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Each character has a strategy score (ala 2nd ed).

Each strategem has a cost.

You BUY strategems from their score that they keep as part of their rules.

You then expend them when appropriate, based on the character that owns them.

Special squad leaders like exarchs may be able to take strategems as well.

So you build your strategems into your army creation, rather than choosing them when you want to.

This doesn't feel like a simplification.

Not saying it's a bad idea, just that your thread title isn't very good.

 JNAProductions wrote:
This doesn't feel like a simplification.

Not saying it's a bad idea, just that your thread title isn't very good.

Streamlined?

Simplified in use and tracking. You don't have to go through lists of strategems to find then, you have the ones you have from the beginning. Especially if on cards you buy the cards and leave them with the character.

It's easier to balance as well, because the current system allows you to access any ability at any time.


It reduces the flexibility of the system, so you have to strategise to use them, rather than reactively use whichever one is most useful at the time you need it.

EDIT abilities that allow you to recoup CP would allow you to regain a strategem for use, rather than points to do anything with - it would be something like "you may roll to reclaim a strategem up to X value".

My friends and I frequently play without he re-roll stratagem (because that more or less ruins all the fun moments in a game). We have also discussed playing stratagems as a deck of cards...play it, and lose it. This would heavily tone down the abuse of certain mega-stratagems.

I'm basically riffing on 2nd ed strategy cards where you had a couple, used them and then that was it.

I feel like they are padding out rules with this stuff, adding extra for the sake of it.

You can simplify it more by "buying" draws from the deck at random - command (3), 3 cards from your army deck.

I find the resource management and crawling through strat lists during the game is a cumbersome system

I like the idea of having a list of strats that is somewhat themed to your unit selection. However, I do have some concerns.

For starters, it would be very easy for this to strongly favor armies with cheap "commander" types. IG, for instance, could probably load up on tons of strats assuming things like company commanders and platoon commanders give you a strategy score.

Also, this would obviously encourage people to take only the most efficient and generally useful strats meaning we'd lose some stuff that has been part of the game for a while. For instance, the Crucible of Malediction (a haemonculus thing) used to be a piece of wargear and has since become a strat. It's only useful if you happen to be facing psykers and happen to get a specific character close to said psykers. You would never take that option if it meant giving up something like Lightning Fast Reactions or Fire and Fade in its place. Most of the "weapon" strats would be in the same boat.

It sounds like you intend for all strats to be one-use as well. That makes me concerned. Harlequins, for instance, kind of depend on lightning fast reactions and their invul-boosting strat to stay alive. If I'm unable to get several uses of each of those during a game, my troupers will probably have to sit on the shelf and wait for an edition change.

And then there are the pregame strats. If I want to theme my list around deepstriking units form the webway, would I essentially have to play the game without strats after deployment? If I want to deepstrike one unit and buy a spare relic for a second character, is that going to leave me with a single stratagem to use mid-game?

Basically, there are some cool strats and some mechanically essential strats whose absence or limitation, in a vacuum, would diminish the game.

These are solvable problems though. Thoughts?

Perhaps strats don't get "used up" so much as they get put on cooldown? Maybe players have an even budget for buying strats pregame (rather than tying it to imbalance-prone unit selection), but specific units can give you bonus SR or let you cooldown strats faster?

EDIT:
Personally, I've been kicking around the idea that stratagems sort of break down into three broad categories:
* assets (wargear strats like Flakk Missiles and special characters like Chapter Masters or Great Harlequins)
* tactics (deepstriking, focusing fire on a wounded target, etc.)
* and heroics (unit-level cool stunts like Only in Death', Lightning Fast Reactions, etc.)

It wouldn't simplify stratagems, but it might be interesting to divvy these up into their own resources somehow. Assets could probably just be purchased with points. Tactics and Heroics might be purchased with point pools determined by your faction, subfaction, warlord, etc. So an Alpha Legion list might have more points for Tactics (booby traps, infiltrating, etc.) but fewer points for Heroics than, say, a World Eaters army (with Heroics that let individual units fight more/better). Just a half-baked idea.

For reusability, I imagine a deck would have duplicates of some. Super powerful ones should only be one use though.

I like your breakdown.

To me, if an army relies too heavily on specific strats, that suggests they should just be core rules.

Malediction is so situational as well that it could just be a cheap upgrade. I don't know why it came out of wargear.

This is why I like your breakdown.

Wargear and core essential rules shouldn't be in strategems imo.

We see the use of the same strats all the time because they are better and more likely to be usable.

Currently I doubt many people have any CP left by the time malediction could be used, because more easily activated strats will have been used.

I don't think GW knows what a strat Actually is -they're a Hodge podge of stuff and they keep bloating the lists out.

I don't think the current massive list of strats available would survive a simplifying like we are discussing.

I definitely think it's poor design to put necessary army rules in Strat lists.

I pretty much agree with all that. I'm not personally all that bothered by the huge stratagem list, but I do think shuffling some strats into other areas might improve game play. So for instance...

* Assets just get turned back into wargear. There's an argument here that some of these (flakk missiles and the crucible of malediction for instance) are so situational that you'll never spend points on them. I wouldn't mind a pregame pool of "wargear points" that get spent after you see your opponent's list, but that's a somewhat complex idea that might belong in its own thread.

* Tactics should maybe replace a lot of the generic character auras. Instead a reroll 1s to hit aura, a primaris captain might be able to point at an intercessor squad and tell them to use one of the intercessor-only strats or else grants a My Will Be Done style bonus to one target unit. Maybe my Autarch can choose to either make a unit fall back and shoot/charge per the Feigned Retreat Strat or to Fire and Fade.

Basically, we could turn a bunch of Tactic strats into Orders.

* Actual strats should probably be macro-level stuff like orbital bombardments, using the webway, infiltrating units, etc. And those can be few in number and limited use if the tactics and assets are made available in other ways.

End Result:
* Fewer bubble auras
* Less rerolls in favor of more dynamic effects
* Strats are big and can feel big.
* We can probably ditch CP at that point, which I kind of like. Especially if you include some troop-specific orders (intercessor style) to make troops desirable.