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If you're going to increase the cost of the units which perform best in each detachment, that makes the detachments less useful beyond just giving some slightly different special rules. At that point you may as well just not have super special snowflake detachments at all.

If you want to take lots of canoptek units, you shouldn't either be rewarded for taking the 'canoptek+' detachment, or effectively penalised for taking one of the other choices.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
If you're going to increase the cost of the units which perform best in each detachment, that makes the detachments less useful beyond just giving some slightly different special rules. At that point you may as well just not have super special snowflake detachments at all.

Well this is why it might help if detachment abilities weren't just 'kill more'.

Then the point would be paying for utility.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
If you want to take lots of canoptek units, you shouldn't either be rewarded for taking the 'canoptek+' detachment, or effectively penalised for taking one of the other choices.

Unless I'm missing something, this would appear to contradict your statement above.

You don't want players to pay more for the units that perform best in a given detachment, yet somehow you also don't want players to be penalised in any way if they take 'suboptimal' detachments (or 'suboptimal' units for a given detachment).

You might need to elaborate a little more.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
that makes the detachments less useful beyond just giving some slightly different special rules.

I think that's pretty much the point.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
At that point you may as well just not have super special snowflake detachments at all.

Nah, because having a Canoptek-focused detachment that makes the Canoptek units a little more elite- but you pay for it, so it's still balanced- is the sort of fun specialization that we used to have in older editions. White Scars got veteran traits on their bikers, but you had to pay points for it. Vostroyans had carapace armor and better accuracy, but also cost significantly more than a Cadian. Fun distinctions and twists on how the army works and is constructed, not straight buffs.

Having Canoptek units instead be lame outside the Canoptek detachment, because they're balanced around buffs only provided by that detachment, is uninteresting and unnecessarily constraining.

Gitdakka wrote:I think there should not even have to exist detachments. Most wargames can do without such rules.

This actually is something I strongly agree with. On the scale that 40k works at, there really wouldn't be significant differences between space marines in different colours. After all, the smallest thing the system can do is to basically give models +1 on something (ok, we also have re-roll ones, but I hope the point is clear). And +1 is the difference between a Marine and a Guardsman. You really wouldn't see that kind of difference between two differently uniformed guardsmen.

And then there's the whole balance issue. Detachments are incredibly difficult to balance because different units have different values in different ones. It also further encourages specialisation which already is something 40K struggles with. You rarely see armies that are a bit of everything doing better than a focused force and detachments only further push into that direction.

Yeah as we all know all marines field huge formations of battle brothers ridding wolves or entire companies+ wearing terminator armour. Whole chapter on bike? No Problem all marines do it. Each marine chapter has its own "Death Company" etc And to make it more fun, all players starting with those that picked chapter X today and those that picked their chapter 30+years ago, have to use the same one codex with the rule of 3 being a thing. Want to play a "Terminator or Bike army" out of the sm codex? Then you better lik 500-1000pts games.

Or to make it less funny. Detachmanets exists to allow people whose factions are drasticly different to have an army of their own. Everyone is telling marines that they should have just one book. But why do eldar need 2? Why can't there be a codex "big monsters and a lot of swarm". Is a carnifex that different from a killer can and a tyranid guard from a mega armoured nob, as far as stats in a d6 based games goes?

Now the problems with marines have roots in the fact that GW instead of giving people playing specific armies their own lists, with its own limitations and point costs decided to build everything on the idea that their players are suppose to buy 1-2 books minimum to play one army, and that somehow a unit of terminators or bikers has to be balanced (rules AND points) for ALL marine detachments at the same time. So a person with 1 dreadnought in gladius is now getting punished for the fact that fire storm (for which GW wrote and tested the rules) was inclined to run 3+ along side multiple tanks.

They even create detachments which in the face of points and unit limitations don't work the way the "lore" says they should. Venguard detachment is for phobos marines doing sneaky stuff? Nah it is a heavy infantry ultramarine detachment with teleporting centurions etc Storm lance is The Way to play White Scars , after the bike mounted models purge? Maybe, if you somehow do the transition in lore that all WS suddenly becam SW and now ride wolves.

With Chaos GW somehow knew that having all 4 cults and "regular" chaos marines in the same codex won't work. Now they still do the crazy thing of trying to make same thing cost the same. But even that is limited in 10th, now if that is a concious thing done by GW or they just don't want cult units to have basic (I am looking at you WE/Khorn berzerker bikers) unit shared with other marines, that is for smarter people then me to decide.


Or really TLDR. If marines had one book, then in short order we would end with everyone from IF through SW and ending with RG playing the same one build. One time it would be a tank build and one something else. But in general it would be a feels bad for most marine players

In their current implementation, I think detachments should have unit specific point costs, so units could be balanced based on their performance in each detachment.

However, I would prefer them to be set up in a way so your only (direct) cost would be that of opportunity.
There should be a default detachment without any specific bonus at all. Taking a detachment would "only" change up how you are able to deploy or what units in which quantity or equipment.

I don't really see the point of trying to balance individual units in each detachment.

Firstly, its difficult to do - since measuring a unit's power can only be considered as a function of a lists success rate, which is a result of all its parts. GW have long since stopped pretending there's some kind of "Ur-Stat line" (I.E. a Tactical Marine) which serves as a balancing benchmark for pricing everything else. Instead they balance by smoothing. Faction/Subfaction performing too well? Taking a lot of units X and Y? Nerf X and Y. Not taking unit Z? Buff Z. The aim is not to create a perfect mathematical result - but smudge win% close enough - and bring most units into relative parity.

It seems to work better than in the old days.

Tyel wrote:
It seems to work better than in the old days.

I would chalk that up to much greater access to data, much more frequent balance cycles, and much more rapid and universal dissemination of updates, not because the system of detachments giving out freebie buffs is especially conducive to reaching relative parity across units.

There's also the whole issue of how unit X might be perfectly viable and balanced based on its frequent use in detachment A, but being weak in any other detachment heavily constrains listbuilding freedom. It gets worse if some detachments are clearly too weak or too strong; free army-wide buffs are hard to adjust.

Plus I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but it's a pretty serious noob trap when the game is balanced this way. So you just bought a unit of Kataphrons for your AdMech because they look cool- but they've been balanced around their use in the Cult Mechanicus focused detachment, and since the rest of your army isn't conducive to that detachment, you have to choose between either having underpowered Kataphrons or an underpowered rest of your army. I mean, even in the 'old days' focused lists tended to outperform highlander-style ones, but now those focused lists get additional, tangible rules buffs as well that act as force-multipliers.

I don't think having every detachment have its own bespoke set of points costs for every unit is reasonable or viable. But I do think a shift away from 'every unit in this detachment gets these buffs' and back towards 'these specific units get this buff, at the cost of Xpts', as we had in prior editions, would make balance much more manageable. There's always going to be some fudge-factor arising from the interplay of those buffed units with other units, and the presence of stratagems and enhancements that can affect a unit's viability, but it would be closer to relative parity than the current system and provide much better levers for adjustment.

Edit:

 Dolnikan wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:I think there should not even have to exist detachments. Most wargames can do without such rules.

This actually is something I strongly agree with. On the scale that 40k works at, there really wouldn't be significant differences between space marines in different colours. After all, the smallest thing the system can do is to basically give models +1 on something (ok, we also have re-roll ones, but I hope the point is clear). And +1 is the difference between a Marine and a Guardsman. You really wouldn't see that kind of difference between two differently uniformed guardsmen.

This is why I actually like the stratagem system as a mechanism for differentiating subfactions, though I don't like aspects of its implementation. There really isn't any good reason why individual Death Korps and Cadian troopers ought to have different combat capabilities at the scale and granularity 40K plays at, but different doctrinal capabilities that encourage them to play differently at a more macro level feels appropriate.

One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

 catbarf wrote:
One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

You know, I actually really like this. Remove all the passive abilities, and instead change it to a different selection of opportunity abilities. There's still going to be difference, but those differences won't be taking place constantly, and there's an element of cost to using each one.

Genuinely, this might well be my favourite of the solutions presented.

No, no, no, who's been huffing the hopium? GW can't even balance a codex, especially if the B Team gets their hands on it. I don't trust GW to be able to accurately point things. To do this requires such subtlety and precision that I haven't seen on display at GW, maybe ever. Hell, even they don't trust themselves, with the move to no gear choices, power level and a game that you win by being alive somewhere (so stats are less important then the tick box of attendance). Besides that, you'll end up with discussions of 'is it better to use unit X in the detachment with the point increase or not?' Funnily enough you'll be afford more of unit X in the non specialized detachments, which seems stupid on the face of it. Then when a detachment doesn't buff the unit X enough to compensate for the points GW assigns it, it gets "nerfed". This is just another failure point for their directionless design team. We're probably better off doing it ourselves as the net community IS capable of figuring it out. GW could explicitly state units that CAN'T be used in certain detachments instead of trying this chemistry level of balancing.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

You know, I actually really like this. Remove all the passive abilities, and instead change it to a different selection of opportunity abilities. There's still going to be difference, but those differences won't be taking place constantly, and there's an element of cost to using each one.

Genuinely, this might well be my favourite of the solutions presented.

That approach definitely has merits, but I don't think I'd personally want to go that direction. One of my major pet peeves is that stratagems, generally being usable only once per phase and then also limited by your CP, means that certain flavorful abilities in your army don't get used very often/only get used by a single unit each turn. Which is especially noticable in larger games where the percentage of your army doing the flavorful thing is even smaller.

If anything, I think I might prefer to get rid of stratagems entirely and instead flesh out thematic subsystems for each detachment.

Example:
Currently, stratagems let a single one of my eldar bike units move-shoot-move or "jink" (-1 to-hit strat) each turn. And doing both of those things in a game round is only possible if I have an autarch around to generate an extra CP.

What I'd rather see is a detachment rule that lets me give a "speed token" to a Fly unit whenever its models end up more than 12" away from their starting location in my own Movement phase. And then let me spend those tokens to do things like move after shooting, "jink" when targeted by enemy shooting, hammer of wrath a unit I charge, turbo boost at the cost of shooting/charging, etc. This lets a larger portion of my army do the cool, flavorful thing and changes how the army behaves on the macro level (I'd be fielding lots of Fly units and constantly have them moving in large distances instead of just posting up as a somewhat mobile gunline; my ability to perform optimally is dependent on my ability to move a long distance first.) In contrast, the stratagem approach encourages me to not lean into my Saim-Hann-esque theme because only one squad per turn is allowed to act "fast."

Taking that concept a step further, you could have detachments do some Rites of War style army adjustments. Maybe the speedy detachment requires all units start the game on a bike, wearing wings, or riding in a transport. Maybe I can field extra squads of windrunners provided the extra squads only have a max of 1 heavy weapon per 3 bikes. Maybe guardian defenders' special rule changes to something that works better with the mobility theme rather than encouraging them to stand around on objectives.

Basically, detachments currently tend to have a thin little sidebar's worth of detachment rules, and then like 2/3rds of a page dedicated to enhancements and 1 page dedicated to strats. I want to take that strat real-estate and give it to the detachment rule section.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

You know, I actually really like this. Remove all the passive abilities, and instead change it to a different selection of opportunity abilities. There's still going to be difference, but those differences won't be taking place constantly, and there's an element of cost to using each one.

Genuinely, this might well be my favourite of the solutions presented.

That approach definitely has merits, but I don't think I'd personally want to go that direction. One of my major pet peeves is that stratagems, generally being usable only once per phase and then also limited by your CP, means that certain flavorful abilities in your army don't get used very often/only get used by a single unit each turn. Which is especially noticable in larger games where the percentage of your army doing the flavorful thing is even smaller.

If anything, I think I might prefer to get rid of stratagems entirely and instead flesh out thematic subsystems for each detachment.

Example:
Currently, stratagems let a single one of my eldar bike units move-shoot-move or "jink" (-1 to-hit strat) each turn. And doing both of those things in a game round is only possible if I have an autarch around to generate an extra CP.

I see your concern - would adding more command points or increased ways of generating them be worth it? If stratagems existed in their more reduced state (ie, the generic ones and the six granted from your specific detachment), and could also target multiple units, would that be better?

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

You know, I actually really like this. Remove all the passive abilities, and instead change it to a different selection of opportunity abilities. There's still going to be difference, but those differences won't be taking place constantly, and there's an element of cost to using each one.

Genuinely, this might well be my favourite of the solutions presented.

That approach definitely has merits, but I don't think I'd personally want to go that direction. One of my major pet peeves is that stratagems, generally being usable only once per phase and then also limited by your CP, means that certain flavorful abilities in your army don't get used very often/only get used by a single unit each turn. Which is especially noticable in larger games where the percentage of your army doing the flavorful thing is even smaller.

If anything, I think I might prefer to get rid of stratagems entirely and instead flesh out thematic subsystems for each detachment.

Example:
Currently, stratagems let a single one of my eldar bike units move-shoot-move or "jink" (-1 to-hit strat) each turn. And doing both of those things in a game round is only possible if I have an autarch around to generate an extra CP.

I see your concern - would adding more command points or increased ways of generating them be worth it? If stratagems existed in their more reduced state (ie, the generic ones and the six granted from your specific detachment), and could also target multiple units, would that be better?

It would probably be better, but I think we'd still run into issues.

Yesterday I tried out a quirky list that was basically all bikes. I had something like 5 jetbike units (not counting characters), 8 light skimmers (vypers, venoms, voidweavers), and a wave serpent. In the past, there have been points where all those units could have Jinked, tubo-boosted/moved flat-out, and all the bikes could have ducked behind terrain after shooting in lieu of charging. If you gave me, say, 6 CP a turn and let me re-use all my stratagems as many times as I wanted, I still wouldn't be able to "jink" (-1 to-hit strat would be the modern equivalent) with all of those units, and jinking with any of them leaves me with that much less CP to turbo boost (closest thing being auto-advance 6" but meh) or move after shooting.

What I'm trying and failing to say is that you'll either:
A.) Give me so much CP that I can do a ton of mobility-related tricks. At which point, why make it a finite resource if I can functionally jink and move-shoot-move as much as I want anyway?
B.) Not give me enough CP to Jink (or whatever) with all my units, at which point it feels weird that only half my bikes know how to do a barrel roll. Which is basically the problem I have with the current system, albeit improved from only one of my bikes knowing how to do a barrel roll to only half my bikes knowing how to do a barrel roll.

Basically, the crux of the problem is that the types of rules I want to see supporting my army's theme aren't the sort of rules that I only want to do a finite number of times per turn. If I want to turbo-boost to reposition my bikes and deny a flank, I want to do that with all my bikes on that flank; not just one or two units. Doing a barrel roll to evade incoming fire is cool, but only being able to do that with half my units for no clear in-universe reason feels off.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
One of my favorite changes brought by 10th was paring down the enormous list of stratagems for every faction down to just a limited set that is specific to each detachment, and I think it does a good job of giving those detachments flavor. You could nix the army-wide benefits altogether, and a Crusher Stampede would still play very differently from an Unending Swarm. Stratagems also have a direct resource cost in the form of command points, so how far you lean into the chosen detachment determines your opportunity to spend that resource, rather than directly magnifying the benefits you receive. Plus of course individual stratagems can be easily tweaked if overpowered or underpowered. I think it's a much more robust system for differentiating subfactions than the straight buffs.

You know, I actually really like this. Remove all the passive abilities, and instead change it to a different selection of opportunity abilities. There's still going to be difference, but those differences won't be taking place constantly, and there's an element of cost to using each one.

Genuinely, this might well be my favourite of the solutions presented.

I don't mind it either... But I think the truth is that everyone was already doing it anyway- yes, there WERE 40 strats in your book, but I never went into battle planning to use more than 10 of those anyway. I always made my own cards- paying GW $30 for cards when I can buy a deck of 100 3x5 index cards and a pen for two bucks at a dollar store was my definition of stupid.

The point is that I never felt compelled to write up more than ten of those cards for each army, because I knew realistically, those were the only strats I was going to use anyway. I used to tell this to people all the time when they pissed and moaned about "cognitive load;" now GW's rules force people to do it, but the truth is anyone who liked 9th was already doing it anyway.

On Wyldhunt's point, I think the issue is that from the start, CP have been almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the game.

I could see, for example, each unit having an Action Token that it could use to perform one of a few effects.

e.g. a unit might use its token to Matchless Agility or to Fire and Fade (but not both in the same turn).

This would make a reasonable amount of sense in that there are only so many things a given unit can reasonably do.

Instead, however, CPs exist in their own pool, entirely independent of any and all units on the battlefield. Thus, using a CP to let a unit use Matchless Agility prevents entirely different units from using either the same ability or another, unrelated one. If unit A throws a grenade, then Unit B's grenades all disintegrate. Unless you want to have Unit B throw a grenade the next turn, in which case its grenades miraculously reappear but unit A's grenades vanish.

It just seems the most bafflingly stupid way of doing things.

Though I suppose that's just par for the course for GW at this point.

CP makes sense for some things. Strategems started out (in 4th edition expansions) as fairly major resources that made sense to be allocations to the commander. Stuff like combat engineers or orbital bombardments or a void shield generator. A commander might reasonable spend their political capital on lobbying for specially trained troops or extra artillery fire missions or a shipment of special equipment (for the entire battle). These were typically quite powerful, but limited though, you generally only got 1-3 choices.

The disconnect came when inherent unit abilities or basic wargear got attached to strategems, and only usable at the whim of the commander if they didn't do something else instead. Like meltabombs. Every unit in your army now carries a meltabomb... but can only use it if the commander notices them at the right moment and isn't ordering another unit to use their's instead... Commander is all spent? I'm afraid this meltabomb is useless chaps...

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Yesterday I tried out a quirky list that was basically all bikes. I had something like 5 jetbike units (not counting characters), 8 light skimmers (vypers, venoms, voidweavers), and a wave serpent. In the past, there have been points where all those units could have Jinked, tubo-boosted/moved flat-out, and all the bikes could have ducked behind terrain after shooting in lieu of charging. If you gave me, say, 6 CP a turn and let me re-use all my stratagems as many times as I wanted, I still wouldn't be able to "jink" (-1 to-hit strat would be the modern equivalent) with all of those units, and jinking with any of them leaves me with that much less CP to turbo boost (closest thing being auto-advance 6" but meh) or move after shooting.

i mean, thats a pretty heavy skew list, and being able to hide your whole army from retaliation after shooting isn't something that is especially fun to play, i'd much rather have an in-between where some units can do it (shadow spectres, scourges) than it be available to every unit in a list.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Yesterday I tried out a quirky list that was basically all bikes. I had something like 5 jetbike units (not counting characters), 8 light skimmers (vypers, venoms, voidweavers), and a wave serpent. In the past, there have been points where all those units could have Jinked, tubo-boosted/moved flat-out, and all the bikes could have ducked behind terrain after shooting in lieu of charging. If you gave me, say, 6 CP a turn and let me re-use all my stratagems as many times as I wanted, I still wouldn't be able to "jink" (-1 to-hit strat would be the modern equivalent) with all of those units, and jinking with any of them leaves me with that much less CP to turbo boost (closest thing being auto-advance 6" but meh) or move after shooting.

i mean, thats a pretty heavy skew list, and being able to hide your whole army from retaliation after shooting isn't something that is especially fun to play, i'd much rather have an in-between where some units can do it (shadow spectres, scourges) than it be available to every unit in a list.

To clarify, I don't have any expectation that that entire list would be able to successfully hide behind terrain afterwards. Even if you gave me unlimited CP and unlimited uses of strats, there simply wouldn't be enough terrain to hide all those units.

However, past editions of the game would have let me do things like:
* Jink with any number of the units that did get shot at; trading future offense for immediate defense. Compare to 10th which lets me spend CP to impose a -1 to-hit against a single unit.
* Move any number of *bike* units specifically after shooting, thus letting me reliably hide a couple squads even if I can't realistically hide them all. Compare to 10th which lets me hide a single unit.
* Turbo-boost/flat-out any number of these units in my own movement phase, thus letting me deny a flank and mitigate my opponent's offense in exchange for sacrificing some of my own board presence. Also would have offered more defense to my vehicles depending on the edition. Compare to 10th where all I can really do in this vein is auto-advance 6" with a single unit for CP.

Not having jink and turbo boost and assault move bikes as part of the core rules of 10th is fine. But if they're going to give us detachments, I want one of those detachments to let me lean into speed/mobility. And I want that speed/mobility to be present throughout the army; not limited to one or two units per turn.

Opting to jink with large portions of my army even though it cost me a lot of offense felt good. Lightning Fast Reactions (-1 to-hit) with a single unit for CP feels bad even though it doesn't cost me offense. Whole army go ZOOOOM! felt good. One unit go Zoom feels meh. Bikes doing drivebyes while using their mobility to stay safe felt good. Bikes holding still while they shoot with the exception of a single unit each turn feels weird. (And kind of discourages fielding more than one bike squad at all.)

When my mobility-related rules were core rules present on all my units, they felt like satisfying tools to have in my pocket; available as needed with it being up to me to decide when it was worth it to spend a turn turbo boosting to safety or giving up my offense to jink with an exposed unit. Now that my mobility rules are strats, it feels like I'm paying dearly to use the mobility central to my army's theme at all, and there's a cap on how often I'm allowed to use that mobility.

Yeah, as I alluded to earlier it's the concept of resource-constrained situational buffs or capabilities, tied to your chosen subfaction, that I like. Not so much an implementation that has CP as an abstract resource wholly divorced from what's occurring on the table, and restricting abilities and equipment which really ought to be innate or at the very least not once-per-turn.

Your concerns about mobility are totally legitimate, but I think that really stems more from a deeper issue of the limitations imposed by every unit getting to use most or all of its capabilities on any given turn. Many modern games use an action economy instead, and manipulating the ways units can spend their actions, or giving them new things to spend actions on, can provide the sorts of capabilities you describe (with inherent tradeoffs) rather than simply conferring buffs as stratagems do.

Put more simply, it's tough to come up with interesting, balanced, flavorful abilities if the only structure you have to work with is always-on free passive benefits. Temporary resource-constrained benefits provide a little more design space, but it's still constraining, and there are things that really aren't best represented as either mechanism.

 Haighus wrote:
CP makes sense for some things. Strategems started out (in 4th edition expansions) as fairly major resources that made sense to be allocations to the commander. Stuff like combat engineers or orbital bombardments or a void shield generator. A commander might reasonable spend their political capital on lobbying for specially trained troops or extra artillery fire missions or a shipment of special equipment (for the entire battle). These were typically quite powerful, but limited though, you generally only got 1-3 choices.

The disconnect came when inherent unit abilities or basic wargear got attached to strategems, and only usable at the whim of the commander if they didn't do something else instead. Like meltabombs. Every unit in your army now carries a meltabomb... but can only use it if the commander notices them at the right moment and isn't ordering another unit to use their's instead... Commander is all spent? I'm afraid this meltabomb is useless chaps...

Yeah, I'd be fine with CP being used for orbital bombardments, bombing raids, and other things that aren't represented by units.

The issue, as you say, is that about 90% of stratagems amount to 'allow a unit to use its standard wargear' or 'allow a unit to use its own physiology'.

 catbarf wrote:
Yeah, as I alluded to earlier it's the concept of resource-constrained situational buffs or capabilities, tied to your chosen subfaction, that I like. Not so much an implementation that has CP as an abstract resource wholly divorced from what's occurring on the table, and restricting abilities and equipment which really ought to be innate or at the very least not once-per-turn.

Your concerns about mobility are totally legitimate, but I think that really stems more from a deeper issue of the limitations imposed by every unit getting to use most or all of its capabilities on any given turn. Many modern games use an action economy instead, and manipulating the ways units can spend their actions, or giving them new things to spend actions on, can provide the sorts of capabilities you describe (with inherent tradeoffs) rather than simply conferring buffs as stratagems do.

Put more simply, it's tough to come up with interesting, balanced, flavorful abilities if the only structure you have to work with is always-on free passive benefits. Temporary resource-constrained benefits provide a little more design space, but it's still constraining, and there are things that really aren't best represented as either mechanism.

Solid points. But I feel like detachment rules should be a place to address some of that. Like, my speed token idea has the built-in trade-offs of requiring you constantly scoot units around making it harder to hold a given area while retaining your benefits. And some of the options for spending those tokens (like Jink or Turbo Boost) effectively trade your "action" for improved defense or speed. So if 10th doesn't want to include rules like jink and turbo boost in the core rules, having them be exclusive to the speed-focused detachment of a codex seems like a reasonable place to put them.

I feel like you could apply similar trade-offs to other detachments. Have a stealthy detachment that lets units use their "action" to hide, effectively giving the unit Lone Operative while on an objective or turning non-BLOS terrain into BLOS for purposes of targeting them. Let hidden units receive bonuses on the turn they "pop out" and attack, letting you trade one turn's offense for a spike in offense on a subsequent turn. Let enemy units un-hide units by moving within X" and line of sight of those units to promote counterplay via positioning. Maybe even let the stealthy detachment use GSC-style blip mechanics. All stuff that would probably be a bit much as core rules, but would be a reasonable amount of rules to remember if we swapped out strats for them. And they have the benefit of being usable by multiple units a turn instead of just the one unit you spend a strat on.

Maybe I'll toss something together and post it into the homebrew section to clarify my thoughts and give myself something to point at in future conversations.

Wayniac wrote:
ALmost like 40k was never meant to be a competitive game, and GW still wants to chase that idea...

Yeah the game was so much better when GW's response to 2+ invulnerable save deathstars, invisiblity spam and daemon factories giving you an extra 500 points of units over your opponent was to shrug and say "uhhh 40k is a casual narrative game, just don't do those things I guess idk don't ask us lmao"!

Anyway, I'm a fan of either not having points costs at all for detachments or giving them all the same points costs. The problem with giving them variable points costs is that now you have to tie the value of the detachment to its points cost which can lead to feels bad moments in list building. It sucks when you want to be the biker marine guy and you see that the biker detachment is either the cheapest detachment and thus has the weakest rules or is the strongest detachment but has an absurdly high points cost. It's better to have them all cost the same, and then try to balance their relative power so that they're netural to one another.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

Anyway, I'm a fan of either not having points costs at all for detachments or giving them all the same points costs.

Those are the same thing.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
The problem with giving them variable points costs is that now you have to tie the value of the detachment to its points cost which can lead to feels bad moments in list building. It sucks when you want to be the biker marine guy and you see that the biker detachment is either the cheapest detachment and thus has the weakest rules or is the strongest detachment but has an absurdly high points cost. It's better to have them all cost the same, and then try to balance their relative power so that they're netural to one another.

The assumption is obviously that the cost would properly reflect the power of the detachment. What you're describing is a feature, not a bug. The whole point of adding costs to detachments is to allow the weaker ones to still be viable by using that cost to balance out the stronger ones.

In theory you can make all detachments cost zero, if they're all equally strong. We're less than halfway through the Codices at this point and it's already clear that's not going to be the case. GW are incapable of doing this and I think a big part of it comes down to the shallow core mechanics of 40k. There's just not a lot of levers you can pull using detachment rules only and inevitably you end up with at least one which is just "make these units better". At the moment a detachment needs to be thematic, but also needs to at least attempt to compete with the other detachments available to the faction. Adding a cost to detachments gives more leeway to make sure they remain thematic while still allowing them to not be terrible choices for competitive play.

Slipspace wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:

Anyway, I'm a fan of either not having points costs at all for detachments or giving them all the same points costs.

Those are the same thing.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
The problem with giving them variable points costs is that now you have to tie the value of the detachment to its points cost which can lead to feels bad moments in list building. It sucks when you want to be the biker marine guy and you see that the biker detachment is either the cheapest detachment and thus has the weakest rules or is the strongest detachment but has an absurdly high points cost. It's better to have them all cost the same, and then try to balance their relative power so that they're netural to one another.

The assumption is obviously that the cost would properly reflect the power of the detachment. What you're describing is a feature, not a bug. The whole point of adding costs to detachments is to allow the weaker ones to still be viable by using that cost to balance out the stronger ones.

In theory you can make all detachments cost zero, if they're all equally strong. We're less than halfway through the Codices at this point and it's already clear that's not going to be the case. GW are incapable of doing this and I think a big part of it comes down to the shallow core mechanics of 40k. There's just not a lot of levers you can pull using detachment rules only and inevitably you end up with at least one which is just "make these units better". At the moment a detachment needs to be thematic, but also needs to at least attempt to compete with the other detachments available to the faction. Adding a cost to detachments gives more leeway to make sure they remain thematic while still allowing them to not be terrible choices for competitive play.

GW said from the second detachments were revealed with the codex structure they acknowledged they wouldn't all be made equal and were happy with some being more thematic and others more competitive. Stu mentions it in some of the early edition metawatch videos iirc.

 BlaxicanX wrote:


Anyway, I'm a fan of either not having points costs at all for detachments or giving them all the same points costs. The problem with giving them variable points costs is that now you have to tie the value of the detachment to its points cost which can lead to feels bad moments in list building. It sucks when you want to be the biker marine guy and you see that the biker detachment is either the cheapest detachment and thus has the weakest rules or is the strongest detachment but has an absurdly high points cost. It's better to have them all cost the same, and then try to balance their relative power so that they're netural to one another.

"It sucks when you want to run Marine bikes and you see that the biker unit is either the cheapest unit and thus has the weakest rules or is the strongest unit but has an absurdly high points cost. It's better to have them all cost the same, and then try to balance their relative power so that they're netural to one another."

I'm failing to see why the same argument doesn't apply to units, with the same issues.

 BlaxicanX wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
ALmost like 40k was never meant to be a competitive game, and GW still wants to chase that idea...

Yeah the game was so much better when GW's response to 2+ invulnerable save deathstars, invisiblity spam and daemon factories giving you an extra 500 points of units over your opponent was to shrug and say "uhhh 40k is a casual narrative game, just don't do those things I guess idk don't ask us lmao"!

It's not an either or. Embracing the idea that your game isn't especially well-suited for balanced, tournament-style play doesn't mean that you have to completely ditch any semblance of balance.

When they put out the survey in 7th(?) edition asking what people were looking for from the game, I gave responses indicating that I wanted more game balance. But I wasn't looking for tournament-style, mirrored terrain, bland armies style balance. I just wanted two lists in a pickup game to be close enough in power level that that the players could have a good experience without having to spend extra time tailoring their lists to eachother or having a pregame discussion about which interpretation of the rules they were going to operate by that day.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I just wanted two lists in a pickup game to be close enough in power level that that the players could have a good experience without having to spend extra time tailoring their lists to eachother or having a pregame discussion about which interpretation of the rules they were going to operate by that day.

Well.. maybe I'm just biased - but I think GW have largely achieved that. If anything that's the benefit of slimmed down rules.

There's still something of a tier list and through 8th/9th/10th there's been clear factions of the month (or 3-6). But that's usually 1-2 factions while the rest has been okay into the rest.

Its not like 7th edition where you had:
Eldar
Necrons
Dark Eldar
Orks

And each faction feels like they have no chance against any of the ones above, unless they are deliberately building/playing wrong. The rules made it hard for the weaker factions do anything while they got quickly deleted. And while 7th was the most egregious, I'd argue that sort of "ladder tier list" was quite common going back to at least 5th, maybe even 3rd.

Dudeface wrote:


GW said from the second detachments were revealed with the codex structure they acknowledged they wouldn't all be made equal and were happy with some being more thematic and others more competitive. Stu mentions it in some of the early edition metawatch videos iirc.

I'm fine with the odd highly thematic detachment like the Kroot or Chaos Cultist one, that are clearly not the most competitive choice but open up some extra options. I think 1 per Codex is the maximum GW should be giving us, though, and claiming they won't all be made equal doesn't absolve them from the responsibility of designing them to be balanced against one another. Even if you take out the clearly semi-serious detachments like the Kroot Hunting Party, there are huge misses in every Codex so far.

 xeen wrote:
Now that there are quite a few codex's out (I think a bit more than 1/3 and a bit less than 1/2) and we can see that even with some of the better balanced books, there are clear winners and losers with the detachments, should the good detachments have a small points cost to them?

For example, the CSM Pact Bound and Renegade Raiders detachments make the units in them much more impactful. Should you say need to pay 50 or 100 points to unlock those detachments to balance it out? Also, GW would never point units related to the detachments they are brought in i.e. Predators being x points in Pact Bound and y points in Raiders, so having points for detachments would let them not price units only for use in the best detachment. The Vindicator and Predators come to mind with the newest points increases clearly because of their over performance in Pact Bound and Raiders. Those units are not as good as their points in other detachments. I focus on CSM because that is my primary army, but I am sure you could make the same case for things like hypercrypt and Iron Storm. I would not put points on index detachments due to being limited to only one detachment.

Anyway do people agree if this would be a good idea or not so much?

Rules should be simple, fluffy and fun. Nerfing Intercessor Sergeants to have 1 wound while the rest of his squad has 2 wounds would be unfluffy and complicated to remember, it also doesn't add anything interesting to the game, so it'd be a bad change. Points are for making the game balanced. I would argue that some things should not cost points to make list building simpler. If GW wants you to make the choice between A and B to be anti-tank or anti-infantry, if they get the numbers wrong and A is superior to B almost all the time and they increase the cost of A then the choice is not anti-tank or anti-infantry but expensive vs inexpensive, changing the rules puts the focus back to anti-tank vs anti-infantry in a way points cannot.

If army list A1 with Vindicators in Detachment A is overpowered you can either nerf the Detachment, the Vindicator or Vindicators in the Detachment, things to consider would be how good are Vindicators in other Detachments and how good are the replacements for Vindicators in Detachment A and how complicated would it be to only nerf Vindicators in the Detachment. If list A2 without Vindicators in Detachment A is almost as good as list A1 then nerfing Vindicators doesn't change the scales much regardless whether GW nerfs Vindicators into oblivion, nerfing the Detachment is right. If Vindicators are too good in most Detachments then they need to get nerfed. If it's a very narrow issue, like perhaps the Detachment provides a unique benefit for VINDICATORS then they could remove that benefit or they could add a Vindicator-specific tax to the Detachment. I sure points costs for Detachments is wrong for the game 40k is trying to be at the moment. I would like it to be a different game but even then I do not think Detachments need points costs, I think having them there might be good for shipping quick fixes, like every Eldar Detachment is increased by 200 pts. I think the choice should be thematic and gameplay-feel-based and not "does this Detachment increase my efficiency by 10% compared to this other Detachment", that's too spreadsheet-y for me.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
If you're going to increase the cost of the units which perform best in each detachment, that makes the detachments less useful beyond just giving some slightly different special rules. At that point you may as well just not have super special snowflake detachments at all.

If you want to take lots of canoptek units, you shouldn't either be rewarded for taking the 'canoptek+' detachment, or effectively penalised for taking one of the other choices.

There shouldn't be a Canoptek units get +1 Strength Detachment, it's pointless, spamming Canoptek units is possible either way, the Detachment enables nothing, it just makes Canoptek units worse in other Detachments because they have to be costed for the +1 Strength Detachment.