Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I was thinking the other day about how I want a playable force (doesn't have to be an effective one) with as few duplicate units as possible mostly because I want to paint as much variety as possible but would like to to paint a force that was at least conceptually legal. For example I wouldn't want to paint 20-40 Skitari. The sometimes critical and sometimes positive comments about soup forces got me wondering how I could create a force with as many different units as possible (Maybe with two or three different start collecting boxes as a base. Realising that this is unlikely to be a particularity effective army but might be a fun one to paint and model. For example maybe an inquisition themed force that has units from the Tempest, Skitari and Deathwatch start collecting kits involved.

I was wondering how you guys would go about creating a 40k force that minimised multiple boxes of the same kind of troops if you were to try to similar with any race or faction/factions. Can be as fluffy or as ridiculous as you like as long as its legally playable pick your own points level as large or small as you like.

Thanks

A monster mash list would be pretty good for that sort of thing: kitbash some custom DP for each god, grab one each of the Greater Daemons and maybe even 1 or 2 of the Uber-Greater Daemons.

If you wanted a really fluffy and varied army, maybe try to re-create the Seige of Vraks defence forces: put together a central force of cultists, zombies and renegade guard with a beefy tank and artillery column, with supporting detachments of: World Eaters, Death Guard, Alpha Legion, Khorne/Nurgle Daemons and maybe a titan if you save up your pocket money. Would be a fantastic list if you could find someone who plays DKoK, DA, SM, GK and titans.

Inquisition is good for this. I run a battalion of Deathwatch along with a Supreme Command of cool Inquisition HQs (Celestine/Voldus/Dreadknight/Greyfax/etc). Sometimes I fit in a Knight and at some point I'll probably add the option to include a Battalion of Scions and/or Grey Knights. As is, the most duplicated thing in my army is 4 models that have Frag Cannons. Even those are hardly "duplicates" though.

Knights of the Round is a semi-jokey army concept where you pretend your Custodes are Bretonnians and paint them up in a riot of widely varied heraldry. It doesn't necessarily get you away from painting a lot of different instances of the same model, but they're Custodes so your 2,000pt list is going to be 20-30 models and every one of them could be a completely different scheme. Another way of doing the few models/different schemes setup sort of like that is Imperial Knights where your army is about four big models that can, again, have wildly varied heraldry.

If you're set on not repeating units/going for a soup list rather than just a rainbow-scheme setup on repeating units you're also sort of describing the Great Court (a Biel-Tan army concept named after an old Apocalypse formation) where you take a few units of each Aspect. Trying to go soup with it does push you into ineffective units pretty quickly; superfriends (Imperial Supreme Command detachments) has been nerfed pretty effectively by the character-rule change that means you can't just hide behind Culexis Assassins to get into range, going for an Inquisitorial unit-from-each-book sort of list you run out of effective units pretty quickly and end up taking things like Grey Knight Strike Squads and Deathwatch units.

Tyranid or Daemon monster lists would also work well in terms of being able to use a bunch of different expensive single models, but both are improved by having a few 20-30-man infantry blobs.

The problem here is that the sheer alpha-strikiness of 8th and the need to fill space strongly encourages redundancy in list-building and large units where you would have to paint 20-30 of the same guy. On gameplay effectiveness I think Daemons (all four gods, two or three big infantry blocks to occupy space while the monsters run around killing things) and combined-arms Tyranids (a few infantry blocks and Rippers for space-filling to let your monsters maneuver) probably offer you the most variety in models while also having space-filling units that are relatively easy to paint (no decals, separate materials, clothing...), and Bretonnian-Custodes probably come closest to your vision of no duplicates/large blocks within a single Codex (you will be painting duplicate units but they tend to be 3-model units).

I don't really like the idea of no-duplicates Imperial soup from a gameplay standpoint, but if you wanted to do it LunarSol's suggestion (superfriends + Deathwatch/Scions + Knight) is probably the way to do it. It also ties back into the Bretonnian-Custodes concept a bit, because getting a box of Custodes jetbikes and running them as a Supreme Command detachment of jetbike Captains with three different schemes (also possibly with a flag to give Invulnerable saves to your other infantry) is a reasonably workable addition to said Imperial superfriends.

I'm brewing up some Aeldari soup just for this reason. Plenty of options across the 3 (and a bit) lists. Planning to eventually have enough to deploy a detachment of each (maybe more depending how the DE Codex looks.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

I don't really like the idea of no-duplicates Imperial soup from a gameplay standpoint, but if you wanted to do it LunarSol's suggestion (superfriends + Deathwatch/Scions + Knight) is probably the way to do it. It also ties back into the Bretonnian-Custodes concept a bit, because getting a box of Custodes jetbikes and running them as a Supreme Command detachment of jetbike Captains with three different schemes (also possibly with a flag to give Invulnerable saves to your other infantry) is a reasonably workable addition to said Imperial superfriends.

3 Custodes Bike Captains is definitely one of the things I swap in for one of the detachments these days. Fun stuff.

I just collect what I like,
and I typically don't like to collect a bunch of the same things.
Then, I use what I have got to build an army.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Knights of the Round is a semi-jokey army concept where you pretend your Custodes are Bretonnians and paint them up in a riot of widely varied heraldry. It doesn't necessarily get you away from painting a lot of different instances of the same model, but they're Custodes so your 2,000pt list is going to be 20-30 models and every one of them could be a completely different scheme. Another way of doing the few models/different schemes setup sort of like that is Imperial Knights where your army is about four big models that can, again, have wildly varied heraldry.

If you're set on not repeating units/going for a soup list rather than just a rainbow-scheme setup on repeating units you're also sort of describing the Great Court (a Biel-Tan army concept named after an old Apocalypse formation) where you take a few units of each Aspect. Trying to go soup with it does push you into ineffective units pretty quickly; superfriends (Imperial Supreme Command detachments) has been nerfed pretty effectively by the character-rule change that means you can't just hide behind Culexis Assassins to get into range, going for an Inquisitorial unit-from-each-book sort of list you run out of effective units pretty quickly and end up taking things like Grey Knight Strike Squads and Deathwatch units.

Tyranid or Daemon monster lists would also work well in terms of being able to use a bunch of different expensive single models, but both are improved by having a few 20-30-man infantry blobs.

The problem here is that the sheer alpha-strikiness of 8th and the need to fill space strongly encourages redundancy in list-building and large units where you would have to paint 20-30 of the same guy. On gameplay effectiveness I think Daemons (all four gods, two or three big infantry blocks to occupy space while the monsters run around killing things) and combined-arms Tyranids (a few infantry blocks and Rippers for space-filling to let your monsters maneuver) probably offer you the most variety in models while also having space-filling units that are relatively easy to paint (no decals, separate materials, clothing...), and Bretonnian-Custodes probably come closest to your vision of no duplicates/large blocks within a single Codex (you will be painting duplicate units but they tend to be 3-model units).

I don't really like the idea of no-duplicates Imperial soup from a gameplay standpoint, but if you wanted to do it LunarSol's suggestion (superfriends + Deathwatch/Scions + Knight) is probably the way to do it. It also ties back into the Bretonnian-Custodes concept a bit, because getting a box of Custodes jetbikes and running them as a Supreme Command detachment of jetbike Captains with three different schemes (also possibly with a flag to give Invulnerable saves to your other infantry) is a reasonably workable addition to said Imperial superfriends.

'Knights of the Round', brings back memories of FF7

Biel-tan eldar is the way to go. There are 9 different aspect shrines which all have various paint schemes. If you want to go highlander, you can definitely get a 2k list without taking a single duplicate and it will probably perform well too.

Thanks to everyone for your comments so far. Happy to hear more of your ideas.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

If you're set on not repeating units/going for a soup list rather than just a rainbow-scheme setup on repeating units you're also sort of describing the Great Court (a Biel-Tan army concept named after an old Apocalypse formation) where you take a few units of each Aspect. Trying to go soup with it does push you into ineffective units pretty quickly; superfriends (Imperial Supreme Command detachments) has been nerfed pretty effectively by the character-rule change that means you can't just hide behind Culexis Assassins to get into range, going for an Inquisitorial unit-from-each-book

I don't really like the idea of no-duplicates Imperial soup from a gameplay standpoint, but if you wanted to do it LunarSol's suggestion (superfriends + Deathwatch/Scions + Knight) is probably the way to do it. It also ties back into the Bretonnian-Custodes concept a bit, because getting a box of Custodes jetbikes and running them as a Supreme Command detachment of jetbike Captains with three different schemes (also possibly with a flag to give Invulnerable saves to your other infantry) is a reasonably workable addition to said Imperial superfriends.

Great court sounds fun. I am probably leaning towards super friends inquisition personally at the moment.

I don’t feel strict about no duplicates but I’m collecting stuff to paint first with play being a distant second. I can understand however thsf it may be far less fun to play.

 carlos13th wrote:
Thanks to everyone for your comments so far. Happy to hear more of your ideas.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

If you're set on not repeating units/going for a soup list rather than just a rainbow-scheme setup on repeating units you're also sort of describing the Great Court (a Biel-Tan army concept named after an old Apocalypse formation) where you take a few units of each Aspect. Trying to go soup with it does push you into ineffective units pretty quickly; superfriends (Imperial Supreme Command detachments) has been nerfed pretty effectively by the character-rule change that means you can't just hide behind Culexis Assassins to get into range, going for an Inquisitorial unit-from-each-book

I don't really like the idea of no-duplicates Imperial soup from a gameplay standpoint, but if you wanted to do it LunarSol's suggestion (superfriends + Deathwatch/Scions + Knight) is probably the way to do it. It also ties back into the Bretonnian-Custodes concept a bit, because getting a box of Custodes jetbikes and running them as a Supreme Command detachment of jetbike Captains with three different schemes (also possibly with a flag to give Invulnerable saves to your other infantry) is a reasonably workable addition to said Imperial superfriends.

Great court sounds fun. I am probably leaning towards super friends inquisition personally at the moment.

I don’t feel strict about no duplicates but I’m collecting stuff to paint first with play being a distant second. I can understand however thsf it may be far less fun to play.

The advantage, and the disadvantage, of the Inquisition is that you have very few official models, so you need to/have the freedom to figure out proxies/conversions for your Acolytes. Third-party Imperial Guard ranges are a good place to begin; Anvil Industries and Victoria Miniatures both do a wide range of different 'regiments' designed to let you mix and match parts to make something they weren't expecting and they're both more in-scale with 40k; Mantic Games' Warpath range and Warlord's Beyond the Gates of Antares are both a little more truescale (so they're shorter/skinner than 40k humans would usually be) and a little more sleek-scifi rather than the pseudo-historical/gothic wackiness of 40k, and Dreamforge Games' Eisenkern and Puppetswar's models are both more truescale and a little bigger than 40k models (so they're about the right height but also skinnier).

The other problem with trying to make a soup list work is the number of different army books you need, so; I'd suggest picking either Deathwatch or Tempestus as the initial focal point of your motor pool and building from there to minimize the irritatingness of needing to keep track of too many books/take too many detachment taxes when you do start playing them.

 LunarSol wrote:
Inquisition is good for this.

Yeah, I definitely thought about doing this. An inquisitor can drag almost anything Imperial into service they want. Grey Knights, Deathwatch, SoB, Guard, Knights, Mechanicum, Space Marines, Custodes, you name it.

Personally I have a few official inquisitor models including Eisenhorn. The Skitari Start collecting box and the guys from deathwatch overkill to get started with. Also have a bits box.

That's how I am going to start, really want Scions so that will be added later on once progress has been made on what I have in a much similar way to Jeff White mentioned earlier. Paint what I like then work out how to use it later. With duplicated added because I think they will look good in the force or because I think they will be fun to play

Some great ideas in this thread though. Also thanks for the suggestions for third party minis to make acolytes.

If any of you have any pictures of these kind of forces would love to see them.