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

People are souping because it is more powerful then mono and because Elite armies lack bodies and CP they need to compete.

Removing soup just makes the strong codexes stronger and strangles the field of diversity. (even if that diversity is a dozen variants of X + IG)

Ordana wrote:
People are souping because it is more powerful then mono and because Elite armies lack bodies and CP they need to compete.

Removing soup just makes the strong codexes stronger and strangles the field of diversity. (even if that diversity is a dozen variants of X + IG)

Many of the suggestions of this thread are ways to soup up mono versus soup, for example, you can only use strategems from the main detachments codex (So if I have a battalion of BA + detachments of IG and SM, then I can only use BA strategems), or bolstering CP values for playing mono-armies (such as 2 bonus CP for no detachments).

Currently the field of diversity is IG + detachment allies, Innari weirdness, and spam-a-lamb Chaos when your at events... people just wanna see unique armies that are interesting to see and field, and not play against the next netdeck spamathon someone concocted... what are we, magic the gathering?

 Zid wrote:

Ordana wrote:
People are souping because it is more powerful then mono and because Elite armies lack bodies and CP they need to compete.

Removing soup just makes the strong codexes stronger and strangles the field of diversity. (even if that diversity is a dozen variants of X + IG)

Many of the suggestions of this thread are ways to soup up mono versus soup, for example, you can only use strategems from the main detachments codex (So if I have a battalion of BA + detachments of IG and SM, then I can only use BA strategems), or bolstering CP values for playing mono-armies (such as 2 bonus CP for no detachments).

Currently the field of diversity is IG + detachment allies, Innari weirdness, and spam-a-lamb Chaos when your at events... people just wanna see unique armies that are interesting to see and field, and not play against the next netdeck spamathon someone concocted... what are we, magic the gathering?

Your at a tournament, your going to see a lot of netlists.

What needs to happen in matched play, if it has not been said before (I only read two pages) is that bringing a "pure" army should net you extra command points. This solution is not perfect as some codex's are far more complete than others and can be better poised to take advantage of this bonus. But in the end I think pure forces should carry a certain advantage to cherry picking the best units out of a entire faction. Nothing game breaking but lets say 3 extra CP for a pure force.

 Zid wrote:

Ordana wrote:
People are souping because it is more powerful then mono and because Elite armies lack bodies and CP they need to compete.

Removing soup just makes the strong codexes stronger and strangles the field of diversity. (even if that diversity is a dozen variants of X + IG)

Many of the suggestions of this thread are ways to soup up mono versus soup, for example, you can only use strategems from the main detachments codex (So if I have a battalion of BA + detachments of IG and SM, then I can only use BA strategems), or bolstering CP values for playing mono-armies (such as 2 bonus CP for no detachments).

Currently the field of diversity is IG + detachment allies, Innari weirdness, and spam-a-lamb Chaos when your at events... people just wanna see unique armies that are interesting to see and field, and not play against the next netdeck spamathon someone concocted... what are we, magic the gathering?

Thats like saying you dont want to see Fox in a smash bros brawl tournament.
Actualy barring eldar and dark reaper an SS spam i believe the high competitive scene has great variety for what high competitive scenes of any game normally have.
The variety is even better when you are playing at regionsl, local, less netlisting meta.

 Galas wrote:

 Zid wrote:

Ordana wrote:
People are souping because it is more powerful then mono and because Elite armies lack bodies and CP they need to compete.

Removing soup just makes the strong codexes stronger and strangles the field of diversity. (even if that diversity is a dozen variants of X + IG)

Many of the suggestions of this thread are ways to soup up mono versus soup, for example, you can only use strategems from the main detachments codex (So if I have a battalion of BA + detachments of IG and SM, then I can only use BA strategems), or bolstering CP values for playing mono-armies (such as 2 bonus CP for no detachments).

Currently the field of diversity is IG + detachment allies, Innari weirdness, and spam-a-lamb Chaos when your at events... people just wanna see unique armies that are interesting to see and field, and not play against the next netdeck spamathon someone concocted... what are we, magic the gathering?

Thats like saying you dont want to see Fox in a smash bros brawl tournament.
Actualy barring eldar and dark reaper an SS spam i believe the high competitive scene has great variety for what high competitive scenes of any game normally have.
The variety is even better when you are playing at regionsl, local, less netlisting meta.

The problem I see with this comparison is that Smash people play who they are best with, but in Brawl Fox is broken. But looking at the Wii U SB people play a wide variety of characters, and theres not really a "best", just who your best WITH. Smash is a 1v1 game, you can only take one character, so (barring Melee and Brawl who have OP broken chars) why not take who your best with?

In Warhammer you are given a huge variety of units and setups. Yes, naturally in a competitive game, people gravitate to those "powerful" models that give them the edge. But when your given so many options, why does it have to be this way? Its not like Magic the Gathering where you have to have crappy common cards to fill packs, and we don't have a finite number of combinations that "work". Its just in tabletop some lists work better than others, and thats the beauty of working out the kinks of your list.

The issue is that when you have a few models that skew the meta this way, its not healthy. Yes, I agree that once you get into regional matches, the variety is much more diversified. As many have stated, "national meta is not the meta in and of itself!" because you still have people who want Orcs to work, or Necrons to have a chance, or try and win with their mono-Death Guard army. My issue doesn't lie with any of this. Its that people are spamming a single model ad-infinitum because they have no way around it to win in a "competitive" match, and that people who want to build honest lists with variety and trying new stuff, are pigeonholed by these overpowered models and lists into taking their "OP broken stuff".

What caused this is not a slight to me, personally, but I do love people who have unique lists that try and take it to the top. 5th edition this forum was filled with people who took interesting lists, like Reecius, JY2, and others, and made them work despite the odds. They could pilot these creations and topple lists that seemed unbeatable.

But now? How do you combat Dark Reapers that make every other model a joke? How many lists have an honest chance against 8 Plagueburst Crawlers that auto-hit, have 12 wounds, and toughness 8? Stuff like this is where my concern comes from. This and the fact that many allied detachments are just used for access to specific things generally, such as Death Guard taking CSM detachments for Warptime.

 Zid wrote:

GSC doesn't really compliment Tyranids, which is why you probably don't see it, they are more powerful as a mono-faction; but looking at ITC standings, only one army that was Mono ( a blood angels army) even made it to the top 8. People defend soup because they want to run IG with their marines, or whatever, and thats cool, that makes the game fun. But you can't argue that people aren't taking advantage of souping to bend or break rules, or finding wonky combo's that were a huge oversight.

GSC with Tyranids did better at LVO than mono-GSC or mono-Tyranids fwiw. They seem to compliment each other fine.

As for problems in Chaos that were FAQ'd vs problems with Eldar that haven't been.... well, that's like saying the solution to electrical fires is to go back to candles...

 LunarSol wrote:

 Zid wrote:

GSC doesn't really compliment Tyranids, which is why you probably don't see it, they are more powerful as a mono-faction; but looking at ITC standings, only one army that was Mono ( a blood angels army) even made it to the top 8. People defend soup because they want to run IG with their marines, or whatever, and thats cool, that makes the game fun. But you can't argue that people aren't taking advantage of souping to bend or break rules, or finding wonky combo's that were a huge oversight.

GSC with Tyranids did better at LVO than mono-GSC or mono-Tyranids fwiw. They seem to compliment each other fine.

As for problems in Chaos that were FAQ'd vs problems with Eldar that haven't been.... well, that's like saying the solution to electrical fires is to go back to candles...

I like that they are fixing these issues earlier than they once did. And thanks for the heads up with Nids.

I honestly love the new Detachment system. My Blood Angels army is very fluffy while running 3 Detachment (2x Battalion, 1x Spearhead).

The neat builds I can do with the new system was just a pipedream with the old FOC.

I did like the old FoC, but I think it would need updating even if I wanted it back.

However, the current detachment system really does seem like an awful mess. I think part of the problem is with GW building on shoddy foundations. Classifying units into HQ, Troops etc. made sense back with the old rules. now, though, every unit has a ridiculous pile of keywords. You've got keywords to tell you the unit type (Character, Jetbike etc.) that matters in-game, you've got keywords to tell you the unit type (HQ, Troop etc.) that only matters for list-building, you've got keywords for factions, you've got keywords for subfactions, you've got keywords for subsubfactions. It's like it was designed by some sort of hybrid of man and spreadsheet.

And then you've got the detachments themselves. You've got a detachment that's for taking a lot of troops, you've got a detachment that's for taking a lot of HQ, you've got detachment each for taking a lot of FA, HS or Elites, you've got a detachment for taking one of anything, you've got a detachment for taking a lot of everything. Again, it just seems like a right mess.

Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army? The restriction could either be absolute or per 500pts or 1000pts, depending on whether you want them to scale. Troops would be defined by a lack of restriction on how many you can take. In terms of HQs, maybe say that an army needs one character per 500pts or something?

You'd need to change or remove the ally system for this, but otherwise it would seem far more in line with both the dataslate idea and also the reduced restrictions on army composition.

Also I have to say I like that it's easy to build a detachment if you only have a small army.

 vipoid wrote:


Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army?

That's kinda what they do in Warmahordes(or did in the edition I played). You have unique units which are the heroes. Then you have units that can be used at will, and then there were the heavy hitters that were limited per army.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army?

That's kinda what they do in Warmahordes(or did in the edition I played). You have unique units which are the heroes. Then you have units that can be used at will, and then there were the heavy hitters that were limited per army.

Actually thats a good point, I do remember that from Warmahordes.

Honestly labels do very little anymore for an army when you can take 6 of really any slot. Saying that a Battalion requires "at least 5 units" is no different than saying 2 HQ and 3 troops.

For example, place a limit of 2 Imperial Knights per detachment, or 6 units of Dark Eldar Warriors per detachment, etc. You could even divide a codex based on how many of a unit you can take, a limit the sizes of detachments based on how "big" the army should be, like a Patrol needs to have 1 Character + 2 units. Character could be any solo model that would "lead" the detachment.

Interesting thought.

 Zid wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army?

That's kinda what they do in Warmahordes(or did in the edition I played). You have unique units which are the heroes. Then you have units that can be used at will, and then there were the heavy hitters that were limited per army.

Actually thats a good point, I do remember that from Warmahordes.

Honestly labels do very little anymore for an army when you can take 6 of really any slot. Saying that a Battalion requires "at least 5 units" is no different than saying 2 HQ and 3 troops.

For example, place a limit of 2 Imperial Knights per detachment, or 6 units of Dark Eldar Warriors per detachment, etc. You could even divide a codex based on how many of a unit you can take, a limit the sizes of detachments based on how "big" the army should be, like a Patrol needs to have 1 Character + 2 units. Character could be any solo model that would "lead" the detachment.

Interesting thought.

The problem comes with the hypothetical scalability. Limiting units this way makes sense if we can guarantee a fixed point size of games(say 1500-2000), but becomes an issue if you play larger games. This also ignores the fact that game designers will just bypass this rule by saying: Well, you can only have two units of Imperial Knights, but each unit can have dozen Imperial Knights!

This is why I have mentioned that it is good to keep in mind that over the past decades the designers have been trying to expand the amount of units you can use(ie. how many Imperial Knights in an army or whatever) rather than limit and considering the fact that they are also in the business of selling models it is quite advantageous for them to keep things limitless.

AoS actually has an interesting approach where they explicitly state number of heroes and battlelines you need to cover at each point range.

If you make it a limit per detachment it works out okay as long as you scale your detachments by game size correctly.

That was even Warmachine's solution to that issue, but their casters served the role of detachments. The problem ended up being that casters don't mix well at all and nobody really wanted the game to scale up anyway, so it became an unused feature that was more or less dropped.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army?

That's kinda what they do in Warmahordes(or did in the edition I played). You have unique units which are the heroes. Then you have units that can be used at will, and then there were the heavy hitters that were limited per army.

Indeed. I had the Warmahordes system in mind when I suggested this.

I'm always a little surprised 40k doesn't have any sort of limit on how many times you can take something. I mean, I get why; that's a limit on how many of something people are willing to buy, but it seems like the only thing that really prevents you from identifying the best thing and taking as many of that as you can.

I think the strength of named characters this edition helps with that a lot. If you rely on their buff for something to work, you're not going to be able to take an entire army of that thing (hopefully....). Relics seem to be a generic variation of the same idea and detachments seem to help with this as well. I've long felt the game really only supports 800ish points of unique army composition. 3 detachments seem to make that an actual reality.

 LunarSol wrote:
I'm always a little surprised 40k doesn't have any sort of limit on how many times you can take something. I mean, I get why; that's a limit on how many of something people are willing to buy, but it seems like the only thing that really prevents you from identifying the best thing and taking as many of that as you can.

I think the strength of named characters this edition helps with that a lot. If you rely on their buff for something to work, you're not going to be able to take an entire army of that thing (hopefully....). Relics seem to be a generic variation of the same idea and detachments seem to help with this as well. I've long felt the game really only supports 800ish points of unique army composition. 3 detachments seem to make that an actual reality.

Oddly enough, in the last we’ve had FW consistently try to balance things by restricting the number of FW units you can take in regular games. We had relic vehicles that could only be taken as one-offs, LOWs that had to be a certain % of your points, special prerequisites for certain models like the grot mega-tank, and just plain limits to how many of a unit you can put in a detachment. While GW started strict and relaxed their limits in each army’s codex, FW started with GW’s relaxed restrictions and moved towards limits.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 Zid wrote:

 Eldarsif wrote:

 vipoid wrote:


Might it not make more sense to scrap the HQ, Troop, FA etc. labels entirely, and instead give each unit a value for how many can be taken in an army?

That's kinda what they do in Warmahordes(or did in the edition I played). You have unique units which are the heroes. Then you have units that can be used at will, and then there were the heavy hitters that were limited per army.

Actually thats a good point, I do remember that from Warmahordes.

Honestly labels do very little anymore for an army when you can take 6 of really any slot. Saying that a Battalion requires "at least 5 units" is no different than saying 2 HQ and 3 troops.

For example, place a limit of 2 Imperial Knights per detachment, or 6 units of Dark Eldar Warriors per detachment, etc. You could even divide a codex based on how many of a unit you can take, a limit the sizes of detachments based on how "big" the army should be, like a Patrol needs to have 1 Character + 2 units. Character could be any solo model that would "lead" the detachment.

Interesting thought.

The problem comes with the hypothetical scalability. Limiting units this way makes sense if we can guarantee a fixed point size of games(say 1500-2000), but becomes an issue if you play larger games. This also ignores the fact that game designers will just bypass this rule by saying: Well, you can only have two units of Imperial Knights, but each unit can have dozen Imperial Knights!

This is why I have mentioned that it is good to keep in mind that over the past decades the designers have been trying to expand the amount of units you can use(ie. how many Imperial Knights in an army or whatever) rather than limit and considering the fact that they are also in the business of selling models it is quite advantageous for them to keep things limitless.

AoS actually has an interesting approach where they explicitly state number of heroes and battlelines you need to cover at each point range.

This is true, which was why most warmahorde games were around 50 points, 75 tops (at 100 it became... extremely unwieldly). It seems like 40k, more or less, is around 1500-2k for a typical game. Larger games, 3k+, are more rare, but you could have their own game type like they currently do; no game will EVER be balanced when its that massive, so those are always a way to drop all the models you own and play a game. Warmahordes was also extremely, extremely competitive, but the casters themselves limited the lists and made them "fluffy"; it was pretty cool that one warcaster made a unit that sucked normally into a powerhouse.

Anyway, yes, they would definitely have to keep those limits in mind. There wouldn't be anymore "units of tanks" and things if you wanted to keep it balanced this way, of course, points go a long way toward this balance as well.

I actually liked the Warmahordes gameplay and list building, I just hated the community as a whole and their attitude toward one another. Even a friendly game was extremely rules lawyer-y and games came down to 1/4' arguments at times, lol.
"

 Zid wrote:

I actually liked the Warmahordes gameplay and list building, I just hated the community as a whole and their attitude toward one another. Even a friendly game was extremely rules lawyer-y and games came down to 1/4' arguments at times, lol.
"

You should try MK3 if you haven't. Premeasuring has made it a lot easier to play clean and precise without creating measurement arguments.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Zid wrote:

I actually liked the Warmahordes gameplay and list building, I just hated the community as a whole and their attitude toward one another. Even a friendly game was extremely rules lawyer-y and games came down to 1/4' arguments at times, lol.
"

You should try MK3 if you haven't. Premeasuring has made it a lot easier to play clean and precise without creating measurement arguments.

Hmmm, might give it a shot then. The lack of premeasuring drove me nuts and added too much rules lawyering for me.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Zid wrote:

I actually liked the Warmahordes gameplay and list building, I just hated the community as a whole and their attitude toward one another. Even a friendly game was extremely rules lawyer-y and games came down to 1/4' arguments at times, lol.
"

You should try MK3 if you haven't. Premeasuring has made it a lot easier to play clean and precise without creating measurement arguments.

I actually liked the no pre-measuring, but yeah, it did drive a lot of arguments. Besides, people used their warcasters bubble range to "premeasure" anyway. I'm good with 40k for now, I sold all my Cryx, Menoth, and Skorne and I'm happy with just 40k anymore lol

What really killed no premeasuring was the scenario zones. It's pretty hard to make guessing a 11" threat a challenge when you're both in a 12" diameter circle.

The other thing I've been happier with in MK3 is that I feel like a single faction covers a lot more game than before and I don't feel the same need for multiple armies I once did. I have a ton of factions, but I've largely scaled back and focused on two, putting the extra time and money towards branching out to other game systems instead.