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johnpjones1775 wrote:
Some level of restrictions on what you take beyond rule of 3 made the game more interesting imho.
Limiting the number of elite/specialist units was good and meant that units like intercessors actually filled a role in the army list

You should take units because the units fill a role, not because you just can’t take what you actually want to.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
So a topic I don’t really see about 40K is the force organization chart. For something that’s been around for whole editions, its recent loss in mainstream 40K is noticeable for me.

What are other people’s opinions on it?

It helped with pick-up games in older editions as one of the limits on how much of a skew list you could created compared to take-all-comers lists. The idea for instance that you would never face more than three heavy tanks / heavy artillery pieces / heavy weapon units, or that you would never have to deal with more than three units starting right up in your face, or that your opponent would be entirely bereft of basic infantry units.


Much more important with the paper/scissors/stone-like design of older editions.

 JNAProductions wrote:

johnpjones1775 wrote:
Some level of restrictions on what you take beyond rule of 3 made the game more interesting imho.
Limiting the number of elite/specialist units was good and meant that units like intercessors actually filled a role in the army list

You should take units because the units fill a role, not because you just can’t take what you actually want to.

Yep. Agree with JNA. If intercessors are supposed to be the heart of a marine army, give them rules that make you *want* them at the heart of a marine army. Like I said earlier, I took guardians in 4th-7th edition because I had to. Now I take them because I want to because GW finally took a minute to figure out how to make them useful as something other than an expensive heavy weapon platform or direct competitor for dire avengers.

Plus, there's the whole conversation of armies that don't/shouldn't have to put conventional troops at the heart of their armies. (Iyanden, Death Wing, White Scars, etc.) But we've had that conversation plenty of times before.

The FOC worked well in 3e and 4e, but started to crack under the strain as GW upped the scope of the game with more superheavies and elite units.

It just wasn't designed with the increase in unit types that some armies had in mind. Which is a shame. Also, I think you can see that the idea was to have different FOC for different missions, but in practice nobody played the non-standard missons (sadly) and they were eventually dropped.

Imo the issue is with the bloating of the game and I liked the variant foc missions. But I am obviously in the minority there!

Troop tax is the first thing that comes to mind. When you have to buy units that you don’t want to buy to play the game it makes it harder to get into. It also made it harder to convince other people to play. Off the rip they had to buy $100 worth of miniatures just to play with the miniatures they actually wanted to play with.

Game bloat is hard to deal with

People often lock into specific armies as a finance/time constraint of reality. Not just for collecting but also for playing,


So people want more models for the army they have, which leads that to bloat. Now GW can get around some of it by updating sculpts because they can justify the re-investment; but even so people still want new things.


Warmachine hit the same issue and grew their armies and then tried to make a skirmish system work for a wargame and it never really quite worked. Then they went for theme lists which people didn't like because it was kind of like trying to fragment 1 army into many sub-armies.


Bloat is tough.

the critisisms are fair, but what is confusing me is the talk like you needed to max out the two troops required. I know min-maxxing tac squads or guardian squads where much maligned back then, but you could still just take two min squads to unlock everything else.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
the critisisms are fair, but what is confusing me is the talk like you needed to max out the two troops required. I know min-maxxing tac squads or guardian squads where much maligned back then, but you could still just take two min squads to unlock everything else.

I think some people just in general hate any kind of mandated unit, esp when many armies often only had one "troop" choice or one or two options.

That said I agree, in most GW games the troops component never feels too limiting to me and honestly feels sensible that armies have troops.

in theory, i like what 7th edition was doing with each army having its own FOC options, and for some detachments to be based around formations instead of rote FOC slots. i think there's a lot of potential in a system like that, even if the execution as it existed then was messy and problematic

I actually think the difference between FOC and the 'new' system, at least for some armies, is fairly minor. I take maybe 2-3 Battleline every time due to them having OC2.

IDK. It wouldn't be too onerous.

There were two aspects to it.

It reflected tangible limits on what you could draw on and it was used as a rough balancing tool.

If you're using it too much for balance, then it means units in different parts of your org are not balanced internally very well and the only way to combat it is to restrict how many you can take.


ignoring the game play aspect, i did enjoy the background aspect. No general gets to pull together exactly what they want when they want in whatever quantity they want.

Considerations like 'we only have X of the new supa blasta and need to deploy it only in strategically important situations' are real, but with no restrictions 40k lets you pile on far more equipment than the general would willingly use just because you can.


I don't see unrestricted unit selection any different to unrestricted unit equipping - if you can take nothing by an army of terminator librarians, why can't i take nothing but an army of guardsmen with lascannons?

Rather than dividing at an organisational level, you're dividing at a unit level. taking it down to equipment is just one more level down.

Or to put it another way, why is it ok to restrict equipment on units, but not units themselves?



The more abstracted 40k gets, the less flavour it has and the less connected to the setting it becomes. Feels bad is sometimes necessary and too many people are trying to make a game with no feelsbad and turning it into something that doesn't actually reflect the battles in the background. Hence the enduring love for 2nd ed.

They're a necessity to promote reasonable list structure. There are lots of ways to make this flavourful. Have detachments or HQ's grant troop keyword to their underlings to unlock more of them. It seems better than increasing the cost for models that get benefits of detachments. It allows you to take bunch of them without incurring penalties or making them OP from extra rules interactions.

FOC was great, and people maligning a "troops tax" are just wrong.

Honestly though? 7th ed Formations is more where it's at. Prescribed army structures that are different depending on faction, not enforced as a hard rule, but encouraged through bonus.

Not that 7th did it well. . . Oh no no no.

Utter trash. They worked for maybe a quarter of the armies post-3rd edition and were nothing but an outdated relic by the time 7th rolled around.

 Insectum7 wrote:
FOC was great, and people maligning a "troops tax" are just wrong.

Honestly though? 7th ed Formations is more where it's at. Prescribed army structures that are different depending on faction, not enforced as a hard rule, but encouraged through bonus.

Not that 7th did it well. . . Oh no no no.

Explain why they’re wrong. Don’t just assert it as fact-actually take the time to articulate why a troop tax is good for every single army.

I didn't hate the 3e-7e FoC format.
I don't hate it in HH2.0 either.
I could (and still do in HH) make armies I enjoyed playing just fine.

But after having played with it for 20 years?
I'm perfectly fine making armies the current way.
In fact, I've been able to field a few forces that were completely impossible with the FoC. For that? My local shops thank GW as it meant me spending even more $....
And nothing is stopping me from making FoC style armies here in 10th if I want to.

 Overread wrote:

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
the critisisms are fair, but what is confusing me is the talk like you needed to max out the two troops required. I know min-maxxing tac squads or guardian squads where much maligned back then, but you could still just take two min squads to unlock everything else.

I think some people just in general hate any kind of mandated unit, esp when many armies often only had one "troop" choice or one or two options.

That said I agree, in most GW games the troops component never feels too limiting to me and honestly feels sensible that armies have troops.

Yeah. It wasn't actually that big a deal. It was just really, really frustrating because it managed to do a lot of things wrong all at once:

* You had to spend points on troops you might not want to field.
* Depending on faction, you might be forced to spend more points than your opponent on that troop tax.
* Depending on faction, your mandatory troop units might be less cost-effective than your opponent's.
* What was and wasn't a "troop" was extremely arbitrary. Terminators had to be troops instead of elites for the sake of game balance, but apparently they were fine as troops if your army was lead by Lysander or if they were all psychic and armed with force swords.
* It was actively unfluffy for subfactions who canonically used non-troops in place of troops. Ex: my Iybraesil army which is known for using howling banshees where other crafworlds might use avengers or guardians.

So the troop tax wasn't helping game balance, it wasn't helping forge the narrative, and it wasn't impacting factions equally.

I'm not eager to return to the force org chart, but if we did, it would be improved immensely by just taking away the troop requirements. It would still have a bunch of problems though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
I actually think the difference between FOC and the 'new' system, at least for some armies, is fairly minor. I take maybe 2-3 Battleline every time due to them having OC2.

IDK. It wouldn't be too onerous.

The key here is that you want to take those battleline units. Now imagine if the rules of the edition made you not want to take them but forced you to take them anyway. And also your opponent's troop tax is 100 points cheaper than yours, so he functionally has 100 more points to spend on stuff he's excited about than you do.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 RaptorusRex wrote:
I actually think the difference between FOC and the 'new' system, at least for some armies, is fairly minor. I take maybe 2-3 Battleline every time due to them having OC2.
IDK. It wouldn't be too onerous.

The key here is that you want to take those battleline units. Now imagine if the rules of the edition made you not want to take them but forced you to take them anyway. And also your opponent's troop tax is 100 points cheaper than yours, so he functionally has 100 more points to spend on stuff he's excited about than you do.

Now imagine you actively dislike the models that comprise a factions "troops".
Models =/= rules.
I will deal with bad rules.
But I will not waste my $ buying models I dislike. I will not own them.
This always prevented from making a Drukhari army as I dislike all the model options for the troops. I still don't like them (though theyve improved).

Without the old FoC?
I can now field a force using just the models I do like.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
FOC was great, and people maligning a "troops tax" are just wrong.

Honestly though? 7th ed Formations is more where it's at. Prescribed army structures that are different depending on faction, not enforced as a hard rule, but encouraged through bonus.

Not that 7th did it well. . . Oh no no no.

Explain why they’re wrong. Don’t just assert it as fact-actually take the time to articulate why a troop tax is good for every single army.

Aside from the optics of framing a "typical" army, they weren't a tax. People claiming they were usually just didn't know how to use their troops effectively. And if we're being honest, I think this is primarily a Space Marine thing. The mantra for Orks was "Boys before toys", Tyranids had a bunch of good options, Guard had their own build structure via Platoons, DE got double Bright Lances in their troops, etc. etc. The popular hangup was the Tactical Squad, which was a trickier unit to get the value out of, but still very worthwhile.

In my opinion you’re completely wrong when you assert that the troop tax wasn’t a troop tax.

I played Eldar with guardians, rangers, and dire avengers as our troop choices. None of those thematically fit with how I played my army.

I ran three squads of striking scorpions in flacons and pushed them around the battlefield quickly striking and then running.

My troop choices usually sat in a corner and did nothing until they died. When the wave serpent got super OP I used them for the free transport and that was about it. I

I prefer a FOC over what we have now. I think it promotes armies that look like armies and provides another balancing tool. As ever with GW, I think the idea was good but the execution pretty terrible.

Troop tax was a problem, but I don't think that's an intrinsic issue with the FOC. I think it's just GW not bothering to provide good reasons to take Troops other than them being required. The current Pariah Nexus missions go some way to trying to encourage Battleline by making them actually useful, which I think is the right way to do it and I don't see any reason why that wouldn't also work under a FOC. With all units now having some kind of ability you can also use those to make Troops attractive. We can see this with units like CSM Legionaries, or Intercessors, who have useful abilities and are pretty competitively priced.

The force organisation chart was a great idea that was not properly exploited. I would love to see its return in a future edition, but modified for each army.

The old Force Org chart suffered from being hung around the Space Marines' particular way of working. As noted by posters above, it didn't serve Tyranids or Eldar well at all – their specialists rarely fitting the arbitrary Troops/Elite/Heavy Support distinctions.

Likewise, as an Imperial Guard player, the rules forced me to jump through all sorts of hoops that basically bypassed the chart anyway.

+++

The various versions of Epic did army building much better, with unique ways of army building that better reflected the particular faction. For example, Imperial forces in Space Marine second edition (SM2) were built around Company cards of large numbers of 'core' forces (e.g. Tactical, Assault, Predators etc.) For each Company card, you were allowed a number of Support cards (additional platoons of troops, squadrons of tanks) and Special cards (more unusual or rare stuff like Librarians).

There was thus a nice balance, and while there was flexibility you ended up with a Space Marine army like you read about in the background.

Importantly, the other armies were built differently. Orks, for example, were built in a broadly similar way, but you could never take more than six Clans (the Company card equivalent). However, you could always expand these with more boyz – which were in addition to those bought as Support or Special cards. The result was fewer, larger, more unwieldy (but virtually unstoppable!) formations on the battlefield.

Eldar worked in a similar way again, but their leaders weren't included as part of the Company cards. They were rare and tus you had to buy them separately, resulting in more brittle but flexible forces.

Some armies were completely different – the Tyranids in particular had a fantastically characterful method of army building. Their cards were hexagonal (as you can see in Filbert's Specialist Game Blog here on Dakka), with arrows on. You chose a synapse creature, which had a number of outward facing arrows. You then tessellated other creatures to those arrows.

Synapse creatures lower down than the hierarchy would allow you to open out the army, so attaching one to your leader would give you more options, which you could string out.

+++

Anyway, why do I bring this up? Well, the whole thing was wonderfully characterful and fun – and there's absolutely no reason at all why it couldn't be used in 40k, too.

You could have the 'rule of three' as a very basic army building method in the main rulebook, but include unique and characterful army-building methods in the Codex supplements. It'd be a hell of a lot more interesting than just re-buying the same lightly reworded material from the previous edition...

These rules could use the HQ/Troops/Elites/Heavy Support/Fast Attack paradigm, but equally you could have unique terms and structures.

Consider orks having Bosses/Boyz/Runtz/Karts and Kans/Orky-know-wotz – with Boyz being the restricting feature: each mob of orks allows you to take X other choices; so you're never restricted on the number of Boyz you take – but equally you can't have all the weird stuff without the Boyz.

Likewise, Eldar could have a much simpler and more flexible Leaders/Hosts/Support structure, with 'Hosts' covering all the Aspects along with Guardians – but you'd need Guardians to take Leaders and Support units.

... the point is that every army functions differently in the background, and the force org chart could serve that; giving more flavourful armies overall.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
FOC was great, and people maligning a "troops tax" are just wrong.

Honestly though? 7th ed Formations is more where it's at. Prescribed army structures that are different depending on faction, not enforced as a hard rule, but encouraged through bonus.

Not that 7th did it well. . . Oh no no no.

Explain why they’re wrong. Don’t just assert it as fact-actually take the time to articulate why a troop tax is good for every single army.

Aside from the optics of framing a "typical" army, they weren't a tax. People claiming they were usually just didn't know how to use their troops effectively. And if we're being honest, I think this is primarily a Space Marine thing. The mantra for Orks was "Boys before toys", Tyranids had a bunch of good options, Guard had their own build structure via Platoons, DE got double Bright Lances in their troops, etc. etc. The popular hangup was the Tactical Squad, which was a trickier unit to get the value out of, but still very worthwhile.

That wasn't my experience. Marines were an obvious example because most infantry units aside from tacticals were just tacticals with better gear. Plus marines (like many factions) had units that were basically just +1 versions of their troops (see: sternguard). My experience with eldar was similar to Jammer's. Even when eldar had a wide variety of troop options, they mostly just hid and tried not to die right away while contributing very little. With the possible exception of dire avengers whose oldschool bladestorm power made them hit somewhat hard. But even then, they mostly just unlocked wave serpents or made transports scoring depending on the edition. Chaos marines infamously spammed cultists for quite a while because they were simply the cheapest option. Tau fire warriors had their moments (especially when annoying super overwatch was a thing), but generally tau builds have leaned towards wanting to spam suits as much as possible. Some armies didn't mind investing in troops! But plenty of armies did.

The armies you use for examples mostly either avoid the troop tax or had useful/efficient/diverse enough troops to not mind it. Orks, from what I recall, generally focused on hitting the enemy with lots of waves of boyz, especially in truk rush editions, so you didn't mind fielding some boyz because they were a relatively cheap way to hurl something across the table and tie up the enemy in melee. Tyranids had a wide variety of troops ranging from dirt cheap minimal investments (gaunts, rippers) to killy outflankers (genestealers) to multi-wound warriors. So you could either pay one of the cheapest troop tax in the game, or you could invest in one of several very different units if they supported your overall game plan. Depending on the edition, guard also had one of the cheaper troop taxes in the game in the form of either infantry squads (if the multi-squad platoon rules weren't in play) or veteran squads. Vets, notably, were also able to cram a relatively high ratio of special weapons into their cheap units if they were so inclined. So you could either keep your tax low or you could get a relatively efficient unit for your troop tax. Dark eldar are complicated and vary a lot from edition to edition, but generally their troops are actually decent and tend to be an exception to the troop tax thing. You usually don't mind having an extra blaster or raider (unlocked by a warrior squad) floating around your army. Although notably, no one was going out of their way to take more warriors until after they'd maxed out their true born in 5th-7th edition.

The issue wasn't that people needed to git gud and learn to use their troops or whatever. We knew how to use them. We also knew that troops were frequently worse version of non-troop units or were just kind of inefficient or badly designed. Or just not particularly fluffy for my army.

 Jammer87 wrote:
In my opinion you’re completely wrong when you assert that the troop tax wasn’t a troop tax.

I played Eldar with guardians, rangers, and dire avengers as our troop choices. None of those thematically fit with how I played my army.

I ran three squads of striking scorpions in flacons and pushed them around the battlefield quickly striking and then running.

My troop choices usually sat in a corner and did nothing until they died. When the wave serpent got super OP I used them for the free transport and that was about it. I

I rest my case!

That's more or less what I saw a lot of people do, pay for them but not put them to use. "5 Tacs sitting in the backfield with a missile launcher." type stuff. Imo it's wasting capability. Sometimes that's an ok thing to do, but a lot of the time they're better served comitting them to the midfield to lend a hand when advantageous.

And you had three choices! Rangers at least made it their role to camp. Guardians in 3rd of course had the Starcannon when it had three shots. Avengers came into their own in 4th with the 18" Catapult (and Rending, maybe? I forget)


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 Wyldhunt wrote:

That wasn't my experience. Marines were an obvious example because most infantry units aside from tacticals were just tacticals with better gear. Plus marines (like many factions) had units that were basically just +1 versions of their troops (see: sternguard).

Sternguard only came about in 5th edition. But even then, of course you're spending more for the unit, when Tacticals are giving you wounds for fewer points, and basic Marine bodies were valuable on their own if you leaned into "punch the shooty, shoot the punchy", and the fact that, starting in 5th, Frag and Krak were standard equipment.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Jammer87 wrote:
In my opinion you’re completely wrong when you assert that the troop tax wasn’t a troop tax.

I played Eldar with guardians, rangers, and dire avengers as our troop choices. None of those thematically fit with how I played my army.

I ran three squads of striking scorpions in flacons and pushed them around the battlefield quickly striking and then running.

My troop choices usually sat in a corner and did nothing until they died. When the wave serpent got super OP I used them for the free transport and that was about it. I

I rest my case!

That's more or less what I saw a lot of people do, pay for them but not put them to use. "5 Tacs sitting in the backfield with a missile launcher." type stuff. Imo it's wasting capability. Sometimes that's an ok thing to do, but a lot of the time they're better served comitting them to the midfield to lend a hand when advantageous.

And you had three choices! Rangers at least made it their role to camp. Guardians in 3rd of course had the Starcannon when it had three shots. Avengers came into their own in 4th with the 18" Catapult (and Rending, maybe? I forget)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

That wasn't my experience. Marines were an obvious example because most infantry units aside from tacticals were just tacticals with better gear. Plus marines (like many factions) had units that were basically just +1 versions of their troops (see: sternguard).

Sternguard only came about in 5th edition. But even then, of course you're spending more for the unit, when Tacticals are giving you wounds for fewer points, and basic Marine bodies were valuable on their own if you leaned into "punch the shooty, shoot the punchy", and the fact that, starting in 5th, Frag and Krak were standard equipment.

To be fair, Marines also had their Veterans in 3rd. But no one even noticed them because they were Tacticals who cost more and had another pip of Leadership. Oh, and they could buy an extra attack but absolutely no one ever did that.

A lot of competitive modern lists would fit neatly into the FOC, so I feel complaints about how its all unbound now are a bit artificial.

I don't really care about the FOC as the FOC. For me the desire to have "some Troops" is the idea that armies should have sufficient bulk in them "to be armies". In that respect a lot of the definitions felt arbitrary. The issue isn't whether you have a certain number of units of troops - or take "troops+1".

The issue is that it feels weird to me if one player brings a "standard force" - say Marine Company based on a vaguely codex compliant concept. I.E. here's some tactical squads, an assault marine unit, some devastators, maybe some tanks or dreads or terminators led by 2-3 characters etc.

Now lets see what they are fighting... two mega-tanks, Seal Team 6 and Darth Vader?

To my mind the Marine Army, as an Army, should just go occupy the area - whatever that is - and consequently "win". It can do that because it has a "meat" element that the above list doesn't. In practice however its often been inferior - which is why people talk about troops taxes etc.

40k as "cinema" doesn't really care. I don't know where it would leave Knights as currently conceived etc. But I'm not a fan of armies which are say 4 Ctan or 5 Greater Daemons plus some chaff. At its core, I just like seeing lots of models on the table.

Slipspace wrote:
Troop tax was a problem, but I don't think that's an intrinsic issue with the FOC. I think it's just GW not bothering to provide good reasons to take Troops other than them being required.

For a while they were the only scoring units in the game.

The FoC and compulsory troops ensured that when one played turned up with a list to play objectives they weren't met with 2000pts of static artillery - at least until GW started releasing factions like renegades and heretics.

Current complaints about the lack of FoC really feel like theyre coming from people theorycrafting a boogeyman list that is not actually being played.

I find the current system to work muuuch better, with missions encouraging you to bring troops for their OC2 and now having some victory points achievable specifically by them.

The only thing currently missing is to have more stuff like the Troope master where having one as a warlord turns some units into battleline (and make these abilitites also give them OC x2).

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Current complaints about the lack of FoC really feel like theyre coming from people theorycrafting a boogeyman list that is not actually being played.

I find the current system to work muuuch better, with missions encouraging you to bring troops for their OC2 and now having some victory points achievable specifically by them.

The only thing currently missing is to have more stuff like the Troope master where having one as a warlord turns some units into battleline (and make these abilitites also give them OC x2).

I was really hoping that they would play around more with conditional battleline, after seeing it show up a few time in the indexes, but there's another two years of the edition, so maybe we'll see some more of it

 Insectum7 wrote:

Avengers came into their own in 4th with the 18" Catapult (and Rending, maybe? I forget)

In 4th and 5th, avengers had Bladestorm (the exarch power) which gave you +1 shots for one turn, then kept you from shooting at all on the next turn. But the biggest, best, most infamous use for avengers around that time was the Dire Avengers Vehicle Upgrade where you'd leave them inside wave serpent or (better yet) falcon with holofields so they'd make the vehicle scoring. That was the optimal meta troop choice in 5th edition: take the cheap guys so they can sit in a tank and make it scoring.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

That wasn't my experience. Marines were an obvious example because most infantry units aside from tacticals were just tacticals with better gear. Plus marines (like many factions) had units that were basically just +1 versions of their troops (see: sternguard).

Sternguard only came about in 5th edition. But even then, of course you're spending more for the unit, when Tacticals are giving you wounds for fewer points, and basic Marine bodies were valuable on their own if you leaned into "punch the shooty, shoot the punchy", and the fact that, starting in 5th, Frag and Krak were standard equipment.