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Curious what others think here, since I'm considering starting a new AoS army and this problem is really limiting any choices that I decide to make because I am more or less an army purist, in that I like to pick a specific subfaction and focus on that, devouring the lore and trying to make a force that completely sticks to the background. With AoS though it seems like that's more detrimental than anything else because most of the subfactions released thus far seem to be pretty limited in scope with what they have available, almost as though you are expected to be pulling from the Grand Alliance book as well to build your army.

I find it very hard to look outside of a specific faction from a fluff/narrative/theme approach; for example I play Flesh-Eater Courts currently, so I have like 3 units, 7 heroes (3 of which are variations of the same guy) and 2 monsters and that's it for my army choices, but the fluff purist in me is like it's "wrong" (relatively speaking of course) to ally in other Death factions even though I'm allowed to do so, because it doesn't suit the theme of the army I envision to mix and match, and makes it that much harder in many cases to really build a story around a cohesive army, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the intent is that you cover gaps in your own subfaction with things from the whole Grand Alliance, whether you want to or not.

Does anyone else experience this, and if so how do you cope? Do I need to just learn to consider everything in the alliance as being my "army" not just the specific subfaction I like? Like, I can't help but shake this feeling that it's not the "spirit of the game" to adjust my own army narrative in order to fit in allies where they don't really make sense; it feels like trying to game the system and take what might be "best" over what makes the most sense for the army.

I am the same way for the most part. My main army is khorne, and thats mostly the mortal stuff though I have no problem combining khorne daemons in my army as well. In that sense, my purist comes from the khorne keyword and not khorne mortals.

Personally I also prefer to stick to a single subfaction as it looks better on the table IMHO. Some factions can perform better while sticking to their own theme, flesh eater courts being one of them. Others are horrendously split up in several itty bitty factions with some left out in the compendium (Aelves in general)leaving them with poor choices in army composition.

I think when the new battle tomes with allegiance abilities come out, more players will be enticed to stick to a theme.

Yeah, I'm thinking maybe I just need to wait a bit and see what else is coming out. Right now I feel super limited with my Flesh-Eater Courts (it's literally a question of do I want to buy more Ghouls or more Crypt Horrors... obviously the answer is "both" but you get the idea ) but the way the army is set up in the fluff, I can't see them really working with anything else in the Death alliance without essentially being forced, which goes against my own fluff where I have self-contained and monstrously deluded kingdom. I could maybe see introducing some Morghasts or whatever they're called (those big winged skeleton monsters) under the guise of "angelic messengers" sent by the gods (i.e. Nagash) and that might be an idea I could run with (sort of a parody of Basilea in Kings of War, which I had considered playing a while ago; in fact I kinda like that idea) but like, I don't really see my kingdom allying itself with skeletons or zombies or ghosts or, heaven forbid, Vampires.

Something like Chaos it makes thematic sense to mix daemons and mortals, or even the different Skaven clans together, but the other factions seem to largely be self-contained, Order especially with some exceptions like the Aelves or Stormcast Extremis.

I also tend to buy bulk boxes, so I end up with a lot of miniatures that are not always of my choosing. So for instance, I ended up with a bunch of Chaos stuff from various places (the Slaughterpriest from White Dwarf, Bloodbound from starter set, bunch of Tzeentch stuff from Silver Tower, a start collecting Slaves to Darkness) - the Slaves to Darkness is the only one I bought specifically for the Chaos alliance. Everything else just short came with things I was buying for other reasons. I think it is cool that I kind of built an army without dedicating a lot of time and money towards it. It wouldn't be my first, or even third, choice for an army, but I like variety.

If I ended up with a single Destruction model, I wouldn't be able to use it though. Hopefully, GW will make some board games or bulk boxes for Destruction and Death too.

It allows for them to make even more specialized factions without needing to require a full set of everything within a faction, which I like because it allows for things like "Tzeentch Mortals" to come naturally even if just with a smaller force at first.

I'm not yet sure how I feel about it. I like my Khorne Bloodbound and haven't yet amassed a big enough to collection to own them all however there are some really nice other Chaos model I think would be cool to own one day and would go well with my army. For example a big monster like a Bloodthirster would be great as would some Khorne marked Slaves to Darkness like the Warshrine or maybe some Chaos Knights.

Atm there are not any allegiance rules for going pure Bloodbound AFAIK but when there are I'm going to have to seriously think of whether I want to limit myself to Bloodbound for those rules or ignore them for some extra cool stuff. I also don't mean following the rules purely for mechanical benefit, once there are allegiance rules to break then it'll make me feel worse for failing them.

As an aside some of the new sub faction are small I can't imagine sticking to them. Even if they get multiple rules out of a single kit they still seem really boring.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
It allows for them to make even more specialized factions without needing to require a full set of everything within a faction, which I like because it allows for things like "Tzeentch Mortals" to come naturally even if just with a smaller force at first.

I like that idea, but it does make me "worry" that they are basically doing minimal things for all these various subfactions, with no intention to expand them out later because they can just point to the alliance and say you can mix and match them together, so it's not a big deal if your "subfaction" has only 4 choices.

WayneTheGame wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
It allows for them to make even more specialized factions without needing to require a full set of everything within a faction, which I like because it allows for things like "Tzeentch Mortals" to come naturally even if just with a smaller force at first.

I like that idea, but it does make me "worry" that they are basically doing minimal things for all these various subfactions, with no intention to expand them out later because they can just point to the alliance and say you can mix and match them together, so it's not a big deal if your "subfaction" has only 4 choices.

Well they did increase Stormcast out by making another faction (Extremis) that works well with it in some manner.

 durecellrabbit wrote:
As an aside some of the new sub faction are small I can't imagine sticking to them. Even if they get multiple rules out of a single kit they still seem really boring.

That's one of the things I'm facing with Flesh-Eater Courts; they are cool in the fluff, I even like the models (and normally I don't like undead) but the choices are extremely simple, I mean there are literally 3 main units to pick from (i.e. Crypt Ghouls, Crypt Horrors or Crypt Flayers), and that gets fairly boring. A lot of the new battletomes seem that way, they have like a very small selection of units themselves, which isn't always a bad thing from a collecting perspective (makes it way easier to plan out!) but feels a bit lackluster if you are like me and, for example, want an army themed around a specific Orruk clan and don't want to have a big Waagh that combines several different clans (which as I am looking at some Orruks, either Ironjawz or Bonesplitterz, that's what I would do. One single clan of my own devising).

You can make alliance tough. I totally can imagine savage orruk archer with beastclaw raiders as a big hunting party.

I get what you mean when you say it feels wrong to mix factions. I did feel that way, but then got bored with the limited ways of using and painting the Bloodbound, so I got some Khorne Daemons and got really bored with the colour red and having no magic or effective shooting, but there's just no way I'm taking a spellcaster in a Khorne-themed army. No chance. However such an army plays, and there're plenty of Khorne armies with extraordinarily bold and daring spellcasters in the army list threads, to me this kind of army lacks identity. It's an obvious patch to add a spellcaster to a Khorne army in order to improve its effectiveness on the table. Perhaps it is pedantic of me, but this is just an opinion and easily disregarded. I wouldn't have a problem with an opponent using a Khorne-wizard list against me, but I'm not going to look at his/her army and be inspired, and that's certainly one of the things I'm after.

As demonstrated by the aforementioned personal issues with building a Khorne-specific list, in spite of what I've said I really like the idea of a faction-specific list, but I clearly also like the idea of creating a single army that's full of variety, and that does mean adopting the Grand Alliance rather than any of the factions. To this end, going forward I'll be collecting a Tzeentch/Nurgle/Khorne/Mortal-keyword list to represent an earthy ragtag alliance. The key for me is balancing the presence of these three gods in the army, dramatizing the tensions between them in my head and perhaps on paper, and occasionally letting in units from factions outside of the 'big three', so long as I can fit them into the narrative in my head. Synergy will suffer but I'm not too fussed, because I'll like all of the models in the army and therefore paint them with love and care.

As a Chaos player, though, and I think for Destruction players also, with these alliances having a somewhat ragtag character, picking units from across a Grand Alliance is much less of an obstacle than for anyone who draws from Death like yourself (certainly for the Flesh-Eaters, who do seem very hermetically-sealed within their fluff) or from Order. Your idea of using Morghasts as angelic messengers is brilliant, though, and I'd encourage you to do it. You could really push this concept of re-labelling units to fit the Flesh-Eaters' collective delusion to extremes if you wanted to. For me, it's this sort of thing that's most inspiring about AoS. Bottle's 'Siegfreid's Desperados' thread, for instance, where Death and Order are mixed was probably critical in forming my opinions in this respect, rather than GW's 'unbound' approach to army building. Of course, it does seem as though each new faction release/update will benefit from faction-specific bonuses, which is almost a shame because the idea of diversity within an army seemed to be one of the more interesting motives for bothering with AoS in the first place.

 Funbug No.1 wrote:
As a Chaos player, though, and I think for Destruction players also, with these alliances having a somewhat ragtag character, picking units from across a Grand Alliance is much less of an obstacle than for anyone who draws from Death like yourself (certainly for the Flesh-Eaters, who do seem very hermetically-sealed within their fluff) or from Order. Your idea of using Morghasts as angelic messengers is brilliant, though, and I'd encourage you to do it. You could really push this concept of re-labelling units to fit the Flesh-Eaters' collective delusion to extremes if you wanted to. For me, it's this sort of thing that's most inspiring about AoS. Bottle's 'Siegfreid's Desperados' thread, for instance, where Death and Order are mixed was probably critical in forming my opinions in this respect, rather than GW's 'unbound' approach to army building. Of course, it does seem as though each new faction release/update will benefit from faction-specific bonuses, which is almost a shame because the idea of diversity within an army seemed to be one of the more interesting motives for bothering with AoS in the first place.

Yes, I think that basically Chaos and Destruction feel a lot easier to mix and match, Chaos for obvious reasons and Destruction because they used to be all under one. Death, even though Undead used to be all together, feels like they were given more unique personalities that destroy that cohesion (ironically similar to how when they initially split Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings, it become harder to put them back together). Flesh Eaters especially seem to be relatively self-contained. Right now I'm debating another faction mainly because I'm not really "feeling" the Flesh Eater playstyle, but the biggest thing is that I don't want to hamstring myself by refusing to branch to other things, but I also want it to feel like a coherent army with looks; part of the reason I could never play Eldar in 40k, for example, was largely due to the fact the aspect warriors each looked out of place in the whole army.

Destruction came from two armybooks (Orcs & Goblins and Ogre Kingdoms), not one. Even then, I for one never really thought that Savage Orcs or Night Gobbos fit in thematically with the standard Orcs and Gobbos.

I like my armies to stick to a theme. Sometimes that means staying within a subfaction (my Slaanesh) while other times it means a mix (my Destruction). Its all about building an army you want to play. How effective it is doesn't matter if you don't want to play the army in the first place. Of course for some people that is the exact factor that determines if they want to play it, but that's a separate matter.

FWIW try building Flesh-Eaters around different battalions. They work well as a subfaction on their own, so that's not a huge concern.