helps. Yes it allows for amazingly cool, narrative driven games and fluffy armies but that's not what people use it for. Instead it changes local metas in a faux tournament manner and strips out the vestiges of generalship to replace them with financial tiers.
ArcaneHorror wrote: With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
You can still do it for narrative games anyway and if you are happy to have slightly less CP, but it stops the ever present Loyal 32 with Knights etc etc etc
Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.
1) AS noted several times above, if you design an army with a codex to have weaknesses and strengths, then give them a lot of allies. It's possible for them to not only use allies to avoid any of their inherent weaknesses, but to use allies with the same strengths to redouble their gain. This results in a balance situation where a souped army is vastly superior to one without. This creates huge issues in 40K because there's a heavy bias to allies for Imperials; whilst many of the Xenos armies don't have half as many if any allies.
2) Heavily focus on allies being overpowered compared to "pure" armies destroys the games visual identity. Many of us are visually sold on armies by armies being shown as a single unified force in terms of visual designs. Now neither approach is correct, but when one overpowers the other significantly it means that you end up with "pure" armies being left behind. Visually and aesthetically this is bad for marketing.
3) It becomes much harder to balance the game with corrective adjustments. Because now you're not just fixing an issue within an army, but also between allied armies as well. That overpowered souped army can be countered by making the components weaker, however that also makes the more balanced "pure" army components get weaker as a result. So you end up in an impossible to balance situation where you can pick to balance either the souped or the stand alone forces but not easily both.
4) Confusion on the tabletop. When GW started giving every single army sub-factions within itself and then let you ally those subfactions together things got complicated. Because most of those subfactions were focused around specific roles it meant that instead of building 1 army, you'd instead want to build a mix so that your close combat units can go into the hive fleet or tau force or craftworld etc.. that gave the best close combat bonuses. Meanwhile the ranged are going into the ranged best bonuses army etc... This confuses on the tabeltop because very few people will buy and paint two or three different armies of the same force. So now you've got an added layer of confusion and complication because you might have two or three "armies" with different bonuses to keep in mind - all painted the same.
Marines get a slight benefit here because they do at least have unique models for many of their sub-armies; but that's the exception - all the others don't even have upgrade packs for their sub-forces.
It led to some, retracted, daft ideas on enforcing armies linked to paint schemes.
Overall the idea of allies is not bad, the problem is when a game has so few limits on allies and so much potential to use them that armies stop being "armies" and start being allied forces only.
AoS has managed to avoid these issues by strict limitations of allies; whilst "Grand alliance" forces are generally weaker. This creates a game where there's much more reward for having at least a core of one faction forming the bulk of your army; and then adding in allies for flavour and enhancement of the force.
AnomanderRake wrote: Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.
You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.
I love my imperial soup. Custodes with inquisitors and tempestus scions retinues are my most played army. I had 0 sinergy and benefits but that doesn't affect me that much.
What I always find funny is how everybody puts the blame on imperial soup but the real competitive soup, Chaos, that runs 3-4 codex in nearly every list is much less mentioned, I assume because for most people chaos should be played as a soup, wich I find a little hypocritical.
Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.
Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.
AnomanderRake wrote: Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.
You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.
I think those army’s are particularly held to the model side of things, really hard to write good rules if they barely have the units to function within the game so often.
ArcaneHorror wrote: With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
Because being forced to buy models from a faction you do not want to play, to have a working army is not very fun. And the codex can't be design in mind that people never soup, if soup is an option. They are designed with soup in mind, so any faction that can't soup, and all players who don't want to soup are at an automaticly disadventage.
its is a mechanic good for tournaments, not so good for everyone else.
My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.
Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.
If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.
Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.
The problem is if you want to have big diverse armies ally to each other en-mass with few restrictions then the only way to balance it is to basically have totally flat unit balance. That is each army has the same core units with the same stats. Or so similar they don't make a difference. Only then can you easily balance mass allies because each army is basically the same components so there's no huge swings to consider.
Soup is the term the allies have got because in 40K its more than just taking a few allies, its often ending up with the army itself having no real "core" faction as such. Sure you've the core army name, but when the units that comprise it are so heavily spread out in different forces its not the same. It's why Aos hasn't picked up the term because there you can only have 1/4 of allies in your army in points and model count. So always 3/4 is going to be from your single core army. And that core army is one core army from your battletome - you're not mixing and matching two or three sub-armies together.
PenitentJake wrote: My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.
Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.
If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.
If you have made the campaign you can put ally buffs in it, it also does not stop GW putting out a campaign book that buffs that style of play. They probably won’t, but they could if they where to put effort into a campaign book.
Things like knights should have auxiliary guard in there codex anyway, And be balanced around there use for the health that would provide to the game design.
PenitentJake wrote: My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.
Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.
If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.
And even those doctrines can be easily worked around by bringing power armour soups. IF shooting core with BA smashes for instance. For the purpose of your own campaign you can easily avoid any or all rules and write them down by yourself. For the game in the outside world however we need soups to be possible, but only as an alternative form of list building and with a cost of some sort to balance the added value (sometimes humongous - vide all the IG battalions proliferation with Castelans and BA smashes at one point).
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.
Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.
The problem is if you want to have big diverse armies ally to each other en-mass with few restrictions then the only way to balance it is to basically have totally flat unit balance. That is each army has the same core units with the same stats. Or so similar they don't make a difference. Only then can you easily balance mass allies because each army is basically the same components so there's no huge swings to consider.
Soup is the term the allies have got because in 40K its more than just taking a few allies, its often ending up with the army itself having no real "core" faction as such. Sure you've the core army name, but when the units that comprise it are so heavily spread out in different forces its not the same. It's why Aos hasn't picked up the term because there you can only have 1/4 of allies in your army in points and model count. So always 3/4 is going to be from your single core army. And that core army is one core army from your battletome - you're not mixing and matching two or three sub-armies together.
You're sorta correct, but when you have no incentive to run your own units for a role that's a problem. Look at how in the first Space Marine codex for this edition with Artillery for example. Both the Whirlwind and TFC were basically awful. Just because Marines aren't KNOWN for artillery doesn't mean whatever artillery units they have should be awful at the role. Now with the new codex, you don't have as bad a want to bring in Guard Artillery as now the TFC is actually good (and the Whirlwind is kinda meh but still functions kinda at least).
Endless allies upon allies is really only a risk in a game with horrible balance, because you HAVE to rather than just wanting to.
AnomanderRake wrote: Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.
You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.
Oh, true, another problem with GW thinking "eh, we don't have to make these guys any good, they can just take allies to prop themselves up" is that we then start comparing them to all these allies they can take and discovering that actually there's no reason to play the army at all.
In a perfectly balanced game every 100 points of units would be worth 100 points - but in practice its highly unlikely to ever be entirely like that.
As someone who wanted soup gone - I don't mind if you can do it because your fluffy campaign says you should. But I don't think soup should be the automatic consideration of a competitive list. The game should be more than picking the best 500 points from that book, 800 points from this book and the rest from another book.
At the same time though, I think GW should get away from this idea you design a book with strengths and weaknesses. Because, as per the first statement, a weakness is usually just either a hole (i.e. this army doesn't do X, suck it up) or bad design (this army does do X, but pays 120-150% more points than most other factions would, so you are probably never going to see it on a competitive table, just go all in on the other units.)
Like say Custodes. I don't think they *need* the loyal 32 - although clearly its a massive help. What they *need* is for Custodian Guard not to be a bit crap. An awful lot of their issues come from trying to get around this issue - and if it wasn't an issue things would be different. (PA changes for Harlequins may help - but they have a similar issue with the basic Troupe and boat being too expensive.)
Eh... the question is why is soup considered so horrible.
I personally think it's an economic argument. People come to the game for a lot of reasons, soup is where they clash.
For some, you fall in love with a specific faction, you spend a lot of money on specific models, you pour endless hours into constructing and painting models, you stick with that faction through rebalancings, rules changes, etc. You want to play that faction and have a fair chance.
For others, they are competitive above all else and want to win. They don't really care about the fluff, at least not as much as success on the games table. They are numbers guys, some of them are actual accountants, managers, executives. They will put together armies based on max potential offensive output and drop a unit the moment the rules don't favor them.
Everyone only has so much time and resources to devote to the game. The people in the first category look at soup differently, adding a unit from a different faction raises questions about needing to build an entire army they're not passionate about. The people in the second camp might not have a complete army of a single faction to begin with.
The superposition is that the conflict between monofaction vs soup has an impact on the game. I'd rather there be clearly delineated benefits and drawbacks for going either way. As it stands now - you can get more of an advantage playing soup.
Also, let's separate soup from allies. I have a Daemon Primarch army with TS, Nurgle and CSM detachments. That's not soup, or at least most people would not call it soup. That's multiple individual detachments fighting together. Soup is where I put Abaddon, Typhus and Ahriman into a single Supreme Command Detachment and put it on the board. I can technically do that and get some benefit from doing so. But a lot of people find it objectionable and it doesn't make me feel real good about what I'm fielding.
Especially from a modelling, hobby and collecting perspective, I think it is great. 40K armies are expensive and time-consuming to collect. Having the option to just paint a few of those shiny new .. say Sisters of Battle or a funky new Primaris Space Marine Biker unit and bring them along with my existing Imperial Guard or so is great for the player/collector, allowing different models, experiment different schemes, etc.., etc.. It's obviously also great from a business perspective.
Souping is a bit more problematic from a game-design perspective as more options usually mean overall stronger armies, given you have a greater selection to choose what you need, unless (!) the act of souping itself imposes some type of penalty / cost in the army construction. More theoretically, it also limits design-space somewhat. Designing (and balancing) armies that are, say, a) super-punchy but lack board control or b) super-shooty but slow on the move or whatever is a moot point, if players can just ally in the "fixes" to cover the supposed weaknesses of a faction (presumably meant to balance out their strengths), which leads to less variety.
Codexes should be INTERNALLY consistent and balanced as much as possible. Maybe you price X unit this way because this army lacks Y unit, so they need this unit to be stronger to make up for it.
This can easily get out of hand when there are units that exist OUTSIDE that codex you can take.
An example: The Brohammer list would probably not have worked if the Leviathan Dreadnaught did not exist. Although not strictly soup, they liked never played with the damn thing under Iron Hands, they just never bothered to test the entire range of Space Marines line before writing their dreadnaught / passing wounds rules under Iron Hands.
When you see meta lists that include Knights, Guardsmen, and Blood Angels, strictly just metaing out the weaknesses of each army (Knights: lack of screens / CP, Guards: vehicles without invul saves, Knights + Guard: Blood angels destroy in melee even without all their free doctrine gak).
And it's not like armies are on equal footing for allies. Chaos and the Imperium has bundles of codexes to draw on. Tyranids has 1; Orks has 0.
Soup needs to be costly otherwise it's just a more complex math problem to tune your list to maximum effectiveness.
As an Ork player, I just hope subfactioning your army isn't too costly, as it's really the only tool I got to buff certain components of my army.
On top of the points others have made about competitive and balance issues, from a thematic/fluff standpoint, many rarely see soup/allies being taken advantage of for actual fluff reasons but rather almost exclusively just for the aforementioned competitive reasons, and more importantly, a lot of these factions don't actually operate together that much or on such a close tactical level, when they do it's a rare notable exception, not something that should be seen often.
Eldar/Dark Eldar for instance are normally pretty deadly blood enemies, not simply wayward cousins, and the Dark Eldar coming to Iyanden's assistance for example is more about humiliating Iyanden and needling them about having to conscript their dead and be saved by those they consider filthy deviants than it is about uniting against the Tyranid menace (which doesn't really affect the Dark Eldar at all from the relative safety of the Dark City). Space Marines involved in a large campaign alongside the Imperial Guard typically share no direct chain of command (and indeed SM's are typically forbidden from taking command of Guard/Navy forces without specific dispensation to do so post-HH) and often never even see one another. For example, the Siege of Vraks where the Dark Angels show up, blow up the spaceport, and leave without coming anywhere near the actual main battle lines or doing much other than telling the Guard forces on the planet "we did what we came to do, peace out", that's how it normally works. When we see Space Marines commanding Guard forces and fighting directly alongside them on Armageddon, that's a notable major atypical event.
From a lore perspective, seeing a lot of these forces operate so closely together so often tends to get a bit weird.
It is so-maligned by some (myself included. I know I'll be told I'm "wrong" here. Whoop dee doo. Fight me IRL...) because, like most things they do; GW implemented it in the most hamfisted way possible and not everything was created equal. So you are left with weird mishmashes of armies allied with themselves to get subfaction bonuses, odd things just thrown together on the battlefield with zero visual cohesion, especially at the typical game size 40k plays at. No, 30 odd Guardsmen and a random Knight showing up with a dozen Marines does not an army make.
"But that's how muh Imperium fights in the fluff!" they will respond. Maybe so, but that is in engagements involving hundreds if not thousands of troops and not normal 40k. Hell, there is even a game for that (Apocalypse) where souping wasn't just encouraged, it was allowed, and it just looks better. Mass combined arms Imperial force? Sign me up! Looks great on the tabletop. Hodgepodge of random units in a game not designed for that scale? Nope. Looks gak.
One (if not the only for some) of 40k's biggest assets is the visuals. Take that away by having an army that looks like someone hit the random button on Battlescribe and what are you left with? A good system? Don't make me laugh.
Other games get it right. Now, Warmachine is far from perfect on how Merc units are used as, just like in 40k there are a solid cadre of "always takes", but they are far from compulsory like they feel in 40k. You know why? Due to one simple word. "Faction" (almost as if 40k needs USRs... ). Many, many model have abilities that only affect "friendly faction" models. Mercs in your force are simply "friendly" (unless you take certain unit attachments) and are therefore unable to be used in the worst abuses of wombo comboing.
Also, let's separate soup from allies. I have a Daemon Primarch army with TS, Nurgle and CSM detachments. That's not soup, or at least most people would not call it soup. That's multiple individual detachments fighting together. Soup is where I put Abaddon, Typhus and Ahriman into a single Supreme Command Detachment and put it on the board. I can technically do that and get some benefit from doing so. But a lot of people find it objectionable and it doesn't make me feel real good about what I'm fielding.
I think this is an important distinction to make, and one that is often not made even by myself. Soup takes the idea of allies to an extreme that poisons the concept because there should have been a cost to it or more limitations (even a bit of both) but there isn't. Units from different armies buffing one another and beyond. There are simply not enough limitations with it.
As a chaos player, I have more than once (let's say in a 2kpts list) brought, for example, about 1100pts of Black Legion, then plugged in some death guard meat in a battalion and maybe even a supportive conclave of Thousand sons via SCD, all in different detachments but under an undivided BL lord's banner. This IS fluffy, it should be allowed. Another example is when I bring 1400pts of World Eaters and then 600pts of Khorne daemons. Again, this is fluffy and should be allowed, these types of allies are rampant through the fluff and daemons and CSM are just staple bedfellows. I would fight anyone that thinks this shouldn't be allowed lol
To answer the OP question, the problem isn't allies as a concept, it's people taking allies that don't have restrictions to the ultimate degrees to win or find the most competitive builds and GW's inaction to curtail that. The keyword system also allowed a little too much latitude.
I personally welcome the idea that in matched play there's a larger CP pool that you have to pay from to access allies, I think that's fair and makes sense, I don't mind there being some price of admission to using allies in terms of matched games but at the same time I reject the thought process that just because it's not balanced this second, it shouldn't exist at all because that's not the universe these things have been created to exist in and it's not actually tackling a problem, it's just putting it away. I want to be able to use as many of my models as often as I can within the confines of the formal rules.
There are issues with allies and soup. Allies should be restricted to their own detachments at least and the limitations or costs should go further than that but firstly, not to the point of making an allied list uncompetitive and secondly not to give mono-factions an advantage over allied lists. The two should be, as best possible, of equal footing.
Ultimately, I find the complaints about soup to be a little redundant. Any game that has nuance and detail to this level is going to struggle to be reasonably balanced; there's always going to be power lists. If you want perfect balance then you need simplicity in the set up such as that provided in Chess. You can't have flavour and balance. So if people are THAT concerned about soup because of a competitive or balancing issues, then really we should have the exact same models and stats with just different paint schemes and shapes/sizes.
Vaktathi wrote: On top of the points others have made about competitive and balance issues, from a thematic/fluff standpoint, many rarely see soup/allies being taken advantage of for actual fluff reasons but rather almost exclusively just for the aforementioned competitive reasons, and more importantly, a lot of these factions don't actually operate together that much or on such a close tactical level, when they do it's a rare notable exception, not something that should be seen often.
Eldar/Dark Eldar for instance are normally pretty deadly blood enemies, not simply wayward cousins, and the Dark Eldar coming to Iyanden's assistance for example is more about humiliating Iyanden and needling them about having to conscript their dead and be saved by those they consider filthy deviants than it is about uniting against the Tyranid menace (which doesn't really affect the Dark Eldar at all from the relative safety of the Dark City). Space Marines involved in a large campaign alongside the Imperial Guard typically share no direct chain of command (and indeed SM's are typically forbidden from taking command of Guard/Navy forces without specific dispensation to do so post-HH) and often never even see one another. For example, the Siege of Vraks where the Dark Angels show up, blow up the spaceport, and leave without coming anywhere near the actual main battle lines or doing much other than telling the Guard forces on the planet "we did what we came to do, peace out", that's how it normally works. When we see Space Marines commanding Guard forces and fighting directly alongside them on Armageddon, that's a notable major atypical event.
From a lore perspective, seeing a lot of these forces operate so closely together so often tends to get a bit weird.
That`s not allies-specific though.
All Dark Eldar-Marine alliances or whatever are probably still more plausable and far more common in-universe than, say, Ahriman actually fighting with Thousand Sons, instead of getting slaughtered by them on sight, or Typhus joining with Morarion, etc..
ArcaneHorror wrote: With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
As it was you could just take best of every faction ignoring weaknesses. Plus get more CP than pure. At zero cost. None.
Now you still can but you at least pay.
Ask yourself. If you can get +1 to hit to your devastators for free why NOT take it? With allies you can cherry pick best at no cost. That's essentially free buffs to your army. Before question is "why soup". Question was "why NOT soup".
There needs to be price to pay for power. Free buffs screw balance.
From the way they worded it, they might even attach a price tag to mixing and matching sub-factions from the same codex, so you can't attach the perfect army trait to every unit like orks or space marines do without a drawback.
Yeah. Finally there would be actually be point in playing mono kulture/regiment/etc. Playing say mono evil sun isn't all that optimal. Pure melee doesn't really work but evil sun tank bustas? Umm not that good. Bad moons just better. Before there was literally no point not to take bad moon/deathskull if you wanted tank bustas. Now there's at least CP saved. Small reward for staying pure.
I think that we have some factions that act as magnets that draw factions together.
Any collection and arrangement of allied Imperial factions, no matter how ridiculous it might otherwise seem, makes perfect sense if you add an Inquisitor and the enemy is the target of said Inquisitor's Quarry.
While it was always somewhat fluffy for Harlequins or Corsairs to work with either CWE or DE, it only really makes sense for DE and CWE to be in the same army when you add Ynnari- another magnet for alliances.
As for Tyranids, GSC are the ally magnet for the faction. It really does make sense for Guard and Nids to be a part of the same force if GSC is on the table- especially a large table where Guard take a flank and Nids take a flank with GSC holding the centre supported by the other forces when necessary.
But yeah, at a tournament, and from a design perspective, it is brutally hard to design a game where this diversity is supported, but which is also balanced. As pointed out earlier, it's only really possible by baselining each faction to the point where their identity as a distinct faction is at least partially diminished.
Jidmah wrote: It's not a bad thing, but having multiple codices to draw from is an inherent advantage over drawing an army from a single codex.
If there is no downside to doing it, there is no reason to play an army from a faction with the option to soup using only a single codex.
If you pick Chaos Space Marines as an example, there is no reason not improve your army with more powerful psykers from the Thousand Sons codex and more powerful troops from the daemons codex. You gain nothing from playing pure CSM instead.
From the way they worded it, they might even attach a price tag to mixing and matching sub-factions from the same codex, so you can't attach the perfect army trait to every unit like orks or space marines do without a drawback.
Doctrine is just for marines. While game is heavily marine heavy soup is still more than just marines.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vaktathi wrote: On top of the points others have made about competitive and balance issues, from a thematic/fluff standpoint, many rarely see soup/allies being taken advantage of for actual fluff reasons but rather almost exclusively just for the aforementioned competitive reasons, and more importantly, a lot of these factions don't actually operate together that much or on such a close tactical level, when they do it's a rare notable exception, not something that should be seen often.
Yeah. 3 marine smashhammers souping up with other elements...that's pretty hard to explain sensibly in background but very common.
I'm never really sure about fluff-based arguments for... well, anything, because everyone's fluff is different.
To my mind - sorry folks who disagree - DE and Eldar made up over their "Its High Elves and Dark Elves in SPAAACE" fluff ages and ages ago. I'm thinking probably late 3rd - certainly by 5th.
They don't like each other. Yes.
But lets be honest - Dark Eldar don't like other Dark Eldar.
They however prefer "Aeldari" to just about every other species in the galaxy. Much like how humans make deals with other humans... we don't make deals with monkeys.
Pretty much every piece of recent Eldar fluff has been about trying to show how there is a single Aeldari society, that maybe is a bit fractured and riddled with distrust - got to have conflict and endless attempted assassinations - but people still communicate and act together.
Also not really convinced on aesthetic reasons. A unifying 3 colour scheme can basically make almost any army tie together to be part of a greater whole. Maybe this is from playing too many computer games - but if you have red marines, with red Ad Mech, with red Sisters and red Guard - you are just going to see a sea of red. I don't think you would see a major clash - but that might just be me.
The key issue with “soup” in 8th was it encouraged Cherry Picking the best unit’s from all available codices, gave you more CP for doing so, without any real drawback to account for the advantages.
My primary interest in 40k is the social / gaming aspect. So I don’t mind soup per se, but without drawbacks to balance the advantages, I disliked the implementation.
Karol wrote: I always had problems in defining, in non game terms, what kind of an army was the IG with castellan and some BA jump captins with 15 scouts.
[IMPERIUM]
Next...?
purplkrush wrote: Each army was designed with specific strengths and weaknesses in mind. Soup is a crutch for people who can't play their armies. It only came about couple of editions ago.
Every edition of the game has had allies as a mechanic, to some degree or another.
Grimtuff wrote: Other games get it right. Now, Warmachine is far from perfect on how Merc units are used as, just like in 40k there are a solid cadre of "always takes", but they are far from compulsory like they feel in 40k. You know why? Due to one simple word. "Faction" (almost as if 40k needs USRs... ). Many, many model have abilities that only affect "friendly faction" models. Mercs in your force are simply "friendly" (unless you take certain unit attachments) and are therefore unable to be used in the worst abuses of wombo comboing.
Not to forget that every Merc/Minion unit in the game has a list of factions it will work for - there are very few with universal access. You might find a unit/character is a "must have" for Cryx, but Cygnar might not be able to use it (and Trollbloods almost certainly won't).
I like the idea of allies alot, but the 8th ed implementation is horrible. Using allies should be allowed, but make it reasonable, impose strict limits on points/power level for allies, heck, why not limit unit choices too while you're at it.
That "1/4 of points max for allies" is a good step in the right direction. I'd also not allow HQs, and would severly limit the availbility of units outside of troops slot (power level cap could be a good limiter).
It’s essentially lopsided, and really only benefits certain Imperial Armies.
See, CPs and Stratagems are the coin of the realm, yes? Used well with other buffs certain units can become super Killy.
Now, in their native forces, overall points costs keeps things relatively sane. Yes, you can Smash Captain, but maybe only once or twice.
Add in Loyal 32? Congratulations. For Not Many Points, you’ve bagged loads of cheap CPs, and even better, some cheapo backfield objective holders.
In essence, those that can effectively Soup get significant bonuses.
Eldar, Tyranids, Necrons and Orks? Yeah no dice. Because you can’t Soup that well. This of course means Space Marines and Imperial Knights get an unfair advantage.
They could have sorted a chunk of the "Allies!" problems with an "allied force detachment", feel free to bring multiple of them, but the only units outside you codex are in there, then have them reasonably limited, say:
1 HQ 2-4 Troops
0-1 Fast Attack
0-1 Heavy
0-1 Elite
have this cost no CP, but also provide none
idea that you will now be able to spend CP to bring allies works for me - just needs to be such that they cost more than they bring (say allies generate no CP)
Grimtuff wrote: Other games get it right. Now, Warmachine is far from perfect on how Merc units are used as, just like in 40k there are a solid cadre of "always takes", but they are far from compulsory like they feel in 40k. You know why? Due to one simple word. "Faction" (almost as if 40k needs USRs... ). Many, many model have abilities that only affect "friendly faction" models. Mercs in your force are simply "friendly" (unless you take certain unit attachments) and are therefore unable to be used in the worst abuses of wombo comboing.
Not to forget that every Merc/Minion unit in the game has a list of factions it will work for - there are very few with universal access. You might find a unit/character is a "must have" for Cryx, but Cygnar might not be able to use it (and Trollbloods almost certainly won't).
Doh! Yes, forgot about that bit. Not played WMH in a while, despite there being a cabinet full of minis next to me as I type this (and typed that!) that I could have just glanced over to to remind myself...
Is the Auxiliary Support Detachment (the one that costs a CP) supposed to be how you bring in allied forces? Like, the 3 detachment limit is specifically for organized play, so you can bring as many allied units as you have CP.
Blndmage wrote: Is the Auxiliary Support Detachment (the one that costs a CP) supposed to be how you bring in allied forces? Like, the 3 detachment limit is specifically for organized play, so you can bring as many allied units as you have CP.
In 8th no you take any detachment usually a battalion for the CP and can go ham.
In 9th the whole system has been upended.
CP is dependent upon game size.
Your first detachment is free
You pay CP for each additional detachment
You Pay CP for each additional codex you want units from
You can still bring allies in 9th, it just finally has a downside unlike 8th where its all free bonuses.
Doh! Yes, forgot about that bit. Not played WMH in a while, despite there being a cabinet full of minis next to me as I type this (and typed that!) that I could have just glanced over to to remind myself...
My brother and I actually just started up Warmahordes when this whole lockdown nonsense started and I gotta say, reading about the 'Theme Forces' has made me wish something along those lines would have come into play for 40k.
Karol wrote: I always had problems in defining, in non game terms, what kind of an army was the IG with castellan and some BA jump captins with 15 scouts.
[IMPERIUM]
Next...?
I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
To use a historical wargaming analogy, it's the difference between being able to take a battalion each of Americans and Brits in a WW2 game, versus being able to take an army consisting of mostly Americans but with Russian artillery pieces and a couple of Canadian officers for some reason. The former is allies, the latter is soup.
I've said this in numerous threads before (concerning the same topic).
When I was playing 40K, I was interested in narrative games, not competitive stuff. Bringing competitive soup was simply a visual indicator to me that you weren't interested in the same kind of game I was, and thus made it easy to avoid certain players. Not in a mean-spirited way, but it very openly indicates "I'm playing to win using the best components of any book I can buy", vs. "I love this army and enjoy playing it, even with its flaws", etc.
Now, if you had a cool fluffy and narrative army that involved soup, that's fine...but it's always been exceptionally easy in 8th to spot competitive soup vs. story driven soup. Early in the game it was Celestine and Guilliman leading hordes of "conscripts"...later it was Knights, the loyal 32 and smash captains, etc. etc.
As an adult, none of us have heaps of free time, so I won't bother pursuing a game with someone who's looking for tournament-competitive style gaming, when I am not.
Very much agree there’s a world of difference between Soup (cherry picked for power and abuse of CPs) and a list representing a Crusade force, with various elements of the Imperium’s forces, done because it looks cool to have Sisters and Marines amongst Imperial Guard.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned about soup that I don't like is that certain factions are expected to soup. Gw seems to have designed most chaos factions to work as soup. Sorry, I don't want to have to use other armies, I should be able to play my Night Lords as a pure army without losing anything.
I'm fine with not getting all the toys, but the ones I get should work. That means better balanced codexes. Csm and loyalists shouldn't want to take a knight, for instance, our own super heavys should be good enough to take. Maybe not as good as a knight but still good enough to actually be viable.
One of my armies is GSC, and given the limited range of models for the Cult, souping up gives me access and excuse to get my hands on the vast pool of interesting AM kits....for example the Baneblade. I don't want to build an entire AM army, but I do love some kits in the range.
The other army is Nids and I don't really like souping up with them. I can't even stand doing two hive-fleets in a list, first, because there's literally ONE documented instance of cooperation happening in the entire lore, and survivors of the first force actually submitted to the synapse creatures of the other.
And second, Nids simply look best as a wave of models with the same paint scheme. Two hive fleets mean two paint schemes mean disrupted immersion.
Karol wrote: I always had problems in defining, in non game terms, what kind of an army was the IG with castellan and some BA jump captins with 15 scouts.
[IMPERIUM]
Next...?
I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
But how is that different?
Two batallions on one hand
A batallion, superheavy detachment and Supreme command on the other hand.
The triumvirate is in charge, but all the other marines are busy elsewhere,or really just the three guys were sent (ignore that they're captains, think of them as movie marines) in the first place.
The castellan is the leader of the knights, but the marines are in charge.
Same with the guard.
This could be staight out of a novel, as long as you ignore the marine ranks.
Do I have to spell out what I, and others have posted already ITT so you can infer from context that that one specific example is not the norm when it comes to souping and the people that participate in it?
Needless pedantry and Dakka. Name a more iconic duo.
Why is soup hated? Go look at the competitive filth lists you see in tournaments. Maybe SM 2.0 changed it but when you see garbage like taking a Blood Angels detachments where the only Blood Angels are Mephiston and 2 Smash Captains and everything else is from different factions it's ridiculous.
Basically like others said it makes things super hard to balance when Imperium has umpteen codexes they can mix and match with zero drawback across detachments to remove the army's weaknesses. Why even have weaknesses when you can take a different faction to alleviate it?
Knights were a good example. Their weakness was lack of screens and low CP generation but good stratagems. That weakness was completely removed with the Loyal 32 and guess what? It was ridiculously OP and had to be nerfed but they nerfed the Knight rather than fix the reason it was OP: being able to negate a design weakness.
With luck this change will also mean the end of Unit X getting nerfed because competitive players are pairing it with Units Y and Z from different factions and that combination is making unit X crazy good.
I always thought a good start would be to limit CPs generated to the faction that generated them. It won't fix every issue with soup, but at least the CP batteries would not work any more and thus it would be less of a Problem that 1CP in Knight stratagems is usually a bigger thing than 1CP in IG stratagems.
Pyroalchi wrote: I always thought a good start would be to limit CPs generated to the faction that generated them. It won't fix every issue with soup, but at least the CP batteries would not work any more and thus it would be less of a Problem that 1CP in Knight stratagems is usually a bigger thing than 1CP in IG stratagems.
Thankfully 9th edition fixes the mess of the 8th CP system by replacing it completely
The strategums had to be different power between factions though some factions Knights and custodes struggling to pass double digets of CP while some, Guard, can make it to almost 30CP in 2k game.
Karol wrote: I always had problems in defining, in non game terms, what kind of an army was the IG with castellan and some BA jump captins with 15 scouts.
[IMPERIUM]
Next...?
I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
But how is that different?
Two batallions on one hand
A batallion, superheavy detachment and Supreme command on the other hand.
The triumvirate is in charge, but all the other marines are busy elsewhere,or really just the three guys were sent (ignore that they're captains, think of them as movie marines) in the first place.
The castellan is the leader of the knights, but the marines are in charge.
Same with the guard.
This could be staight out of a novel, as long as you ignore the marine ranks.
You need to come up convoluted excuses that goes against how it's descrcibed in fluff and novels. That's the difference
Martel732 wrote: For those of us who don't care about fluff and novels?
It's imbalanved as heck and also gets really old when the way to make your army better is just adding 30 guardsmen and 2 tank commanders/company commanders etc.
Some of us want to play the armies we bought into not guard or admech.
Martel732 wrote: For those of us who don't care about fluff and novels?
It's imbalanved as heck and also gets really old when the way to make your army better is just adding 30 guardsmen and 2 tank commanders/company commanders etc.
Some of us want to play the armies we bought into not guard or admech.
I think everyone hit all the right check-boxes before me.
Soup Bad:
- Most armies are balanced within themselves, interactions between other armies or units make the complexity exponentially more complex for points to capability.
- Most armies have a style to them, horde, shooty, melee, durable, re-populates, army-wide abilities. Soup allows a means to cover the disadvantages of these given styles which can lead to strong synergies. (Maybe a good thing??)
- Added things like keywords were made to try to contain abilities so they would only interact with intended units or armies (another layer of complexity).
Soup Good:
- More representative of GW "fluff" where combined arms are typically deployed.
- More interesting visually and strategically.
I gave up in using 40k competitively... it seems an oxymoron, I have turned to other systems for that.
BUT we like to use matched play to keep things somewhat sane.
We really like to use the game as a 40k sandbox simulator... we are more into the look of the thing and the insane amount of carnage that happens during the game.
I will be interested to see with the new edition how command points and strategems are separated between the factions of the "soup".
Martel732 wrote: For those of us who don't care about fluff and novels?
It's imbalanved as heck and also gets really old when the way to make your army better is just adding 30 guardsmen and 2 tank commanders/company commanders etc.
Some of us want to play the armies we bought into not guard or admech.
Or daemons. Or knights. Or any of the other eight legions.
catbarf wrote: I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
But how is that different?
Two batallions on one hand
A batallion, superheavy detachment and Supreme command on the other hand.
The triumvirate is in charge, but all the other marines are busy elsewhere,or really just the three guys were sent (ignore that they're captains, think of them as movie marines) in the first place.
The castellan is the leader of the knights, but the marines are in charge.
Same with the guard.
This could be staight out of a novel, as long as you ignore the marine ranks.
'Its the same thing, as long as you pretend the Marines are something they're not, and come up with a contrived backstory/excuse'?
Is that really the angle you want to go with?
Uh, maybe that American army recaptured a couple of German-captured Katyushas and liberated some Canadian POWs, just pretend that they're special forces even though I'm using the rules for officers. See, my WW2 soup army is historically plausible, and totally not just a flimsy excuse at powergaming.
catbarf wrote: I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
But how is that different?
Two batallions on one hand
A batallion, superheavy detachment and Supreme command on the other hand.
The triumvirate is in charge, but all the other marines are busy elsewhere,or really just the three guys were sent (ignore that they're captains, think of them as movie marines) in the first place.
The castellan is the leader of the knights, but the marines are in charge.
Same with the guard.
This could be staight out of a novel, as long as you ignore the marine ranks.
'Its the same thing, as long as you pretend the Marines are something they're not, and come up with a contrived backstory/excuse'?
Is that really the angle you want to go with?
Uh, maybe that American army recaptured a couple of German-captured Katyushas and liberated some Canadian POWs, just pretend that they're special forces even though I'm using the rules for officers. See, my WW2 soup army is historically plausible, and totally not just a flimsy excuse at powergaming.
I was waiting for the mental gymnasts to appear for my (and it appears yours) main issue with soup.
I mean, it's not like GW produces a game or anything that allows you to run these combined arms forces without squeezing them into a game not designed for such things without it looking incredibly stupid and convoluted. No, not at all. No such game exists...
Kayback wrote: Lotta people here talking about cheese not soup.
There's no real difference.
Well one is an interesting mix of flavours, the other is bland.
No seriously. Adding a squad or two of allies can enhance the feel of your army. There is something to be said for mono-lists and they shouldn't get the short end of the stick - which we can all agree on - I just think that allies shouldn't be made useless either.
ArcaneHorror wrote: With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?
Look up the RPG term "munchkin", and you'll figure out why it's bad.
Gadzilla666 wrote: One thing that hasn't been mentioned about soup that I don't like is that certain factions are expected to soup. Gw seems to have designed most chaos factions to work as soup. Sorry, I don't want to have to use other armies, I should be able to play my Night Lords as a pure army without losing anything.
I'm fine with not getting all the toys, but the ones I get should work. That means better balanced codexes. Csm and loyalists shouldn't want to take a knight, for instance, our own super heavys should be good enough to take. Maybe not as good as a knight but still good enough to actually be viable.
Yeah, chaos is in a weird spot, and it seems really baffling (and that it survived into the v2 codex is utterly absurd).
No rules should produce the results it does. For example:
Pure Word bearers army, dark apostles, chaos marines, sorcerer, etc. You get your (crappy) legion trait. But then you want to go a step fluffier, and include some daemons for the legion known for binding daemons. Woops, legion trait goes away, despite lessers being in the CSM book.
But wait, you can take detachments of daemons from the daemon book and not lose any traits and if you do them right with herald plus correct daemon types by detachment, you get their locus bonuses as well for each detachment and a larger range of daemons. There is absolutely no reason to take the first route (daemons in your WB detachment) rather than the latter. There's no excuse for having rules that work this way.
Gadzilla666 wrote: One thing that hasn't been mentioned about soup that I don't like is that certain factions are expected to soup. Gw seems to have designed most chaos factions to work as soup. Sorry, I don't want to have to use other armies, I should be able to play my Night Lords as a pure army without losing anything.
I'm fine with not getting all the toys, but the ones I get should work. That means better balanced codexes. Csm and loyalists shouldn't want to take a knight, for instance, our own super heavys should be good enough to take. Maybe not as good as a knight but still good enough to actually be viable.
Yeah, chaos is in a weird spot, and it seems really baffling (and that it survived into the v2 codex is utterly absurd).
No rules should produce the results it does. For example:
Pure Word bearers army, dark apostles, chaos marines, sorcerer, etc. You get your (crappy) legion trait. But then you want to go a step fluffier, and include some daemons for the legion known for binding daemons. Woops, legion trait goes away, despite lessers being in the CSM book.
But wait, you can take detachments of daemons from the daemon book and not lose any traits and if you do them right with herald plus correct daemon types by detachment, you get their locus bonuses as well for each detachment and a larger range of daemons. There is absolutely no reason to take the first route (daemons in your WB detachment) rather than the latter. There's no excuse for having rules that work this way.
To be fair it does seem very much like GW can't decied if Choas marine's are supposed to represent the legions of old horus heresy, or if they are supposed to represent the rag tag warbands and cults that is more inline with the 40k lore
However that's still not an argument that supports the 8th edition system of add allies it's all upsides no downsides those are all for those filthy mono codex players.
Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
I disagree. I think GW has a very clear idea what they want the CSM's to be. It is just that CSM players don't want their army to be the 40K equivalent of Cobra for the Space Marine GI Joes to beat each week.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
I disagree. I think GW has a very clear idea what they want the CSM's to be. It is just that CSM players don't want their army to be the 40K equivalent of Cobra for the Space Marine GI Joes to beat each week.
Least its better than Tyranids who everyone beats up!
I mean I guess in fairness Tyranids do beat up several Space Marine chapters; but darn it we've not killed one yet!!
Gadzilla666 wrote: One thing that hasn't been mentioned about soup that I don't like is that certain factions are expected to soup. Gw seems to have designed most chaos factions to work as soup. Sorry, I don't want to have to use other armies, I should be able to play my Night Lords as a pure army without losing anything.
I'm fine with not getting all the toys, but the ones I get should work. That means better balanced codexes. Csm and loyalists shouldn't want to take a knight, for instance, our own super heavys should be good enough to take. Maybe not as good as a knight but still good enough to actually be viable.
Yeah, chaos is in a weird spot, and it seems really baffling (and that it survived into the v2 codex is utterly absurd).
No rules should produce the results it does. For example:
Pure Word bearers army, dark apostles, chaos marines, sorcerer, etc. You get your (crappy) legion trait. But then you want to go a step fluffier, and include some daemons for the legion known for binding daemons. Woops, legion trait goes away, despite lessers being in the CSM book.
But wait, you can take detachments of daemons from the daemon book and not lose any traits and if you do them right with herald plus correct daemon types by detachment, you get their locus bonuses as well for each detachment and a larger range of daemons. There is absolutely no reason to take the first route (daemons in your WB detachment) rather than the latter. There's no excuse for having rules that work this way.
I thought that daemons that were summoned were not put into the same detachments as those that summoned them (CSM or other daemons), and thus no traits and loci were lost.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
They got it right with the 3.5 codex, then screwed it up in the 4th edition codex and haven't been able to find the plot since. Or when they do they lose it again, like they did in 8th after they invalidated Traitor Legions.
And what lore says the legions are now all "ragtag warbands and cults"? Have you read the description of the massing of the legions in The Lords of Silence? Does that sound "ragtag"? Even warbands should still act like the legions they belong to. Tenth Company were poor, but they still fought like Night Lords, because they were Night Lords. Word Bearers would still fight like Word Bearers. Iron Warriors like Iron Warriors.
I don't understand how they got it so right once and can't do it again.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
They got it right with the 3.5 codex, then screwed it up in the 4th edition codex and haven't been able to find the plot since. Or when they do they lose it again, like they did in 8th after they invalidated Traitor Legions.
And what lore says the legions are now all "ragtag warbands and cults"? Have you read the description of the massing of the legions in The Lords of Silence? Does that sound "ragtag"? Even warbands should still act like the legions they belong to. Tenth Company were poor, but they still fought like Night Lords, because they were Night Lords. Word Bearers would still fight like Word Bearers. Iron Warriors like Iron Warriors.
I don't understand how they got it so right once and can't do it again.
So they got it right with 3.5 codex, wasn't that the codex that broke third edition?
As for the fluff maybe the depends on who's fluff your reading but most of the time choas is described as a mix of cultits, some marines and then demons.
Not really seen much thats all marine's with no demons or cultists/renegade guard.
Though I'm not sure if thats deliberate or if GW wrote themselves into a hole and are hoping no-one will notice if they just up and retcon some stuff.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
They got it right with the 3.5 codex, then screwed it up in the 4th edition codex and haven't been able to find the plot since. Or when they do they lose it again, like they did in 8th after they invalidated Traitor Legions.
And what lore says the legions are now all "ragtag warbands and cults"? Have you read the description of the massing of the legions in The Lords of Silence? Does that sound "ragtag"? Even warbands should still act like the legions they belong to. Tenth Company were poor, but they still fought like Night Lords, because they were Night Lords. Word Bearers would still fight like Word Bearers. Iron Warriors like Iron Warriors.
I don't understand how they got it so right once and can't do it again.
So they got it right with 3.5 codex, wasn't that the codex that broke third edition?
As for the fluff maybe the depends on who's fluff your reading but most of the time choas is described as a mix of cultits, some marines and then demons.
Not really seen much thats all marine's with no demons or cultists/renegade guard.
Though I'm not sure if thats deliberate or if GW wrote themselves into a hole and are hoping no-one will notice if they just up and retcon some stuff.
99% of Imperium conflicts don't involve Space Marines. Should we restrict you to only using Space Marines one in every hundred battles?
The thing about 3.5 is that at the time, we had an inverse situation to what we currently have. CSM were SM +1. They had the toys of the Imperium, but could also bring Daemonic units and had remarkable customization with nearly 100 wargear / gift upgrades to choose from.
I think it’s swung back too far. CSM are now like SM +1, -2 in terms of available options, lesser Chapter Tactics, alternative gear, etc. Just my take, of course.
Chaos used to be one Codex with several (current) factions in it. So I have no issue with allies and multiple detachments here. Becomes a soup issue when the best of several codices are skimmed for the cream of them all. Compared to Orks, Tau, Necrons and Tyranids that are effectively forced to draw from a single factions resources, its poor implementation.
One way to break it would be to get rid of fluff-based restrictions. Unpopular. Another would be to write fluff, giving all factions more autonomy to have allies of convenience. Nids would pretty much need the Newcron treatment and get some degree of individual personality... perhaps multiple personalities within the singular Hivemind? Unpopular. You don’t need to say it.
So balancing “allies” in a way that prevents “soup” would need some kind of either immersion break (free-for-all allies) where anyone can skim from anyone, or an enlarging of the Xenos allies list (lesser immersion break?).
I don’t mind allies. Let’s you dip your toes into a second faction without going all-in to get a “standard” size game in your area. I think that’s good.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
They got it right with the 3.5 codex, then screwed it up in the 4th edition codex and haven't been able to find the plot since. Or when they do they lose it again, like they did in 8th after they invalidated Traitor Legions.
And what lore says the legions are now all "ragtag warbands and cults"? Have you read the description of the massing of the legions in The Lords of Silence? Does that sound "ragtag"? Even warbands should still act like the legions they belong to. Tenth Company were poor, but they still fought like Night Lords, because they were Night Lords. Word Bearers would still fight like Word Bearers. Iron Warriors like Iron Warriors.
I don't understand how they got it so right once and can't do it again.
So they got it right with 3.5 codex, wasn't that the codex that broke third edition?
As for the fluff maybe the depends on who's fluff your reading but most of the time choas is described as a mix of cultits, some marines and then demons.
Not really seen much thats all marine's with no demons or cultists/renegade guard.
Though I'm not sure if thats deliberate or if GW wrote themselves into a hole and are hoping no-one will notice if they just up and retcon some stuff.
The 3.5 codex had a lot of gameplay/competitive issues (in both directions, and had plenty of both broken gimmicks and absolute garbage), but had a clear idea on what it wanted to portray and how it viewed CSM's, even with the inclusion of Daemons. There were issues of execution and how it related to game balance, as is typical with GW, but the basic vision and structure of that particular codex was really well done. The subsequent 2008 4E book had its own issues with balance (hooray Lash Princes!) but really lost the feel of the faction.
There's lots of CSM fluff that doesn't involve daemons or human troops, just as there's lots of Marine stuff without involving the Guard or the Inquisition or Sisters or the AdMech.
Vaktathi wrote: Aye, I don't think GW has had a clear idea on what they've wanted CSM's to be since they released the 4th edition book in 2008. They've been mixing modern Renegades who for some reason have HH-Legion era equipment but no current Loyalist gear, and Legions with afterthought rules, weird mixes and differentiations between Cult units vs "Marked" units, and inconsistent ideas on how they should interact with other forces of Chaos.
They got it right with the 3.5 codex, then screwed it up in the 4th edition codex and haven't been able to find the plot since. Or when they do they lose it again, like they did in 8th after they invalidated Traitor Legions.
And what lore says the legions are now all "ragtag warbands and cults"? Have you read the description of the massing of the legions in The Lords of Silence? Does that sound "ragtag"? Even warbands should still act like the legions they belong to. Tenth Company were poor, but they still fought like Night Lords, because they were Night Lords. Word Bearers would still fight like Word Bearers. Iron Warriors like Iron Warriors.
I don't understand how they got it so right once and can't do it again.
So they got it right with 3.5 codex, wasn't that the codex that broke third edition?
As for the fluff maybe the depends on who's fluff your reading but most of the time choas is described as a mix of cultits, some marines and then demons.
Not really seen much thats all marine's with no demons or cultists/renegade guard.
Though I'm not sure if thats deliberate or if GW wrote themselves into a hole and are hoping no-one will notice if they just up and retcon some stuff.
3.5 got it right in the way it allowed the legions to behave like they should, not like a bunch of renegades with inferior equipment and tactics, and all effectively the same besides color scheme. Not in raw power, which is what you're talking about. I don't want the power back, I just want my army to play like it should, not like Black Legion with lightning bolts on their armour.
And yeah, that's how they're portrayed in a lot of lore, lore where they're the "Cobra to loyalists G.I.Joe" as previously mentioned. Not in their own.
catbarf wrote: I think maybe you've misunderstood the question. Karol is asking what such an army is supposed to represent from a fluff perspective, since the Imperium does not regularly deploy integrated combat units consisting of Imperial Guard with Knights and led by Space Marines. These are typically independent assets; often used in the same operations, but with their own independent chains of command, logistics, and deployment.
This is rather different from taking, say, a 1000pt detachment of Guard along with a 1000pt detachment of Blood Angels, where each is based around a Battalion and represents a functionally coherent fighting unit in its own right.
But how is that different?
Two batallions on one hand
A batallion, superheavy detachment and Supreme command on the other hand.
The triumvirate is in charge, but all the other marines are busy elsewhere,or really just the three guys were sent (ignore that they're captains, think of them as movie marines) in the first place.
The castellan is the leader of the knights, but the marines are in charge.
Same with the guard.
This could be staight out of a novel, as long as you ignore the marine ranks.
'Its the same thing, as long as you pretend the Marines are something they're not, and come up with a contrived backstory/excuse'?
Is that really the angle you want to go with?
Uh, maybe that American army recaptured a couple of German-captured Katyushas and liberated some Canadian POWs, just pretend that they're special forces even though I'm using the rules for officers. See, my WW2 soup army is historically plausible, and totally not just a flimsy excuse at powergaming.
You asked for a narrative to explain this, I gave you one. It's fine if you don't like it, its not well thought out. I don't play at tournaments nor do I bring lists that weird, but this whole "oh my God I can't accept that your list does not fit my view of how the standard imperial task force would operate" thing is honestly just stupid in a universe that big. There are examples that could work as reference, for example Badab.
I'd rather just be honest about it and say "I'm not going to play your tournament tryhard list".
So just because a few people play the game in a weird way everyone else is suppose to have to deal with a worse rule set and be play the game in a way they do not want?
Also just because IG or ad mecha fight on the same planet as marines doesn't mean they fight side to side. those cases are extremly rare, and a non small reason to it is that non marine forces are not able to keep up with mariens, specialy in the more dangerours enviroment.
Karol wrote: So just because a few people play the game in a weird way everyone else is suppose to have to deal with a worse rule set and be play the game in a way they do not want?
Also just because IG or ad mecha fight on the same planet as marines doesn't mean they fight side to side. those cases are extremly rare, and a non small reason to it is that non marine forces are not able to keep up with mariens, specialy in the more dangerours enviroment.
Yes. Its similar to the rule of 3.
But really I wouldn't worry about it much. They have suggested it will cost CP to unlock other factions.
But they also suggested many (all?) factions will get more CP.
So you may be slightly worse, but if you are married to your multi-faction mix, you can probably carry on running it without great concern.
Karol wrote: So just because a few people play the game in a weird way everyone else is suppose to have to deal with a worse rule set and be play the game in a way they do not want?
Also just because IG or ad mecha fight on the same planet as marines doesn't mean they fight side to side. those cases are extremly rare, and a non small reason to it is that non marine forces are not able to keep up with mariens, specialy in the more dangerours enviroment.
Yes. Its similar to the rule of 3.
But really I wouldn't worry about it much. They have suggested it will cost CP to unlock other factions.
But they also suggested many (all?) factions will get more CP.
So you may be slightly worse, but if you are married to your multi-faction mix, you can probably carry on running it without great concern.
Boy, this will totally save the day of all those guard/knight/blood angel players who built their army because they enjoy the fluff behind it so much and would continue playing them in this combination out of love to their army no matter how much the game around them changes.
Karol wrote: So just because a few people play the game in a weird way everyone else is suppose to have to deal with a worse rule set and be play the game in a way they do not want?
Also just because IG or ad mecha fight on the same planet as marines doesn't mean they fight side to side. those cases are extremly rare, and a non small reason to it is that non marine forces are not able to keep up with mariens, specialy in the more dangerours enviroment.
All im saying is that instead of bitching about soup you should bitch about balance, if that's what this is about. Instead of just saying "well CP farming and cherry picking suck" you're claiming that soup itself is the issue for fluff reasons?
If I want to play Grey Knights with Sisters of Battle I'm not necessarily "power gaming", I'm just playing the prelude to a certain incident. Going "oh my God why would you send both witch hunters AND daemon hunters to fight my daemons" is kinda weird.
* I should add that with "you" I don't necessarily mean you, Karol, but the initial argument by eg catbarf
And a last edit: just out of curiosity, is it "acceptable" to have both tanks and infantry and artillery in a single imperial Guard detachment, or do you have to bring these in separate detachments and preferably of different regiments, too? Which one do you prefer to play against?
One can make the argument that soup makes balance worse.
I don't agree with that-soup makes balance HARDER, but if enough effort is put in, the balance can still be good with soup. And, quite honestly, even without soup, the game still has garbage balance.
nekooni wrote: And a last edit: just out of curiosity, is it "acceptable" to have both tanks and infantry and artillery in a single imperial Guard detachment, or do you have to bring these in separate detachments and preferably of different regiments, too? Which one do you prefer to play against?
Yeah, if we're going to complain about detachments *needing* to be fluffy, are we not allowed to take Leman Russes and infantry together? God forbid you took a Leman Russ and a Basilisk in the same list. And is that a Space Marine Scout in the same detachment as a Terminator? Oh, the horror!
I mean, I personally actually do organise my armies by detachment (so, my Leman Russes are a separate detachment to my infantry), but no-one should be forced into that.
This is the crux of what I’m getting at. Putting whatever dudes you want on the table is not an issue. I like the idea that in an entire Galaxy, there’s room for unusual or even typical groups that could fall outside of a single Codex working together.
My concern is balance related, and seems to be at least acknowledged with the forthcoming rules.
nekooni wrote: And a last edit: just out of curiosity, is it "acceptable" to have both tanks and infantry and artillery in a single imperial Guard detachment, or do you have to bring these in separate detachments and preferably of different regiments, too? Which one do you prefer to play against?
Yeah, if we're going to complain about detachments *needing* to be fluffy, are we not allowed to take Leman Russes and infantry together? God forbid you took a Leman Russ and a Basilisk in the same list. And is that a Space Marine Scout in the same detachment as a Terminator? Oh, the horror!
I mean, I personally actually do organise my armies by detachment (so, my Leman Russes are a separate detachment to my infantry), but no-one should be forced into that.
Given the way sub faction bonus work having to pay CP for that next level of optimisation seems justified.
If you bring a Brigade of catachan, that makes more sense than 3 Tallern tank commanders, a battaliin of cadian infantry and catachan detachment of 2 basilisks, a wyvern and a named charictor.
I think that the Jan 2019 WD was a watershed for Soup. It showed that GW was indeed tracking, and the nerfs to Soup followed. The most obvious offenders were reined in, but there is more work to be done! The Ahriman Supreme Command Detachment supporting non-TS forces is one. Having said that, anything goes in Narrative Play!
Lets say for argument sake that in 9th Ed you start with 10 CPs at 2000 points and under. Lets say you pay 1 CP for each additional detachment from your Codex, and 2 CP for detachments outside your Army Codex. I suppose we'll need some form of rule for Battle-Forged armies where you declare your Army Codex. Perhaps >50% of your points and Warlord must come from that Codex? So the real Soupers would be down to 6 CP to start the game before they've even used any other pre-game Strats. You would really want those Knights and Smash Captains! In 8th you get extra CPs for taking two Minimum Battalions. Now, you might just go for a Brigade.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: I think that the Jan 2019 WD was a watershed for Soup. It showed that GW was indeed tracking, and the nerfs to Soup followed. The most obvious offenders were reined in, but there is more work to be done! The Ahriman Supreme Command Detachment supporting non-TS forces is one. Having said that, anything goes in Narrative Play!
Lets say for argument sake that in 9th Ed you start with 10 CPs at 2000 points and under. Lets say you pay 1 CP for each additional detachment from your Codex, and 2 CP for detachments outside your Army Codex. I suppose we'll need some form of rule for Battle-Forged armies where you declare your Army Codex. Perhaps >50% of your points and Warlord must come from that Codex? So the real Soupers would be down to 6 CP to start the game before they've even used any other pre-game Strats. You would really want those Knights and Smash Captains! In 8th you get extra CPs for taking two Minimum Battalions. Now, you might just go for a Brigade.
I could get behind something like that.
I think it's even more simplistic than that you start building your list your faction is I'm going to guess determined by your warlord.
I think it will be more than 10CP at 2k many lists hit around 15 and they talk about it going up.
Mono faction mono subfaction starts with 20 CP
Add in 1 additional subfaction detachment to not loose bonuses -1CP
Want to bring long another detachment for another codex, -1CP for aditional detachment , -2CP for additional codex.
If you wanted to go full super soup your be down 6CP, that would be quite a hit
I don't agree with that-soup makes balance HARDER, but if enough effort is put in, the balance can still be good with soup. And, quite honestly, even without soup, the game still has garbage balance.
Not sure really.
In theory 100 points is 100 points - but some things are always going to have more on-table synergy than other things.
So for example Doom and Jinx buffing non-Eldar Eldar shooting. These abilities were considerable force multipliers, so even if you were going to take mainly DE/Harlequins (all the bikers all the time) - you'd be silly not slotting in a Farseer.
But this raises the issue of balance about whether DE/Harlequins should be nerfed because... of those abilities. Or those abilities should be nerfed, because they are boosting superior non-Eldar Eldar shooting. But that shooting should be superior because they were not designed with the fact you would buff them via those psychic powers. So you either get a situation where its balanced if you do take those psychic powers - or they are too good because you don't.
So I think the change was quite reasonable - and while it diminishes the reasons to bring a Farseer in a list which isn't mainly Craftworlds you can still do it if you want to.
I look at say GW's massive reaction to Ahriman+2 DPS+Plaguebearers and friends - and sure, that list was a bit obnoxious to play. I think, as the_scotsman has suggested, people disproportionately hate tough "control" style lists.
But to my mind GW didn't really nerf the soup component. They could have gone with something like "the character rule only applies to units from your own faction". Instead they significantly nerfed key units for TS and Plague Bearers by raising the points, with the result of further harming the mono-factions, when they weren't exactly dominating tournaments to begin with.
greatbigtree wrote: This is the crux of what I’m getting at. Putting whatever dudes you want on the table is not an issue. I like the idea that in an entire Galaxy, there’s room for unusual or even typical groups that could fall outside of a single Codex working together.
My concern is balance related, and seems to be at least acknowledged with the forthcoming rules.
If you aren't given incentives to use your own units because they perform terribly, Allies will always appear to be the bad guy even though that's not the heart of the issue. GW is likely going to forget this as usual and we will end up with another mess of balance for units.
nekooni wrote: And a last edit: just out of curiosity, is it "acceptable" to have both tanks and infantry and artillery in a single imperial Guard detachment, or do you have to bring these in separate detachments and preferably of different regiments, too? Which one do you prefer to play against?
Yeah, if we're going to complain about detachments *needing* to be fluffy, are we not allowed to take Leman Russes and infantry together? God forbid you took a Leman Russ and a Basilisk in the same list. And is that a Space Marine Scout in the same detachment as a Terminator? Oh, the horror!
I mean, I personally actually do organise my armies by detachment (so, my Leman Russes are a separate detachment to my infantry), but no-one should be forced into that.
Given the way sub faction bonus work having to pay CP for that next level of optimisation seems justified.
If you bring a Brigade of catachan, that makes more sense than 3 Tallern tank commanders, a battaliin of cadian infantry and catachan detachment of 2 basilisks, a wyvern and a named charictor.
Actually, not much more sense. Guard novels generally have several infantry regiments from various worlds, a tank regiment from another world, and artillery maybe associated with one of the others but just as often not.
The Munitorum just issues orders to whoever happens to be in the subsector and not otherwise engaged (or engaged in something that doesn't matter as much as the new crisis)
The only thing that doesn't really happen is the multiple tank commanders or the artillery battery with a random Special Idiot.
But a Cadian regiment backed by Valhallan tanks (or whatever mix)? Happens a lot.
Voss wrote: ...Actually, not much more sense. Guard novels generally have several infantry regiments from various worlds, a tank regiment from another world, and artillery maybe associated with one of the others but just as often not.
The Munitorum just issues orders to whoever happens to be in the subsector and not otherwise engaged (or engaged in something that doesn't matter as much as the new crisis)
The only thing that doesn't really happen is the multiple tank commanders or the artillery battery with a random Special Idiot.
But a Cadian regiment backed by Valhallan tanks (or whatever mix)? Happens a lot.
Depending on the Regiment (GW uses the term inconsistently) that could easily be ten thousand infantry and thousands of tanks. Are they really integrated enough at the tactical level that tank squadrons are attached to the foot units at the company level within an efficient chain of command that's effective at letting them share CP?
Soup is wonderful for a casual game, and has been, and continues to be, a complete nightmare for the competitive scene. It opens up abusive combinations that the playtesters never foresaw.
That, and paired with gaining access to all the stratagems from all souped armies, all relics, and the way that CP is generated, it creates an instant crutch to any army that has access to a cheap battalion of allies, leaving a few armies completely out in the cold.
I just started the game so I can’t comment on balance, but with help from people on this board and another i was able to create a really neat Knights/Admech that’s fluffy and functional at the same time. I even finished painting and assembling my first knight and I was really proud of how it came out.
I’m worried that whatever changes they make are going to throw all that work out the window. ☹️
Soup is considered horrible because supposedly, you can create some pretty broken combos that are outright unstoppable.
Supposedly.
Keep in mind we're talking about something unbalancing an already unbalanced game. So it's essentially someone whining because you pissed in the piss puddle.
While rare combined arms regiments do exist within the the Imperial Guard, mixed regiment armies are typically the norm in terms of background, in that instance at least "souping" sub-factions isn't terribly unfluffy the way it is with many other factions, and in fact goes all the way back to 2E, where the sample army in the 2E Imperial Guard codex including both Cadian and Catachan command squads, and the rules for army construction dictating that for each command squad or command HQ you can include up to three squads of that regiment type.
However, at the same time, there weren't different rules for different regiments and subfactons in 2E, just different model lines, so there wasn't really any cheesing out to do in that regard at the time, there was no gameplay advantages to wring out of it one way or the other
Khalith wrote: I just started the game so I can’t comment on balance, but with help from people on this board and another i was able to create a really neat Knights/Admech that’s fluffy and functional at the same time. I even finished painting and assembling my first knight and I was really proud of how it came out.
I’m worried that whatever changes they make are going to throw all that work out the window. ☹️
You'll still be able to field them together, there just won't be strong incentives and rewards for doing so over a mono-faction army it sounds like.
Adeptus Doritos wrote: Soup is considered horrible because supposedly, you can create some pretty broken combos that are outright unstoppable.
Supposedly.
Keep in mind we're talking about something unbalancing an already unbalanced game. So it's essentially someone whining because you pissed in the piss puddle.
Tournament results over the course of the edition proved pretty conclusively that it was abusive and required several active adjustments in Errata/FAQ, and while nobody will claim the game is perfectly balanced, there's also plenty of room to identify and fix obvious outliers and mechanics that cause issues and incentivize the wrong sort of outcomes.
Vaktathi wrote: Tournament results over the course of the edition proved pretty conclusively that it was abusive and required several active adjustments in Errata/FAQ, and while nobody will claim the game is perfectly balanced, there's also plenty of room to identify and fix obvious outliers and mechanics that cause issues and incentivize the wrong sort of outcomes.
The problem is, as I understand from some source I have (one that you're free to doubt, by all means- however you can go back through my post history and look at the last time I referenced this person and how much of that has just been proven true)....
The 'playtesters' are a combination of in-house players and external sources. Those external sources aren't going to tell GW that something sucks or needs to be redone, it's always going to be awesome and great and perfect (or much of the time, at least) because that's how they get their free toys earlier so they can do their reviews.
Supposedly. Take it with a grain of salt, won't offend me.
nekooni wrote: And a last edit: just out of curiosity, is it "acceptable" to have both tanks and infantry and artillery in a single imperial Guard detachment, or do you have to bring these in separate detachments and preferably of different regiments, too? Which one do you prefer to play against?
Yeah, if we're going to complain about detachments *needing* to be fluffy, are we not allowed to take Leman Russes and infantry together? God forbid you took a Leman Russ and a Basilisk in the same list. And is that a Space Marine Scout in the same detachment as a Terminator? Oh, the horror!
I mean, I personally actually do organise my armies by detachment (so, my Leman Russes are a separate detachment to my infantry), but no-one should be forced into that.
Given the way sub faction bonus work having to pay CP for that next level of optimisation seems justified.
If you bring a Brigade of catachan, that makes more sense than 3 Tallern tank commanders, a battaliin of cadian infantry and catachan detachment of 2 basilisks, a wyvern and a named charictor.
I'm talking something like the Cadian 3rd Infantry being supported by tanks from the Cadian 193rd Armoured. Despite functioning mechanically identically, they would be different detachments from a fluff perspective.
So, something like the Cadian 3rd, who might have 6x Infantry Squads, 2 Commanders, alongside their own Command Squads and a Commissar, being supported by the 193rd Armoured, with a Leman Russ Commander, his 3 squadrons of Leman Russes, and 3 Hellhounds. In game, I should have no reason not to play these as a Brigade, but in lore, they'd be classed as a Battalion and Spearhead respectively.
Is that the kind of fluffy gameplay we're after? Because I wouldn't want to enforce that.
PenitentJake wrote: My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.
Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.
If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.
I am not calling you out specifically but the mindset 100%. The only play style 40k rules should have in mind is competitive play because all other types can be flubbed by whomever is playing. Hell I did that back in 4th edition when I wanted to ally my Orkz with my Blood Angels army, my friends and I just ignored the rules that said we couldn't do that (Specifically that they wouldn't function near one another) and just played. It didn't hurt anyone to break those rules for my fun narrative games.
From a game standpoint, balance should be the #1 priority and if something is broken like Allies (Soup) than fix it, if you want to play a narrative campaign with your allied soup army...go for it, nobody is stopping you, and if your opponent wont play against it, than have a discussion with them or find someone who will.
Soup has been broken since Day 1 of 8th because if you are Imperial, Chaos or Eldar you have an immediate advantage over anyone else with Imperial having the biggest advantage. Orkz, Crons, Tau and Nids (Up until recently) didn't have any allies they could use. So trying to balance the game was impossible which is why the loyal 32 was ever a thing.
SO why is Soup hated? because people in the competitive meta will use anything to get an advantage so they did their best to exploit the allies rule.
I really really want to re-emphasize this point though. If you aren't a competitive tournament player then any new rules regarding allies are irrelevant, just talk to your opponent before hand and get the ok from them.
nekooni wrote: You asked for a narrative to explain this, I gave you one. It's fine if you don't like it, its not well thought out. I don't play at tournaments nor do I bring lists that weird, but this whole "oh my God I can't accept that your list does not fit my view of how the standard imperial task force would operate" thing is honestly just stupid in a universe that big. There are examples that could work as reference, for example Badab.
I'd rather just be honest about it and say "I'm not going to play your tournament tryhard list".
I never asked for a narrative to explain it. I said there's a difference between what is obviously a tryhard soup list that doesn't fit the fluff, and one that simply mixes reasonably standalone detachments as one would expect in a combined-armed force.
You then argued that they're the same thing... as long as you come up with a contrived backstory to explain it, and assume that the Marines (who are smash captains on the tabletop) are actually just randoms.
Give me an excerpt from any fluff relating to Badab that supports the idea of a couple of Space Marines with jetpacks and hammers leading a Guard detachment accompanied by several Knights and I will eat my umble pie.
If every army gets the same amount of CP based on game size, it really levels the playing field between armies with a lot of models in the range and armies with only a handful.
It makes armies with limited access to troops viable, which means it's awesome for Imperial Agents. Inquisition has Zero troops choices.
But now, 2000 points of Inquisitors, accolytes, assassins and null maiden vanguards get just as many CPs as Brigade + Battalion + other.
As for paying CP for additional detachments from your core dex, that only makes sense if they invent new benefits for detachments- the only impact they had on the game previously was determining command points (now moot, because they aren't awarded based on detachment) and keeping your factions neatly separated, which is still relevant. So you pay a CP cost per ALLIED detachments, but you're free to use as many detachments as you want from your core dex.
They may have a small cost for out of subfaction detachments too, but I hope not; if they do, DE absolutely need an exemption to it, because the system would put them at particular disadvantage.
Finally, I want to respond to the smash captain thing, where buddy did come up with a story, and it was shot down. Before I get into it though, let me acknowledge that this particular built was so good for it's time that it was kinda cheesy even with a story, and that the VAST majority of people who used that particular build were probably doing it to win, even if they could pull out a viable story.
But one of the styles of campaign play that I frequently use does make this kinda thing not only possible, but probable.
I have three planets in my campaign setting; the first has 8 settlements with 25 territories each and one city with 45 territories. Factions deploy with a single settlement, and must divide to hold territory within that settlement. Some players control multiple factions and deal making is encouraged.
Cults are recruiting citizens under the Imperial Radar, and factions have to assign units from their detachments to investigate events at particular territories.
Now, within that campaign environment, the odds that a BA captain leaves his battleforce to hold the beachhead while he goes to investigate a different territory based on critical intelligence, and in this territory, he encounters a battalion of Guard who are preparing to secure the site for the arrival of an Imperial Advisor. Realizing that the cultist's objective in the territory is probably the assassinating of that Advisor, the Captain informs the Guard Commander of the danger, and the two forces agree to work together.
There is a Knight House on the planet, but as Knights are too large to occupy settlements, their role in the Planetary defense network is to occupy the wide open spaces BETWEEN the settlements. But when the full scale of the cultist threat becomes known, assuming the guard have a functioning comm unit on the table, Company Commander X, a long time friend of the House calls in a favour, and the knight joins the fray as reinforcements.
Now given our particular dynamic, this story would probably be spread out over an arch- it would be a 40k scale game with a guard loss that triggers the need for the advisor, and a 40k game for the BA to claim a territory as a base of operations within the settlement. Then a kill team game for the cult to find out about the Advisor's eminent arrival. Then the BA do a recon kill team to find out where the cult is. Then two 40k battles fought simultaneously- one at the BA base, which forced the captain to leave his force behind, and the other begin this epic convergence of the threefold army.
Also, with us, the Knight player and the Guard player might even consider a set of historical battles to explore how the relationship between the Knight House and the Guard formed.
Now again, obviously the player who brings his smash cap/ loyal 32/ knight to a tournament isn't doing that; they are playing to win.
Obviously, you can tell I'm looking forward to Crusade rules.
DeathKorp_Rider wrote: For armies like R&H, there is no way to soup so you’re basically screwed
R&H needs a full rewrite under this system, as if a detachment of them won't give you cp but in fact cost them they don't currently bring anything to the factions they can allie with to be worth it. The only thing they have that other chaos armies don't is lots of indirect fire and snipers. Without a way to buff the artillery it just isn't that good, and as much as I love my Marauders I just don't think my sneaky mercs will be worth it. The army needs strategems, warlord traits, and functional covenants and demagogue devotions back.
I'll say being able to just buy a start collecting tempestus scion box and mix them with my Sisters of Silence and Custodes or mixing a force of grey knights with sisters of battle and dark angels or an imperial knight feels great.
For someone with as much lack of focus to his buying habits that was a god send to be able to field 2000 point armies. They are terrible and I lose a ton but damm If I'm not having fun with it. And I'll keep doing the same even with this new system were the more focused force you have the more CP you have. I have always tought that was how it should have been from the beginning.
Which IIRC you couldn't go above 25% of your points which remains a far better method of maintaining faction identity while allowing for some thematic alliances.
Eldarain wrote: Which IIRC you couldn't go above 25% of your points which remains a far better method of maintaining faction identity while allowing for some thematic alliances.
Yup. Iirc it may have also come from your Support allowance, but I could be wrong about that.
nekooni wrote: You asked for a narrative to explain this, I gave you one. It's fine if you don't like it, its not well thought out. I don't play at tournaments nor do I bring lists that weird, but this whole "oh my God I can't accept that your list does not fit my view of how the standard imperial task force would operate" thing is honestly just stupid in a universe that big. There are examples that could work as reference, for example Badab.
I'd rather just be honest about it and say "I'm not going to play your tournament tryhard list".
I never asked for a narrative to explain it. I said there's a difference between what is obviously a tryhard soup list that doesn't fit the fluff, and one that simply mixes reasonably standalone detachments as one would expect in a combined-armed force.
You then argued that they're the same thing... as long as you come up with a contrived backstory to explain it, and assume that the Marines (who are smash captains on the tabletop) are actually just randoms.
Give me an excerpt from any fluff relating to Badab that supports the idea of a couple of Space Marines with jetpacks and hammers leading a Guard detachment accompanied by several Knights and I will eat my umble pie.
Sure, I won't even try to find that exact scenario, but during the badab war Space Marines acted as integrated commanders to the Tyrants Legion. Not sure if there were also knights around, but it's not hard to imagine eg a freeblade helping out the Astral claws during that conflict. Regarding the other points see my previous post.
What people don't like is the fact that it's better in 90% of cases than running a mono army because there are no downsides to doing it and it generates more CP.
What people don't like is the fact that it's better in 90% of cases than running a mono army because there are no downsides to doing it and it generates more CP.
Yes, looking forward to today's talk about the new rules. Hope they give details on how detachments work with the new cp system. I want to start planning lists now. Though they may change when the new points are released.
Just Tony wrote: Look up the RPG term "munchkin", and you'll figure out why it's bad.
Because of this?
Spoiler:
Slayer-Fan123 wrote:I haven't played Munchkin in forever so I might just pick that expansion up when this all blows over.
…
I was referring to the type of character that power gamers design that have no weakness, no flaws, the like. Soup is like that, allowing people to build lists with the sole intent of compensating/eliminating the inherent weaknesses/flaws of their army.
SemperMortis wrote:From a game standpoint, balance should be the #1 priority
Disagree. Fun/enjoyment should be the #1 priority. And balance certainly helps with that, but I've never viewed balance as the critical thing in my experience.
As much as you say "oh, ignore the narrative stuff and let those players figure that out for themselves", why shouldn't it be the other way around, and say "ignore all the balance and competitive stuff, let them figure that out for themselves"?
Sgt_Smudge wrote: y "ignore all the balance and competitive stuff, let them figure that out for themselves"?
GW tried that - it was AoS at launch.
Whilst those who love making their own games finally had an eager audience (locally) to play their games, it was overall a disaster. You lose unity between game clubs (even within for the biggest); you lose all sense of structure.
To me Game rules and balance are like the foundations of a language. It's spelling, sentence construction etc... They are the tool that allow you to them write a novel, a short story, an action adventure, a childs book, a highly complex legal document etc.... Ergo they are the foundations upon which everything else can be built. If you've a well balanced system you can play better narrative and open play games because now when you tweak things away from the "2K standard armies" you have some ability to predict outcomes or at least counterbalance changes.
It's a simple fundamental that underlays the whole game - solid rules simply work better than sketchy confusing poorly balanced ones.
SemperMortis wrote:From a game standpoint, balance should be the #1 priority
Disagree. Fun/enjoyment should be the #1 priority. And balance certainly helps with that, but I've never viewed balance as the critical thing in my experience.
As much as you say "oh, ignore the narrative stuff and let those players figure that out for themselves", why shouldn't it be the other way around, and say "ignore all the balance and competitive stuff, let them figure that out for themselves"?
Because it's easier for a couple of new players to make up a scenario for the setting they know instead of mathing out what's over the top and what's not and figuring out which Strats are overpowered or not.
). Many, many model have abilities that only affect "friendly faction" models. Mercs in your force are simply "friendly" (unless you take certain unit attachments) and are therefore unable to be used in the worst abuses of wombo comboing.
Not played WMH in a while, despite there being a cabinet full of minis next to me as I type this (and typed that!) that I could have just glanced over to to remind myself... 
legions.
