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The problem with insistance on troops being "backbone" is that this is certainly true on a strategic level IRL.Which a game of 40k doesn't represent in any way. You don't care that 90% of your Elites eat dirt because next pick-up game you can just field a full squad again, so the question of reserves and replenishment (much easier for basic troop types than specialists) doesn't come into play. It also doesn't matter that you can field 200 grunts with a rifle for the price of 1 tank, because 40k does not bother itself with taxation and budgets, points are purely description of battlefield efficiency.

Simply put,at the level 40k operates and without resorting to campaign play, there is no real niche for Basic Troop units except as meatshields for elites at best, except they tend to cost too much for that most of the time. They're not killy enough to be desireable, and not cheap enough to be disposable. Unless you make listbuilding much more complex, or make them super-cheap, they will always be seen as a burden in a normal pick-up game.

Of course given the size of the games, 40k "armies" are basically at best understrenght companies, and should consist 90% of the same troop type, not random smattering of units from every branch possible. But no one would find that fun, so another IRL aspect of "balancing troops" is dispensed with.

There is nothing realistic about how 40k armies are or were constructed, Troops being some sort of mandatory choice because IRL they make up most of the armies is silly when nothing else in 40k attempts to simulate reality.

 Strg Alt wrote:

leopard wrote:
you deal with "troops tax" by making troops something you actually want

No. Grunts of any faction shouldn´t feel special or powerful as they would overshadow the elite and support options. It would boil down to this:

"If everybody is super no one is."

you can make them something you want without them being overpowered, they can have roles beyond killing stuff, screening, objectives and similar, also works because while you want them, you cannot them spam a silly number to win as they lack the damage output and can be killed, it just takes a bit of time

 Strg Alt wrote:

leopard wrote:
you deal with "troops tax" by making troops something you actually want

No. Grunts of any faction shouldn´t feel special or powerful as they would overshadow the elite and support options. It would boil down to this:

"If everybody is super no one is."

If you expand the combat mechanics of 40K to be about more than just pure lethality then you can make Troops useful without needing to make them feel special or powerful.

EG: Troops are designed around holding a position and suppressing enemy units.
Your elite units are then the hammer that destroys the suppressed unit.

I actually think 10th is actually taking steps in the right direction for making troops desirable without making them super lethal. You've got units like kabalite warriors who can make objectives sticky, eldar guardians and battle sisters who help fuel your army-wide mechanics, and necron warriors who are better at reanimating and thus better at holding objectives or keeping up your forward momentum.

Honestly, those are the sorts of things I've been wanting to see for years. I may not love the Strands of Fate mechanic, but at least my guardian defenders no longer feel like they're jockying with avengers for the role of most-efficient-catapult-platform any more.

it is simple, if Troops are meant to be a tax for the good stuff as a balancing factor, not all armies having a choice which troops to take and some armies having a troop choice that is the good stuff, is a big problem

if troops are not a tax, the must do something the other units don't or you are not taking them at all

that there are mandatory troops for a theme in a SciFi game is only related to fluff, GW can write a text that there is a chapter using Desolators as troops all reason why there must be something else is gone

and this happened tot he old FOC because instead of having specific types of units in the slots, they used it to add flavour for the background and as GW is not good at writing rules, some armies got good units in all slots and the others got all their good units moved into support for fluff reason

I like what they've been doing with troops in 10th, giving them bonuses that centre around objectives (sticky objectives, re-rolls to hit/wound when on an objective or firing at enemy units holding objectives).

They should be USRs, as there there are only a few variations and repeating them over and over again is brain dead levels of stupid (but that's 10th Ed for ya!), but the concept is something I think could work. Plus the higher OC on those sorts of units.

It's not a tax if these units are genuinely better at completing objectives and if completing objectives is vital to winning the game, as opposed to something you can try to do if you feel like rather than just wiping your opponent out with an Alpha Strike.

A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

leopard wrote:
you deal with "troops tax" by making troops something you actually want

No. Grunts of any faction shouldn´t feel special or powerful as they would overshadow the elite and support options. It would boil down to this:

"If everybody is super no one is."

If you expand the combat mechanics of 40K to be about more than just pure lethality then you can make Troops useful without needing to make them feel special or powerful.

EG: Troops are designed around holding a position and suppressing enemy units.
Your elite units are then the hammer that destroys the suppressed unit.

I remember editions where blocks of cheap State Troops/Clanrats/Spearmen/etc being fantastic for getting rank bonuses, tying up expensive elite blocks, preventing your elites from being outnumbered in combat, and generally just having all the utility that came with bodies on the table in WHFB.

But people still complained about the 'Core tax' because they didn't want basic ordinary mundane (effective) dudes, they wanted shiny Greatswords/Stormvermin/Swordsmasters.

There's a perception issue here that goes beyond pure effectiveness. Basic troopers that are worth their points by holding terrain are effective but not cool.

 catbarf wrote:

A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:

leopard wrote:
you deal with "troops tax" by making troops something you actually want

No. Grunts of any faction shouldn´t feel special or powerful as they would overshadow the elite and support options. It would boil down to this:

"If everybody is super no one is."

If you expand the combat mechanics of 40K to be about more than just pure lethality then you can make Troops useful without needing to make them feel special or powerful.

EG: Troops are designed around holding a position and suppressing enemy units.
Your elite units are then the hammer that destroys the suppressed unit.

I remember editions where blocks of cheap State Troops/Clanrats/Spearmen/etc being fantastic for getting rank bonuses, tying up expensive elite blocks, preventing your elites from being outnumbered in combat, and generally just having all the utility that came with bodies on the table in WHFB.

But people still complained about the 'Core tax' because they didn't want basic ordinary mundane (effective) dudes, they wanted shiny Greatswords/Stormvermin/Swordsmasters.

There's a perception issue here that goes beyond pure effectiveness. Basic troopers that are worth their points by holding terrain are effective but not cool.

given how effective it has been for a while to try and win with basic troops scoring points while flashy stuff acts as a distraction the whole idea of a "tax" unit has shifted, now its not just about raw killing powers its about scoring VP to win the game there is value in something that can sit on an objective and be forgotten about

and in WHFB it used to be one of the main counters to 'death stars', feed them chaff

personally I quite like the occasional victory where the little mundane dudes win the day

People always want the cool stuff. I think the issue with WHFB, which was shown very much in the extreme with old Skaven with Skaven slave rats.

Basically a unit you need a LOT of and which did nothing but tarpit and mostly just died. So you invested a lot of money and time into building them, but on the table they did almost nothing of value besides kind of hold the line. It was your shiny fewer in number models that came up behind which did the exciting stuff.


The slaves had value and they worked within that tactical approach; however because they were designed as chaff and because of the unit numbers required the investment in them was heavily disproportionate to their "fun" factor.



Other armies could be the same. Now you can get around it in part by making more interesting looking models and by cutting down unit counts and by making less of a divide between chaff and elite models in performance. The risk is you end up listening too much to this feedback and everything becomes and elite and suddenly a whole layer of tactics, movement and other aspects are lost in the game and everything because very samey.