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I've been reading a lot about the new GSC release, where it's almost a soup army by design, and then about how soup is dominating tournaments like the LVO. I myself had had my ovipositor scorched by some combination of exactly 32 Guardmen and the biggest rock-unit my opponent can lug.

So it occurred to me, why not put Command Points (CPs) in silos to put a brake on how soup-armies work to circumvent the weaknesses and costs built into their constituent codices. I mean, it's easy enough to keep track of which Weirdboy/Primaris Psycker/Neurothrope/whatever has which psychic powers and whatnot. It seems like it would be easy enough to keep track of which detachment has which CPs, with the 3 for battle-forged being army-wide.

I track my CPs on distinct dice in the top-tray of a dice cube, turning them to track CPs with pips. I've had opponents remark that they did that as well but knocked them over or accidentally rolled them too many times. Other opponents have used visually distinct tokens or dice. It seems like it would be easy enough to run the CP book-keeping for ~3 detachments + army-wide CPs. Particularly where it incentivises players to take Brigades instead of multiple Battalions.

What do you think?

I don't think that CP generation is the root of the problem. It does not help, but the core of it is intreaction. For example, the eldar soups do not need as much CP to function. Spliting CP for them would not effect them as much, as someone playing an elite army that has to run IG to fuel its stratagem use.

It would also effect something like the 1ksons soup a lot less. Their soup power comes from overlaping rules, while breaking the rule of 3 and cheap chaff. CP is a secondary thing for such armies.

What you're proposing gets pitched a lot, and it always frustrates me. Consider armies like harlequins or Death Watch. These armies are bad at generating CP but are also very reliant on CP for delivery systems, survival, or just to use stratagems that are innately interesting/enjoyable. Segregating CP pools would cripple an imperial knight's ability to use stratagems, sure, but you're hurting a lot of other armies along the way.

Plus, you're kind of just switching the CP problem from, "What army can fill out lots of detachments to generate lots of CP," to , "What army can fill out one really big detachment that generates lots of CP?"

My preferred fixes are:

1. Players get X CP based on game size. Detachments cost CP instead of generating it. So taking a brigade might cost 1CP or 0CP or whatever, but a spearhead might cost 5CP. Optionally, you could apply an additional CP tax on detachments that don't share a specific keyword with your first detachment.

The result here is that you're rewarded for playing a mono-faction army with lots of troops and are not encouraged to grab 32 guardsmen just to generate CP. You're effectively paying CP to take a less well-rounded army and to unlock all the units, strats, etc. of any allies you bring.

2.) Divorce CP generation from unit selection entirely. Right now, CP generation can basically be boiled down to, "Take lots of troops to get lots of CP." This is unhelpful from a fluff angle because some very fluffy armies do not field a lot of units with a battlefield role of Troop (Iyanden, Deathwing, White Scars, etc.). From a mechanical angle, armies with cheap and/or efficient troops (like guard) will have a big advantage over elite armies like GK or Harlequins who pay a premium for each unit.

So instead of making it extra difficult to balance CP generation by forcing designers to try and factor in all the possible unit/detachment options available in the game, why not just say, "Each player can do X amount of cool stuff per game," where X is the CP and stratagems are the "cool stuff."

You can tweak this a little. You can say that certain options give you slightly more CP (an autarch or Roboute Guilliman for instance), and you can say that CP is generated at the start of each turn instead of pregame or whatever. The point is that both players will have access to basically the same amount of CP regardless of what units they take. This means that you can now reliably design around players having X amount of CP. No more making guard stratagems extra expensive because you assume they'll generate tons of CP. no more using the loyal 32 or cyber 17 or whatever to generate extra CP. Players will do X amount of cool stuff each game, so figure out just how cool each stratagem is from there.

It's late. Did that word vomit make sense?