Stormonu wrote:How about detachment strategms? Its not quite a free rule as you have to spend
CPs to gain a benefit, but you could then make some interesting rules that are “appropriately” costed.
Just out of my bum:
Patrol: 1
CP; choose up to 3 units. After deployment but before the first turn, the selected units may redeploy.
Spearhead: 1
CP (per turn); When 3 or more units choose the same target in the shooting phase, the attacks gains a +1 bonus to Wound, and you may reroll To Hit rolls of 1.
Conceptually cool, but still tricky to balance because some units will benefit from the stratagem more than others. So let's pretend that I've done the math and it has shown that dark reapers (an already good unti) benefit from that spearhead stratagem way more than wraith lords (a less good unit). Now I have yet another reason to take reapers over wraith lords, further weakening that particular bit of internal balance. Alternatively, let's say my swooping hawks and dark reapers are roughly equal in value for their points at the moment, but that the hypothetical spearhead stratagem happened to benefit reapers more than the outrider one benefited hawks. Now we've broken good internal balance with a potent generic option.
And then you have scenarios where one army's heavy supports or fast attack or whatever benefit from a generic stratagem significantly more than another's, and it feels like you're playing at a slight handicap for choosing that army.
It's a cool idea though.
Maybe a person could make a faction-specific detachment rule or stratagem if they looked carefully at the capabilities and combos of a given faction? For instance, maybe playing an Iyanden Batallion allows me to treat wraithguard as troops instead of elites (thus allowing me to get command points more easily), but my opponent gains bonus points for killing my precious wraith units off.
But yeah. It's tricky to do something so formation-esque. The "formation" will benefit unit X. If unit X was already balanced, then you've made a balanced unit better, thus risking making them too good for their points and pushing them into
OP territory. If unit X was too weak without the formation benefits, then the formation might fix that, but it means the unit is suffering from a different problem in the first place that should probably be fixed so that the unit is usable in a broader array of army types. So formations either break working units or else reveal problematic design in units that they don't break. Though you might be able to make an argument for balancing out a formation/detachment's benefits with built-in drawbacks...