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It's called a Highlander game. Been around for awhile. Tons of fun. Some think it's an extra challenge for the more experienced players to try this while not imposing the limit on newwer players.

While he addressed the basic issue of troop choices I'm still severely limited in my options. Especially compared to most other codices. I have a total of 8 Non-HQ units to choose from and most people consider Penitent engines and Repentia poor choices at best. So unless I want my base army to, effectively, become an allied contingent I'm screwed

Really, I play sisters and its actually not that hard to do. Only issue you have is that your scoring units are pretty much only a unit of Battle Sisters and Celestians. Other than that you can get a good mix of anti tank, anti infantry in your list. I tried making a list using this limitations and I hit the points limit without even thinking. I think the list I came up with may not be the greatests, but its potential wouldn't be that diminished from a normally built SOB army.

This seems pretty obviously not intended to be a permanent change to the game. I've run it as a variant format for one-off tournaments in the past, the same way I've run kill teams, or doubles, or tournaments where half your list is comprised of HQs. They're fun occasional mix-ups to the status quo, and they all handicap certain factions. So long as they don't all handicap the same faction, they're fun little diversions that give everyone a little list-building mix-up. Not all factions are created equal in normal 40K, it should be no surprise the same is true of variant formats.

 Peregrine wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:
Edit: and I think you guys analyzing that lack of troops missed that denial elites are also scoring, according to the OP. That'd make a huge difference for many armies.

It sounds like the "elites are scoring" rule only applies to SoB, to compensate for only having one troops choice in their entire codex. If it's a general rule that's meant to apply to all armies then it does help, but it's a really badly written sentence.

OP wrote:In this setup, sisters are allowed to get by with using only a single troops unit (since they have only one option) and any denial elite unit is also considered a scoring unit (basically anything on foot, not dreadnoughts or other elite vehicles)

Sisters have dreadnoughts?
Man, I was unaware...

Highlander-style events are cool, but if you're looking for a balancing measure for 40k tournaments, Highlander comp is about one edition too late.

Spamming units in competitive builds is more a holdover of 5th and previous editions. With 6e and the recent explosion of allied detachment options, limiting armies to "one of each" functionally does very little to curb what most people see as egregious abuses of the rules. Instead of limiting players' ability to come up with broken combos, you're actually encouraging them to do so by restricting the amount of anti-deathstar choices they can take!

Just my 2c on the matter

I think the format also forbade allies, because then you could effectively double-up on units.

"This is my tactical squad. Then I have allied Blood Angels, who take a tactical squad - what, it's from a different codex!"

So that limits some of the bad options (well...ok Tau).

And yes, I understand it kind of kills some themed forces. When I was first shown this and was making army lists with my armies, one that came up was my Slaanesh daemons - since the only army allowed to take a single troops unit is sisters, a mono-god daemons army cannot be made. I could only take a single unit of Daemonettes, and that's not legal.

So yes, some armies are just chopped out of the tournament. If that's the case, it's not that difficult to borrow someone's models or ask the TO if you can proxy something - obviously the format is being done just for fun, even if it is done as a tournament one-off format, so saying "hey can I use these five orcs as a tactical squad for my otherwise Deathwing army?" isn't unreasonable. And hey, they're green!

Tau without allies are actually a lot tamer in this format. You are basically combined to one Riptide and one suit commander, plus a lot of the other common gimmicks get tempered by this.

I have run this for a couple RTTs and yeah the Highlander format has been around for a while. It makes a good change of pace and you see some units being used that would otherwise never see the table top. For the guy with his netlist spamfest, yeah they are not going to like it very much. But your pickup gamer guy who buys a little of everything from their favorite army, this is a great format for a game.

I do totally want to give this a try sometime. Then again, I am totally the pickup gamer guy who likes to use a bit of everything not just the units that the internet Gods deem competitive.

Granted, it doesn't impact IG that negatively -- as many have already stated, but if you added "no squadrons" to the rule I think it would balance that out a bit. DE and Sistas totally get shafted by it though.

 Phazael wrote:
For the guy with his netlist spamfest, yeah they are not going to like it very much. But your pickup gamer guy who buys a little of everything from their favorite army, this is a great format for a game.

You're making a huge mistake in assuming that there are only two kinds of players: "netlist spammers" and "pickup gamers who buy a little of everything". There are a lot of people who play casual pickup games, and play their favorite army that happens to contain multiple copies of units. There's nothing inherent about being "less competitive" or whatever that makes you more likely to buy a bunch of random stuff without any unifying theme.

I recently played in a Highlander styled tourney. It was a lot of fun. It had different restrictions as it can be tweaked to however folks want to play it: we allowed freedom of choice in the Troops selection, but everything else (including dedicated Transports) were a 0-1 choice. We also played at 1500 points as it is a bit more tricky to build a list and requires a larger collection to draw from.

In relation to the previous Tau army posted, that's easy: Farsight counts as Tau Commander (Named characters would count such as Eldrad counting as a Farseer). This would pretty much temper the Tau build, although I don't even feel it would be all that game breaking in this style of game.

It's a great break from what is essentially Deathstar 40K.

My question is this. Could you take the same unit twice if they fell into different slots. For example, in the Ork codex, if you take a big mek as an HQ, you can then take a single Deff Dread as a troop choice. If I did that, then could I also take another Deff Dread as a Heavy Support?

It depends on the organizer. I've seen a lot of variations to this theme with several minor adjustments.