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 vict0988 wrote:

Sorcererbob wrote:
For me the solution is to largely do away with standard formations. Let each army take formations that are thematic and play to that army’s intended strengths.

E.g. Dark Eldar are supposed to be fast. Give them a detachment with 5 fast attack units and make it 5 CP. And if you want your Dark Eldar to have a detachment with 3 heavy supports, you can, but since that isn’t their strength you get one or no CP.

E.g. Space Marines are supposed to be elite. Blah blah elite detachment, many CP. etc

Providing uniform options gives some armies intrinsic advantages. Providing an option per army allows for per-army balance.

If Dark Eldar are fast in the lore they should have speed in their datasheets, if I want to run a Pain Engine list (which is perfectly fluffy) I should not be punished. It's super shallow to boil down armies to one aspect, total Flanderization. You either relegate units to obscurity or you have to buff their pts cost anyways. Dark Eldar are not supposed to be fast, Raiders and Venoms are. If I bring Venoms and Raiders I can be fast. If I bring Pain Engines I'm slower, both are equally fluffy. Space Marines Scouts are fluffy, SM Assault Marines and Devastator Marines are fluffy, if it's in the codex then it's fluffy.

The other aspect is that surely armies should already be designed to reflect their characteristics? Hence, if Dark Eldar's FA units are supposed to be more common than the current troops, then those units should be the actual troops.

 vipoid wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Sorcererbob wrote:
For me the solution is to largely do away with standard formations. Let each army take formations that are thematic and play to that army’s intended strengths.

E.g. Dark Eldar are supposed to be fast. Give them a detachment with 5 fast attack units and make it 5 CP. And if you want your Dark Eldar to have a detachment with 3 heavy supports, you can, but since that isn’t their strength you get one or no CP.

E.g. Space Marines are supposed to be elite. Blah blah elite detachment, many CP. etc

Providing uniform options gives some armies intrinsic advantages. Providing an option per army allows for per-army balance.

If Dark Eldar are fast in the lore they should have speed in their datasheets, if I want to run a Pain Engine list (which is perfectly fluffy) I should not be punished. It's super shallow to boil down armies to one aspect, total Flanderization. You either relegate units to obscurity or you have to buff their pts cost anyways. Dark Eldar are not supposed to be fast, Raiders and Venoms are. If I bring Venoms and Raiders I can be fast. If I bring Pain Engines I'm slower, both are equally fluffy. Space Marines Scouts are fluffy, SM Assault Marines and Devastator Marines are fluffy, if it's in the codex then it's fluffy.

Another aspect is that surely armies should already be designed to reflect their characteristics? Hence, if Dark Eldar's FA units are supposed to be more common than the current troops, then those units should be the actual troops.

The other aspect is that our FA slot is ironically our weakest. We have Scourge, that are ok but not competitive since they don't benefit from Obsessions, then theres Beasts, Hellions and Reavers, all only available to Wych Cults and all are bad, being forced into taking those units would really hurt the army.

Yoyoyo wrote:

ERJAK wrote:
You'll also be heavily buffing guard and daemons while seriously nerfing armies like custodes/grey knights/sisters/admech/chaos/ some Eldar because they either can't build a brigade or have a dead slot.

Armies that already do brigades, or battalion and 1-2 detachments would not be affected. And that's a lot of the top lists in tournaments already.

The solution is not to use CP as a crutch because your army has no diversity, it's to work on internal balance to make every slot relevant. I'm sure you see the benefit there for Sisters, Admech, Chaos, etc. Specialist armies will have a rougher time generating CP but that's something you can balance through their Relics and Stratagem costs.

This has nothing to do with diversity or specialists though. Whether you can bring a brigade or not solely decided by having 3 choices in each that are cheap and worth fielding, plus troops cheap troops enough to cram the whole thing into 2000 points. Important: Don't mistake cheap models for cheap units. A unit of boyz is 210+, because anything below is pretty much useless, while a unit of 5 intercessors is barely half that and doesn't lose anything from not being 10 strong.

Death Guard, for example, have decent choices in each slot. Decent HQs (DP, lord, psykers), elite choices(characters, terminators), troops(plague marines, pox walkers), fast attack (drones, MBH) and heavy support (PBC, predators). Create a DG brigade? Barely doable, but possible at 2000 points, but why would you? There is nothing to spend your CP on, better max out all the good units and get daemons as troops.

Orks can burn CP like no other, my record is 18 in one turn. However, you would be forced to bring 3 elite choices and 3 fast attack choices on top of expensive troops (you'll need at least some troops to not be gretchin) to build the battalion. Elite, fast attack and heavy support all have one common theme - either the units are expensive because you need to max them out, or they work well with maxed-out units because they are support characters or need target saturation to work. So in order to field a brigade you are basically forced to take some otherwise worthless minimal units like five kommandoz or single koptas that won't have any real impact on the game.

So, who actually benefits from brigades?
Armies which want to field minimal units anyways (moral/special weapon count/worthless not matter the size) and have good and cheap units in both their fast attack and elite slots and that can make use all those CP.
So an army which can just spam the same cheap units for those slots, but has a decent way to turn those CP into damage will get the most benefit out of it.
Also note that pretty much any army that tries to focus on close combat won't be using brigades a lot - outside of very few exceptions, you always want close combat units to have as many combatants as possible, and more often that not, those units rely on some sort of horde bones as well.

In general, I agree with tneva that a system which rewards fielding less detachments would be superior to a system that rewards fielding as many detachments as possible. It's stupid that I have to field multiple units of gretchin because I want to have a speed freeks army that doesn't fall flat on its face.

Sorcererbob wrote:
For me the solution is to largely do away with standard formations. Let each army take formations that are thematic and play to that army’s intended strengths.

E.g. Dark Eldar are supposed to be fast. Give them a detachment with 5 fast attack units and make it 5 CP. And if you want your Dark Eldar to have a detachment with 3 heavy supports, you can, but since that isn’t their strength you get one or no CP.

E.g. Space Marines are supposed to be elite. Blah blah elite detachment, many CP. etc

Providing uniform options gives some armies intrinsic advantages. Providing an option per army allows for per-army balance.

So, if I like Ravagers [those are heavy support, right?], and I want my army to have them in it, I should be penalized because it doesn't conform with somebody else's narrow definition of their dude's fluff?

An army doesn't have a slot type as it's strength [except by accident, for small factions, when all the choices may just happen to be crap]. Dark Eldar have fast, lightly armored, and well armed as a faction wide generalization, so they have fast, lightly armored, and well armed heavy support choices like Ravagers. And then, having such a narrow range of capabilities is also crippling, so they also have slow and well protected Talos Pain Engines. It's not like they don't use either of these when they take to the field, or they have less of them than they have of whatever their Fast Attacks are.

I detest it when people suggest assigning mechanical bonuses to what is in your list according to an arbitrary single definition of "fluff". First off, what happened to "you dudes"? and second off, when composing your army, players should be free to select units that conform to and provide capabilities to facilitate their personal strategy for the list. Having bonuses tied to fielding your list a specific way was the second worst part of formations.



Also, for "diversity", stratagems and CP farms lead to more intra-list diversity. As I already explained, these things are very powerful and rule-of-1-limited, but a unit not buffed by one of these isn't nearly as strong, so you don't usually rule-of-three a unit you're planning to hit with a ton of stratagems. Units that are rule-of-three'd are strong without relying on stratagem and psychic support, so you field three of them because they don't need single-use abilities to be good.

Even Guard don't really like taking Brigades, mostly because the FA choices aren't especially attractive, and you can easily take as many Battalions as you want.

The Brigade just doesn't offer enough of a benefit to be worthwhile- and if it did, then there'd be units taken solely as a 'tax', and in general I think 'tax' units represent bad design.

I also like the idea of detachments subtracting from CP rather than adding to it. Maybe something like Brigades subtract nothing, Patrols and Battalions subtract 2 each, all the other detachments 3 each, and start with 1CP per 100pts.

Yoyoyo wrote:

Karol wrote:
The chance that a custodes or GK codex is going to come out anytime soon is close to zero though.

Fluff-wise it makes sense. These are small specialist armies, they should not be fielding brigade-strength elements. You'd expect something more like a core Battalion and then a specialist detachment, like an HQ and 3x Terminator squads.

I would prefer if we not try to bring fluff into this, considering an Astra Militarum 'Brigade' is really just a reinforced platoon led by multiple Company Commanders for some reason.

 catbarf wrote:
Even Guard don't really like taking Brigades, mostly because the FA choices aren't especially attractive, and you can easily take as many Battalions as you want.

The Brigade just doesn't offer enough of a benefit to be worthwhile- and if it did, then there'd be units taken solely as a 'tax', and in general I think 'tax' units represent bad design.

I also like the idea of detachments subtracting from CP rather than adding to it. Maybe something like Brigades subtract nothing, Patrols and Battalions subtract 2 each, all the other detachments 3 each, and start with 1CP per 100pts.

Yoyoyo wrote:

Karol wrote:
The chance that a custodes or GK codex is going to come out anytime soon is close to zero though.

Fluff-wise it makes sense. These are small specialist armies, they should not be fielding brigade-strength elements. You'd expect something more like a core Battalion and then a specialist detachment, like an HQ and 3x Terminator squads.

I would prefer if we not try to bring fluff into this, considering an Astra Militarum 'Brigade' is really just a reinforced platoon led by multiple Company Commanders for some reason.

Hellhounds were really popular for a while; IIRC Hellhound-based lists won a few tournaments back in the Castellan age. Sentinels were also a must-have before deep-strike was kicked back to turn 2.

Anyway, I would also say that the Guard also doesn't take Brigades because there's no reason to. There are few good stratagems in the IG book, and some of them are regiment-locked. This makes them idea for souping, because they provide valuable support, are cheap enough to get a lot of CP, and don't need CP to function. If I took a Brigade and 2 Battalions, I would be sitting on 24 command points to start the game [25-1 for the artillery group detachment. Might as well also buy the armored group detachment too, since I have so many]. As Catachan, the only real "do this always" stratagems are going to be Pounding Barrage and Aerial Spotter, so 24 CP is really a superfluous amount and I might as well cut some fat out of the list to be more efficient and stick with 13-18 CP and get more listbuilding flexibility.



Also, I agree, fluff should not play a factor in what you're allowed to bring in your army or what you should bring in your army. That only serves to limit the flexibility and depth you can get out of the list-building portion of the game, which is an important element of the match strategy.

As far as detachment size goes, a Battalion/Spearhead/Outrider/Vanguard is a reinforced Platoon, and a Brigade is about a reinforced company.

 vict0988 wrote:
It's super shallow to boil down armies to one aspect, total Flanderization. You either relegate units to obscurity or you have to buff their pts cost anyways. Dark Eldar are not supposed to be fast, Raiders and Venoms are. If I bring Venoms and Raiders I can be fast. If I bring Pain Engines I'm slower, both are equally fluffy. Space Marines Scouts are fluffy, SM Assault Marines and Devastator Marines are fluffy, if it's in the codex then it's fluffy.

Yet that's what GW is actually doing with their traits etc. Armies are boiled down to one aspect and if you want other aspect you ally in army that's boiled down to that aspect.

I've posted this before, but here it is again... slightly modified.

The problem is the gap between the Battalion and the Brigade. It's too large a gap both in number of units and CP.
My solution would be to boost the requirements for the Batt to something like this:
Command 2+
Troops 3+
Plus 3 additional units. These can be taken from one of the remaining types, Elite, Fast, Heavy... etc.
The Army MUST include 3 Troops AND 3 non-Troop, Non-Command units in addition to the 2 Command.
+8 CP.

Replace the Battalion with a Company at the current CP but change the requirements to:
Command 2+
Troops 1+
Plus 2 additional units from any type except Command.
This allows some flexibility in choice but must have a minimum of 3 Non-Command Units and one MUST be Troops.
+5 CP.

It's a fairly simple fix that addresses many of the issues with the current structure.

These make Elite Armies more point friendly while not seriously nerfing Horde armies.

I dont really see how that fixes anything for mono armies. You just gave away a ton of CP. Too flexible detachments and at that point could just remove it and give everyone a ton of cp and take whatever they would want.

Like my BA or RG lists would get 6 extra cp for doing nothing. Sure they were needed but not in this way. Every list that runs 2 battalions to fuel their elite/heavy units just got 6cp.

For soup it is slightly more expensive to get 5 cp from a CP battery but the ease of getting 8 from said battery makes up for it, especially guard that can just take 99pts of mortars and gain 3cp over what they have now, and extra CP from your own main force make cp more abundant.

Think faction specific with some smaller upside and some restrictions is the 2ay to go. Like let DA take a single "Deathwing" detachment that gives 5cp if you have 1-2 terminator HQ and 3-5Terminator units instead of 1 cp. Makes a Deathwing list much more viable and you cant really break the system. Then same with Ravenwing and bikes and BA and JP units. The more restrictive the stronger the bonus can be and if loose enough maybe only give a single bonus CP to avoid forcing a faction to play that detachment. And then make it only work if mono codex.

Wont make or break units and armies but moves away from the always 2 battalion list to get the cp needed to play some more niche armies and lists that should be viable without having to spend 1k points on troops and HQs.