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.

Hi folks. Long time lurker but I setup a new account recently and just wanted to throw my two-cents into the general state-of-the-game and balance discussion here. First off, I play Druhkari primarily, though I have a small Harlequins force I'm working on too. I thought both codexes were fairly well crafted and I really liked the Druhkari faction split with obsessions making a True Kin force feel like a collection of different political players in Commorragh coming together for a raid. I do wish that they would give more advantages to bringing a detachment of each type (one kabal, one cult, one coven to discourage spam), but Alliance of Agony was at least a nice bone to throw in as slight encouragement. There probably needs to be some point adjustments for some of our stronger (Ravagers) and weaker units (as every codex probably needs, and hopefully the CA plan accomplishes this goal), but generally I feel like Drukhari got lucky with a cool, well thought out and strong codex from GW.

Despite the former thoughts that I wanted to include just as some background, I'm not creating a thread to discuss specific army/codex strengths as there are obviously MANY threads on Dakka doing just that. The reason for this thread is that I feel as if the balance of 40K really hinges on, and currently is somewhat screwed over by SOUP lists. This is not controversial, but I feel like the overarching game balance /list building was designed with detachments in mind (generating CPs to spend on cool strategems, etc.) but codexes are primarily balanced on a book by book basis even though we have overarching keywords that allow Imperium players to take detachments from 12 different armies with 0 downside, Chaos from 5 armies, Eldar from 3.5, etc. while the last few Xenos have no options for allies. The only real limit is the 3 detachment suggestion per the FAQ. But as we all know, 3 detachments is more than enough to do soup damage.

The thesis of this post is, why does Games Workshop create codexes that are written to create a balanced army with strengths and weaknesses when they've created a game that allows some players to grab goodies (strongest parts) from a variety of codexes with no downside, CP or otherwise?

I'm not a tournament player, and don't want to call out specifics from my friendly matched play games at my FLGS that may not be universally abusable in different settings. Nor do I want to act like I'm complaining! I'm lucky as I have an army/codex that is strong enough to stand on its own in most situations. The problem is that I look over at an Aeldari soup list who takes 3 ravagers with a Kabal of the Black Heart Archon a.k.a. taking the best couple units and strategems from the Druhkari codex, and combining it with the psykers of Craftworlds, dark reapers, w/e is the OP eldar unit of the month. PLUS maybe a strike force of Harlequins which are some of the best melee options an Aeldari army can bring, etc. It just doesn't make sense to me, and leads to untenable balance situations. There will be calls to nerf all the best units from all the Aeldari codexes which in turn will over-nerf any players that play "codex-pure" armies. Like, Drukhari units were designed with the idea that the army has no psykers, and so they should have some advantages, but then you combine these units with the strongest psykers in the game, and voila! OP city! The same can be said with Imperium obviously and Custodes bike armies with infinite guard screens. . . I just don't understand how GW plan on balancing the Imperium as an entire faction against say the Tau codex. How is this possible?

Further, I don't just want to complain or point out what seems to be the obvious. I hope that maybe we can brainstorm in this thread as to solutions. Do solutions come through CPs? Taking them away from soup lists presumably? To counterbalance the obvious advantages of a soup list it seems to me as if strategems should be disabled for soup armies entirely. I don't know what other solutions there are to this problem, and I don't think the old battle brothers rules from 6th and 7th are the answer necessarily either. I think it's fine for players (especially in narrative matches) to bring a list that includes imperium or eldar units from different codexes as it can feel a lot more thematic in a battle. But matched play is different, and should be balanced to create the least amount of abusable list gimmicks possible.

Thanks for reading-

Vect's Masque wrote:
The thesis of this post is, why does Games Workshop create codexes that are written to create a balanced army with strengths and weaknesses

They don't.

A.T. wrote:

Vect's Masque wrote:
The thesis of this post is, why does Games Workshop create codexes that are written to create a balanced army with strengths and weaknesses

They don't.

Ok, then why do they TRY and create decent armies through codices (though they sometimes fall short) when they create a huge problem on the other end of list building by allowing armies to be built from 3 different codices? My point is that SOUP is a bigger problem than a few codices being weaker than others.

Is this another post where “soup” just means “two allied Imperial factions”? Because that isn’t soup.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Is this another post where “soup” just means “two allied Imperial factions”? Because that isn’t soup.

I mean soup means mixing codices for an army right? Presumably 3, but I guess 2 would be a "lesser" type of soup as well.

Vect's Masque wrote:
Ok, then why do they TRY and create decent armies through codices (though they sometimes fall short)

They don't.
The units in a codex are based on the models being sold, not on some carefully thought out balance and counter-balance between the factions.

For instance if faction (a) gets a powerful flyer and faction (b) doesn't have one - b doesn't get one, or an anti-flier unit, or anti-flyer protection, or any other kind of counter... at least until they decide to make a model of one.
Faction (c) on the other hand may have 20 different types of anti-flyer units for no other reason than that forgeworld decided to do a run of them.

Vect's Masque wrote:
when they create a huge problem on the other end of list building by allowing armies to be built from 3 different codices? My point is that SOUP is a bigger problem than a few codices being weaker than others.

Depends somewhat on where you start and what you do with it.

Using soup to generate cheap CPs for a blood angels captain is a problem, for instance. Without soup BA would be decent but weakened.

On the other hand an Inquisition player trying to use the current soup rules to build an old witch/daemonhunter style army is going to have problems with them being too restrictive. Without soup Inquisition would be unplayable.

the problem isn't soup. people will ALWAYS find the most broken army they can find and run that, people where doing that before allies.

BrianDavion wrote:
the problem isn't soup. people will ALWAYS find the most broken army they can find and run that, people where doing that before allies.

While true, there's also merit to the argument that allies and soup offers new possibilities in that regard that weren't open before however. Broadly speaking, armies are still primarily self contained forces, designed with specific strengths and weaknesses and fighting styles in mind. Allies and soup allows for interactions to cherry pick the best from multiple armies and suffer none of the downsides or capability gaps, or to supercharge units that otherwise are fine in their original self-contained guise. It was a problem immediately starting in 6E when Allies were reintroduced after 2E, and has continued to be one up to the present day.

GW doesn't try to balance codices- at least not very hard.

Soup exists because in 6th edition GW allowed players to bring a detachment of allies along with their main army. In 8th they doubled-down on this with mix-and-match because it encourages model sales.

Why don't they encourage sales by making people want to buy stuff from their own codex? It is not like the cost of plastic is different what ever someone uses BA tacticals or IG mooks.

Karol wrote:
Why don't they encourage sales by making people want to buy stuff from their own codex? It is not like the cost of plastic is different what ever someone uses BA tacticals or IG mooks.

because ally rules are a long term marketing stragety to sell not more minis, but more ARMIES. it's a hell of a lot easier to pick up some custodes if you're inital intent is that they'll make something neat you can ally into your force, then it is if you have to commit to a full new army.

Karol wrote:
Why don't they encourage sales by making people want to buy stuff from their own codex? It is not like the cost of plastic is different what ever someone uses BA tacticals or IG mooks.

Because spending time working on the rules and balancing factions is time they would rather spend on making new models to sell.

As much as I like 8E over the previous rulesets, it's clear they simplified the rules because they wanted to focus more on the modeling aspect and deal less with arguing rules semantics. Their motto seems to be "go play with your toys - we'll keep making more cool ones to buy". GW's rules aren't about being perfect for competitive play; they're about being "good enough" for casual play.

Karol wrote:
Why don't they encourage sales by making people want to buy stuff from their own codex? It is not like the cost of plastic is different what ever someone uses BA tacticals or IG mooks.

GW has a weird thought process. Instead of working hard to make codices balanced internally and externally and to create great games, and pricing them at a reasonable value, they rely on gimmicks and tricks- like soup and formations, or even scoring points in events if you purchase/paint kits like with Fate of Konor and Season of War.

GW doesn't have a good grasp of how their game works and the permissive universal detachment system was a mistake (IMHO). Individual army FOCs would probably have been a better design but that ship has sailed. Maybe a limit of 20-25% allies (or just patrol detachment only)?

DE are really strong on their own, throw in eldar psychers and they are broken. Now one of those is (hopefully) going to get hit with an oversized nerf bat which will balance up the soup a bit but for casual competitive people who don't run them together it will be too much.

4++ brimstone horrors, reduce fire-raptor costs just to jack them back up, multiple gulliman point increases, devastator centurions, dark reapers, costing of most ork units, the problem of the guard cp battery, tau commanders vs crisis suits, ravagers, disi-cannons, stacking negatives to hit, grinding advance, flyrants, hive guard, lichtors...

It's obvious that GW can't keep track of all of their units, the rule interactions and what makes a unit powerful to the point where they can barely turn out a codex which is internally balanced much less a game with external balance.

The light at the end of the tunnel is they seem to be responsive to how we are breaking their game and are actually trying. Hopefully once all the codexes and expansions are released, a couple big FAQs and CA have had a chance to try to square things up, 9th edition in 2020-2 will be good...

[edit: grammar]

I think they just need to continue to buff the bad units in the codexes so that there are more viable options to soup with or not depending on your preference.

DE and eldar are a good example as their books are strong enough to stand on their own for the most part (though some things may still need balance adjustments), but they can also make powerful soup armies. You aren't really forced one way or the other.

There main reason we just see the same three units from most imperium armies is that most of their units agent very good, so it's all BA captains + scouts, single castellans, IG troops/tanks, Custodes bikes, etc. There isn't anything wrong with armies using those units together IMO. There issue is that all the other units in those codexes kinda suck, so there aren't a ton of other good units to choose from.

That being said I think is also be okay with more limited allies rules, and I do think CP needs to work differently.

The solution to the “but Inquisition!” argument for soup being required is simply giving them an exception, just like 3rd Ed Daemonhunters had an army rule allowing limited Space Marine or Imperial Guard allies when allies weren’t a thing yet.
Because the cases where soup causes problems far outnumber the cases where soup is a good thing

 greyknight12 wrote:
The solution to the “but Inquisition!” argument for soup being required is simply giving them an exception, just like 3rd Ed Daemonhunters had an army rule allowing limited Space Marine or Imperial Guard allies when allies weren’t a thing yet.
Because the cases where soup causes problems far outnumber the cases where soup is a good thing

Totally agree!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrianDavion wrote:

Karol wrote:
Why don't they encourage sales by making people want to buy stuff from their own codex? It is not like the cost of plastic is different what ever someone uses BA tacticals or IG mooks.

because ally rules are a long term marketing stragety to sell not more minis, but more ARMIES. it's a hell of a lot easier to pick up some custodes if you're inital intent is that they'll make something neat you can ally into your force, then it is if you have to commit to a full new army.

There's probably a lot of marketing behind their thought process here, but you're right. I imagine soup players end up buying more models overall than 'pure' codex players since the pure Drukhari guy will play his models regardless with maybe a couple more of what is OP at the moment, whereas the soup guy's entire list would change after a CA or an FAQ since I assume most soup folks are min/maxing to a larger degree. Probably ends up in more $ for GW.

The problem isn't the armies it's the people playing the game. If you approach any game with an overly competitive attitude and a desire to crush any good times people will have then yeah, soup is a problem.

I play soup but really it's not what people refer to when they say soup. I played Custodes/IG once and didn't care for it. I preferred Sister/Custodes list, or my AdMech/IG list. When people refer to soup they generally mean "optimised cheese lists". It's entirely possible to play a fun game with soup if the right person is playing it.

They just need to adjust points of models that are taken in every list and probably give more boni to codex pure armies. One should still be able to play a soup, but if your soup army ends up like an army that loses all faction rules (like a detachment that only shares the CHAOS or IMPERIUM keyword) you think twice about using it. If 3 shield captains for your IG are still that important to you, you may use them, but don't expect to also benefit from all your cadian boni.

Soups are a good thing for the game, they help you make realistic armies. In old editions making a demon + chaos army, or IG + astartes or GSC + nids was impossible, which meant that the game was flawed. This game is a narrative game that happens to work well enough in a competitive environment, but at it's basis, it's a narrative game. If i cannot represent on the table an army that has a sense in the fluff, then the game is not good. Everything else is secondary.

Now, starting from the assumption that souping is a good thing and is here to last, let's see what it can be done so that it can coexist with our craving for a competitive healthy game.

I'm optimist in this regard, and i think that if the CP battery problem is solved, then souping will become a much much smaller issue.

After all, souping already received a HUGE hit with 8th, it is now but a shadow of what it used to be in 6th and 7th. The keyword system dealt to it an almost fatal blow. It went from "Let's see how many buffs i can stack on this deathstar" to "Let's see if i can cover my lack of Y by taking a detachment of X", which in my book is perfectly fine as long as the two detachments have no way to interact with each other rules wise.

What is wrong right now with souping is:

1) CP sharing. No explanations needed.
2) Stratagems based on loose keyowords (like "Aeldari").

There needs to be a downside to taking allies. Not quite sure what it should be though. No CP sharing would be a good start and I'd be tempted to say you also lose the 3 CP bonus for being battle forged.

If you want to play narrative games in your garage you can always ignore it.

As said its a problem of synergy - which is GW's bane. If X & Y is really good, you can nerf them both, but the result is that X & more X or Y & more Y will now suck.

In a similar but different issue - Marines will never get a buff until RG is changed or made so expensive he will never be taken. The buff is far too significant to combine it with efficient choices.

Tyel wrote:
There needs to be a downside to taking allies. Not quite sure what it should be though. No CP sharing would be a good start and I'd be tempted to say you also lose the 3 CP bonus for being battle forged.

If you want to play narrative games in your garage you can always ignore it.

As said its a problem of synergy - which is GW's bane. If X & Y is really good, you can nerf them both, but the result is that X & more X or Y & more Y will now suck.

In a similar but different issue - Marines will never get a buff until RG is changed or made so expensive he will never be taken. The buff is far too significant to combine it with efficient choices.

Agree with this. I don't have a problem with allies/soup in principle, but I would like to see a system that at least provides a meaningful choice for players about taking allies or not. At the moment, when trying to create the most powerful army possible, it's pretty much always correct to do so if you can. Some sort of trade-off for allying vs remaining mono-Codex would be a good idea, IMO.

Change command points and detachments.

You get 2 detachments for free, every detachment after that cost a command point. Every new army you ally in cost a command point.

So 2 battalions of guardians gets you 10 command points. Add a out rider of shining spears, you gain nothing, a spearhead of vect ravagers net -1. A patrol of clowns net -2.

You can still do it. You can still mix and match which is fun, but there is a cost.

Soup is a solution to the problem GW created when they decided every new facet of the Imperium should be its own faction. No other faction has its chaff infantry and super heavies as separate codexes. As someone who's mostly watched from the sidelines, I think 8th edition lists are vastly more varied and interesting than the homogeneous spam I've seen in the past.

Overall I think its done wonders for the game. Competitive lists look cool and exciting with a good blend of roles on the table and a need for a good mix of weaponry. More factions are seeing time at the top tables than at any point since I started paying attention to the game a decade ago. Soup seems to largely be a good thing, that mostly seems to offend people against the principle of the idea.

I think another issue with “soup” is that the game was somewhat designed around them. Take Grey knights.. Started out as a Anti-Demon squad you could add to a Space Marine force for some extra power.

Well now they have their own Dex… And does that mean they shouldn’t be the imperium’s anti demon hit man squad?

Overall, the entire idea of allies needs to be re-examined in 40K. I’m sure you will see 20 ideas, many with promise from Detachments, to CP, to Stratagems, to fixed costs, ect as ways to fix them.

But the issue I feel is that GW should figure out the plan they want, and re-release/ Re-brand to that reality. If they have decided the operative keyword for Faction is Imperium/Eldar/Ork/Tau/Nid/Chaos, so be it. And work on building out the other factions as its clear that Imperium is the 800 pound monster in that group.

The thread has a false premise. Soup exists for a marketing reason and no other reason.

The simple fact is a customer is more likely to buy $500 worth of models for a brand new army than he is to but $500 worth of models for an army he has already sunk $500 to $800 on. but he will only do that if he can play with all his models on the table at the same time.

GW isn't going to make any changes to the game that prevent players from playing different armies at the same time. IMO in a few years we'll see players at a Grand Tournament fielding army lists with Eldar, Chaos, Tryanids and Necrons all in the same army, and someone will write a White Dwarf article about how awesome and "characterful" such an army is.

Reemule wrote:

But the issue I feel is that GW should figure out the plan they want, and re-release/ Re-brand to that reality. If they have decided the operative keyword for Faction is Imperium/Eldar/Ork/Tau/Nid/Chaos, so be it. And work on building out the other factions as its clear that Imperium is the 800 pound monster in that group.

They heavily marketed 8th Edition as a 3 faction game: Imperium/Chaos/Xenos. 2 of those 3 actually played out that way, with only the third remaining segregated. Not that I think they SHOULD blindly merge the Xenos, but Imperium and Chaos definitely play the way they were sold when they announced 8th edition.

And the three faction idea is fine.

I think its more a game balance issue. Some random dude shows up with Imperium soup, and other random dude shows with Necrons and gets shown the door.

The bigger your selection of options the better chances you have of being able to compound small balance issues, and rules mismatchs to make a army that is stronger than its points should be.

I can see some of it where you pointed to the 3 faction idea. But the reality is that Xenos get screwwed.

Reemule wrote:
And the three faction idea is fine.

I think its more a game balance issue. Some random dude shows up with Imperium soup, and other random dude shows with Necrons and gets shown the door.

The bigger your selection of options the better chances you have of being able to compound small balance issues, and rules mismatchs to make a army that is stronger than its points should be.

I can see some of it where you pointed to the 3 faction idea. But the reality is that Xenos get screwwed.

It's really specific Xenos; not a blank slate. Most of the Xenos factions just never got splintered out the way the Imperium was, so they have more unit variety within their faction. Orks for example, really don't need allies as much as they need their various subthemes polished up to where all that variety worked. Given Orks clan rules for Hordes, Weirds, Cult of Speed, and Meks that provide the rules to make focused groups of those types really shine and Orks have all the "allies" they really need. Eldar and Tyranids are essentially already there. The two big outliers seem to be Tau and Necrons. I'm not entirely sure what the answer is there, though I think both factions are long overdue for some release support. The Tau lack of allies feels like a pretty huge oversight from a fluff standpoint.

Necrons, Tau, and Tyranids don't have allies. But that's fine.

Soup isn't a problem, it's poorly balanced units. The last change to restricting detachments was a big change that really helped.