ClockworkZion wrote:
A thought just struck me regarding the Imperium's poor faction to faction balance: isn't that the point of what Guilliman did following the Heresy. I mean, if we're speaking from a narrative standpoint, the fact that monofaction armies in the Imperium are so terrible actually lends well to the flavor of the game since they're supposed to be horribly lopsided to prevent another Horus Heresy situation.

That said, I wish we could have this AND good game balance so that you aren't hosed for latching onto a single faction over others, but if GW was trying to make narrative statements using rules for the Imperium they seem to have nailed it.

Yes from a fluff pov the imperiums various fighting forces are in fact supposed to have weaknesses that only other subfactions have the strengths - although this has been underminned by constant marine additions and lack of interest in non marine factions.

not sure it works trying to have that aspect in game.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
A thought just struck me regarding the Imperium's poor faction to faction balance: isn't that the point of what Guilliman did following the Heresy. I mean, if we're speaking from a narrative standpoint, the fact that monofaction armies in the Imperium are so terrible actually lends well to the flavor of the game since they're supposed to be horribly lopsided to prevent another Horus Heresy situation.

That said, I wish we could have this AND good game balance so that you aren't hosed for latching onto a single faction over others, but if GW was trying to make narrative statements using rules for the Imperium they seem to have nailed it.

Yes from a fluff pov the imperiums various fighting forces are in fact supposed to have weaknesses that only other subfactions have the strengths - although this has been underminned by constant marine additions and lack of interest in non marine factions.

not sure it works trying to have that aspect in game.

It works if you intend Imperium flavored armies to be a mixed bag, but doesn't work if you sell them as monofactions first, and a mixed bag second (as GW currently does).

That said, Imperium allies show that the Imperium really is the strongest when banded together. I mean just look at those Nova placements.

 Jidmah wrote:


Allies without drawbacks will always be superior to no allies.

But it is not. For example Black Templars allied with Sisters is not even remotely superior to mono Guard or mono Dark Eldar.

I agree with some of what Englishman is saying but if you follow his argument to the conclusion you end up with a situation where the question becomes, why balance any armies at all because if you are not playing the most powerful one you are not taking a competitive choice.

Orks are underpowered, that's your fault for not playing eldar. We end up with the solution being "just play ynarri soup?"

I'm not sure that's a healthy point for the game. Even if it is a logically defensible situation I don't think the solution for balance issues should just be "play the new hotness." It's just not fun to see entire swaths of your army competitive unusable and hopefully most of us are in this hobby to have fun.

In addition I think some of the "balance mono factions" comes from people actually wanting to be able to use the models they have collected and painstakingly assembled/painted over the years. A type of gameplay that is obviously not beneficial to GWs bottom line.

GW doesn't care that I have 10k of black templars that I've collected/painted over the last 20 years. In fact, they hate it. They already have my money, they need me to go out and purchase new models in order to satisfy the investors and bean counters. Anecdotally I have three shelves where I keep my army. On the top shelf are the units I'll use (which, unsurprisingly are all new outside of the neophytes[they are not scouts!!!]) the second shelf are units I may use (devs, razors from earlier in the edition, assassins from earlier, stormtalon/raven/hawk) and the bottom shelf is full of everything else.

I think I have at least one of all GW produced marine models/units (outside of the characters). GW already has my money and they need me to go out and buy more. Creating new models is expensive for them, at least more expensive than selling stuff they already have (or at least already have the molds for).

No wonder the new armigers are better than my dreads/preds. Custode bikes are so good. The primaris were a bolt on to an existing already established army and I was going to buy some regardless of the rules (although it sucks that they melt as soon as they see a dark eldar force across the table). Even then they are one of the few marine models that saw a downward points adjustment in the FAQ/CA cycle even though the rest of the dex was in desperate need of help as well.

Either way. I think GW realizes they don't benefit from a balanced game and I think if we're honest with ourselves we don't want a perfectly balanced game. Collecting/hobying/theorizing are all important parts of this game and all of those go stale when the meta is "solved." The only way to keep the meta from being solved is to keep shaking things up. It would be nice if each faction had enough internal diversity and balance that meta shake ups would just require dipping into my faction for tools/tricks to at least compete (cough, eldar, cough) but GW has shown they either don't have the skill or desire to make that happen so we end up with the current situation where we are chasing the meta across codexes.

 Jidmah wrote:


Tell me, how does one fix the internal balance of 10 imperial codices in a way that not one of them has something worse than any of the others?

Because as soon as someone has something even slightly better than another, you can bet your hat it will be allied in.

But same happens with mono armies too. If one heavy support choice is superior to others, then that is exclusively taken. But as long as these power differences are small enough, it really doesn't matter in most games (they are not now.) Sure in the top end tournament scene it might matter if one choice was 2% more effective than another, but in more casual games most people play it really makes no noticeable difference (now, if it is 20% more effective, then that's a problem.)

To some extent, yes, a perfectly balanced game isn't beneficial to GW's bottom line, and we're likely to live with a "perfectly imbalanced" game where the balance is constantly being adjusted, but even with that, tighter balance among the stuff that isn't the new hotness of the week would be nice.

Personally think it would be better for the game if the "better" a unit is at something the more specialised it becomes as a result, doesn't stop you taking strong units just leads to either a one trick pony list that struggles or a selection of units to cover each others weaknesses

Nope - I want a balanced game. Though I think you are correct. GW doesn't want a balanced game.

 Jidmah wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Allies without drawbacks will always be superior to no allies.

Only because the internal balance of those codices is garbage. If they weren't, Guard wouldn't be the crutch they are for Imperial armies.

Tell me, how does one fix the internal balance of 10 imperial codices in a way that not one of them has something worse than any of the others?

Because as soon as someone has something even slightly better than another, you can bet your hat it will be allied in.

The same way if no Imperial armies but Space Marines existed and you needed to balance them vs Chaos and Xenos.

This is the laziness argument again. You can't perfectly balance, so why try? Just toss mechanics out the window without a single thought. Hey, psyker powers aren't balanced, but we aren't just tossing them out either and blaming Psykers entirely for things like Invisibility.

Oh wait people did and now the Psyker phase and most Psykera in general are garbage.

 Xenomancers wrote:
Nope - I want a balanced game. Though I think you are correct. GW doesn't want a balanced game.

There is definitely an argument to be made for a constantly shifting meta (it keeps MtG playable after all these years for example), but the core mechanics of the game and how everything interacts needs to be balanced enough that even if everyone has a tactical nuke button in their army the game doesn't just fall apart. I feel like the devs are really trying to reach that point and are trying to ensure games have a certain minimum length in order to ensure that it's more fun for all parties than just a turn 1 tabling.

That said, we've got a ways to go and things that still need ironing out and who knows, if this isn't the last and only edition of 40k going forward (which I assume it isn't, it'll just be a long runner like 2nd was and we'll eventually see a 9th to consolidate all the changes and add some new twists) then the next edition will be better at launch than 8th was.

Rulvek wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Karol wrote:

Lemondish wrote:
People need to stop trying to kill allies by calling it soup. I'd rather let multiple units from multiple books be viable than go back to a time when entire books were obsolete. Do we honestly want to see more books like Grey Knights? feth no.

How does the ally system help the GK exactly? It doesn't make GK better.

Is that a serious post? They get several benefits with Allies like decent Anti-Tank for a reasonable price and CP to use on their already too expensive Stratagems or actual bodies to hold objectives, as the idea of Grey Knights holding out to do that is an absolute silly thought.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jidmah wrote:

Lemondish wrote:
People need to stop trying to kill allies by calling it soup. I'd rather let multiple units from multiple books be viable than go back to a time when entire books were obsolete. Do we honestly want to see more books like Grey Knights? feth no.

Allies without drawbacks will always be superior to no allies.

Only because the internal balance of those codices is garbage. If they weren't, Guard wouldn't be the crutch they are for Imperial armies.

Hmmm, so, to play with GK, what you have to do is play with IG.
Is that how you say the allies help to play GK?

In the current state with their crap codes? Yes. I ain't happy about it as most GK players are, but unless you have suggestions as to how to make GK a good army, don't bother tossing allies out the window without a plan.

Either way, GK players should be able to ally with Sisters, Guard, and Marines without so much consequence as you keep blaming the mechanic and not the actual problem units.

bananathug wrote:
I agree with some of what Englishman is saying but if you follow his argument to the conclusion you end up with a situation where the question becomes, why balance any armies at all because if you are not playing the most powerful one you are not taking a competitive choice.

Orks are underpowered, that's your fault for not playing eldar. We end up with the solution being "just play ynarri soup?"

I'm not sure that's a healthy point for the game. Even if it is a logically defensible situation I don't think the solution for balance issues should just be "play the new hotness." It's just not fun to see entire swaths of your army competitive unusable and hopefully most of us are in this hobby to have fun.

In addition I think some of the "balance mono factions" comes from people actually wanting to be able to use the models they have collected and painstakingly assembled/painted over the years. A type of gameplay that is obviously not beneficial to GWs bottom line.

GW doesn't care that I have 10k of black templars that I've collected/painted over the last 20 years. In fact, they hate it. They already have my money, they need me to go out and purchase new models in order to satisfy the investors and bean counters. Anecdotally I have three shelves where I keep my army. On the top shelf are the units I'll use (which, unsurprisingly are all new outside of the neophytes[they are not scouts!!!]) the second shelf are units I may use (devs, razors from earlier in the edition, assassins from earlier, stormtalon/raven/hawk) and the bottom shelf is full of everything else.

I think I have at least one of all GW produced marine models/units (outside of the characters). GW already has my money and they need me to go out and buy more. Creating new models is expensive for them, at least more expensive than selling stuff they already have (or at least already have the molds for).

No wonder the new armigers are better than my dreads/preds. Custode bikes are so good. The primaris were a bolt on to an existing already established army and I was going to buy some regardless of the rules (although it sucks that they melt as soon as they see a dark eldar force across the table). Even then they are one of the few marine models that saw a downward points adjustment in the FAQ/CA cycle even though the rest of the dex was in desperate need of help as well.

Either way. I think GW realizes they don't benefit from a balanced game and I think if we're honest with ourselves we don't want a perfectly balanced game. Collecting/hobying/theorizing are all important parts of this game and all of those go stale when the meta is "solved." The only way to keep the meta from being solved is to keep shaking things up. It would be nice if each faction had enough internal diversity and balance that meta shake ups would just require dipping into my faction for tools/tricks to at least compete (cough, eldar, cough) but GW has shown they either don't have the skill or desire to make that happen so we end up with the current situation where we are chasing the meta across codexes.

I agree with a lot of this post. It's in both GWs interest and in our interest to see some amount of "churn", it keeps the hobby vibrant even if it has some downsides. The bright side is that it isn't really necessary to chase the latest hotness unless you're expecting to compete at major tournaments. I mean, it's fun to do, and some local metas push harder than others, but there's tons of wiggle room imo.

Allies just need limitations. That's all there is to it. The best way to do it is points. I wouldn't mind also seeing a "one ally" per army rule. So you could still soup, but it'd be 2 factions, not 3.

Once a limit like this is imposed, we could get a better picture of how mono lists are actually performing. I also wouldn't mind seeing a limit of 1 primarch per table. Because more of them are going to come out, and it's going to get stupid fast.

 Marmatag wrote:
Allies just need limitations. That's all there is to it. The best way to do it is points. I wouldn't mind also seeing a "one ally" per army rule. So you could still soup, but it'd be 2 factions, not 3.

Once a limit like this is imposed, we could get a better picture of how mono lists are actually performing. I also wouldn't mind seeing a limit of 1 primarch per table. Because more of them are going to come out, and it's going to get stupid fast.

When you say points do you mean "Army points" or command points?

Limiting to 2 factions I guess I'd rather not see, though I see where it's coming from. Theoretically if they did the "CPs can only be used by the faction that generates them" then it would push against the use of several factions anyways.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
A thought just struck me regarding the Imperium's poor faction to faction balance: isn't that the point of what Guilliman did following the Heresy. I mean, if we're speaking from a narrative standpoint, the fact that monofaction armies in the Imperium are so terrible actually lends well to the flavor of the game since they're supposed to be horribly lopsided to prevent another Horus Heresy situation.

That said, I wish we could have this AND good game balance so that you aren't hosed for latching onto a single faction over others, but if GW was trying to make narrative statements using rules for the Imperium they seem to have nailed it.

Yes from a fluff pov the imperiums various fighting forces are in fact supposed to have weaknesses that only other subfactions have the strengths - although this has been underminned by constant marine additions and lack of interest in non marine factions.

not sure it works trying to have that aspect in game.

The GK fluff says that they are ready to face any enemy with no support of any kind, that they have superior tech, gene seed, have their own psytitans and prognosticators that know where an attack is going to happen, so they are always are on time to stop it. Nothing of that shows up in their rules.

Karol wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
A thought just struck me regarding the Imperium's poor faction to faction balance: isn't that the point of what Guilliman did following the Heresy. I mean, if we're speaking from a narrative standpoint, the fact that monofaction armies in the Imperium are so terrible actually lends well to the flavor of the game since they're supposed to be horribly lopsided to prevent another Horus Heresy situation.

That said, I wish we could have this AND good game balance so that you aren't hosed for latching onto a single faction over others, but if GW was trying to make narrative statements using rules for the Imperium they seem to have nailed it.

Yes from a fluff pov the imperiums various fighting forces are in fact supposed to have weaknesses that only other subfactions have the strengths - although this has been underminned by constant marine additions and lack of interest in non marine factions.

not sure it works trying to have that aspect in game.

The GK fluff says that they are ready to face any enemy with no support of any kind, that they have superior tech, gene seed, have their own psytitans and prognosticators that know where an attack is going to happen, so they are always are on time to stop it. Nothing of that shows up in their rules.

Grey Knights also support PDF, Guard, Sisters, Inquisition and others when dealing with daemons and either kill or mind wipe the survivors (depending on rank). That said, I will never argue that a codex shouldn't be playable as a monobuild, I was just tossing out the idea that GW might have nailed the idea of the Imperium being reliant on inter-faction relations (even if it was possibly accidental) and that amused me a bit.

Karol wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
A thought just struck me regarding the Imperium's poor faction to faction balance: isn't that the point of what Guilliman did following the Heresy. I mean, if we're speaking from a narrative standpoint, the fact that monofaction armies in the Imperium are so terrible actually lends well to the flavor of the game since they're supposed to be horribly lopsided to prevent another Horus Heresy situation.

That said, I wish we could have this AND good game balance so that you aren't hosed for latching onto a single faction over others, but if GW was trying to make narrative statements using rules for the Imperium they seem to have nailed it.

Yes from a fluff pov the imperiums various fighting forces are in fact supposed to have weaknesses that only other subfactions have the strengths - although this has been underminned by constant marine additions and lack of interest in non marine factions.

not sure it works trying to have that aspect in game.

The GK fluff says that they are ready to face any enemy with no support of any kind, that they have superior tech, gene seed, have their own psytitans and prognosticators that know where an attack is going to happen, so they are always are on time to stop it. Nothing of that shows up in their rules.

Nothing in the Space Marine lore tells me to expect to lose half a battle company in every engagement either, but that's how it tends to go.

That might be the angle they are going but it is the wrong angle. Most people want to play mono. It just means competitive 40k wont take off as much as it should. My store has decided to ignore all FAQ's except for points changes at this point. The changes do not make the game better.

 Xenomancers wrote:
That might be the angle they are going but it is the wrong angle. Most people want to play mono. It just means competitive 40k wont take off as much as it should. My store has decided to ignore all FAQ's except for points changes at this point. The changes do not make the game better.

So you're ignoring clarification on rules like that Biovores don't pay for their spore mine shots?

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Grey Knights also support PDF, Guard, Sisters, Inquisition and others when dealing with daemons and either kill or mind wipe the survivors (depending on rank). That said, I will never argue that a codex shouldn't be playable as a monobuild, I was just tossing out the idea that GW might have nailed the idea of the Imperium being reliant on inter-faction relations (even if it was possibly accidental) and that amused me a bit.

I find nothing about the state of my army amusing. If GW can't make good codex for everyone, then I am in for every other faction getting the GK treatment. For edition or two, after that GW can do what ever the hell it wants.

 Crimson wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:


Allies without drawbacks will always be superior to no allies.

But it is not. For example Black Templars allied with Sisters is not even remotely superior to mono Guard or mono Dark Eldar.

That's not my argument.

My argument is that Imperium will always be superior to Orks unless Orks are superior to every mono-army that has the Imperium Faction Keyword.

Because in a balanced state between Orks and Imperium, Imperium can have the best stuff from three out of ten codices. All other possible codices from the Imperium codices must be worse or equal to the the best three Ork detachments. If Black Templar are not among the best three (or five, or seven) detachments, all competitive Black Templar armies are inferior to all competitive Ork armies.

Unless there is a limit on allies, there is no reason to not fill your army with the best stuff possible. The best shooting units, the best screening units, the best support, the best combos, best relics, best stratagems. The only way to prevent this is to eliminate all army weaknesses and strengths across Space Marines, AM, Ad Mech, Knights, Custodes etc - which would defeat the point of having most of those codices in the first place.

Therefore, an Imperium army with allies cannot ever be balanced against mono-codex armies from the Imperium and other mono-codex faction at the same time as long as there is no drawback to taking allies. It's logically impossible.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
That might be the angle they are going but it is the wrong angle. Most people want to play mono. It just means competitive 40k wont take off as much as it should. My store has decided to ignore all FAQ's except for points changes at this point. The changes do not make the game better.

So you're ignoring clarification on rules like that Biovores don't pay for their spore mine shots?

Im one of the only nid players around here and I don't use biovores. Issues like this really haven't come up. We are coming up with ideas to make all models playable though. For example - mono custodes are terrible - so I suggested a rule that all their rapid fire weapons become assault (not jetbikes) and the army play a lot better now.

 Marmatag wrote:
Allies just need limitations. That's all there is to it. The best way to do it is points. I wouldn't mind also seeing a "one ally" per army rule. So you could still soup, but it'd be 2 factions, not 3.

Once a limit like this is imposed, we could get a better picture of how mono lists are actually performing. I also wouldn't mind seeing a limit of 1 primarch per table. Because more of them are going to come out, and it's going to get stupid fast.

I know many recent lists are 3 factions, but would Eldar really get shafted by a limit of one? It doesn't seem like it would.

Karol wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Grey Knights also support PDF, Guard, Sisters, Inquisition and others when dealing with daemons and either kill or mind wipe the survivors (depending on rank). That said, I will never argue that a codex shouldn't be playable as a monobuild, I was just tossing out the idea that GW might have nailed the idea of the Imperium being reliant on inter-faction relations (even if it was possibly accidental) and that amused me a bit.

I find nothing about the state of my army amusing. If GW can't make good codex for everyone, then I am in for every other faction getting the GK treatment. For edition or two, after that GW can do what ever the hell it wants.

Frankly I want to dismiss your point of view due to your biases, but let's talk about it anyways: honestly the issue with Grey Knights has nothing to do with allies. It has to do with how Marines lack the durability they once had (and still pay for) and how they're over-costed across the board on top of that. Allies HELP Marine armies, but considering that they all rely on BA smash captains (except the one guy who was using GK instead) up until this FAQ, the problem is clearly more the baseline of being a Marine in general than it being that allies fix things.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
That might be the angle they are going but it is the wrong angle. Most people want to play mono. It just means competitive 40k wont take off as much as it should. My store has decided to ignore all FAQ's except for points changes at this point. The changes do not make the game better.

So you're ignoring clarification on rules like that Biovores don't pay for their spore mine shots?

Im one of the only nid players around here and I don't use biovores. Issues like this really haven't come up. We are coming up with ideas to make all models playable though. For example - mono custodes are terrible - so I suggested a rule that all their rapid fire weapons become assault (not jetbikes) and the army play a lot better now.

So basically you only play homebrew and throw out what GW actually wants the game to look like.

I mean it's not wrong, but it really limits any weight your arguments can have about the FAQs if you don't even play with them.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Allies without drawbacks will always be superior to no allies.

Only because the internal balance of those codices is garbage. If they weren't, Guard wouldn't be the crutch they are for Imperial armies.

Tell me, how does one fix the internal balance of 10 imperial codices in a way that not one of them has something worse than any of the others?

Because as soon as someone has something even slightly better than another, you can bet your hat it will be allied in.

The same way if no Imperial armies but Space Marines existed and you needed to balance them vs Chaos and Xenos.

This is the laziness argument again. You can't perfectly balance, so why try? Just toss mechanics out the window without a single thought. Hey, psyker powers aren't balanced, but we aren't just tossing them out either and blaming Psykers entirely for things like Invisibility.

Oh wait people did and now the Psyker phase and most Psykera in general are garbage.

So you are saying all troops in the Imperium should have the same strength and weaknesses?

All shooting units as well?

And the elites?

That guardsmen+tanks+officers need to be have the same strength and weaknesses as custodes+knights+grey knights?

You understand that the only way to do that is to eliminate the reason for codices to exist, right?

The whole problem isn't new. It has appeared in other games as well - the solution has always been the same: The ability to mitigate weaknesses by drawing from other factions/pools/colors/classes MUST come at a price. WH40k is no special snowflake in that regard.

 Jidmah wrote:


That's not my argument.

My argument is that Imperium will always be superior to Orks unless Orks are superior to every mono-army that has the Imperium Faction Keyword.

Because in a balanced state between Orks and Imperium, Imperium can have the best stuff from three out of ten codices. All other possible codices from the Imperium codices must be worse or equal to the the best three Ork detachments. If Black Templar are not among the best three (or five, or seven) detachments, all competitive Black Templar armies are inferior to all competitive Ork armies.

Unless there is a limit on allies, there is no reason to not fill your army with the best stuff possible. The best shooting units, the best screening units, the best support, the best combos, best relics, best stratagems. The only way to prevent this is to eliminate all army weaknesses and strengths across Space Marines, AM, Ad Mech, Knights, Custodes etc - which would defeat the point of having most of those codices in the first place.

Therefore, an Imperium army with allies cannot ever be balanced against mono-codex armies from the Imperium and other mono-codex faction at the same time as long as there is no drawback to taking allies. It's logically impossible.

Or you balance units properly, so that regardless the group of units you bring (excluding some extreme rock-paper-scissors situations) it is balanced against other group of units.

This strength and weakness fallacy must stop. Units should pay points for their effectiveness and that they pay fair amount of points do not mean they need to be the same. If your army's strength is melee, and you spend 30% of your points for shooty units (be they allies or not) you've now diluted your melee strength and this is compenated by increased shootyness, resulting an army which is not more powerful nor less powerful, but one that requires different playstyle.

I think the argument is that there are more effective counters available to you if you play Imperium. For instance, if Orks become meta with light vehicles and tons of Boyz, the Imperium lists might have a unit of 8 Custode Bikes. Because 96 hurricane bolter shots deep striking will clear a couple blobs and the subsequent melee is perfect for dealing with T5 or T6, 4+ or 5+ vehicles.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Karol wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Grey Knights also support PDF, Guard, Sisters, Inquisition and others when dealing with daemons and either kill or mind wipe the survivors (depending on rank). That said, I will never argue that a codex shouldn't be playable as a monobuild, I was just tossing out the idea that GW might have nailed the idea of the Imperium being reliant on inter-faction relations (even if it was possibly accidental) and that amused me a bit.

I find nothing about the state of my army amusing. If GW can't make good codex for everyone, then I am in for every other faction getting the GK treatment. For edition or two, after that GW can do what ever the hell it wants.

Frankly I want to dismiss your point of view due to your biases, but let's talk about it anyways: honestly the issue with Grey Knights has nothing to do with allies. It has to do with how Marines lack the durability they once had (and still pay for) and how they're over-costed across the board on top of that. Allies HELP Marine armies, but considering that they all rely on BA smash captains (except the one guy who was using GK instead) up until this FAQ, the problem is clearly more the baseline of being a Marine in general than it being that allies fix things.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
That might be the angle they are going but it is the wrong angle. Most people want to play mono. It just means competitive 40k wont take off as much as it should. My store has decided to ignore all FAQ's except for points changes at this point. The changes do not make the game better.

So you're ignoring clarification on rules like that Biovores don't pay for their spore mine shots?

Im one of the only nid players around here and I don't use biovores. Issues like this really haven't come up. We are coming up with ideas to make all models playable though. For example - mono custodes are terrible - so I suggested a rule that all their rapid fire weapons become assault (not jetbikes) and the army play a lot better now.

So basically you only play homebrew and throw out what GW actually wants the game to look like.

I mean it's not wrong, but it really limits any weight your arguments can have about the FAQs if you don't even play with them.

I don't think it disqualifies me. I know the rules - play them at tournaments - plus we've played them leading up to now. This new FAQ is crap dude. It might as well not exist. Well see what chapter approved brings. Until then we are just going to have fun. You know chapter approved is going to make big changes anyways.

 Crimson wrote:
Or you balance units properly, so that regardless the group of units you bring (excluding some extreme rock-paper-scissors situations) it is balanced against other group of units.

This strength and weakness fallacy must stop. Units should pay points for their effectiveness and that they pay fair amount of points do not mean they need to be the same. If your army's strength is melee, and you spend 30% of your points for shooty units (be they allies or not) you've now diluted your melee strength and this is compenated by increased shootyness, resulting an army which is not more powerful nor less powerful, but one that requires different playstyle.

This is a fantasy though. Unless units are literally identical for their points (i.e. you generate the same probability curves against all targets both in attack and defense) and there is no synergy either explicitly (i.e. special rules that buff other units) or implicitly (for example this unit helps screen another unit and it does this better than the rest).

It turns out a Castellan with say 9 CP in a mono-Knights list is not as good as a Castellan with 25+ CP with guardsmen screens and Smash captains menacing any obvious countermeasures.
How many points should it be? Which list are we balancing it for? Its effectiveness is fundamentally different.

If Soup isn't a thing, you can try to balance within the pressure system that is a single codex. With soup you have to balance with every single synergy across every single imperial (etc) codex. Every psychic power, warlord trait, unit ability, guard's cheapness for efficient and good CPs etc.

Its back to 7ths formations. There was no reason to take anything outside of formations because you got extra stuff for free. And extra stuff is better.

 Marmatag wrote:
I think the argument is that there are more effective counters available to you if you play Imperium. For instance, if Orks become meta with light vehicles and tons of Boyz, the Imperium lists might have a unit of 8 Custode Bikes. Because 96 hurricane bolter shots deep striking will clear a couple blobs and the subsequent melee is perfect for dealing with T5 or T6, 4+ or 5+ vehicles.

Sure, you have more choice and thus more theoretical options (if you are willing to buy more models*) but then we are basically talking about list tailoring. And the bottom line is that if you tailor to counter one thing then you weaken yourself against another (assuming units are properly costed and there are no god units which are too cheap and good against everything.)

Also, I really don't think it is fair to punish armies for things they could in theory do. Why are we punishing BT & Sisters soup players because some soup players might bring Guard and a Castellan? That is crazy. It is like making marines crap because in theory theory could bring Guilliman (no that was not a good idea.) If there are problem units or combos then address those specifically.

(*GW probably considers this a feature rather than a bug.)

Tyel wrote:

If Soup isn't a thing, you can try to balance within the pressure system that is a single codex. With soup you have to balance with every single synergy across every single imperial (etc) codex. Every psychic power, warlord trait, unit ability, guard's cheapness for efficient and good CPs etc.

But ultimately the process is the same. Sure, it is harder with a bigger group of units, but doesn't mean it cannot be done (to a degree, balance will never be perfect anyway.)

Furthermore, remember that while there are indeed certain soup synergies (some of which are arguably too good) the edition is mostly built against this. Most of the auras, psychic powers and other special rules only affect units of the same faction (unlike in the previous editions.) So this sort of monosynery is weakened when you soup, and should in theory work as counter to the advantages of the soup.

Tyel wrote:

Its back to 7ths formations. There was no reason to take anything outside of formations because you got extra stuff for free. And extra stuff is better.

Agreed, that was terrible. But the allies are not like that, you pay points and detachment slots for them.

It's not about punishing the armies, it's about acknowledging there is a problem with allies. It becomes less of a problem when you limit the degree to which an army can be comprised of allies.

For instance, Age of Sigmar has a 400 point ally limit at 2000 points. I'm not saying that specific number works for 40k, but the idea might.

The idea that you need to make a Xenos codex that is, on its own, able to compete with the best-of-the-best from the Imperium and Chaos codexes is silly. A better solution is to make codexes that are generally well balanced, and limit the degree to which people can bring in allies.

So how would you make a reasonable Ynnari list if you can only bring 400pts of an ally?

Bharring wrote:
So how would you make a reasonable Ynnari list if you can only bring 400pts of an ally?

By taking the time/effort to make a formal Ynnari codex with its own unit costs or nuking the entire faction from orbit and admit it was a botched effort to save 7th edition that only served to poop on the game's balancing and lore even more.

I'm all for squatting Ynnari, personally. Let people run the HQ's as equivalent models from their respective original factions and be done with it.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not about punishing the armies, it's about acknowledging there is a problem with allies.

But there isn't. There is a problem with badly balanced units.

Honestly, I would be fine with that as well. Squatting Ynnari and just giving DE and CWE access to those characters as a part of their factions.

I would also be fine with squatting GSC and just combining them with the Tyranids codex. As it stands they don't function as a standalone army anyway, after the last FAQ.

Same deal with corsairs, inquisition, etc. Special snowflake factions shouldn't be a thing.

Insert post here of a guy who has spent 20 years collecting a fallen army who is now outraged:

 Marmatag wrote:
Honestly, I would be fine with that as well. Squatting Ynnari and just giving DE and CWE access to those characters as a part of their factions.

I would also be fine with squatting GSC and just combining them with the Tyranids codex. As it stands they don't function as a standalone army anyway, after the last FAQ.

Considering that neither of those have gotten their own codex yet (yes, Ynnari will get their own codex and likely new models too), it seems a bit premature to squat them. Ynnari will likely be considerably different than their current rules and GSC especially since they are getting more models and their codex is being designed around the new rules.

I mean whatever, that's fine. But there needs to be some limitation on allies. I'm not saying 400 points is the way to do it - just that this is how Age of Sigmar works, and AoS reboot was a good predictor for a lot of how 8th edition works.

perhaps GD will take that into account when they will release 9th edition (im pretty sure that wont happen so late)

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I'm all for squatting Ynnari, personally. Let people run the HQ's as equivalent models from their respective original factions and be done with it.

The models and fluff already happened. They just need their own codex to balance out the unit points instead.

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not about punishing the armies, it's about acknowledging there is a problem with allies. It becomes less of a problem when you limit the degree to which an army can be comprised of allies.

For instance, Age of Sigmar has a 400 point ally limit at 2000 points. I'm not saying that specific number works for 40k, but the idea might.

The idea that you need to make a Xenos codex that is, on its own, able to compete with the best-of-the-best from the Imperium and Chaos codexes is silly. A better solution is to make codexes that are generally well balanced, and limit the degree to which people can bring in allies.

What if they are balanced (discounting the marine/terminator and IS problem)? Many mono codexes don't all have the pieces for take all comers. Knights alone don't work well, because they can get bogged down and have very limited CP. Custodes lack CP and long range anti-tank. A thunder hammer that does 4 damage just happens to be the perfect amount to ace a banana bike.

Placing an arbitrary point limitation on allies just ensures that those books that can fit under the limit and still bring synergy benefit most. A detachment limit means the armies that bring the best force multipliers benefit most. A CP restriction means small codexes that don't have chaff (or some other key element) will never be effective.

Limiting stratagems to one per phase removes all the cool synergies you can pull off. Increasing the cost of stratagems by 1 for each used in a phase just makes armies rely on CP generation even more.

I haven't seen a silver bullet put forth by anyone yet. In my head the only path forward is toning down CP regen (done) and balancing points until all units are modestly viable. People *want* to take things like terminators and giving them a reason to do so may naturally reduce use of allies....or increase it.

tneva82 wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

SemperMortis wrote:

So what are you basing that on?

Also as a side note, why not spend the 2pts? well at the moment there isn't a reason NOT to spend 2CP to get +1 armor turn 1. But that is because we have no Strategems worth using beyond the basic ones. So if I bring out a couple of detachments and have 10-15 CP yeah i'll probably spend 2 to get a tiny buff to my armor on turn 1 but as soon as the codex comes out and we have something worth saving CP for, then the +1 to armor strat goes out the window unless they drastically reduce the price of our more elite units so I can stop taking 180-240 boyz to every game to have a CHANCE of winning.

The way GW does these codexes. They upped the prices in index, got people play 2k, after that every codex has been steadily dropping point costs so people get to buy more models. Name one 8th ed codex that has systematic price ups to index? Generally units not only got free rules and stat increases loaded up on them AND price drops. If you are so sure about orks not getting price drops wanna wager a bet?-) Easy to be sure they won't get claiming GW hates orks but are you willing to put money on the line on that claim? I'm up for it provided we get 3rd party to whom money gets transfered in advance and who then transfers whole pile to the winner so that neither can claim they are in only to back out when they lose.

Or is this more of your "GW hates orks" conspicary theorists...

Yes the way GW has worked the codex's would indicate GW will give our index options a fairly substantial price reduction. I am not disagreeing with that point and NO I am not one of those conspiracy theorists who believe GW hates orkz.

What I am though is someone who has played orkz for a LONG time and realize that GW doesn't understand orkz nor do they know how to write a good codex for us (at least in the last decade). No codex for 2 editions and then we got the 7th edition codex which was as I mentioned, unarguably one of the absolute worst. Then we got the 1st supplement and the only thing in it that was competitive was Green Tide, it had some fluffy options but that was about it, then they realized they screwed up and gave us a 2nd supplement which was basically the same thing except they removed the Green Tide. We also were given a useless flyer and 2 giant knight sized walkers that didn't work unless you were playing a friendly game.

The 8th index showed more of the same lack of imagination and understanding of the faction by simply making everything unplayable except for boyz, stormboyz, Kommandos, KMKs and some characters.

So to summarize, I do think we will get a price cut, I just don't know if it will be enough or in the right places to make the ork codex decent as opposed to just "Playable". I mean, I have yet to figure out how someone legitimately thought a Trukk should be 82pts.

 Crimson wrote:
Or you balance units properly, so that regardless the group of units you bring (excluding some extreme rock-paper-scissors situations) it is balanced against other group of units.

This strength and weakness fallacy must stop.

It's not a fallacy. It's proven game design theory. Assuming it's a fallacy is pretty much on the same level as calling gravity a fallacy.

Units should pay points for their effectiveness and that they pay fair amount of points do not mean they need to be the same. If your army's strength is melee, and you spend 30% of your points for shooty units (be they allies or not) you've now diluted your melee strength and this is compenated by increased shootyness, resulting an army which is not more powerful nor less powerful, but one that requires different playstyle.

All of this is true and right, and it should be that way, no questions asked.

However, there is one thing you missed:
Not every army has T8 28W robots.
Not every army has cheap throw-away units with many bodies.
Not every army has reliable long-range anti tank.
Not every army has reliable and powerful psykers.
Not every army has super-durable elite units.

This is what differentiates Custodes from Ultramarine from Adeptus Militarum from Imperial Knights from Adeptus Mechanicus. All those units can be balanced under your premise, but allies won't stop being a problem.
Even if every chaff unit is equally powerful across all codices, but Custodes, Imperial Knights and Grey Knights still won't have such a unit.
Even if every titanic vehicle is equally powerful, Space Marines still don't have one.
Adeptus Militarum doesn't have land raiders or terminators, Imperial Knights don't have any infantry, Black Templars don't have psykers.

Either you have a mono-army that can win despite lacking certain types of units, then you need to provide their remaining units with tools to fill those gaps. Which means, making them more powerful than other representatives of their kind.
Or you have a factions where every unit is equally powerful, then mono-armies cannot compete because they have gaps they cannot fill.

There are two ways to fix this: Give every type of unit to every army, so no army has any gaps. At that point, you can just eliminate factions and codices all together, because there is no longer a difference in play-style. An IG gunline would equal an Ork gunline would equal a Chaos Soup gunline.
Or you simply put some sort of tax on allies, so armies with gaps have can pull even with armies that do not have gaps.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not about punishing the armies, it's about acknowledging there is a problem with allies. It becomes less of a problem when you limit the degree to which an army can be comprised of allies.

For instance, Age of Sigmar has a 400 point ally limit at 2000 points. I'm not saying that specific number works for 40k, but the idea might.

The idea that you need to make a Xenos codex that is, on its own, able to compete with the best-of-the-best from the Imperium and Chaos codexes is silly. A better solution is to make codexes that are generally well balanced, and limit the degree to which people can bring in allies.

What if they are balanced (discounting the marine/terminator and IS problem)? Many mono codexes don't all have the pieces for take all comers. Knights alone don't work well, because they can get bogged down and have very limited CP. Custodes lack CP and long range anti-tank. A thunder hammer that does 4 damage just happens to be the perfect amount to ace a banana bike.

Placing an arbitrary point limitation on allies just ensures that those books that can fit under the limit and still bring synergy benefit most. A detachment limit means the armies that bring the best force multipliers benefit most. A CP restriction means small codexes that don't have chaff (or some other key element) will never be effective.

Limiting stratagems to one per phase removes all the cool synergies you can pull off. Increasing the cost of stratagems by 1 for each used in a phase just makes armies rely on CP generation even more.

I haven't seen a silver bullet put forth by anyone yet. In my head the only path forward is toning down CP regen (done) and balancing points until all units are modestly viable. People *want* to take things like terminators and giving them a reason to do so may naturally reduce use of allies....or increase it.

What do you think of the fixed CP suggestion?

2 points base.
+2 CPs per 500 points of game size.
-1 or -2 CPs per ally.
No penalty for a Brigade or Battalion.
-4 or -5 CPs for any other type of detachment.

The Brigade would have to confer some other sort of bonus, or maybe just go away altogether.

The Newman wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
It's not about punishing the armies, it's about acknowledging there is a problem with allies. It becomes less of a problem when you limit the degree to which an army can be comprised of allies.

For instance, Age of Sigmar has a 400 point ally limit at 2000 points. I'm not saying that specific number works for 40k, but the idea might.

The idea that you need to make a Xenos codex that is, on its own, able to compete with the best-of-the-best from the Imperium and Chaos codexes is silly. A better solution is to make codexes that are generally well balanced, and limit the degree to which people can bring in allies.

What if they are balanced (discounting the marine/terminator and IS problem)? Many mono codexes don't all have the pieces for take all comers. Knights alone don't work well, because they can get bogged down and have very limited CP. Custodes lack CP and long range anti-tank. A thunder hammer that does 4 damage just happens to be the perfect amount to ace a banana bike.

Placing an arbitrary point limitation on allies just ensures that those books that can fit under the limit and still bring synergy benefit most. A detachment limit means the armies that bring the best force multipliers benefit most. A CP restriction means small codexes that don't have chaff (or some other key element) will never be effective.

Limiting stratagems to one per phase removes all the cool synergies you can pull off. Increasing the cost of stratagems by 1 for each used in a phase just makes armies rely on CP generation even more.

I haven't seen a silver bullet put forth by anyone yet. In my head the only path forward is toning down CP regen (done) and balancing points until all units are modestly viable. People *want* to take things like terminators and giving them a reason to do so may naturally reduce use of allies....or increase it.

What do you think of the fixed CP suggestion?

2 points base.
+2 CPs per 500 points of game size.
-1 or -2 CPs per ally.
No penalty for a Brigade or Battalion.
-4 or -5 CPs for any other type of detachment.

The Brigade would have to confer some other sort of bonus, or maybe just go away altogether.

To low starting number of CP's.
And I don't think there is a need or point to lose CP for both allies and per detachment. Just detachments is much cleaner.

Put the base CP for 2k points to like 16 instead of 10 (4 base, 3 per 500 points) and then lose CP per detachment

Brigades as a formation have no place in 40k scale battles.
My obly objection to the paying for detachment model is some traits or rules like Tau commanders requiring multiple detachments.

Ice_can wrote:
Brigades as a formation have no place in 40k scale battles.
My obly objection to the paying for detachment model is some traits or rules like Tau commanders requiring multiple detachments.

Yeah the brigade can be ditched completely. Hardly any factions even use it.

The Newman wrote:


What do you think of the fixed CP suggestion?

2 points base.
+2 CPs per 500 points of game size.
-1 or -2 CPs per ally.
No penalty for a Brigade or Battalion.
-4 or -5 CPs for any other type of detachment.

The Brigade would have to confer some other sort of bonus, or maybe just go away altogether.

That would mean the most you'd get at 2000 points is 10CP, except that if you take an outrider or spearhead you end up with only 5cp. That's a huge penalty. Especially if you're Chaos (for example) and you take a Daemons vanguard (which is totally fluffy and not at all powergaming), you end up on 3cp, which isn't even enough to play the basic stratagems required to make Chaos even vaguely competitive for one turn.

You basically end up with Mono armies being the only choice, and soup armies being totally unplayable. Which is a very GW kind of fix to the problem, but that doesn't mean it's a good fix.

It might work if you tweaked the numbers a bit, such as making battallions have zero downside but outriders etc give -1 CP. But you would need the base amount of CP to be a lot higher still.

Simpler to just use the rule that you can only spend CP on the army that produced them.

 Jidmah wrote:

All of this is true and right, and it should be that way, no questions asked.

However, there is one thing you missed:
Not every army has T8 28W robots.
Not every army has cheap throw-away units with many bodies.
Not every army has reliable long-range anti tank.
Not every army has reliable and powerful psykers.
Not every army has super-durable elite units.

I did not miss this.

This is what differentiates Custodes from Ultramarine from Adeptus Militarum from Imperial Knights from Adeptus Mechanicus. All those units can be balanced under your premise, but allies won't stop being a problem.
Even if every chaff unit is equally powerful across all codices, but Custodes, Imperial Knights and Grey Knights still won't have such a unit.
Even if every titanic vehicle is equally powerful, Space Marines still don't have one.
Adeptus Militarum doesn't have land raiders or terminators, Imperial Knights don't have any infantry, Black Templars don't have psykers.

Space Marines actually do have a bunch of titanic units via Forge World. But I get what you're saying.

Either you have a mono-army that can win despite lacking certain types of units, then you need to provide their remaining units with tools to fill those gaps. Which means, making them more powerful than other representatives of their kind.
Or you have a factions where every unit is equally powerful, then mono-armies cannot compete because they have gaps they cannot fill.

There are two ways to fix this: Give every type of unit to every army, so no army has any gaps. At that point, you can just eliminate factions and codices all together, because there is no longer a difference in play-style. An IG gunline would equal an Ork gunline would equal a Chaos Soup gunline.
Or you simply put some sort of tax on allies, so armies with gaps have can pull even with armies that do not have gaps.

Yeah, the fallacy that I speak of is that you need to have every type of unit to function, and that variety of units is automatically better than no variety. There are certain things a functional army needs to be able to accomplish: they need to be able to deal with different sort of enemy units, hordes, elite Infantry, big tough targets such as vehicles and monsters. They need to be ale to claim and hold objective. However armies do not need to approach these things in similar way. One army may deal with tough targets via long ranged big guns, while another may tackle them via flying monsters which punch the enemy vehicles to death. Both approach can and should be viable, as should be a mix of them.

Furthermore, if variety of units offered via soup would be inherently and advantage, then such an advantage already exists for some monoarmies over other monoarmies. Chaos Marines for example have, chaff, elite infantry, flying big monsters, titanic vehicles with big guns, powerful psykers and many other things. Meanwhile the Harlequind have fast clowns with some psychic support and that's about it. So can you explain to me why it is not a problem that Chaos Marines have a such massive advantage of variety over Harlequins while it is somehow a problem that a soup army has a similar advantage over a monoarmy?

The whole thing is fallacy. Sure, some armies may have more ways to be effective, but they cannot be supremely effective in all those way in the same time! If Chaos Marines use their points for flying daemon princes or Primarchs then it is less point for big guns and so forth. People are acting like points were not a thing, like an faction could just bring all units in its disposal simultaneously...

Remember, In previous edition the Eldar could ally, but they usually didn't, as their own stuff was good enough.

Dandelion wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Brigades as a formation have no place in 40k scale battles.
My obly objection to the paying for detachment model is some traits or rules like Tau commanders requiring multiple detachments.

Yeah the brigade can be ditched completely. Hardly any factions even use it.

Can you qualify this statement? I see brigades everywhere in my local meta - across friendly games and tournaments.

The brigade is a bit of a problem as it accentuates the issue of cheap units being able to generate a crapton of CP.

Brigades have a use if your playing 5k points. For 2k they only matter to Guard bring even more CP while giving 2 possible detachments to Allies.
I don't see a problem with removing Brigades and Supreme Commands from the game (the latter used almost only to 'cheat' in powerful allies for minimal cost)

Edit:
And yes we can lose the Airwing aswell for tournament games.

I would prefer to see the detachments be dictated by points.
For example...

0-999pts - Patrol, Vanguard, Outrider and Spearheads only.
1000 - 1999pts - Same as lower value, plus Battalion, Super Heavy Auxilliary (1 Super Heavy)
2000pts+ - Same as previously but add Brigade, Supreme Command, Super Heavy, Airwing, and Forts as options.

Yes, this means that a full knight army can't be played below 2000pts, but c'mon, let's be serious....should it be? We're talking about knight titans. You could still play with a single one at lesser points. Also cuts back on the Airwings, and Supreme Command at lower points.

This also gives TOs some power to manipulate an event by deciding if they want everythng (2000pts or more) or something a little different (1750pt events).

 Crimson wrote:
The brigade is a bit of a problem as it accentuates the issue of cheap units being able to generate a crapton of CP.

The only reason brigades popped up more is because the 3 detachment limit keeps them from spamming battalions. A brigade actually keeps them from spending on more acutely powerful units though those units are more useful for strategic play.

Bumping up the cost of mortars and IS really puts the squeeze on such lists.

Lemondish wrote:

Dandelion wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Brigades as a formation have no place in 40k scale battles.
My obly objection to the paying for detachment model is some traits or rules like Tau commanders requiring multiple detachments.

Yeah the brigade can be ditched completely. Hardly any factions even use it.

Can you qualify this statement? I see brigades everywhere in my local meta - across friendly games and tournaments.

How many different factions regularly use the brigade?
I'm not talking number of players, just the variety factions. Guard, and Nids can likely fill out a brigade fairly easily without sacrificing too much flexibility, but even once you start looking at Tau, admech, Sisters, it becomes a lot harder to achieve. And as the army gets more elite the less likely they are to fit in a brigade, till you get to certain factions where it's just impossible to fit in a 2000 pt game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
The brigade is a bit of a problem as it accentuates the issue of cheap units being able to generate a crapton of CP.

The only reason brigades popped up more is because the 3 detachment limit keeps them from spamming battalions. A brigade actually keeps them from spending on more acutely powerful units though those units are more useful for strategic play.

Bumping up the cost of mortars and IS really puts the squeeze on such lists.

Ah, but if they are taking the brigade instead of the more "acutely powerful units" then isn't the CP better than those units? So tossing out the brigade would be a nerf no?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ordana wrote:
Brigades have a use if your playing 5k points. For 2k they only matter to Guard bring even more CP while giving 2 possible detachments to Allies.
I don't see a problem with removing Brigades and Supreme Commands from the game (the latter used almost only to 'cheat' in powerful allies for minimal cost)

Edit:
And yes we can lose the Airwing aswell for tournament games.

While I agree with you, the only issue I see is that removing Supreme Command would no longer allow certain LOWs from sharing faction traits unless you take 3. I'd just move the LOW slot to the battalion at a minimum, and possibly the vanguard, outrider etc... ones too.

Dandelion wrote:

Lemondish wrote:

Dandelion wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
Brigades as a formation have no place in 40k scale battles.
My obly objection to the paying for detachment model is some traits or rules like Tau commanders requiring multiple detachments.

Yeah the brigade can be ditched completely. Hardly any factions even use it.

Can you qualify this statement? I see brigades everywhere in my local meta - across friendly games and tournaments.

How many different factions regularly use the brigade?
I'm not talking number of players, just the variety factions. Guard, and Nids can likely fill out a brigade fairly easily without sacrificing too much flexibility, but even once you start looking at Tau, admech, Sisters, it becomes a lot harder to achieve. And as the army gets more elite the less likely they are to fit in a brigade, till you get to certain factions where it's just impossible to fit in a 2000 pt game.

T'au brigades are super common - they're ridiculously cheap, too. I see Nids, Tau, and Guard most often in tournament play.

I see a decent number of space marine brigades lately, too. Lots of scouts, scout bikes, buffbots, etc.

Brigades are actually more common than outrider, vanguard and spearhead combined.

Dandelion wrote:


Ah, but if they are taking the brigade instead of the more "acutely powerful units" then isn't the CP better than those units? So tossing out the brigade would be a nerf no?

They sprang for CP, because they had units that were very powerful and CP hungry.

As a relative measure tossing the brigade means they lose 7 CP, but gain space to bring other strong units. So, sure they can't pump the Castellan and Smash Cap all game long, but they might grab Custodes over BA or a Gallant.

Lemondish wrote:

T'au brigades are super common - they're ridiculously cheap, too. I see Nids, Tau, and Guard most often in tournament play.

I see a decent number of space marine brigades lately, too. Lots of scouts, scout bikes, buffbots, etc.

Brigades are actually more common than outrider, vanguard and spearhead combined.

Interesting. I've tried building a tau brigade, but it forced me to sacrifice too much flexibility and to take units I don't like. Plus, with the whole 1 Commander per detachment, it's generally better to run 3 battalions.

But the question still remains: how many of all the factions take brigades? You've listed 4 (super surprised by marines there tbh), but what about Eldar, Custodes, Admech, Sisters, Necrons, Orks, Grey Knights, Deathwatch etc... ?
My stance is that most factions don't use brigades regularly, and that it's function can easily be taken up by the battalion. Ultimately it's kinda redundant.

 Crimson wrote:
Furthermore, if variety of units offered via soup would be inherently and advantage, then such an advantage already exists for some monoarmies over other monoarmies. Chaos Marines for example have, chaff, elite infantry, flying big monsters, titanic vehicles with big guns, powerful psykers and many other things. Meanwhile the Harlequind have fast clowns with some psychic support and that's about it. So can you explain to me why it is not a problem that Chaos Marines have a such massive advantage of variety over Harlequins while it is somehow a problem that a soup army has a similar advantage over a monoarmy?

Uh, my argument is that this is a problem? Having more access to more things is a form of power.

For harlequins as a very limited mono-army to be just as powerful as an all-round mono-army like CSM, their units need to be more powerful than comparable units from Codex: CSM - because they don't have psyker to buff them/debuff the enemy, daemon princes to flip some tanks or predators and helbrutes to blow up tanks from a distance.
Let's assume GW managed to balance this and harlequins are almost as powerful as CSM.
Now, if allies have no drawback, you can now just add those powerful harlequin units to eldar and dark eldar units and have more powerful combat units than CSM, while also having more powerful shooting from the dark eldar codex and more powerful psykers from the eldar codex. Mono-CSM is now weaker than eldar soup.

Also note how CSM is not the best at any of the things you named:
CSM chaff is worse then AM, elite infantry are worse than Custodes or Eldar, flying big monsters are weaker than Tyranids, titanic vehicles are done better by knights, psykers are done better by thousand sons. The famous jack of all trades, master of none.
I do not consider forgeworld part of the equation because I assume that GW will continue to call exterminatus on any FW over performers, meaning most will be of the radar for competitive play anyways.

In a perfect WH40k game, the power budget of each codex is the same, and it is allocated to multiple aspects of the game, creating the unique feel of each army.
Let's do a quick example, based on the Chaos faction. I assume the total budget for each codex is 30, each mono-army is assumed to be balanced against each other mono-army, higher values are better than lower ones.
DISCLAIMER: The number do not reflect my opinion of the current state of the game in any way, they are just used to prove a point.

So, all those mono-codices are balanced against each other.

Now I go and optimize my CSM army with DG and TSM detachments:

Chaos Space Marine Soup:
Light Infantry 6 (from CSM)
Elite Infantry 7 (from DG)
Big guns 5 (from DG)
Monsters 8 (TS/DG Primarch)
Titanic 3 (from CSM)
Psykers 9 (from TS)
Total: 38
Neither Harlequins, nor Orks with their measly power budget of 30 can compete with that, despite being perfectly balanced against all single codices. The only way to prevent this is either equalizing TS, DG and CSM (removing the reason to have different codices in the first place) or making allying cost something worth 8 power-budget.

All that is before even considering cross-codex synergies like Magnus/Mortarion having a higher chance of surviving turn 1 because the other one is present, or warp-time being cast on Mortarion.

This is the sole reason why lists made from three codices are dominating competitive play. Bringing allies is strictly better than not bringing allies, as long as there are allies that can do anything better than you can.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dandelion wrote:
But the question still remains: how many of all the factions take brigades? You've listed 4 (super surprised by marines there tbh), but what about Eldar, Custodes, Admech, Sisters, Necrons, Orks, Grey Knights, Deathwatch etc... ?
My stance is that most factions don't use brigades regularly, and that it's function can easily be taken up by the battalion. Ultimately it's kinda redundant.

Orks could easily be fielding brigades, it's just a mixture of "all our non-boyz units suck" and not having anything good to spend those CP on that keeps people from doing that.
Most ork armies in tournament are bringing enough elite/troops/heavy support to fill up a brigades already, but additional battalion provide actually useful HQ slots rather than useless CP.

Niiru wrote:

The Newman wrote:


What do you think of the fixed CP suggestion?

2 points base.
+2 CPs per 500 points of game size.
-1 or -2 CPs per ally.
No penalty for a Brigade or Battalion.
-4 or -5 CPs for any other type of detachment.

The Brigade would have to confer some other sort of bonus, or maybe just go away altogether.

That would mean the most you'd get at 2000 points is 10CP, except that if you take an outrider or spearhead you end up with only 5cp. That's a huge penalty. Especially if you're Chaos (for example) and you take a Daemons vanguard (which is totally fluffy and not at all powergaming), you end up on 3cp, which isn't even enough to play the basic stratagems required to make Chaos even vaguely competitive for one turn.

You basically end up with Mono armies being the only choice, and soup armies being totally unplayable. Which is a very GW kind of fix to the problem, but that doesn't mean it's a good fix.

It might work if you tweaked the numbers a bit, such as making battallions have zero downside but outriders etc give -1 CP. But you would need the base amount of CP to be a lot higher still.

Simpler to just use the rule that you can only spend CP on the army that produced them.

Doesn't a spearhead or outrider only grant 1 CP as it is? A -4 or -5 point penalty is actually making them comparatively stronger, and your alternative would give an army comprised of a single spearhead only one CP less than a battalion. That said I was just spit-balling numbers, and I see nothing wrong with the end product being -3 for a spearhead or outrider and -2 for some of the others that currently grant 3-5 CPs or something

I'd originally though 3 CPs per 500 points rather than 2, and I put a range in on the penalties because I'm not sure where the right balance would be. On the low end of what I suggested it would give a mono-build with only Battalions 14 CPs at 2000, and your average two-Battalion ally list only loses one. I have no idea whether it's possible to build a viable demon battalion though.

 Jidmah wrote:

Uh, my argument is that this is a problem? Having more access to more things is a form of power.

So how is my space marine army that does not include Guilliman because there is Guilliman in the codex? Sorry, this is just crazy, it's not how it works and definitely how it should work. You pay points for the stuff you actually take and those points should reflect the power of the thing regardless of the source book.

For harlequins as a very limited mono-army to be just as powerful as an all-round mono-army like CSM, their units need to be more powerful than comparable units from Codex: CSM - because they don't have psyker to buff them/debuff the enemy, daemon princes to flip some tanks or predators and helbrutes to blow up tanks from a distance.

Harlequins have psykers. So let's assume we balance this in your way. CSM biker and other fast units as well as their psykers are worse for their points than Harlequin equivalents, because the CSM have access to other units too. So now a CSM player makes some sort of fast moving army with those elements, lead by a psyker. That's their theme, it's the sort of army they want to make. So now they go against Harlequins, which have similar sort of units. The points are equal, but the harlequin army is much better, because the CSM player could have chosen different units but didn't. Sorry, this is bad design.

In a perfect WH40k game, the power budget of each codex is the same, and it is allocated to multiple aspects of the game, creating the unique feel of each army.
Let's do a quick example, based on the Chaos faction. I assume the total budget for each codex is 30, each mono-army is assumed to be balanced against each other mono-army, higher values are better than lower ones.
DISCLAIMER: The number do not reflect my opinion of the current state of the game in any way, they are just used to prove a point.

Spoiler:

CSM
Light Infantry 6
Elite Infantry 5
Big guns 4
Monsters 6
Titanic 3
Psykers 6

TS
Light Infantry 5
Elite Infantry 6
Big guns 4
Monsters 8
Titanic 0
Psykers 9

DG
Light Infantry 5
Elite Infantry 7
Big guns 5
Monsters 8
Titanic 0
Psykers 5

Orks
Light Infantry 10
Elite Infantry 4
Big guns 3
Monsters 5
Titanic 3
Psykers 5

Harlequins
Light Infantry 7
Elite Infantry 10
Big guns 6
Monsters 0
Titanic 0
Psykers 7

So, all those mono-codices are balanced against each other.

Now I go and optimize my CSM army with DG and TSM detachments:

Chaos Space Marine Soup:
Light Infantry 6 (from CSM)
Elite Infantry 7 (from DG)
Big guns 5 (from DG)
Monsters 8 (TS/DG Primarch)
Titanic 3 (from CSM)
Psykers 9 (from TS)
Total: 38
Neither Harlequins, nor Orks with their measly power budget of 30 can compete with that, despite being perfectly balanced against all single codices. The only way to prevent this is either equalizing TS, DG and CSM (removing the reason to have different codices in the first place) or making allying cost something worth 8 power-budget.

Just no. Points, do you understand what they're for? Sure, some army can have better units for certain role, but those units should cost more points than weaker units from another army! You're arguing the armies should intentionally designed with crap internal balance. This is lunacy. As I said, in your example if the CSM make elite infantry focused army and go against Harlequins they get crushed, because they could have taken powerful monsters but didn't!

 Ordana wrote:
Brigades have a use if your playing 5k points. For 2k they only matter to Guard bring even more CP while giving 2 possible detachments to Allies.
I don't see a problem with removing Brigades and Supreme Commands from the game (the latter used almost only to 'cheat' in powerful allies for minimal cost)

Edit:
And yes we can lose the Airwing aswell for tournament games.

Primaris MSU also likes Brigades, though it's not a competetive subfaction it's one of its better builds.

The Newman wrote:


Doesn't a spearhead or outrider only grant 1 CP as it is? A -4 or -5 point penalty is actually making them comparatively stronger, and your alternative would give an army comprised of a single spearhead only one CP less than a battalion. That said I was just spit-balling numbers, and I see nothing wrong with the end product being -3 for a spearhead or outrider and -2 for some of the others that currently grant 3-5 CPs or something

CSM Battallion with a Daemons Spearhead

Your version - ends up with 3CP ((2+8) -5 -2)

My changes to your version - 7CP ((2+8) -2 -1)

Current version - 9CP (3+5+1)

You're right though, that an army with a single spearhead would only have one less CP than an army with a brigade. This is why a detachment/CP system based on negating points is going to be tricky to balance. Your version (of having spearheads give -5) kind of works if you only have a single spearhead, but some armies need to run a battallion+spearhead+vanguard to be competitive, but this would then leave them with ... 0 CP.

Even with my version of your rule, they'd end up with only 6CP (assuming at least one detachment is a daemons soup), which is pretty low.

It might work, as the most a CP battery army can get is 10 so the min/max difference isn't too bad. But it also means that barely any stratagems can be played, and some armies require stratagems to be even vaguely competitive.

Tricky balance. And again, I think the simpler solution is to leave the system as it is and just play "CP only works on their own stratagems".

Some armies can (even less do) bring Brigades. The point is, do any of them suffer greatly if they no longer can do so?

I will argue no. MSU Primaris would function just as well in a battalion (or 2 at worse). Same for Nids, Orks and Guard and everyone else.

I think some units, like Girliman, and others with buff Aura should be priced differently.

they get a base cost, which is them alone, then they have a percentage cost, for the Aura.

so (warning! example!) MArine Captain Serious McCoolname costs 100 points, he also costs a further 5% of your force budget for his aura.

in a 2k game he thus costs 100 + (2000 * 5%) = 200 points, in a 3k game he would be 250 points etc

Balance. Its all about balance.

- Things need to cost an appropriate amount of points for their abilities/functions.

- Stratagems need to cost an appropriate amount of CP for their effect.

- Allied detachments need to have a cost built in. You want Soup, pay a CP tax. Part of this also relates back to my first point, detachments need to be properly costed as to not give "cheap/easy" access to CP.

- Rules need tweaking. This is a constant that evolves over time.

With these four key points I believe GW can go a great distance in making a fair and competitive game that is fun.

I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Not at all!

You can take as many allies as you like. They just won't give you any CP and you can't use their Strats.

Sounds good to me.

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Yeh, it goes too far. Again using the CSM/Daemons example I've used before, this would mean that you couldn't deepstrike any of the daemons units, nor could you use any of the daemons relics.

I mean if daemons were overpowered that might be balanced, but they're not, they barely manage to hang on to average (and that's assuming you use their stronger relics and stratagems).

Once again, this would be a solution that would give Imperials a slap on the wrist, while severely crippling other armies. Which is the same thing that most of the previous nerfs have done.

There needs to be a change that -only- effects Imperials. Or, at worst, effects imperials mostly but slightly effects Aeldari too.

 Stux wrote:

Not at all!

You can take as many allies as you like. They just won't give you any CP and you can't use their Strats.

Sounds good to me.

Right. Thus effectively banning. They would be completely useless in any even semi competitive setting.

Niiru wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Yeh, it goes too far. Again using the CSM/Daemons example I've used before, this would mean that you couldn't deepstrike any of the daemons units, nor could you use any of the daemons relics.

I mean if daemons were overpowered that might be balanced, but they're not, they barely manage to hang on to average (and that's assuming you use their stronger relics and stratagems).

Once again, this would be a solution that would give Imperials a slap on the wrist, while severely crippling other armies. Which is the same thing that most of the previous nerfs have done.

There needs to be a change that -only- effects Imperials. Or, at worst, effects imperials mostly but slightly effects Aeldari too.

Or the less pessimistic view is that it actually gives summoning a purpose!

 Stux wrote:

Niiru wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Yeh, it goes too far. Again using the CSM/Daemons example I've used before, this would mean that you couldn't deepstrike any of the daemons units, nor could you use any of the daemons relics.

I mean if daemons were overpowered that might be balanced, but they're not, they barely manage to hang on to average (and that's assuming you use their stronger relics and stratagems).

Once again, this would be a solution that would give Imperials a slap on the wrist, while severely crippling other armies. Which is the same thing that most of the previous nerfs have done.

There needs to be a change that -only- effects Imperials. Or, at worst, effects imperials mostly but slightly effects Aeldari too.

Or the less pessimistic view is that it actually gives summoning a purpose!

How? Summoning would be exactly as worthless and terrible as it is now.

It would still be better to use a detachment and have no relics and stratagems, than to summon anything. As you would get no relics or stratagems either way, but at least you are guaranteed to have the units you need on the table when you need them.

Summoning would only become worthwhile in this situation, if you were able to use daemons stratagems and relics on summoned units. Even then, it would only make summoning "better than the alternative", and not actually good or competitive.

Niiru wrote:

 Stux wrote:

Niiru wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Yeh, it goes too far. Again using the CSM/Daemons example I've used before, this would mean that you couldn't deepstrike any of the daemons units, nor could you use any of the daemons relics.

I mean if daemons were overpowered that might be balanced, but they're not, they barely manage to hang on to average (and that's assuming you use their stronger relics and stratagems).

Once again, this would be a solution that would give Imperials a slap on the wrist, while severely crippling other armies. Which is the same thing that most of the previous nerfs have done.

There needs to be a change that -only- effects Imperials. Or, at worst, effects imperials mostly but slightly effects Aeldari too.

Or the less pessimistic view is that it actually gives summoning a purpose!

How? Summoning would be exactly as worthless and terrible as it is now.

It would still be better to use a detachment and have no relics and stratagems, than to summon anything. As you would get no relics or stratagems either way, but at least you are guaranteed to have the units you need on the table when you need them.

Summoning would only become worthwhile in this situation, if you were able to use daemons stratagems and relics on summoned units. Even then, it would only make summoning "better than the alternative", and not actually good or competitive.

Because summoning lets you put them on the table where you need them. Deploying daemons on the table gets them shot to pieces turn 1.

I agree that summoning is undertuned though, I'd be happy to tweak the mechanic to make it more reliable in this instance.

Niiru wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Drager wrote:
I love my mixed forces (Inquisition, Aeldari Soup, GSC with Guard etc.) however I would be fine with a rule like the following, how does this strike people?

Battle Brothers

All of the units in each Detachment in your Battle-forged army must have at least one Faction keyword in common. In addition, this keyword cannot be Chaos, Imperium, Aeldari, Ynnari or Tyranids, unless the Detachment in question is a Fortification Network. Furthermore, you may only use Stratagems from the Faction to which your Warlord belongs or general game stratagems (such as Prepared Positions) and only Detachments made up entirely of models with at least two Faction Keywords in common with your Warlord may generate CP. This has no effect on your Army Faction.

It's a terrible rule. It effectively bans allies.

Yeh, it goes too far. Again using the CSM/Daemons example I've used before, this would mean that you couldn't deepstrike any of the daemons units, nor could you use any of the daemons relics.

I mean if daemons were overpowered that might be balanced, but they're not, they barely manage to hang on to average (and that's assuming you use their stronger relics and stratagems).

Once again, this would be a solution that would give Imperials a slap on the wrist, while severely crippling other armies. Which is the same thing that most of the previous nerfs have done.

There needs to be a change that -only- effects Imperials. Or, at worst, effects imperials mostly but slightly effects Aeldari too.

The Eldar problem isn't an allies problem, it's a Farseer problem. Continually dancing around Doom saying "this thing is too good with Doom, maybe we should nerf the unit and leave Doom the way it is" just forces the Eldar into a smaller and smaller box where the tournament list designed around having the optimal usage of each Farseer power in play each turn is playable and nothing else is; price Ravagers assuming Doom and what are the Dark Eldar players who don't want to soup Craftworlders in supposed to do?

The problem with the Imperium similarly isn't an allies problem, it's a problem where the Codexes are written assuming allies are available to plug any hole in the book. People whine about Guard because the Marine books are only playable with Guard to screen and occupy space, but nerfing the Guard doesn't make the Marine books any more useful, it makes pure Guard less useful. Increasing the cost of Blood Angel stratagems just forces people to play soup to use them because BA can't get the CP to do their own stuff on their own.

Just because Allies are a big global lever you can pull with a rule spanning a couple of sentences doesn't mean pulling that lever is going to work; I'm having flashbacks to Proposed Rules back in 7e where the refrain was always "let's make the easiest change we can concerning the thing I dislike without considering any of the consequences." The easiest change to make isn't necessarily a good change to make.

Niiru wrote:



How? Summoning would be exactly as worthless and terrible as it is now.

It would still be better to use a detachment and have no relics and stratagems, than to summon anything. As you would get no relics or stratagems either way, but at least you are guaranteed to have the units you need on the table when you need them.

Summoning would only become worthwhile in this situation, if you were able to use daemons stratagems and relics on summoned units. Even then, it would only make summoning "better than the alternative", and not actually good or competitive.

Thousand Sons have no problem making summons work.

- CP to summon on 4 dice without mortal wounds
- Access to daemon spells
- Access to reroll 1s for daemons

Summon 20-30 horrors, summon herald, stack a mutalith, and give them flickering flames.
That's 60 to 90 BS4 S5 shots that wound infantry on 2s and tanks on 4s - helps me kill Orks quite easily.

Or I can drag in exalted flamers to help with vehicles. Or screamers to get a character behind a screen.

I get that not everyone can use them like that, but the flexibility is the part I value most. I would enjoy having access to their strats, but it's not a deal breaker.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Niiru wrote:



How? Summoning would be exactly as worthless and terrible as it is now.

It would still be better to use a detachment and have no relics and stratagems, than to summon anything. As you would get no relics or stratagems either way, but at least you are guaranteed to have the units you need on the table when you need them.

Summoning would only become worthwhile in this situation, if you were able to use daemons stratagems and relics on summoned units. Even then, it would only make summoning "better than the alternative", and not actually good or competitive.

Thousand Sons have no problem making summons work.

- CP to summon on 4 dice without mortal wounds
- Access to daemon spells
- Access to reroll 1s for daemons

Summon 20-30 horrors, summon herald, stack a mutalith, and give them flickering flames.
That's 60 to 90 BS4 S5 shots that wound infantry on 2s and tanks on 4s - helps me kill Orks quite easily.

Or I can drag in exalted flamers to help with vehicles. Or screamers to get a character behind a screen.

I get that not everyone can use them like that, but the flexibility is the part I value most. I would enjoy having access to their strats, but it's not a deal breaker.

If every CSM legion had access to all of this, then this would be a good answer.

They don't though, so it's not all that helpful.

It's like saying "The Imperium has mono-faction access to cheap CP brigades, because look the Imperial Guard can do it". Which is correct, but doesn't actually help UM/BA/DA/admech/etc etc.

GW seem to have made the decision to squat summoning from the game, except for very specific use cases (which is basically thousand sons). Which is a shame. I would argue that summoning was much fluffier when it was available to a lot more people. Anyone can fall to the temptations of chaos. But alas, neckbeards abused it in 7th and so now it has to be removed from the game.

Niiru wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Niiru wrote:



How? Summoning would be exactly as worthless and terrible as it is now.

It would still be better to use a detachment and have no relics and stratagems, than to summon anything. As you would get no relics or stratagems either way, but at least you are guaranteed to have the units you need on the table when you need them.

Summoning would only become worthwhile in this situation, if you were able to use daemons stratagems and relics on summoned units. Even then, it would only make summoning "better than the alternative", and not actually good or competitive.

Thousand Sons have no problem making summons work.

- CP to summon on 4 dice without mortal wounds
- Access to daemon spells
- Access to reroll 1s for daemons

Summon 20-30 horrors, summon herald, stack a mutalith, and give them flickering flames.
That's 60 to 90 BS4 S5 shots that wound infantry on 2s and tanks on 4s - helps me kill Orks quite easily.

Or I can drag in exalted flamers to help with vehicles. Or screamers to get a character behind a screen.

I get that not everyone can use them like that, but the flexibility is the part I value most. I would enjoy having access to their strats, but it's not a deal breaker.

If every CSM legion had access to all of this, then this would be a good answer.

They don't though, so it's not all that helpful.

It's like saying "The Imperium has mono-faction access to cheap CP brigades, because look the Imperial Guard can do it". Which is correct, but doesn't actually help UM/BA/DA/admech/etc etc.

GW seem to have made the decision to squat summoning from the game, except for very specific use cases (which is basically thousand sons). Which is a shame. I would argue that summoning was much fluffier when it was available to a lot more people. Anyone can fall to the temptations of chaos. But alas, neckbeards abused it in 7th and so now it has to be removed from the game.

But .. we're talking about making changes here anyway!

If we're changing how allies/soup work, why can't we change summoning at the same time if it helps?

Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

Denies are very unreliable.

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

change doom to 18" and i would agree. 24" gives them a nice 6" safety buffer to avoid those things typically

Doom 18" and up the WC by 1. It basically wipes a unit every time it goes off.

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

The Necron players has (had?) access to the Gloom Prism as a Tomb Spyder upgrade, which needs a serious buff since they're the masters of anti-warp tech. Right now it's pretty pants.

Give the Gloom Prism some sort better way to interfere with psykers. Would make them worth the points, and by extension an actual reason to take Spyders.

I would like to see any of the below (or a combination thereof)
- subtract 2 from enemy psychic tests when within 18"
- enemy pyskers will peril on any double when within 18"
- no limit to the DTW tests (also maybe a +1 to the roll)

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

The Necron players has (had?) access to the Gloom Prism as a Tomb Spyder upgrade, which needs a serious buff since they're the masters of anti-warp tech. Right now it's pretty pants.

Great. So Necron solution is to take crappy unit that won't really help. So not really solution. And Tau?

Eldar players free to show eldar lists doing good and NOT having doom. If something is auto take it tells you it's generally too good.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

The Eldar problem isn't an allies problem, it's a Farseer problem. Continually dancing around Doom saying "this thing is too good with Doom, maybe we should nerf the unit and leave Doom the way it is" just forces the Eldar into a smaller and smaller box where the tournament list designed around having the optimal usage of each Farseer power in play each turn is playable and nothing else is; price Ravagers assuming Doom and what are the Dark Eldar players who don't want to soup Craftworlders in supposed to do?

The problem with the Imperium similarly isn't an allies problem, it's a problem where the Codexes are written assuming allies are available to plug any hole in the book. People whine about Guard because the Marine books are only playable with Guard to screen and occupy space, but nerfing the Guard doesn't make the Marine books any more useful, it makes pure Guard less useful. Increasing the cost of Blood Angel stratagems just forces people to play soup to use them because BA can't get the CP to do their own stuff on their own.

Just because Allies are a big global lever you can pull with a rule spanning a couple of sentences doesn't mean pulling that lever is going to work; I'm having flashbacks to Proposed Rules back in 7e where the refrain was always "let's make the easiest change we can concerning the thing I dislike without considering any of the consequences." The easiest change to make isn't necessarily a good change to make.

I wish I could exalt this multiple times.

tneva82 wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

The Necron players has (had?) access to the Gloom Prism as a Tomb Spyder upgrade, which needs a serious buff since they're the masters of anti-warp tech. Right now it's pretty pants.

Great. So Necron solution is to take crappy unit that won't really help. So not really solution. And Tau?

Eldar players free to show eldar lists doing good and NOT having doom. If something is auto take it tells you it's generally too good.

Or the other options aren't viable in comparison. Guide, fortune, and executioner can be achieved to a lesser degree with an Autarch, Spirit Stones or Smite respectively. Mind war is too random to be reliable on its own (and too expensive to get the right combinations in place to make it effective). Will of Asuyan is kind of worthless in an army that promotes MSU or that has Psykers capable of rerolling deny tests. Doom stands alone as only CWE way to reroll any failed wounds. CWE don't have Lieutenants, veterans of the long war, or any other abilities to increase wound chances. It isn't doom per se that is the problem, but rather its synergy outside of CWE. Perhaps restricting Doom to only CWE or only allowing Harlequins/Drukhari to reroll 1's is an amenable solution.

Auto take exists in EVERY army. [Insert Army of your Choice Here] players feel free to show [army] lists doing good and NOT having [X].

Can't we just go to points based CP for everyone? And Stratagems limited to your Warlord's choices?

But some CP are more cost effective than others.

The rage about that on Dakka would be epic.

Reemule wrote:
And Stratagems limited to your Warlord's choices?

Hell no!

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

Necrons get a deny from the Immortal Pride Warlord trait, which seems to be the go-to trait for many lists anyway.

Tomb Sentinels also get a gloom prism - just like Spiders. They might not be the best choices atm, but at least we have to option to field them (unlike Tau) and CA might help out fix that particular problem.

 Crimson Devil wrote:
But some CP are more cost effective than others.

The rage about that on Dakka would be epic.

You mean stratagems ? Because if the amount of CP is based on points, they're all worth the same thing.
Btw, it would be easier to balance stratagems costs (inside and outside of any ally setting) if each army had the ability to generate just as much CPs.

I'm pretty sure it's one of the best solution anyway, CP being generated mainly by troops creates huge gaps between codexes (and the different armies available to them).

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
Have a problem with Doom? Then bring something to counter it. Inquisitor Greyfax is actually a great addition. 2 denies and a +1 to deny, what's not to like? Simply spend a CP to bring her along. Either that or a Culexus. Other armies have to modify lists to counter specific threats, why should Imperium be different? It's not like they are short on options.

...Great. What does the Tau or the Necron player do? Bring Greyfax?

This is just my two cents so take it as it is.

But it would seem that the recent lore has been hinting at the possibility of "Dark Tau." If the Ethereal were actually demons in disguise, then having them take on psycker attributes would alleviate this issue. Also, I know that the T'au recently captured a down imperial vessel and reverse engineered the Warp Drive from it. This was a disaster for them, but suffice it to say they are now aware of the Warp and of Chaos. There isn't any reason as to why they couldn't take the technological approach to research and find some sort of warp dampening technology.

There are plenty of avenues for the story writers to come up with a fix that can be reflected in the base rules.

Imagine a new Suit System that has the capacity to dampen warp fethery within x inches. It might cause the caster to have a harder time casting a spell (+1 to WC within 6,8,12 inches of the suit) or it could cause them to destabilize ( any doubles will cause perils within 6,8,12 inches of the suit)

Both of those are viable I think.

Reemule wrote:
Can't we just go to points based CP for everyone? And Stratagems limited to your Warlord's choices?

I actually really like the apparent intent of elite armies having much more effective stratagems but at a higher cost and lower pool juxtaposed against armies with weaker, lower cost strats they used more often from a higher pool.

Points cost balance the pool size - can't bring a brigade or multiple battalions in an effective list in some armies while some other armies can bring both easily.

The problem is cross contamination. Separate detachments as allies should not deny you access to their stratagems. That seems boring and all but removes allies from competitive play. Likewise, the status quo gives the best of both and shouldn't continue. Conflating issues doesn't help, either. Tackle CP batteries and then tackle points imbalance.

I think the more likely and subtle solution is to limit CP to the force that generates it. There's just two major issues that need to be addressed...

1. How to make this happen without harming mono-builds. Use the battle brothers rule here perhaps?
2. Where do the 3CP from being BF come from? Managing four potential pools seems unwieldy, so my thought is to attribute these 3 to the Warlord's force.

While the idea of a complete revamp of the CP process is awesome..

It seems pretty clear that GW is going to avoid that.

If you go off what GW has proven it likes to do to fix stuff..

Expect detachments to get CP changes. Expect Stratagems to get CP cost changes. Expect new Stratagems to address some issues.

What I took away from the FAQ is that I probably shouldn't expect CA to fix mono-build Marines.

I'd speculated that GW doesn't see a problem with 'The Loyal 32' or with BA/IK/GK/vanilla Marines not being good on their own because GW sees "Imperium" as the faction, and when we complain that mono-build Marines don't work GW reacts the same way one of us would react to someone complaining that am army comprised entirely of Centurion Devastators doesn't work; "well duh, you're obviously not supposed to play it like that you thick burk".

By toning down CP regeneration and slightly raising the cost of some of the more overused strategems instead of admitting that the effect of increasing the CPs for Battalions and Brigades was the opposite of the stated intention (helping elite armies compete*) GW has basically signaled that taking a cheap Guard battalion to power your Knight/Smash Captain/whatever is Imperium working as intended. If you want to play Marines start with the loyal 32, and if that gives you heartburn paint 'em to match your Marines and call 'em initiates or whatever.

If that is where GW is at then I wouldn't expect any really major shake-ups.

* That does suggest a fix to the CP Battery issue, which is to adjust that stuff in the other direction. Set the base CP from 3 to 10, Brigades grant +3, Battalions grand +2, the currently 3-5 point ones grant +1, everything else is 0.

The Newman wrote:
What I took away from the FAQ is that I probably shouldn't expect CA to fix mono-build Marines.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect that.

By toning down CP regeneration and slightly raising the cost of some of the more overused strategems instead of admitting that the effect of increasing the CPs for Battalions and Brigades was the opposite of the stated intention (helping elite armies compete*)

I don't quite understand how you think it was opposite. Elite armies needed more CP. They got more CP. It's just that those elite armies can get even moar CP from IG. It's generally accepted that no matter how you cut it extra CP helps marines more than it helps guard.

The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

Recent GT (battle for salvation) with some of the top players confirms what a lot of people were saying.

Eldar soup still top of the pile (2/top 3 lists)
BA got dropped from IG/IK lists. IG bat replaced with Brig. It's still top of the pile.

BCP had issues with the results of this tourney so I can't get any more info. Anyone else boots on the ground have any idea how the FAQ shaped what happened?

Spoletta wrote:
The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

It was a silly way to go about it. They should have just increased the standard battleforged CP instead. That would have achieved their stated goal without making the cheap allied IG battalions and brigades even more attractive.

 Crimson wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

It was a silly way to go about it. They should have just increased the standard battleforged CP instead. That would have achieved their stated goal without making the cheap allied IG battalions and brigades even more attractive.

Yep

 Crimson wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

It was a silly way to go about it. They should have just increased the standard battleforged CP instead. That would have achieved their stated goal without making the cheap allied IG battalions and brigades even more attractive.

This is part of where the problem with FAQ 2 started, strategums cost a lot of CP and many armies were struggling to generate them.
But by making only battalion and even brigade more CP it made competitive lists become very dependent upon making double battalions as a base for an army to ensure sufficient CP

That made the points cost of these "Tax" formations critical.
Simply put IG being Cheapest made them the problem and fall guy simultaneously, GS& Kurov's not helping.

To give everyone an equal boost they should have changed the battle forged CP and that woulf have been fine.

But once again GW's 40K design team showed they are fluff bunnies and bumbled blissfully unaware into the next abusive meta of IG plus X.

But GW while improving is still like most people reluctant to admit that it's "fix" is actually causing more problems than it solved.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

The Newman wrote:
What I took away from the FAQ is that I probably shouldn't expect CA to fix mono-build Marines.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect that.

Almost everything else I said was explaining that statement, which part didn't make sense?

 Daedalus81 wrote:

By toning down CP regeneration and slightly raising the cost of some of the more overused strategems instead of admitting that the effect of increasing the CPs for Battalions and Brigades was the opposite of the stated intention (helping elite armies compete*)

I don't quite understand how you think it was opposite. Elite armies needed more CP. They got more CP. It's just that those elite armies can get even moar CP from IG. It's generally accepted that no matter how you cut it extra CP helps marines more than it helps guard.

Because context matters. GW flat out said that they were increasing the CPs for Battalions and Brigades because elite armies were struggling with CPs, but it helped hoard armies more and made the existing imbalance worse. Mono-build elite armies might have better strategems, but not by nearly enough to offset being outspent two or three to one.

GW could have addressed that, but they didn't. They addressed that CP regeneration is abusive (yay!) and that some strategems are better than others for the points (also yay) but they didn't do anything about how CP are populated to begin with and that suggests they don't see a problem. If they don't see the problem with CP generation for mono-build Marines/IK/whatever it suggests that they think CP generation for Imperium as a whole is fine.

That chain of logic ends with GW only addressing the issues with Marines within the context of Imperial Soup, and they need more than that for mono-building.

While knife-ears did get 2 of the top 3 at Salvation, neither list was anything like what we used to see.

Neither were Ynnari. Both had *non-Alaitoc* Craftworlders. And not just for a relic!

Both took almost entirely short range weapons. One took a ton of CC. Avatar, Phoenix Lord, and Wyches.

No Shining Spears. No Reapers. No Alaitoc.

Was there some weird Comp rule here?

I don't think BFS is a good meta-litmus test.


Knights were still half the lists at the event and with the FAQ out just 6 days or so before the event, most people simply took the lists they planned for anyhow. Sean Nayden's been playing is Avatar/Wyches list for ever.

Most (non-Knight) lists in the top were very much anti-Knight lists designed to beat Knights as much as possible in the pre-FAQ Knight-meta, (lots of Haywire, no juicy targets for Volcano Lances, shooting denial, lots of cc to clear Catachan Brigades, etc..) and just happened to potentially get a slightly easier ride because Knights got a dampener.

We'll have to wait and see how this shakes out when there's both less Knights around and thus perhaps less turkey-shooting for dedicated anti-Knight-meta-lists.

What makes you think we'll see less knights and subsequently less anti-knight?

Maybe the rise (from 2 to 1?) of eldar may make the meta more anti-eldar but I'm not sure how you go more anti-eldar with anything but eldar...

Eldar being more than just ynarri shows how powerful they are. They have lots of viable builds which the FAQ did NOTHING to reign in (doom, stacking negs to hit, wave serpents, disi cannons, OP units, snowflake rules, characters...)

Although 6 days does seem like a short amount of time to digest the FAQ. I'm curious how SoCAL looks as that seems a more reasonable amount of time to digest the FAQ and make army changes.

bananathug wrote:
What makes you think we'll see less knights and subsequently less anti-knight?

Maybe the rise (from 2 to 1?) of eldar may make the meta more anti-eldar but I'm not sure how you go more anti-eldar with anything but eldar...

Eldar being more than just ynarri shows how powerful they are. They have lots of viable builds which the FAQ did NOTHING to reign in (doom, stacking negs to hit, wave serpents, disi cannons, OP units, snowflake rules, characters...)

Although 6 days does seem like a short amount of time to digest the FAQ. I'm curious how SoCAL looks as that seems a more reasonable amount of time to digest the FAQ and make army changes.

Are you referring to Aeldari or Eldar (aka CWE)?

Also, show me a codex which doesn't have any of the following:
"OP units, snowflake rules, characters..."

Having digested it and playing with the updates:

I'm a big fan. Good job GW.

 mokoshkana wrote:

bananathug wrote:
What makes you think we'll see less knights and subsequently less anti-knight?

Maybe the rise (from 2 to 1?) of eldar may make the meta more anti-eldar but I'm not sure how you go more anti-eldar with anything but eldar...

Eldar being more than just ynarri shows how powerful they are. They have lots of viable builds which the FAQ did NOTHING to reign in (doom, stacking negs to hit, wave serpents, disi cannons, OP units, snowflake rules, characters...)

Although 6 days does seem like a short amount of time to digest the FAQ. I'm curious how SoCAL looks as that seems a more reasonable amount of time to digest the FAQ and make army changes.

Are you referring to Aeldari or Eldar (aka CWE)?

Also, show me a codex which doesn't have any of the following:
"OP units, snowflake rules, characters..."

I think he's referring to the fact that Eldar are not just Ynnari. The have a host of undercosted units with a host of special rules to use. Without targeted nerfs to OP models. The game will never get better.

Ynnari is a problem CWE, much less so. Change Doom to only work for CWE and that problem is solved. After that, what else is truly broken from a CWE perspective? Stacking hit modifiers is quite strong, but outside of flyers, specters, and rangers, no units get an innate modifier. Shining spears need a point increase, but the fly change negatively impacts them (again, ynnari is a separate issue). So what else is so broken that they cannot be beaten?

@Moko,

Mainly the 3 things you named. Although just limiting doom to CWE doesn't go far enough (18" range + LOS required would be a better move or just be able to cast it on one unit and allow that unit to re-roll wounds. Army wide re-rolls is so unbalancing.)

The durability of serpents needs an adjustment, more of the powers need to require LOS with reduced range, character sniping with a reaper launcher needs a FAQ, the flyers need point increases (crimson hunter exarchs and hemlocks are too good for their points) and reapers need to have their max size reduced to 5 (and maybe another 2 point price bump but that's splitting hairs at this point).

A couple of things in the dex need to move the other way (fire prisms, your knight equivalents, the other biker units and maybe a couple of others that I'm not familiar with.)

I think the bigger "nerf" will be to boost up the other dexes so that they can compete with the eldar factions.

DE, Ynnari and Harlies have their own problems (ravagers, grots, disi cannons, flyers, generally undercosted units, str from death, stacking negatives, haywire and some others). Similar to Knights and IG being really good creates super imperium lists Aeldari draws from the rest of the OP dexes to create another super army.

Doom=WC 8 would help too. All the "grand slam" powers cost WC 8.

It's been said somewhere here before but I believe if you want to achieve proper balance, they should bring back the old pre 5th FOC.

Restrict to single codex, eliminate soup entirely (can still have allies in narrative based games)

Something I've seen crop up in one of the podcasts I listen to while painting or doing other hobby stuff proposed an interesting idea: some of the reason this is the "soft touch" FAQ compared to the Spring FAQ is because CA has a lot of the rest of the changes that were already planned. This FAQ is basically everything CA didn't already include (points bumps, possible rule changes to army tactics that give a -1 to hit being a cover save instead, ect).

And considering what GW has shown us so far this edition, I'm inclined to buy in on this claim. I mean CA would have gone to print before the FAQ was even started in Sep to be ready to go by December and considering how much railing on about some of this stuff we've been doing and how ear-to -the-ground GW is trying to be, it's possible that we may be seeing more changes coming in CA as well.

One could hope that CA 2018 will be more substantial.

Personally hoping there's a line in there to allow SM/CSM of all varieties to use their chapter/legion trait for the whole army, not just infantry/dreads. Always hated how every other codex applies to the whole army and for marines it's infantry only.

DG preds with Inexorable Advance? Yes please.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Something I've seen crop up in one of the podcasts I listen to while painting or doing other hobby stuff proposed an interesting idea: some of the reason this is the "soft touch" FAQ compared to the Spring FAQ is because CA has a lot of the rest of the changes that were already planned. This FAQ is basically everything CA didn't already include (points bumps, possible rule changes to army tactics that give a -1 to hit being a cover save instead, ect).

And considering what GW has shown us so far this edition, I'm inclined to buy in on this claim. I mean CA would have gone to print before the FAQ was even started in Sep to be ready to go by December and considering how much railing on about some of this stuff we've been doing and how ear-to -the-ground GW is trying to be, it's possible that we may be seeing more changes coming in CA as well.

back before the first CA came out, GK player were told the same, that their FAQ is the way it is, because the real changes to costs and rules are going to happen in CA. That did not happen. But who knows maybe the new CA is going to be a 400pages book.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
I don't think BFS is a good meta-litmus test.


Knights were still half the lists at the event and with the FAQ out just 6 days or so before the event, most people simply took the lists they planned for anyhow. Sean Nayden's been playing is Avatar/Wyches list for ever.

Most (non-Knight) lists in the top were very much anti-Knight lists designed to beat Knights as much as possible in the pre-FAQ Knight-meta, (lots of Haywire, no juicy targets for Volcano Lances, shooting denial, lots of cc to clear Catachan Brigades, etc..) and just happened to potentially get a slightly easier ride because Knights got a dampener.

We'll have to wait and see how this shakes out when there's both less Knights around and thus perhaps less turkey-shooting for dedicated anti-Knight-meta-lists.

I 100% agree, the BFS event should not be used as an indication of any FAQ meta changes. This is simply because list submission had a deadline of the 29th, just 1 day after the FAQ was released.

In addition to this, after looking over their event pack, their format is… Different. After 3 games they split everyone into groups of 8, with only the top 8 armies in a position to win the event. They ran a 90-man event, which means that there was a potential of 11 people with 3 max point wins or a real close set of scores between those 11 players. 3 of those players never even got a chance to then compete and it means that it is impossible to tell, with their top 16 rankings who got their positions due to bracket splitting. (we also don’t know if the top 16 is just everyone in the top 2 brackets after day 1, or, everyone placed according to their total score over the 6 games).
Usually you’d see a lot more movement in who places where, as someone who went L-W-W-W will be on roughly the same points as those 4-7 players that go W-W-W-L, but, those in the first group essentially have a lower SoS and are more likely to win their day 2 games than those in the top bracket.
This is also further proven, that the person that technically won the event overall (highest competitive and appearance score combined) didn’t even make the top 16 in terms of competitive scores. (that or it just indicates that a lot more weight was put in the appearance score than the actual gaming score).

I’ll be more interested in the results coming from standard large-scale events happening in the last 2 weeks of October and beyond. It is from them, that we can begin to monitor new trends.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
One could hope that CA 2018 will be more substantial.

Personally hoping there's a line in there to allow SM/CSM of all varieties to use their chapter/legion trait for the whole army, not just infantry/dreads. Always hated how every other codex applies to the whole army and for marines it's infantry only.

DG preds with Inexorable Advance? Yes please.

Yup, C'tan with Dynastic codes and reanimates and !! Praetorians and Triarch units too, yuss please!

mind you Soulburst for every elf in the galaxy ... Hmmm suddenly not a fan

but back on topic of soup (or allies) and balance ...

I like the imperials having access to those options, it's flufffy and someone said it earlier it represents a weakened imperium that needs to rely on the other military arms to be effective rather than face another Heresy moment.

and rather than drag them further down with increased costs or CP taxes or whatever .. maybe the answer is to give a benefit to those other mostly Xenos codex that have no allies ..

I liked (some) formations and force orgs from 7th ... it doesn't need to be Decurion or Skyhammer strength ... but a few more points worth of stuff (10% of list total) or even 5 CP for being super friendless!

extra CP would not break mono guard? or mono BA ...


just my preference

Xenomancers wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

It was a silly way to go about it. They should have just increased the standard battleforged CP instead. That would have achieved their stated goal without making the cheap allied IG battalions and brigades even more attractive.

Yep

I disagree, every time you increase the CP for battleforged, you decrease the value of taking battalions and brigades. The CP system exists exactly to encourage the use of those 2 detachments, CPs are not free resources that anyone should get access to, they are rewards for bringing an organic army. The good solution here is to make battalions and brigades reward CP based on the amounts of points you pour in them.

NurglesR0T wrote:It's been said somewhere here before but I believe if you want to achieve proper balance, they should bring back the old pre 5th FOC.

Restrict to single codex, eliminate soup entirely (can still have allies in narrative based games)

That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no one wants, and getting rid of the FOC was the best achievement of 7th. The FOC was a terrible system, may it rest forever.

I'm up for completely eliminating allies.

Maybe it would be better to stop Detachments from granting fixed amounts of CP, and calculate the CP they grant according to the size? For example a Battalion/Brigade could grant 1 CP every 100 points, the smaller Detachments 1 CP every 200 points and Supreme Command/Auxillery dunno. Nerfs 200 point Batts and still rewards you for playing standard units. People would have about 10-20 CPs, depending on their build, which sounds better as it is now.

Spoletta wrote:

Xenomancers wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
The increase in CP for battalions and brigades was surely an help for elite armies, it just wasn't enough.

Monoguard didn't take much from it, they went from 21 to 27 CPs (with the old Kurov and strategist).

Custodes went from 6 to 8 CPs.

Increasing the CP given by battalions and brigades is surely good for elite armies. After all if battalions were 100 CP no one would soup in CP batteries.

It was a silly way to go about it. They should have just increased the standard battleforged CP instead. That would have achieved their stated goal without making the cheap allied IG battalions and brigades even more attractive.

Yep

I disagree, every time you increase the CP for battleforged, you decrease the value of taking battalions and brigades. The CP system exists exactly to encourage the use of those 2 detachments, CPs are not free resources that anyone should get access to, they are rewards for bringing an organic army. The good solution here is to make battalions and brigades reward CP based on the amounts of points you pour in them.

NurglesR0T wrote:It's been said somewhere here before but I believe if you want to achieve proper balance, they should bring back the old pre 5th FOC.

Restrict to single codex, eliminate soup entirely (can still have allies in narrative based games)

That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no one wants, and getting rid of the FOC was the best achievement of 7th. The FOC was a terrible system, may it rest forever.

"I disagree, every time you increase the CP for battleforged, you decrease the value of taking battalions and brigades."
A very simple problem to address. You just incentive's the battalion and brigade differently...like say - making non brigade and battalions cost CP.

Kdash wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:
I don't think BFS is a good meta-litmus test.


Knights were still half the lists at the event and with the FAQ out just 6 days or so before the event, most people simply took the lists they planned for anyhow. Sean Nayden's been playing is Avatar/Wyches list for ever.

Most (non-Knight) lists in the top were very much anti-Knight lists designed to beat Knights as much as possible in the pre-FAQ Knight-meta, (lots of Haywire, no juicy targets for Volcano Lances, shooting denial, lots of cc to clear Catachan Brigades, etc..) and just happened to potentially get a slightly easier ride because Knights got a dampener.

We'll have to wait and see how this shakes out when there's both less Knights around and thus perhaps less turkey-shooting for dedicated anti-Knight-meta-lists.

I 100% agree, the BFS event should not be used as an indication of any FAQ meta changes. This is simply because list submission had a deadline of the 29th, just 1 day after the FAQ was released.

In addition to this, after looking over their event pack, their format is… Different. After 3 games they split everyone into groups of 8, with only the top 8 armies in a position to win the event. They ran a 90-man event, which means that there was a potential of 11 people with 3 max point wins or a real close set of scores between those 11 players. 3 of those players never even got a chance to then compete and it means that it is impossible to tell, with their top 16 rankings who got their positions due to bracket splitting. (we also don’t know if the top 16 is just everyone in the top 2 brackets after day 1, or, everyone placed according to their total score over the 6 games).
Usually you’d see a lot more movement in who places where, as someone who went L-W-W-W will be on roughly the same points as those 4-7 players that go W-W-W-L, but, those in the first group essentially have a lower SoS and are more likely to win their day 2 games than those in the top bracket.
This is also further proven, that the person that technically won the event overall (highest competitive and appearance score combined) didn’t even make the top 16 in terms of competitive scores. (that or it just indicates that a lot more weight was put in the appearance score than the actual gaming score).

I’ll be more interested in the results coming from standard large-scale events happening in the last 2 weeks of October and beyond. It is from them, that we can begin to monitor new trends.

Quick follow up.

Had a brief discussion with someone who went to the event and finished 9th, over on the 40k competitive reddit. Apparently, if you finished day 1 in the top 16, you finished the event... in the top 16 regardless of your scores. This essentially means that 1 player in the event (if running swiss) will end either on a 2-4 record or 2 will finish on 3-3, but, because they were in the top 16 after day 1, they "beat" the 43 other players that have better win records than them.

Apparently auto bracketing day 2 (like they do for day 3 of the LVO to determine and overall winner) is "pretty standard". I've personally never ever been in an event that did this, and i've played at this years LGT and other events with 80-120 players in them, so the concept seems... Off to me. Is this kinda thing standard in the US?

Due to these reasons i 100% definitely can't agree with using this result as an indicator of the post faq meta.

Tyel wrote:
I'm up for completely eliminating allies.

I think taking the route that WoTC took with Magic: The Gathering and having separate formats is the way to go, so you can go all the way from traditional 'open, limited only by points and FOC' play to fixed lists, and stuff in between like "all models from a single army book" or "only one detachment allowed" or "highlander" whatever little restrictions TOs think might make things different and interesting.

Its a US thing, they feel the need for an actual finals where the winner of the event is guaranteed to happen.

Spoletta wrote:

I disagree, every time you increase the CP for battleforged, you decrease the value of taking battalions and brigades. The CP system exists exactly to encourage the use of those 2 detachments, CPs are not free resources that anyone should get access to, they are rewards for bringing an organic army.

They already provided more CP than other detachments, no need to make them effectively mandatory. All the old rules that changed certain units' role to troops were removed in 8th. The justification was that you could still use vanguard outrider detachments to run such armies. But in practice you can't. The CP advantage in favour of battalion or brigade based armies is just too great.

Eliminating allies is something that no one wants,

Unfortunately a lot of people want exactly that.


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Tyel wrote:
I'm up for completely eliminating allies.

I'm up for completely eliminating whatever army you happen to play.

 Ordana wrote:
Its a US thing, they feel the need for an actual finals where the winner of the event is guaranteed to happen.

Sounds like a poor attempt at a playoff to me.

The real way to do it is win or go home starting at round 1 IMO. Also known as - single elimination.

Then for those who lose - you have a random team tournament for SNG's so everyone gets to have fun. You can even have a prise pool for that if you want.

Why would this be better? Well as rounds go on competition gets harder...this is the main reason. Plus the finals games are going to be nothing but the best players and armies...you don't end up with a gak show like this above.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Ordana wrote:
Its a US thing, they feel the need for an actual finals where the winner of the event is guaranteed to happen.

Sounds like a poor attempt at a playoff to me.

The real way to do it is win or go home starting at round 1 IMO. Also known as - single elimination.

Then for those who lose - you have a random team tournament for SNG's so everyone gets to have fun. You can even have a prise pool for that if you want.

Why would this be better? Well as rounds go on competition gets harder...this is the main reason. Plus the finals games are going to be nothing but the best players and armies...you don't end up with a gak show like this above.

Also, looking at this event with a top 16 over 3 games... If there are no draws you'll pretty much always end up with 2 people on 6-0 records lol. So not sure how it all works.

Swiss pairing means rounds get harder anyway.
Single elimination isnt used because people are not going to pay for entry and travel for it

 Ordana wrote:
Swiss pairing means rounds get harder anyway.
Single elimination isnt used because people are not going to pay for entry and travel for it

I agree, and with the winners playing the winners each round anyway, you automatically work towards a winner anyway. Plus, after 5 or 6 games secondary points add up and matter more as well giving us an overall ranking. Otherwise, there is literally no point in noting down seconday points and you might as well just class a win as a win.

 Nurglitch wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I'm up for completely eliminating allies.

I think taking the route that WoTC took with Magic: The Gathering and having separate formats is the way to go, so you can go all the way from traditional 'open, limited only by points and FOC' play to fixed lists, and stuff in between like "all models from a single army book" or "only one detachment allowed" or "highlander" whatever little restrictions TOs think might make things different and interesting.

Its an option - but unlikely. GW will want "Matched play" to be what they balance for - and they will amend points and rules with that in mind. There will always be a "if you want to play different to matched play, knock yourself out, they are your models".

I suspect TOs will lead and GW may or may not follow depending on public outcry. In the UK there does seem to be growing moves to restrict allies - I don't know about elsewhere.

Spoletta wrote:
That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no Imperium player wants

Fixed that for you.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no Imperium player wants

Fixed that for you.

And chaos and eldar players and tyranid players after the GSC codex. So 90-95% of the player base. No big deal.

Allies should not be eliminated. This is ridiculous.

There is a middle ground between "MONO ONLY LULZ" and "SOUP 4 LYF LULZ"

Remove access to the universal stratagems for soup armies. That way if you choose to ally in another army you are losing out on a set of stratagems to gain another set. That's a buff to mono armies and a nerf to soup armies. There, problem solved, everyone can go home.

Primortus wrote:
Remove access to the universal stratagems for soup armies. That way if you choose to ally in another army you are losing out on a set of stratagems to gain another set. That's a buff to mono armies and a nerf to soup armies. There, problem solved, everyone can go home.

This isn't enough I don't think. The universal stratagems are hardly as powerful as codex specific stratagems.

Lock stratagems to the warlord's faction only apart from the generic ones. Perhaps there is a stratagem for 1 or 2 extra CP that allows you to use a stratagem of an allied unit not part of your warlord's faction. Once per game.

That's a horrible change. The problem isn't access to stratagems, it's access to free stratagems because of undercosted infantry & HQs.

I disagree, there is no 'cost' to accessing stratagems in soup lists. Which is one of the reasons soup is flat better than non-soup. You get more than just the most efficient units for a spread of armies, you also get access to all their funky stratagems that can make or break a game.

The cost of command points is in the cost of the units producing them.

Soup is not the boogie man you're making it out to be, it's just the Loyal32 and Ynnari that are problematic.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no Imperium player wants

Fixed that for you.

You forgot Chaos players too.

 Marmatag wrote:
The cost of command points is in the cost of the units producing them.

Soup is not the boogie man you're making it out to be, it's just the Loyal32 and Ynnari that are problematic.

But GW does not nerf eldar to be bad, and it doesn't look as if they could make the IG generate less CP, without either changing the CP mechanic from ground up or making the whole IG army unplayable.

So boogy man or not, the problem is there.

 Marmatag wrote:
The cost of command points is in the cost of the units producing them.

Soup is not the boogie man you're making it out to be, it's just the Loyal32 and Ynnari that are problematic.

Two identical lists, one with access to more stratagems is by definition better than one without.

Not to mention soup lists are made of the best units in the best books

 An Actual Englishman wrote:
I disagree, there is no 'cost' to accessing stratagems in soup lists. Which is one of the reasons soup is flat better than non-soup. You get more than just the most efficient units for a spread of armies, you also get access to all their funky stratagems that can make or break a game.

There is cost, the points used for the allied detachment.

This free strategy thing is basically misconception. Many stratagems are really tied to the units in addition of factions. There are ten stratagems (not counting chapter specific ones) in the marine codex which my current marine army cannot use, as the associated units do not exist in my army. And sure enough, I could use points to take those units (had I models for them) and gain access to these stratagems. Or I could use those points for allied Ad Mech units and get access to some Ad Mech stratagems. Seems pretty fair to me. The system is designed so, that whichever units you bring, you get some stratagems to use on them.

Well maybe for marines it is fair, but Inari can double dip on their stratagems. And other armies just take ally for the CP to fuel stuff.. If someone needs 4CP, for a dead knight to stand up and they will pick the option that gives the CP cheapest, and if it happens to be outside of their codex, which it is most often the case, they will have to take the ally option.

Karol wrote:
Well maybe for marines it is fair, but Inari can double dip on their stratagems. And other armies just take ally for the CP to fuel stuff.. If someone needs 4CP, for a dead knight to stand up and they will pick the option that gives the CP cheapest, and if it happens to be outside of their codex, which it is most often the case, they will have to take the ally option.

This is only a problem because the troop unit that happens to be best at generating CP is also a really superb unit otherwise. This should not be the case. Troops that are bad at generating CP should be better otherwise, so you you'd have to choose whether you rather have better troops or more CP. (Or of course the middle option, a mix of good and not so good troops and moderate amount of CP.)

Karol wrote:
Well maybe for marines it is fair, but Inari can double dip on their stratagems. And other armies just take ally for the CP to fuel stuff.. If someone needs 4CP, for a dead knight to stand up and they will pick the option that gives the CP cheapest, and if it happens to be outside of their codex, which it is most often the case, they will have to take the ally option.

Ynnari don't really have stratagems, so not sure what you mean by "double dipping," and it's not like they earn CP twice.

But back to the point - Xenos factions (Orks, Eldar, Tau, Tyranids) have troops cheaper than 21 points per model. Grey Knights, for example, must pay 21 points per model for troops. That isn't balanced. Soup remedies that.

Anyway, "I play Orks and therefore soup is bad" is kind of a lame stance anyway. Soup is better for the game in a lot of ways. Without it, you'd see essentially Xenos and Guard running around, and that's it.

 Marmatag wrote:

Karol wrote:
Well maybe for marines it is fair, but Inari can double dip on their stratagems. And other armies just take ally for the CP to fuel stuff.. If someone needs 4CP, for a dead knight to stand up and they will pick the option that gives the CP cheapest, and if it happens to be outside of their codex, which it is most often the case, they will have to take the ally option.

Ynnari don't really have stratagems, so not sure what you mean by "double dipping," and it's not like they earn CP twice.

But back to the point - Xenos factions (Orks, Eldar, Tau, Tyranids) have troops cheaper than 21 points per model. Grey Knights, for example, must pay 21 points per model for troops. That isn't balanced. Soup remedies that.

Anyway, "I play Orks and therefore soup is bad" is kind of a lame stance anyway. Soup is better for the game in a lot of ways. Without it, you'd see essentially Xenos and Guard running around, and that's it.

they can soul burst, use stratagems on inari units from other codex. That is what I call double dipping. It would be like my GK by taking a BA detachment suddenly could use BA stratagems on my NDKGM.


soup for GK doesn't balance anything. The only thing it does is make the GK player want to take as few or no GK units. That is something I do not consider fixing. stuff. Now inari using a craft world eldar stratagem on their s spears, is a buff. For GK, what am I suppose to with ally. They are either so superior to anything GK get that it is stupid to take GK stuff, or they stuff like protect stuff as chaff, only GK don't have stuff worth protecting, in fact the chaff is more resilient on a model to point basis then the GK themselfs. More CP from IG, even pre FAQ? great, what do I spend those on, GK have maybe one good stratagem and it procs on characters that just died. etc


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 Crimson wrote:

Karol wrote:
Well maybe for marines it is fair, but Inari can double dip on their stratagems. And other armies just take ally for the CP to fuel stuff.. If someone needs 4CP, for a dead knight to stand up and they will pick the option that gives the CP cheapest, and if it happens to be outside of their codex, which it is most often the case, they will have to take the ally option.

This is only a problem because the troop unit that happens to be best at generating CP is also a really superb unit otherwise. This should not be the case. Troops that are bad at generating CP should be better otherwise, so you you'd have to choose whether you rather have better troops or more CP. (Or of course the middle option, a mix of good and not so good troops and moderate amount of CP.)

Well I don't think the problem, or real problem is that something is too good or bad, but how GW fixs stuff. They don't seem to buff up stuff to make bad stuff worth taking, they nerf stuff and kill it. Or it is eldar and they pretend to change something, and eldar players have a good laugh.

I don't have a long history playing GW games, but imo 2 FAQs and one CA is enough to see a trend, specialy when codex updates are added to it. I don't know what it takes for GW to make a bad army good, other then some die hard fan getting his hands on the design proces or the bad stuff having the option to ally in to eldar. I bet the corsairs from FW can be made good, if GW decide they want it so.

Karol wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Something I've seen crop up in one of the podcasts I listen to while painting or doing other hobby stuff proposed an interesting idea: some of the reason this is the "soft touch" FAQ compared to the Spring FAQ is because CA has a lot of the rest of the changes that were already planned. This FAQ is basically everything CA didn't already include (points bumps, possible rule changes to army tactics that give a -1 to hit being a cover save instead, ect).

And considering what GW has shown us so far this edition, I'm inclined to buy in on this claim. I mean CA would have gone to print before the FAQ was even started in Sep to be ready to go by December and considering how much railing on about some of this stuff we've been doing and how ear-to -the-ground GW is trying to be, it's possible that we may be seeing more changes coming in CA as well.

back before the first CA came out, GK player were told the same, that their FAQ is the way it is, because the real changes to costs and rules are going to happen in CA. That did not happen. But who knows maybe the new CA is going to be a 400pages book.

Hey, I never claim to know anything. I was just sharing what little I've heard as it is a reasonable explination for some of the things we've seen.

And the biggest thing GK need is a points drop (which is definitely CA territory), followed by all Astartes keyword models getting a toughness buff of some kind to justify being so dang expensive.


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 Arachnofiend wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
That is really bad IMHO. Eliminating allies is something that no Imperium player wants

Fixed that for you.

Funny how my Imperial Fists are ally free but I'm waffling on putting Guard into my GSC (mainly for the ranged knight cracking options). Man those darn Imperial faction armies and their desire for allies, am I right?

We need to get over it already, GW ... Will .. Never ... kill .. allies!

and rightly so.

I say this as a Necrons player with about as many options as a quantum one sided coin.

But this said, the imbalance should be addressed.

whether by giving the pure factions (Orks, Necrons, T'au) or anyone that chooses to play a mono faction or minimal allies (one extra detachment) a benefit of some kind.

My option would be 3CP battleforged for Every detachment that matches the warlords codex faction.

-3CP for every allied detachment (on top of the usual benefit it adds ... so a Brigade would add 12 -3 = 9 CP)

so you could take 3 detaches, and it would zero sum out .. or pay a fortune to take your IK/BA/IG or DE/HQ/CWE combos.

 Marmatag wrote:
Allies should not be eliminated. This is ridiculous.

There is a middle ground between "MONO ONLY LULZ" and "SOUP 4 LYF LULZ"

Guess it depends on how much unbalance you want. Any allies will lead to imbalance(that or allies are so lol bad nobody wants to take them) so it's matter of how much imbalance you are willing to deliberately inject into the game.

Reanimation_Protocol wrote:
We need to get over it already, GW ... Will .. Never ... kill .. allies!

and rightly so.

I say this as a Necrons player with about as many options as a quantum one sided coin.

But this said, the imbalance should be addressed.

whether by giving the pure factions (Orks, Necrons, T'au) or anyone that chooses to play a mono faction or minimal allies (one extra detachment) a benefit of some kind.

My option would be 3CP battleforged for Every detachment that matches the warlords codex faction.

-3CP for every allied detachment (on top of the usual benefit it adds ... so a Brigade would add 12 -3 = 9 CP)

so you could take 3 detaches, and it would zero sum out .. or pay a fortune to take your IK/BA/IG or DE/HQ/CWE combos.

I feel like just one of those would do because a difference of up to 18 CP between a soup player and a strong mono codex player would be a bit ridiculous.

 kastelen wrote:

I feel like just one of those would do because a difference of up to 18 CP between a soup player and a strong mono codex player would be a bit ridiculous.

true yes

mono player 3 detach :
BF 3
Battalion 5
Outrider 1 +3
Van 1 +3

16 CP total

Allied detach...
BF 3
Battalion 5 (Warlord faction)
Outrider 1 (Faction 2)
Van 1 (Faction 3)

10 CP total

Allied detach +1
BF 3
Battalion 5 (Warlord faction)
Outrider 1 (Warlord faction) +3
Van 1 (Faction 2)

13 CP total

cheap guard Brigade would still offer a huge amount but the mono player would be able to keep up at least.

and I don't think it kills Eldar for Vect etc. which now doesn't overly punish factions like Necrons that have expensive Battalions and low amount of CP currently

Any particular formations you can think would be utterly broken by this ?

Guard for example are already able to get 20+ CP ... more than they can use .. 6 more would not break them

Off the top of my head probably knights and any other CP reliant army along with DE because of their already good multi detachment CP gain.

Why are we adding additional convoluted rules to fix a bad fix rather than just starting over again.

Take battalions brigades back to old school CP levels.
Make battal forged be 6 or 9 CP.

No need for knight CP rules, drukari CP rules and now everyone else getting overly complicated CP rules just to stop people sliding in cheap formations of Guard.

The 32 are a lot less appealing at 3CP and even more so at 5ppm.

Ice_can wrote:
Why are we adding additional convoluted rules to fix a bad fix rather than just starting over again.

Take battalions brigades back to old school CP levels.
Make battal forged be 6 or 9 CP.

No need for knight CP rules, drukari CP rules and now everyone else getting overly complicated CP rules just to stop people sliding in cheap formations of Guard.

The 32 are a lot less appealing at 3CP and even more so at 5ppm.

Yep, this.

Ice_can wrote:
Why are we adding additional convoluted rules to fix a bad fix rather than just starting over again.

Take battalions brigades back to old school CP levels.
Make battal forged be 6 or 9 CP.

No need for knight CP rules, drukari CP rules and now everyone else getting overly complicated CP rules just to stop people sliding in cheap formations of Guard.

The 32 are a lot less appealing at 3CP and even more so at 5ppm.

Wouldn't it simplify things if CP was based off points versus detachments?

If you get down to it, when balancing the game, its got to be simpler to do that if everyone was in the same ball park of CP over something where you can end up with extremes. IK are basically maxed mono build at 9 CP, and guard can show with 20 without working hard at it.

If there is something where some armies are suppose to have more CP, build it into them if they are mono build. Example:

If your playing 2K you get 10 CP. If your playing Mono faction marine you get 3 more points for battle forged. If your playing Mono faction Guard you get +6 CP points for battle forged. If your playing soup, you get 1 CP for battle forged to recognize the confusion of forces that haven't worked together as much.

My person opinion is the game is best balanced when your have between 10-15 CP per side in a 2K game.

If you are going to change the CP for battalions and brigades, I’d just go 4/10 respectively. I think with a lot of releases now, going back to the 3CP for a battalion is pretty restrictive, but, yes, 5CP for 180-250 points is a bit much. Brigade wise, has to be worth more than 2 battalions, but only just imo. 2 battalions and a spearhead etc should match a brigade imo, so I’d also advocate an increase in the spearhead/vanguard/outrider detachments from 1CP to 2CP to further aid those elite style armies, like pure Ravenwing DA etc etc.

CP for points, I’m still not sold on. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to start with 1-6 extra CP with my pure Knight army at 2k, and I’m sure a DA Wing player would love to triple their starting CP from 4 to potentially 15, but, that to me feels… Too much.

Kdash wrote:
If you are going to change the CP for battalions and brigades, I’d just go 4/10 respectively. I think with a lot of releases now, going back to the 3CP for a battalion is pretty restrictive, but, yes, 5CP for 180-250 points is a bit much. Brigade wise, has to be worth more than 2 battalions, but only just imo. 2 battalions and a spearhead etc should match a brigade imo, so I’d also advocate an increase in the spearhead/vanguard/outrider detachments from 1CP to 2CP to further aid those elite style armies, like pure Ravenwing DA etc etc.

CP for points, I’m still not sold on. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to start with 1-6 extra CP with my pure Knight army at 2k, and I’m sure a DA Wing player would love to triple their starting CP from 4 to potentially 15, but, that to me feels… Too much.

If More CP is needed make battle forged CP scale with points 3 CP per 1000 points.

In the current system double battalion list rocks 13CP(5+5+3)
Under the system I suggested that list has 12 CP ( 3+3+6)
Not really seeing the need to make battalions 4CP

The idea that is to get away from cheap detachments being auto include for their CP, i genuinely don't believe that it's helped the issue GW thinks it does.
the brigade structure should not have been included in a game the scale of 40k.

Kdash wrote:
If you are going to change the CP for battalions and brigades, I’d just go 4/10 respectively. I think with a lot of releases now, going back to the 3CP for a battalion is pretty restrictive, but, yes, 5CP for 180-250 points is a bit much. Brigade wise, has to be worth more than 2 battalions, but only just imo. 2 battalions and a spearhead etc should match a brigade imo, so I’d also advocate an increase in the spearhead/vanguard/outrider detachments from 1CP to 2CP to further aid those elite style armies, like pure Ravenwing DA etc etc.

CP for points, I’m still not sold on. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to start with 1-6 extra CP with my pure Knight army at 2k, and I’m sure a DA Wing player would love to triple their starting CP from 4 to potentially 15, but, that to me feels… Too much.

The CP issue has 3 parts. CP amount. CP Regen, and Stratagem effectiveness. GW cleared the CP regen fairly, and showed that they are very willing to change CP cost for Stratagems.

Hopefully they do something about the CP amount. While I would pin that to Game size, I'm sure other things could be used.

Ice_can wrote:

Kdash wrote:
If you are going to change the CP for battalions and brigades, I’d just go 4/10 respectively. I think with a lot of releases now, going back to the 3CP for a battalion is pretty restrictive, but, yes, 5CP for 180-250 points is a bit much. Brigade wise, has to be worth more than 2 battalions, but only just imo. 2 battalions and a spearhead etc should match a brigade imo, so I’d also advocate an increase in the spearhead/vanguard/outrider detachments from 1CP to 2CP to further aid those elite style armies, like pure Ravenwing DA etc etc.

CP for points, I’m still not sold on. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to start with 1-6 extra CP with my pure Knight army at 2k, and I’m sure a DA Wing player would love to triple their starting CP from 4 to potentially 15, but, that to me feels… Too much.

If More CP is needed make battle forged CP scale with points 3 CP per 1000 points.

In the current system double battalion list rocks 13CP(5+5+3)
Under the system I suggested that list has 12 CP ( 3+3+6)
Not really seeing the need to make battalions 4CP

The idea that is to get away from cheap detachments being auto include for their CP, i genuinely don't believe that it's helped the issue GW thinks it does.
the brigade structure should not have been included in a game the scale of 40k.

Oh, I didn’t realise you were also discussing the potential of upping the battleforged bonus as well, when reverting back to 3CP for battalions.

It’s an option that I like as a starting point. To be fair, most of the CP levels between your suggestion and mine would equal out the same, the only difference being when we start looking at any option including a brigade, where my system awards 1 less CP than yours does, or where your system awards 2CP more for single Vanguard/Outrider/Spearhead detachments than mine does.

Any changes to the CP for each detachment type has massive repercussions at both ends of the Points cost scale but that assumes that armies are costed properly.

and where they are already not (Just to use Necrons as an example but feel free to look at GK, Marines or any other low-mid tier army instead) it really stuffs them up.

so under the above changes Crons would end up with 2 crappy battalions and less CP than they currently get.

so yeah you might catch the polar extremes of cheap guard etc. for 2 less CP (boo hoo) ... you really affect other forces badly.

and it still does not even touch allied forces. in fact giving them more CP somehow?

I would change the rule to

Battleforged - For every detachment that has the same faction (not Imperial, Chaos etc.) as the Warlords faction your army gains +3 CP

so you play 1000 points and take a battalion you get 5+3 = 8CP
you play 2000 points and scrape to 2 battalions (Mono) 5+3 +5 +3 =16 CP

you play 2000 points and take a mixed army of two battalions = 5+5 +3 = 13 CP

'Soup' (allies) still works but mono faction gets a mild boost to compete.


--- complete overhauls to the system have wild and varying effects ... we need a surgical precise fix here.. not a hatchett job.

Reanimation_Protocol wrote:
Battleforged - For every detachment that has the same faction (not Imperial, Chaos etc.) as the Warlords faction your army gains +3 CP

Really like this suggestion. Would be simple to implement, and gives a nice CP buff for not taking allies that would narrow the CP gap without swinging things too far in the opposite direction.

Reanimation_Protocol wrote:
Any changes to the CP for each detachment type has massive repercussions at both ends of the Points cost scale but that assumes that armies are costed properly.

and where they are already not (Just to use Necrons as an example but feel free to look at GK, Marines or any other low-mid tier army instead) it really stuffs them up.

so under the above changes Crons would end up with 2 crappy battalions and less CP than they currently get.

so yeah you might catch the polar extremes of cheap guard etc. for 2 less CP (boo hoo) ... you really affect other forces badly.

and it still does not even touch allied forces. in fact giving them more CP somehow?

I would change the rule to

Battleforged - For every detachment that has the same faction (not Imperial, Chaos etc.) as the Warlords faction your army gains +3 CP

so you play 1000 points and take a battalion you get 5+3 = 8CP
you play 2000 points and scrape to 2 battalions (Mono) 5+3 +5 +3 =16 CP

you play 2000 points and take a mixed army of two battalions = 5+5 +3 = 13 CP

'Soup' (allies) still works but mono faction gets a mild boost to compete.


--- complete overhauls to the system have wild and varying effects ... we need a surgical precise fix here.. not a hatchett job.

I disagreeas your trying to mildly fix a system thats already contains a fix that doesn't work.

How do Necrons end up with less CP?

Taking 1 battalion plus and specialist detachments currrently gives 5 +1 +3 for 9 CP total
My suggestion would give them 3+1+6 for 10 CP so your necrons would actually gain a CP.

The idea is to stop forcing people into double battalion or brigades just for workable amounts of CP.
Even a tripple outrider raven wing list works with 9 CP under what I'm proposing instead of it's current 6

Whiile the old IG/BA/IK list goes from its current 21 CP insanity down to 9(not got a book to check old CP for a battalion) +3 +0+6 for a total of 18 thats still higher than I would like but my original idea was a bit more refined in that the bonus CP was only for mono.
Soup takes a small nerf thats a huge cut while actually leaving mono builds that can't spam relatively untouched was My idea.

Ice_can wrote:

I disagreeas your trying to mildly fix a system thats already contains a fix that doesn't work.

How do Necrons end up with less CP?

Taking 1 battalion plus and specialist detachments currrently gives 5 +1 +3 for 9 CP total
My suggestion would give them 3+1+6 for 10 CP so your necrons would actually gain a CP.

And I'm saying that is not enough of a benefit to mono factions to encourage them up the charts.

1 extra CP for not selling my crons and buying a knight and some guard to be able to win a game once in a while

Yes I play in a Semi competitive meta, like a LOT of folks I would imagine here on Dakka, I like to win once in a while .. and we dislike houseruling out certain things,

Just like in 7th Decurion got a blanket Ban in a lot of places ... I don't think that's fair to do the same to Imperial players that have invested in the hobby buying knights and painting their models.

I'm not after punishing them by saying yeah you can play .. but you only get 6 CP

I want them to Enjoy the game as much as I would ... changes to Benefit mono factions to give them access to the tools to deal at the same level.

Not Nerf the ever loving crap outta them

 ikeulhu wrote:

Reanimation_Protocol wrote:
Battleforged - For every detachment that has the same faction (not Imperial, Chaos etc.) as the Warlords faction your army gains +3 CP

Really like this suggestion. Would be simple to implement, and gives a nice CP buff for not taking allies that would narrow the CP gap without swinging things too far in the opposite direction.

I must be missing how this would work. Two Guard Battalions with a Grand Strategist Warlord adds an additional 6 CP on top of the 10 from the Batts?

The argument is over what is a "workable amount of CP."

People don't chase CP just for the sake of it. You can build a Necron Brigade if you want to. Its just highly restrictive and means bringing a lot of "bad" options - and its not as if there are bags of stratagems you want to spam every turn anyway.

By contrast Guard can produce cheap (ish) brigades and dirt cheap battalions composed of useful units. You then slot in something like a Knight which has very expensive but powerful stratagems. Suddenly you get to have your cake and eat it to.

Knights don't "need" 20 (or say 30+ pre-faq) CP to function. They are just a lot better for it because their stratagems were designed (if they were designed at all and not just thrown down) with the idea that you wouldn't get to use many of them.

But this isn't just about Guard. You get Eldar or Chaos soup - which isn't as obviously about harvesting CPs. Instead its just about putting a lot of powerful abilities together to generate something greater than the sum of its parts. How do you solve that? Say Doom etc just doesn't work with DE or Harlie units?

Probably would be best to revert Battalion and Brigades to their original CP values if the +3 per detachment matching warlord idea was implemented. That would reduce the effectiveness of bringing two guard bats + an ally detachment, which could potentially be a concern otherwise, as pointed out by Lemondish.

Okay Soup & 8th; I’m gonna be that guy and say I am happy with 8th Allies setup. And furthermore something to say about the Gaurdsman Battery, is 180 points for an average of 9CP post changes. Or 20 points a CP. What does this cost you?

The equivalent points of 2 MSU PlasmaGun Tactical teams. Now let’s look at that famous 3++ Analysis of Gaurdsman > Tacticals? To save the math, the point is that a Gaurdsman cause wounds more efficiency per point spent than the Tactical equivalents.

That isn’t false, but neither is it true. Better put, 30 Gaurdsman (120) cause around 1.2-1.5 wounds to MeQ to an MeQ Tactical Squads (130) causing 1.1.-1.2 wounds. More efficient? Let’s look at the issue a second way. On a 6 by 4 table with several units and vehicles of varying size. Try menuvauring those 30 Gaurdsman into a position to bring their guns to bear on a single target.

This is showcased in that if 30 Gaurdsman fight 10 Tacticals, 12” deployment and the models starting 24” apart. The Tacticals actually win. Why? Because only around 10-14 Gaurdsman can actually be in range. Or more accurately get in rapid range. While all 10 mans can. Secondly a single rapid volley actually kills a unit of gaursdman. 6-7 Gaurdsman die then 3 more die to battleshock.

But because the unit of 130 is only removing 40 points, while Gaurdsman squads of 40 points removing only 2/3 of a model in rapid. The efficient is that every 13 points removes 4 points or you have an efficiency less of just under 1/4. While the equivalent Gaurdsman Squad is 40 points to deal 1 wound. So spends 40 to remove 13 points. A ratio of just over 1/4. But we return to that issue. A the 3 Gaurdsman Squads in this scenerio removes only 3/10 of the the Marine Squads firepower while the Marine squads remove 1/3 (30% vs 33%). And additionally around half of the Gaurdsman models simply cannot get in rapid until turn 3. So it’s more like 1/5 or 20% of the Tactical Squads loss of effective firepower.

Now how does this play until the analysis of Gaurdsman? Well 30 Gaurdsman take 3 times the table space as 10 Marines. While that is normally seen as a good thing, it also means that those 30 Gaurdsman have issue bringing all their guns to bear against a single target.

Now back to the initial point, 180 points gives you 9CP on average 5-1+4-5ish more (assuming you get a CP back each turn). Those same 180 points as noted could also get 2 MSU Tacticals w/DblPlas, 1 10 Man Tactical w/DBlPlas&GravCannon*. A many of the various named Chapter Masters. 2 Temple Assasins and almost a Celestine. Or SmashHammer + Auxillary HQ.

Those 32 Gaurdsman unlike the units I listed above beside being warm bodies don’t do anything and are functionally worthlessness. For them to add to the game all 30 have to be within 12/24 of one unit or their lasguns bluntly are ineffective scratch damage (while if they act as one 30 man glorified blob it becomes effective scratch damage). And to do so you risk your CP generation. Meaning you want those warm bodies in front but not the models make said warm bodies useful.

All this together? Gaurdsman are costed accurately. Efficiency questions/issue ignore that while their wounds are per point spent more efficient than an MeQ equivalent. It ignores the fact the reality of in regards to actual number of the wounds caused. There is a difference between 3 squads taking one wound each and 1 Squad taking 3 wounds.

*Contrary to popular belief a 10 Man Tactical w/Plas&Plas and HvyWeapon (GravCannon&Lascannon) are not less efficient than 2 5 man. The GravCannon and Lascannon do the same net number of wounds as a two Plasmas. Secondly, for those who say “but moral”. If I inflict 4 wounds on one squad of 2 5 man, I am assured to kill a specialBro. In contrast a 10 man I need to kill 5-6 before I do so. And due to and they shall know no fear you need to kill 7 and even then it’s still a 20% chance to not fall the test on my end).

This is silly. Guard is obviously the problem child in imperium that enables funky shenanigans.

But remember, most Space Marine armies can't create a viable brigade in the first place.

You can't come up with a balance for soup that doesn't involve an adjustment of how cheap imperial guard is. There is always a way around any rule using guard.

Why not just give fixed number of CP to people based on the armies they play? Some would get more, some would get less. Some armies like orcs could get random numbers of CP. And then limit the ally to a procentage of points spent on the army.
Mono armies would get better, CP problems wouldn't exist, because GW could design stratagems for one army and not worry what happens, if someone runs IG farms. Ally could still be a thing for those people who would want to spend 10-20% of their points on them.

I'm just spit balling....fixed number of stratagems per turn?

+1 stratagem per turn for existing
+1 stratagem per turn if your warlord is also in your largest (point-wise) detachment (battalion/brigade only)

This doesn't really solve pointy eared factions (or maybe nothing at all), I think, but other changes (WC/points) can tackle that issue.

The current rules for stratagems work fine.

Guard are just undercosted.

Mono Army wise what I do is simply put
“for every faction keyword that is shared by every unit in the army, that army has an additional CP.” So an All RavenWing list would have +4CP, +1 for Imperium,1 for Adeptus Astartes, +1 for DA, +1 for RavenWing. This would could also be done, by replacing battleforged +3, you use this rule instead. Most Mono Armies would +2 or +3.

And is also cool is that implicitly supports armies that share a couple faction keywords that would otherwise go unnoticed (SoS having Astra Telepethica). Secondly it would help ‘flavor’ soup notably Chaos god allignment. The armies most hurt is Kroot/Vespid due to having 1 degree of shared keyword with other Tau. Likewise with Inquisition*.

*What I would like to happen there is for Tau to create another faction keyword, Tau Empire, (Species: Kroot/Tau/Vespid/Other), (Sept) or (Kindred) or Auxillary (Vespid/Other). And for the chamber militant to get (Ordos)

 Marmatag wrote:
The current rules for stratagems work fine.

Guard are just undercosted.

I guess if you ignore the fact that pretty much all tournament winning lists are Soup lists abusing allies and stratagems, be they Imperial, Xenos or Chaos, and by no means are all the Imperial lists using Guard

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The current rules for stratagems work fine.

Guard are just undercosted.

I guess if you ignore the fact that pretty much all tournament winning lists are Soup lists abusing allies and stratagems, be they Imperial, Xenos or Chaos, and by no means are all the Imperial lists using Guard

What Imperial lists don't use IG in the top end of tournaments?

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The current rules for stratagems work fine.

Guard are just undercosted.

I guess if you ignore the fact that pretty much all tournament winning lists are Soup lists abusing allies and stratagems, be they Imperial, Xenos or Chaos, and by no means are all the Imperial lists using Guard

Are we at the part where you pretend to know what happens at tournaments?

And don't conflate allies with stratagem use. They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
The current rules for stratagems work fine.

Guard are just undercosted.

I guess if you ignore the fact that pretty much all tournament winning lists are Soup lists abusing allies and stratagems, be they Imperial, Xenos or Chaos, and by no means are all the Imperial lists using Guard

What Imperial lists don't use IG in the top end of tournaments?

I think he's simply pointing out that we have come full circle. 9/10 if not 10/10 top lists at almost every tournament are soup based (obviously imperium soup usually contains guard, not always, just most of the time). He's simply pointing out that you're looking at the molehills and missing the mountains right next to them. While guard are a common ingredient in imperium soup the fact is that no factions that can not soup are really doing all to hot and all top lists are containing soup. So it might be a better idea to do something to curve soup instead of one unit in one faction soup that, if nuked, will simply be replaced by the next best option.

It's not a function of whether or not they can use soup, it's if they can functionally address super heavies.

If you don't have an answer to knights right now, or Primarchs, you won't have a seat at the table. Every other table has Knights on it, both Renegade / Imperium. And you won't have to look far to see Primarchs, as well.

Don't have an answer to these things?
You won't place.

And since all you guys look at are tournament results, it's going to give you the impression that "can't soup no chance." It's more "no answer to good invuln high toughness insane damage output no chance." Since Custodes dropped the meta has been curving hard towards elite armies.

Many armies have a way of playing 200-300 points Battalions, the problem isn't Guard alone. Nids can play Neurotropes+Rippers, Daemons can play Heralds+Brimstones, CSM can play cheap Chars+Cultists, and so on.

Atleast it's my opinion that not Soup is the problem, but being able to get a huge amount of CP for tiny Detachments. It's so damn good, everyone has to do it, and this feels wrong. No one is complaining about playing 1400 points guard with an allied Knight. People are complaining about 200 points guard, with X points this and Y points of that for maxing out CPs while still getting good units.

Hence my post earlier, make Detachments convert their points cost or power level into CP and not just a flat amount.
Or take the easier approach and just do what many people have called out: Make CP scale with the army size and both armies always get the same amount. 2000 points game? 15 CP each. Done.

Marmatag wrote:They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

Fair point, but even then, most Stratagem reliant lists aren't going to take a huge punch having to shave 30-60pts to keep their CP batteries if Guardsmen get bumped (and almost nobody is going to go in on thinking Guardsmen should be 6ppm, GW almost certainly wont). Some specific lists running lots of guardsmen may, but the fundamental value and functionality of the basic Battalion CP battery wont be hit too hard.

Marmatag wrote:It's not a function of whether or not they can use soup, it's if they can functionally address super heavies.

If you don't have an answer to knights right now, or Primarchs, you won't have a seat at the table. Every other table has Knights on it, both Renegade / Imperium. And you won't have to look far to see Primarchs, as well.

Without the glut of CP to feed the stratagems that make these so effective, it would appear to be much less of an issue. For all the moaning about Guard and Superheavies, we're not exactly seeing Baneblade companies doing much of anything.

And since all you guys look at are tournament results, it's going to give you the impression that "can't soup no chance." It's more "no answer to good invuln high toughness insane damage output no chance." Since Custodes dropped the meta has been curving hard towards elite armies.

I'd agree in many respects, but again, a lot of that capability is fueled by having tons of CPs and objective holders that wouldn't be there without Soup. How well do pure Custodes or a Mono-Knight list do on their own?

 Vaktathi wrote:

Marmatag wrote:They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

Fair point, but even then, most Stratagem reliant lists aren't going to take a huge punch having to shave 30-60pts to keep their CP batteries if Guardsmen get bumped (and almost nobody is going to go in on thinking Guardsmen should be 6ppm, GW almost certainly wont). Some specific lists running lots of guardsmen may, but the fundamental value and functionality of the basic Battalion CP battery wont be hit too hard.

If Guardsmen were appropriately costed, as well as mortar teams, Company Commanders, and Primaris Psykers, that would fundamentally alter the game in a positive way. If bringing a battalion of Guard was 300 points, like it should be (6 point guardsmen, 60 point company commanders), you would lose out on tougher knights (like the Crusader) or you wouldn't be bringing Helverins. It's a fundamentally significant change to lose out on 120 additional points.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Marmatag wrote:It's not a function of whether or not they can use soup, it's if they can functionally address super heavies.

If you don't have an answer to knights right now, or Primarchs, you won't have a seat at the table. Every other table has Knights on it, both Renegade / Imperium. And you won't have to look far to see Primarchs, as well.

Without the glut of CP to feed the stratagems that make these so effective, it would appear to be much less of an issue. For all the moaning about Guard and Superheavies, we're not exactly seeing Baneblade companies doing much of anything.

Again, you're looking at this specifically from the lens of imperium. Chaos knights don't need a ton of CP to be effective. Shadowswords are present in guard heavy lists and they do fantastic. You're not seeing it because you only look at the top 5 of a very well hyped GT. This idea that guard are struggling outside of allies is a narrative that exists only on dakka, where people only know what they can glean from a 10,000 foot view of the top 5 lists in a well known event.

 Vaktathi wrote:

And since all you guys look at are tournament results, it's going to give you the impression that "can't soup no chance." It's more "no answer to good invuln high toughness insane damage output no chance." Since Custodes dropped the meta has been curving hard towards elite armies.

I'd agree in many respects, but again, a lot of that capability is fueled by having tons of CPs and objective holders that wouldn't be there without Soup. How well do pure Custodes or a Mono-Knight list do on their own?

Again shift your thinking from Imperium. Many of the Imperium factions are simply not designed to be standalone. You are kind of proving the overall point: Custodes without allies would not be viable. The only no-allies imperium army that is viable is Imperial Guard. Everyone else falls completely flat on their face, against even Necrons and Tyranids.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Marmatag wrote:They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

Fair point, but even then, most Stratagem reliant lists aren't going to take a huge punch having to shave 30-60pts to keep their CP batteries if Guardsmen get bumped (and almost nobody is going to go in on thinking Guardsmen should be 6ppm, GW almost certainly wont). Some specific lists running lots of guardsmen may, but the fundamental value and functionality of the basic Battalion CP battery wont be hit too hard.

Marmatag wrote:It's not a function of whether or not they can use soup, it's if they can functionally address super heavies.

If you don't have an answer to knights right now, or Primarchs, you won't have a seat at the table. Every other table has Knights on it, both Renegade / Imperium. And you won't have to look far to see Primarchs, as well.

Without the glut of CP to feed the stratagems that make these so effective, it would appear to be much less of an issue. For all the moaning about Guard and Superheavies, we're not exactly seeing Baneblade companies doing much of anything.

And since all you guys look at are tournament results, it's going to give you the impression that "can't soup no chance." It's more "no answer to good invuln high toughness insane damage output no chance." Since Custodes dropped the meta has been curving hard towards elite armies.

I'd agree in many respects, but again, a lot of that capability is fueled by having tons of CPs and objective holders that wouldn't be there without Soup. How well do pure Custodes or a Mono-Knight list do on their own?

Baneblades dont have an invul save. Which is what makes Primarchs and Knights so hard to kill and invalidates the 'normal' way of killing LoW's, that dozen lascannons isn't going to cut it anymore.

Custodes are not nearly as CP hungry as people think, yes being able to Stooping dive repeatedly is insane but the army functions well enough without them. Knights are the same, in a world without Stratagems they will still be perfectly fine. Its just that Stratagems really push them over the top.
Castellan is good for its points at base level. Upping its output by 50% through a single stratagem makes it utterly bonkers.

I wonder how a tournament would play out if you just strait up banned stratagems from being used in any capacity....

I really don't think you can justify 6 point guardsmen unless you're also bumping the price on every other sub-marine infantry unit. Which, I mean, might be valid I guess. I dunno if Guardsmen and Cultists and Kabalites all being more expensive makes Immortals any better, and it might just deincentivize the use of troops in the first place (though I wouldn't bet on it considering how valuable battalions and brigades are).

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I really don't think you can justify 6 point guardsmen unless you're also bumping the price on every other sub-marine infantry unit. Which, I mean, might be valid I guess. I dunno if Guardsmen and Cultists and Kabalites all being more expensive makes Immortals any better, and it might just deincentivize the use of troops in the first place (though I wouldn't bet on it considering how valuable battalions and brigades are).

Hes not talking about it in the sense their stats are actually worth 6 points. Clearly an infantry is inferior to a khab. He's talking about in a soup sense their value is easily worth 6ppm due to command point regeneration. Ehh -I don't have any metric to say they are worth 6ppm. Realistically they probably are. GW does not seem to understand the value of taking up space and having the 1W stat. Plus they don't seem to put any value on being able to generate CP. YET - they designed the game so that cheaper HQ's and troops make CP at an astonishing rate compared to elite armies. Personally - I just don't think they thought that through and had very non competitive minds testing out the rules in the beginning. Now they think they are stuck with this busted system. This is a system in which YOU HAVE TO bring your cheapest battalion soup option in every army you play. Currently it's always going to be imperial guard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ordana wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Marmatag wrote:They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

Fair point, but even then, most Stratagem reliant lists aren't going to take a huge punch having to shave 30-60pts to keep their CP batteries if Guardsmen get bumped (and almost nobody is going to go in on thinking Guardsmen should be 6ppm, GW almost certainly wont). Some specific lists running lots of guardsmen may, but the fundamental value and functionality of the basic Battalion CP battery wont be hit too hard.

Marmatag wrote:It's not a function of whether or not they can use soup, it's if they can functionally address super heavies.

If you don't have an answer to knights right now, or Primarchs, you won't have a seat at the table. Every other table has Knights on it, both Renegade / Imperium. And you won't have to look far to see Primarchs, as well.

Without the glut of CP to feed the stratagems that make these so effective, it would appear to be much less of an issue. For all the moaning about Guard and Superheavies, we're not exactly seeing Baneblade companies doing much of anything.

And since all you guys look at are tournament results, it's going to give you the impression that "can't soup no chance." It's more "no answer to good invuln high toughness insane damage output no chance." Since Custodes dropped the meta has been curving hard towards elite armies.

I'd agree in many respects, but again, a lot of that capability is fueled by having tons of CPs and objective holders that wouldn't be there without Soup. How well do pure Custodes or a Mono-Knight list do on their own?

Baneblades dont have an invul save. Which is what makes Primarchs and Knights so hard to kill and invalidates the 'normal' way of killing LoW's, that dozen lascannons isn't going to cut it anymore.

Custodes are not nearly as CP hungry as people think, yes being able to Stooping dive repeatedly is insane but the army functions well enough without them. Knights are the same, in a world without Stratagems they will still be perfectly fine. Its just that Stratagems really push them over the top.
Castellan is good for its points at base level. Upping its output by 50% through a single stratagem makes it utterly bonkers.

I wonder how a tournament would play out if you just strait up banned stratagems from being used in any capacity....

I don't really have to wonder. IG and Ynnari would win every game. IK become garbage level with 5++ saves vs everything you shoot at them.

 Marmatag wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Marmatag wrote:They are two completely different aspects of this game. There are numerous examples of allies that work solely because of stratagem usage (Knights + Guard), and other examples wherein allies work even with no stratagem benefits (Morty + Magnus).

Fair point, but even then, most Stratagem reliant lists aren't going to take a huge punch having to shave 30-60pts to keep their CP batteries if Guardsmen get bumped (and almost nobody is going to go in on thinking Guardsmen should be 6ppm, GW almost certainly wont). Some specific lists running lots of guardsmen may, but the fundamental value and functionality of the basic Battalion CP battery wont be hit too hard.

If Guardsmen were appropriately costed, as well as mortar teams, Company Commanders, and Primaris Psykers, that would fundamentally alter the game in a positive way. If bringing a battalion of Guard was 300 points, like it should be (6 point guardsmen, 60 point company commanders), you would lose out on tougher knights (like the Crusader) or you wouldn't be bringing Helverins. It's a fundamentally significant change to lose out on 120 additional points.

That's a functionally 33% price hike on the most basic fundamental units of the codex. Yeah, you'd probably cut down on CP stuff then. You'd also hose actual Guard armies in tthe process however. No army has seen that kind of shift with GW balance changes, and I wouldn't expect to see such, and nobody thinks CC's are worth 60pts. There's lots of stuff I'd be fine with, I wouldn't cry if the GS and KA went away and CP regen with it, I wouldn't cry if some sort of Platoon structure were reintroduced, I wouldn't cry if Officers were rebound to Command Squads in some way, etc, but that's more than a wee bit far to address allies issues that fundamentally aren't inherently part of the army itself.

Again, you're looking at this specifically from the lens of imperium. Chaos knights don't need a ton of CP to be effective.

Have we seen Renegade Knights show as well as Imperial Knights? Honestly I can't comment on them specifically, though given that they also only have two inherent Stratagems, that may be more because they fundamentally can't rely on them as much.

Shadowswords are present in guard heavy lists and they do fantastic.

Usually singular and that usually just specifically Shadowswords however, and not really because of their inherent resiliency.

You're not seeing it because you only look at the top 5 of a very well hyped GT. This idea that guard are struggling outside of allies is a narrative that exists only on dakka, where people only know what they can glean from a 10,000 foot view of the top 5 lists in a well known event.

Not sure where you're getting this from, I didn't reference any one single event, nor did I make the assertion that Guard are struggling, the only point I made was that at a broad spectrum of events, it's Soup that dominates. That doesn't mean I'm arguing that Guard are struggling, it means that Soup is the dominant balance issue across all factions.

Again shift your thinking from Imperium. Many of the Imperium factions are simply not designed to be standalone. You are kind of proving the overall point: Custodes without allies would not be viable.

I used those as examples because those were the kinda of things you were pointing out were issues. These armies can be built and played on their own without allies. They're composed of very tough elite models with powerful Stratagems. But they cease to be dominating without the the supercharging CP battery and objective holders, they can have issues as mono-forces, but also aren't helpless.

 Ordana wrote:

Custodes are not nearly as CP hungry as people think, yes being able to Stooping dive repeatedly is insane but the army functions well enough without them. Knights are the same, in a world without Stratagems they will still be perfectly fine. Its just that Stratagems really push them over the top.
Castellan is good for its points at base level. Upping its output by 50% through a single stratagem makes it utterly bonkers.

That's kinda what I think, the turbocharging through stratagems by shared CP is what really makes them so scary.

I wonder how a tournament would play out if you just strait up banned stratagems from being used in any capacity....

I'd love to play one

So 37 pages in and still arguing. The impression I get is that if we put our hyperbole aside for a few minutes, we could probably agree on the following:

A) Guard got a very good codex this edition. In a mono-build only meta they're a top tier army, but probably not really broken.

B) There is probably an issue with CP hungry armies being able to take cheap CP battery detachments, just based on the number of different suggestions aimed at it. Imperium might not even be the worst offender, but it stands out the most because of the price difference between Guard and the rest of the Imperial factions.

C) Ignoring the CP question, a soup list has some advantages over a non-soup list just on being able to cover gaps in the primary faction's roster, and there should probably be some sort of disadvantage to counter that.

D) The gap between the top tier armies and the rest is probably bigger than it should be.

I'm going to go out on a limb a little bit and add one more:
E) Space Marines of almost all stripes are in a really sad state right now, excluding GMan crutches and Death Guard (who might as well not be SM at all for how different they are), and it's contributing to the perception that guard are broken since IG effortlessly curb-stomps vanilla Marines.

I don't claim to be adding anything terribly insightful, I just thought maybe a summary was in order.

Schlitzaf wrote:

That isn’t false, but neither is it true. Better put, 30 Gaurdsman (120) cause around 1.2-1.5 wounds to MeQ to an MeQ Tactical Squads (130) causing 1.1.-1.2 wounds. More efficient? Let’s look at the issue a second way. On a 6 by 4 table with several units and vehicles of varying size. Try menuvauring those 30 Gaurdsman into a position to bring their guns to bear on a single target.

Why do they need to be in range of the same exact target? They need to be in range of a similar target to meet that efficiency - not necessarily the exact same unit. This is a really weird, limited, and unrealistic way to compare efficiency...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ikeulhu wrote:
Probably would be best to revert Battalion and Brigades to their original CP values if the +3 per detachment matching warlord idea was implemented. That would reduce the effectiveness of bringing two guard bats + an ally detachment, which could potentially be a concern otherwise, as pointed out by Lemondish.

I don't think that would change anything except limit allies to a single detachment that you overload and use guard CP to boost. Guard with their cheap access to CP works great as a mono force only has cheap, low impact stratagems. When guard can fuel the elite stratagems, which are more impactful but in armies that can't effectively generate lots of CP, you get issues.

CP being detachment specific would remove that without killing allies. It would likewise reduce the impact of strong, elite stratagems being used regularly every turn. The battleforged CP goes to the Warlord's faction, and the battle brothers rules get used to denote who can share what CP. A force of two marine chapters can share, but not with knights or guard.

Lemondish practical battlefield applications that doing 1 wound to 3 different squads is far worse than doing 3 wounds to 1 squads. The latter makes you less likely to kill anything useful while the former means you actually achieve a rather significant effect against a squad in comparison.

It’s not to say gaurdsman aren’t efficient but ignoring the battlefield reality of concentration and projection/deployment of firepower would ignore the reality.

 Ordana wrote:

I wonder how a tournament would play out if you just strait up banned stratagems from being used in any capacity....

I'd be really interested in this!
Sounds like it could be fun, and a big change from the norm.

Schlitzaf wrote:
Lemondish practical battlefield applications that doing 1 wound to 3 different squads is far worse than doing 3 wounds to 1 squads. The latter makes you less likely to kill anything useful while the former means you actually achieve a rather significant effect against a squad in comparison.

It’s not to say gaurdsman aren’t efficient but ignoring the battlefield reality of concentration and projection/deployment of firepower would ignore the reality.

Let's not go crazy and suggest that the main role of either infantry squads or tactical squads is to murderize the enemy quickly. They're troops, for Emperor's sake - and this ain't Deathwatch.

By focusing on what either can kill, you've missed the mountain of other benefits that infantry squads bring for their points. I don't see the value in rehashing this for the 30th time in this thread again, though, so you do you.

Reemule wrote:

Wouldn't it simplify things if CP was based off points versus detachments?

If you get down to it, when balancing the game, its got to be simpler to do that if everyone was in the same ball park of CP over something where you can end up with extremes. IK are basically maxed mono build at 9 CP, and guard can show with 20 without working hard at it.

If there is something where some armies are suppose to have more CP, build it into them if they are mono build. Example:

If your playing 2K you get 10 CP. If your playing Mono faction marine you get 3 more points for battle forged. If your playing Mono faction Guard you get +6 CP points for battle forged. If your playing soup, you get 1 CP for battle forged to recognize the confusion of forces that haven't worked together as much.

My person opinion is the game is best balanced when your have between 10-15 CP per side in a 2K game.

You would need to rebalance strategems as well though. As it is for factions CP's are not worth the same.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I really don't think you can justify 6 point guardsmen unless you're also bumping the price on every other sub-marine infantry unit. Which, I mean, might be valid I guess. I dunno if Guardsmen and Cultists and Kabalites all being more expensive makes Immortals any better, and it might just deincentivize the use of troops in the first place (though I wouldn't bet on it considering how valuable battalions and brigades are).

How about pts stay as their are but become more expensive when used as allies

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I really don't think you can justify 6 point guardsmen unless you're also bumping the price on every other sub-marine infantry unit. Which, I mean, might be valid I guess. I dunno if Guardsmen and Cultists and Kabalites all being more expensive makes Immortals any better, and it might just deincentivize the use of troops in the first place (though I wouldn't bet on it considering how valuable battalions and brigades are).

How about pts stay as their are but become more expensive when used as allies

I mean I'd be fine with that but that's because I want allies to be dead.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Arachnofiend wrote:
I really don't think you can justify 6 point guardsmen unless you're also bumping the price on every other sub-marine infantry unit. Which, I mean, might be valid I guess. I dunno if Guardsmen and Cultists and Kabalites all being more expensive makes Immortals any better, and it might just deincentivize the use of troops in the first place (though I wouldn't bet on it considering how valuable battalions and brigades are).

How about pts stay as their are but become more expensive when used as allies

That's actually an interesting idea.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

I mean I'd be fine with that but that's because I want allies to be dead.

Why? honestly I'm interested.

IMO the imperium and chaos and Eldar have these loose alliances forged over millenia .. they should have access to the tools which come with those alliances.

as for the rest of us Xenos players, as the Imperium has a box full of tools for every job, Mono should have an adjustable 16lbs sledgehammer to be able to compete with those varied tools..


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 vipoid wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:


How about pts stay as their are but become more expensive when used as allies

That's actually an interesting idea.

either giving mono lists more free stuff (I hear ewww 7th formations) or taxing allies lists for points or CP is the honest Simplest solution.

but it boils down to book keeping.. and at a competitive level .. it's hard enough to keep track of who has free plasma pistols let alone who has paid their 'Allies tax' correctly