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With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?

Because balancing codices becomes a complete nightmare when some can ally and others cannot, or where the quality of allies available is not the same.

It's not a bad thing, but having multiple codices to draw from is an inherent advantage over drawing an army from a single codex.
If there is no downside to doing it, there is no reason to play an army from a faction with the option to soup using only a single codex.

If you pick Chaos Space Marines as an example, there is no reason not improve your army with more powerful psykers from the Thousand Sons codex and more powerful troops from the daemons codex. You gain nothing from playing pure CSM instead.

From the way they worded it, they might even attach a price tag to mixing and matching sub-factions from the same codex, so you can't attach the perfect army trait to every unit like orks or space marines do without a drawback.

I think it's fine that armies that are mono codex get some benefits compared to soup armies, as long as soup is still a viable option.

And yes some have more options than others. An Imperial player has a wide depth of options, whereas Tyranids or Necrons for example don't have as much choice.

I think it's a historical thing too. There used to be far more limitations on taking allies than there are now. With more freedom comes more potential abuse. I think GW are at least partially responding to player feedback, some of which just want to use their mono codex army against just one other codex.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?

Prime example of the balance issues caused by Allies, my mono knights list that GW gave a special rule to give them half a chance at building a playable pool of CP became uncompetitive when their best strategums were increased in CP cost because bring 180 points of guard gave you the same amount of CP as over 1000 points of knight's.

The Changes to the CP system isn't punishing allies it's giving them 1 downside compaired to the 8th edition model of all upsides and nevrr a downside.

It is impossible to have codices with meaningful strengths and weaknesses if you can simply obviate the latter by allying in the best stuff from another book; all armies just end up consisting of the best units they can skim off any number of allied factions.

Not all of the factions have the same access to allies, and I think the extent to which factions cooperate on the squad level is overstated.

I've always enjoyed playing against a mixed army, to a point. Like you said Cheese is the downfall of that. Cherry picking super units should be discouraged. We all agree on that I'm sure. I don't mind a small boost to "pure" army lists either.

But I'm curious to see how 9th will treat soup as there are plenty of lore/fluff reasons for soups.

Strangely enough GW seemed to hit it out of the park with allies in Age of Sigmar because even if you do see occasional allies they are not as overbearing as they can be in 40k.

My biggest problem with soup was how free form it was in 8th. It basically meant that if you wanted to play a mono-codex you were actually shooting yourself in the foot unless you were a Space marine codex, which has a built in mechanism to boost itself without allies.

Each army was designed with specific strengths and weaknesses in mind. Soup is a crutch for people who can't play their armies. It only came about couple of editions ago.

Some armies, like Inquisition, are naturally Soup armies and stand outside the general hierarchy. Most armies were never intended to be Soup and some, like Orks, are specifically harmed by Soup armies as they have no Souping available. Unpopular opinion is Primaris armies being Soup as people take the newest face-smashing units and combine with the older specialist face-smashing units, thus avoiding any balancing of the army.

While I understand both sides of the debate, impo, Soup hurts the game more than helps. Yes it allows for amazingly cool, narrative driven games and fluffy armies but that's not what people use it for. Instead it changes local metas in a faux tournament manner and strips out the vestiges of generalship to replace them with financial tiers.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?

You can still do it for narrative games anyway and if you are happy to have slightly less CP, but it stops the ever present Loyal 32 with Knights etc etc etc

Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.

The problems are several:

1) AS noted several times above, if you design an army with a codex to have weaknesses and strengths, then give them a lot of allies. It's possible for them to not only use allies to avoid any of their inherent weaknesses, but to use allies with the same strengths to redouble their gain. This results in a balance situation where a souped army is vastly superior to one without. This creates huge issues in 40K because there's a heavy bias to allies for Imperials; whilst many of the Xenos armies don't have half as many if any allies.

2) Heavily focus on allies being overpowered compared to "pure" armies destroys the games visual identity. Many of us are visually sold on armies by armies being shown as a single unified force in terms of visual designs. Now neither approach is correct, but when one overpowers the other significantly it means that you end up with "pure" armies being left behind. Visually and aesthetically this is bad for marketing.

3) It becomes much harder to balance the game with corrective adjustments. Because now you're not just fixing an issue within an army, but also between allied armies as well. That overpowered souped army can be countered by making the components weaker, however that also makes the more balanced "pure" army components get weaker as a result. So you end up in an impossible to balance situation where you can pick to balance either the souped or the stand alone forces but not easily both.

4) Confusion on the tabletop. When GW started giving every single army sub-factions within itself and then let you ally those subfactions together things got complicated. Because most of those subfactions were focused around specific roles it meant that instead of building 1 army, you'd instead want to build a mix so that your close combat units can go into the hive fleet or tau force or craftworld etc.. that gave the best close combat bonuses. Meanwhile the ranged are going into the ranged best bonuses army etc... This confuses on the tabeltop because very few people will buy and paint two or three different armies of the same force. So now you've got an added layer of confusion and complication because you might have two or three "armies" with different bonuses to keep in mind - all painted the same.
Marines get a slight benefit here because they do at least have unique models for many of their sub-armies; but that's the exception - all the others don't even have upgrade packs for their sub-forces.

It led to some, retracted, daft ideas on enforcing armies linked to paint schemes.



Overall the idea of allies is not bad, the problem is when a game has so few limits on allies and so much potential to use them that armies stop being "armies" and start being allied forces only.
AoS has managed to avoid these issues by strict limitations of allies; whilst "Grand alliance" forces are generally weaker. This creates a game where there's much more reward for having at least a core of one faction forming the bulk of your army; and then adding in allies for flavour and enhancement of the force.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.

You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.

I love my imperial soup. Custodes with inquisitors and tempestus scions retinues are my most played army. I had 0 sinergy and benefits but that doesn't affect me that much.


What I always find funny is how everybody puts the blame on imperial soup but the real competitive soup, Chaos, that runs 3-4 codex in nearly every list is much less mentioned, I assume because for most people chaos should be played as a soup, wich I find a little hypocritical.

Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.

Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.

You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.

I think those army’s are particularly held to the model side of things, really hard to write good rules if they barely have the units to function within the game so often.

 ArcaneHorror wrote:
With the changes revealed for the next edition revealed, it seems like GW seems to be continuing with punishing people who make armies made up of different codices. While I do think that adjustments need to be made when cheesy combos get out of control, I don't see anything wrong why it's so bad with having broadly allied factions part of the same army. In the lore, SM frequently fight alongside Knights, Sisters, and Guard, while Chaos faction like DG and TS often fight alongside other CSM warbands. Eldar factions do team up, and so forth. Different factions working together can play off each others' talents, but it's not like they are inherently overpowered. Why does there seem to be this attitude that making an army consisting of allied factions seem to be such a bad thing?

Because being forced to buy models from a faction you do not want to play, to have a working army is not very fun. And the codex can't be design in mind that people never soup, if soup is an option. They are designed with soup in mind, so any faction that can't soup, and all players who don't want to soup are at an automaticly disadventage.

its is a mechanic good for tournaments, not so good for everyone else.

My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.

Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.

If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.

Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.

The problem is if you want to have big diverse armies ally to each other en-mass with few restrictions then the only way to balance it is to basically have totally flat unit balance. That is each army has the same core units with the same stats. Or so similar they don't make a difference. Only then can you easily balance mass allies because each army is basically the same components so there's no huge swings to consider.


Soup is the term the allies have got because in 40K its more than just taking a few allies, its often ending up with the army itself having no real "core" faction as such. Sure you've the core army name, but when the units that comprise it are so heavily spread out in different forces its not the same. It's why Aos hasn't picked up the term because there you can only have 1/4 of allies in your army in points and model count. So always 3/4 is going to be from your single core army. And that core army is one core army from your battletome - you're not mixing and matching two or three sub-armies together.

I always had problems in defining, in non game terms, what kind of an army was the IG with castellan and some BA jump captins with 15 scouts.

PenitentJake wrote:
My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.

Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.

If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.

If you have made the campaign you can put ally buffs in it, it also does not stop GW putting out a campaign book that buffs that style of play. They probably won’t, but they could if they where to put effort into a campaign book.

Things like knights should have auxiliary guard in there codex anyway, And be balanced around there use for the health that would provide to the game design.

Okey, but that is for people that play narrative. Most people do not play narrative games, so it would be a weak fix of soup.

PenitentJake wrote:
My issue is that doctrines already fixed the SOUP problem.

Now, they've added another fix, and it might turn out to be over correcting- kinda like you don't need to limit the number of detachments someone can take if the only detachments that give you enough CPs to survive are Battalions and brigades.

If they go after sub faction soup too hard, there's a huge risk that it invalidates a key concept in the campaign I've spent a year and a half designing.

And even those doctrines can be easily worked around by bringing power armour soups. IF shooting core with BA smashes for instance. For the purpose of your own campaign you can easily avoid any or all rules and write them down by yourself. For the game in the outside world however we need soups to be possible, but only as an alternative form of list building and with a cost of some sort to balance the added value (sometimes humongous - vide all the IG battalions proliferation with Castelans and BA smashes at one point).

 Overread wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Allies are a fantastic addition to the game, despite what the people here say. The actual problem comes from GWs horrid internal/external balance of units. Allies should be a compliment not a crutch, and in many instances for lots of armies they're a crutch.

Also soup is a fething stupid term and has been since its inception, so let's just call it Allies LIKE IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN PLEASE.

The problem is if you want to have big diverse armies ally to each other en-mass with few restrictions then the only way to balance it is to basically have totally flat unit balance. That is each army has the same core units with the same stats. Or so similar they don't make a difference. Only then can you easily balance mass allies because each army is basically the same components so there's no huge swings to consider.


Soup is the term the allies have got because in 40K its more than just taking a few allies, its often ending up with the army itself having no real "core" faction as such. Sure you've the core army name, but when the units that comprise it are so heavily spread out in different forces its not the same. It's why Aos hasn't picked up the term because there you can only have 1/4 of allies in your army in points and model count. So always 3/4 is going to be from your single core army. And that core army is one core army from your battletome - you're not mixing and matching two or three sub-armies together.

You're sorta correct, but when you have no incentive to run your own units for a role that's a problem. Look at how in the first Space Marine codex for this edition with Artillery for example. Both the Whirlwind and TFC were basically awful. Just because Marines aren't KNOWN for artillery doesn't mean whatever artillery units they have should be awful at the role. Now with the new codex, you don't have as bad a want to bring in Guard Artillery as now the TFC is actually good (and the Whirlwind is kinda meh but still functions kinda at least).

Endless allies upon allies is really only a risk in a game with horrible balance, because you HAVE to rather than just wanting to.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Soup is also a crutch for lazy GW writers to write Codexes that don't function properly on their own because they can take allies to do the things they can't. Daemons, Harlequins, Custodes (rescued eventually by the Forge World rules), and Deathwatch are the most prominent examples in 8e.

You'd have a point if soup literally had helped any of those things...but it really didn't.

Oh, true, another problem with GW thinking "eh, we don't have to make these guys any good, they can just take allies to prop themselves up" is that we then start comparing them to all these allies they can take and discovering that actually there's no reason to play the army at all.

In a perfectly balanced game every 100 points of units would be worth 100 points - but in practice its highly unlikely to ever be entirely like that.

As someone who wanted soup gone - I don't mind if you can do it because your fluffy campaign says you should. But I don't think soup should be the automatic consideration of a competitive list. The game should be more than picking the best 500 points from that book, 800 points from this book and the rest from another book.

At the same time though, I think GW should get away from this idea you design a book with strengths and weaknesses. Because, as per the first statement, a weakness is usually just either a hole (i.e. this army doesn't do X, suck it up) or bad design (this army does do X, but pays 120-150% more points than most other factions would, so you are probably never going to see it on a competitive table, just go all in on the other units.)

Like say Custodes. I don't think they *need* the loyal 32 - although clearly its a massive help. What they *need* is for Custodian Guard not to be a bit crap. An awful lot of their issues come from trying to get around this issue - and if it wasn't an issue things would be different. (PA changes for Harlequins may help - but they have a similar issue with the basic Troupe and boat being too expensive.)

Eh... the question is why is soup considered so horrible.

I personally think it's an economic argument. People come to the game for a lot of reasons, soup is where they clash.

For some, you fall in love with a specific faction, you spend a lot of money on specific models, you pour endless hours into constructing and painting models, you stick with that faction through rebalancings, rules changes, etc. You want to play that faction and have a fair chance.

For others, they are competitive above all else and want to win. They don't really care about the fluff, at least not as much as success on the games table. They are numbers guys, some of them are actual accountants, managers, executives. They will put together armies based on max potential offensive output and drop a unit the moment the rules don't favor them.

Everyone only has so much time and resources to devote to the game. The people in the first category look at soup differently, adding a unit from a different faction raises questions about needing to build an entire army they're not passionate about. The people in the second camp might not have a complete army of a single faction to begin with.

The superposition is that the conflict between monofaction vs soup has an impact on the game. I'd rather there be clearly delineated benefits and drawbacks for going either way. As it stands now - you can get more of an advantage playing soup.

Also, let's separate soup from allies. I have a Daemon Primarch army with TS, Nurgle and CSM detachments. That's not soup, or at least most people would not call it soup. That's multiple individual detachments fighting together. Soup is where I put Abaddon, Typhus and Ahriman into a single Supreme Command Detachment and put it on the board. I can technically do that and get some benefit from doing so. But a lot of people find it objectionable and it doesn't make me feel real good about what I'm fielding.

I am not sure "hated" is the right word.

Especially from a modelling, hobby and collecting perspective, I think it is great. 40K armies are expensive and time-consuming to collect. Having the option to just paint a few of those shiny new .. say Sisters of Battle or a funky new Primaris Space Marine Biker unit and bring them along with my existing Imperial Guard or so is great for the player/collector, allowing different models, experiment different schemes, etc.., etc.. It's obviously also great from a business perspective.


Souping is a bit more problematic from a game-design perspective as more options usually mean overall stronger armies, given you have a greater selection to choose what you need, unless (!) the act of souping itself imposes some type of penalty / cost in the army construction. More theoretically, it also limits design-space somewhat. Designing (and balancing) armies that are, say, a) super-punchy but lack board control or b) super-shooty but slow on the move or whatever is a moot point, if players can just ally in the "fixes" to cover the supposed weaknesses of a faction (presumably meant to balance out their strengths), which leads to less variety.

Balancing.

Codexes should be INTERNALLY consistent and balanced as much as possible. Maybe you price X unit this way because this army lacks Y unit, so they need this unit to be stronger to make up for it.

This can easily get out of hand when there are units that exist OUTSIDE that codex you can take.

An example: The Brohammer list would probably not have worked if the Leviathan Dreadnaught did not exist. Although not strictly soup, they liked never played with the damn thing under Iron Hands, they just never bothered to test the entire range of Space Marines line before writing their dreadnaught / passing wounds rules under Iron Hands.

When you see meta lists that include Knights, Guardsmen, and Blood Angels, strictly just metaing out the weaknesses of each army (Knights: lack of screens / CP, Guards: vehicles without invul saves, Knights + Guard: Blood angels destroy in melee even without all their free doctrine gak).

And it's not like armies are on equal footing for allies. Chaos and the Imperium has bundles of codexes to draw on. Tyranids has 1; Orks has 0.

Soup needs to be costly otherwise it's just a more complex math problem to tune your list to maximum effectiveness.

As an Ork player, I just hope subfactioning your army isn't too costly, as it's really the only tool I got to buff certain components of my army.

On top of the points others have made about competitive and balance issues, from a thematic/fluff standpoint, many rarely see soup/allies being taken advantage of for actual fluff reasons but rather almost exclusively just for the aforementioned competitive reasons, and more importantly, a lot of these factions don't actually operate together that much or on such a close tactical level, when they do it's a rare notable exception, not something that should be seen often.

Eldar/Dark Eldar for instance are normally pretty deadly blood enemies, not simply wayward cousins, and the Dark Eldar coming to Iyanden's assistance for example is more about humiliating Iyanden and needling them about having to conscript their dead and be saved by those they consider filthy deviants than it is about uniting against the Tyranid menace (which doesn't really affect the Dark Eldar at all from the relative safety of the Dark City). Space Marines involved in a large campaign alongside the Imperial Guard typically share no direct chain of command (and indeed SM's are typically forbidden from taking command of Guard/Navy forces without specific dispensation to do so post-HH) and often never even see one another. For example, the Siege of Vraks where the Dark Angels show up, blow up the spaceport, and leave without coming anywhere near the actual main battle lines or doing much other than telling the Guard forces on the planet "we did what we came to do, peace out", that's how it normally works. When we see Space Marines commanding Guard forces and fighting directly alongside them on Armageddon, that's a notable major atypical event.

From a lore perspective, seeing a lot of these forces operate so closely together so often tends to get a bit weird.