PenitentJake wrote:Do you not feel the
CP cost is an incentive?
Two patrols or a patrol + outrider/ vanguard/ spearhead will almost always be at a
CP deficit. Depending on game size, that isn't always a deal breaker, but it is always a disadvantage. Do you think the
CP penalty should be higher?
At least for my armies (
DG and Orks), I often want to have a fourth slot of something, or I don't want to bring three units of troops because they are expensive, boring and not great units. Spending 2 or 3
CP to skip bringing more troops is a good deal most of the time. With 9th there is no more need to maximize your
CPs for turn one, and you still have sufficient
CP for utility/defensive stratagems.
In incursion games (in combat patrol you have to take a patrol), battalions waste almost all of your points on the three mandatory troops and
HQs and never result in a decent army unless you have great troops and
HQs like drukhari or marines.
For strike force, a brigade only makes sense if you were planning to bring all of those slots anyways. However, many army themes tend to be lacking in at least one slot (no elite speed freeks, for example) or the units are too expensive to actually get that many into 2k points. Not having to pay
CP is not enough of an incentive to jump through all of the hoops to get all the mandatory troops.
I'm not sure what a good solution would be, combat patrols work well as they are but battalions and brigades just have too many mandatory slots and too few optional slots to be worth fielding. I wouldn't use
CP to fix this issue, but shift around the slots instead.
For example, if a battalion would unlock as many slots as an outrider+patrol would, that might be an incentive to actually bring 3 troops.
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vipoid wrote:Okay but we literally already have that problem in the form of the Rule of 3 (the fact that it's a blanket rule doesn't mean it's automatically appropriate for all factions and units) and, in a few cases, individual restrictions - e.g. for fliers, hive tyrants etc..
Those changes were added through iteration. The whitelist approach does not allow iteration, it needs to be implemented in one go.
I also don't think that the rule of 3 has caused any problems for the game so far.
I'm not sure if I got you right... are you suggesting to just drop the entire detachment structure and just have the Ro3 (+other limits)?
Jidmah wrote:Sure. But not only do we already have rules for that, said rules are entirely independent of the entire detachment system. Hence, I don't see why removing the detachment system would make one iota of difference here.
Ah, I understand. I thought you were implying that 0-1 for daemon princes would replace the current system as a whole. Yeah, that way is fine.
Jidmah wrote: In technical terms, a blacklist is easier to maintain than whitelist, though the whitelist will fail less often.
Perhaps, but if a company is going to charge ~£30 for its rules then it can damn well go to the trouble of doing the "difficult" route.
When I say difficult, it means that their process is more likely to fail and will cost additional resources. It does not mean that it's a task that can easily be overcome with a good result if you put some effort into it.
In other words, the whitelist approach is guaranteed to suck, since
GW can't and won't increase the resources allocated to writing rules.
In general, you can only justify the costs and effort of whitelist approaches if even a single failure would be catastrophic. This is not the case for
40k, if something goes south really badly they can just issue an emergency patch like they did for buggies.
Jidmah wrote: I think in this case addressing problems as they come up is the way to move forward, as it's nigh impossible to get things right on the first try.
You also can make decisions to limit things based on data, but you can't get data to support taking data off the "whitelist".
I'm not sure what you mean here. It seems you could easily change unit limits the same way you change unit costs, wargear costs and, as we've seen,
unit limits.
Currently, they can look at the data they and others like goonhammer collect, do surveys and read social media so pinpoint problems and address them. Because people are playing the game unlimited, the entire community is collecting data for them.
With the whitelist approach, there is no way to find out which units need less limits, so you can't know which limits should be increased and which shouldn't be.
To clarify, I'm not claiming that this would be a perfect system, just a much cleaner one. Yes, GW can (and probably would) feth it up but you could just as easily apply that argument to any and every rule change.
That is not true though - some processes are easier to feth up than others. Any process that requires you to "get it right" on the first try has high effort and high chances of failure attached to it. Multiple small steps are less likely to fail and easier to fix when they do fail.
It might also help us move away from the godawful Stratagem mindset that currently hangs over every aspect of 9th like a putrid stench. As the current system is literally how CPs are determined and the only penalty for taking multiple (or just "wrong") detachments is in how many CPs you get.
The current system is weighting troops and
HQ tax against
CP. While the amount of stratagems is too damn high, it's not a bad system in general.
If you would take away
CP as a balancing mechanism, what else would you put as counterweight to
HQ and troops tax? Points is kind of a bad idea, as wouldn't create decisions, but just basic math. Where you would always opt for the option which costs the least points.
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Amishprn86 wrote:Why should Marines get to combat squad their units and no one else? Bc different armies has some focus on different things. Just like
DE can take 9 Talos but only 3 Ravagers while
IG can take 9
LRBT, Wyvern's, and other tanks but only 3 Heavy weapon teams.
Why are scouts elite, but eliminators are heavy support?
Why are tank bustas with heavy weapons elite, but lootas with dakka weapons are heavy support?
Why are nobz with kombi shootas elite, but heavy support when they put on pirate hats?
Why are myphitic blight-haulers fast attack, but a helbrute elite and defilers heavy support when they all can have roughly the same guns?
Why are chaos spawn fast attack, but possessed are elite?
Why are assault intercessors troops, but assault marines are fast attack?
There is absolutely no logic or reason behind battle roles outside of some designer thinking "that sounds about right" when the codex was written.
That is the very definition of "arbitrary", and it's also the one big reasons why a
FOC wouldn't work.
