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.

This is my idea for tweaking the ally rules for 8th edition.

Allied detachments

The faction/sub-faction which makes up the largest portion of your army, by points, is your command faction. In the event of a matching points total for different factions you may choose which becomes the command faction. All other detachments become ally detachments.

Only the command faction may be used for the choosing of relics, warlord traits and any strategies associated with them, eg extra relic strategies.

Generic strategies such as CP re-roll and prepared positions are unchanged. Strategies for the command faction are unchanged. The cost of any strategies for allied forces increases by 1CP.


The plan behind this change is to address some of the abuses of "soup" for mechanical advantage without affecting allied armies too greatly.
The castellan with guard list will not have access to the powerful relics and warlord traits unless the knights become the command faction. Same goes for blood angels smash captains. Still good in their own army but not as strong as allies
I'm not sure how exactly the ynarri faction will be affected by this, since they have to be the warlord and ynarri keep the original faction keyword so keep access to the strategies anyway. Just another good reason to release a proper ynarri codex and sort out that particular mess

I feel like this falls into the trap of punishing non-competitive multi-faction armies more than optimized ones. Lots of collateral damage in an effort to punish a few specific problematic builds.

An army that fields primarily IG and allied GK, for instance. GK are already considered kind of subpar. This rule would make it even more expensive to use GK stratagems (assuming they can use them at all; you seemed to ban them entirely in the previous paragraph) and takes away access to GK relics that might help them out. So now a subpar faction becomes even less efficient and less desirable to field.

Meanwhile, that castellan or smash captain you're trying to nerf either remains so cost-effective that people keep fielding them anyway or else get nerfed hard enough to basically invalidate them as competitive options.

Even if you do manage to nerf allied armies to the point of being non-competitive, you'll just be encouraging the meta to shift and find the new OP thing, possibly a mono-faction build.You might count this as a success if you happen to love mono-faction games and hate allied lists just on principle, but you're effectively just removing options from the game and changing what the OP army build is rather than facilitating better game balance in general. OR optimized soup armies will weather the nerf storm better than less optimized ones thus driving people further into the arms of their CP farms and castellans.

tldr; you're using a sword where you need a scalpel. Fluffy armies will be punished and prevented from giving as much character and customization to their units. The OP builds may or may not be nerfed into no longer being OP, but something else OP will just rise from the ashes because these changes don't do anything to ensure overall game balance.

Making mono-guard (or whatever) better than guard + knights (or whatever) doesn't actually improve game balance. It just moves the problem.

Thanks for the feedback.
This rule is envisioned as only applying in a competitive environment, sorry I should have made that clear. The last thing I'd want to impact is people playing for fun, they should be allowed to use whatever they want however they want.
I approached it from the perspective of making the rules as easy to apply as possible, granularity is great for fine tuning but that's not how 8th is written, either in the core book or with the bolter rules beta, for example. I tried to adopt a similar style, hence the sword approach, as you put it.
Allies can still access strats, just not ones related to warlord traits or relics, sorry if I wasn't clear enough.
I'd like to see the meta switched up, it's got pretty stale due to certain ally combo's just being flat out better than they are in a mono build. That's why I took this approach rather than, say, try to nerf the castellan. I wouldn't want to hurt the knight player as collateral damage.

Rather then nerfing soup have you considered boosting Mono-faction? Simple idea I just suggested would be to allow monofactions to use individual stratagems twice a phase instead of once.

What if the main faction doesn't have relics, stratagems, or warlord traits