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I have had an idea which I'm wondering if people think has any mileage to it!

I'm not 100% on how it would be calculated, but it would probably be related to Command Points as it can be a gamechanger!

The concept is that the army can requisition additional forces to allow it to adapt to its foe - whether this be reinforcements coming in from orbit, summoned from the warp, jumping from the webway, or just rolling up from behind the lines.

Let's tie it to CP for the sake of argument. For each 1CP spent on this whilst building your list, you reduce the size of your army by 150pts, up to half the battle size. At the start of the game, before deployment but after you have seen your opponents army list, you can add additional units up to the amount of points you have reduced your army by. These units are always placed into strategic reserves. You may not add to existing units, only take new ones, and these new ones must still fit into your detachments. New detachments can be bought for the usual CP cost to add these units.

This represents you getting intelligence on the enemy and requesting the right tools for the job to back you up. However, the battle is too close to starting for the reinforcements to arrive before it begins - so strategic reserves. This way you can tailor a portion of your army to deal with the enemy - like an actual army would - and it makes hard-counter lists (like all vehicles or all infantry) less effective at making the enemy redundant. It also allows an army to be sneaky - putting half your army as requisition points would cost some CP, but allow your reinforcements to be able to surprise the enemy (as they cannot requisition the needed stuff to help deal with requisitioned forces, as they don't know what they are!).

What do you all think?

Some disorganized thoughts:

* I worry that waiting for my opponent to calculate points for half their army immediately before the game could be prone to taking a long time (depending on indecisiveness) and possibly increase the likelihood of list-writing mistakes.

* CP costs to add new detachments that in turn cost CP seems like it could really exacerbate that first point.

* How would this interact with built-in deepstrike mechanics and deepstrike stratagems? Say I add some swooping hawks to my list with this method. Swooping Hawks are significantly more useful if I can deepstrike them in rather than having them show up along the board edges.

* I feel like a more conventional "side board" might accomplish roughly the same thing while being less prone to severe list tailoring or time consumption. Maybe something like:

Side Board (X CP)
Use this stratagem when assembling your army. You may include up to two SIDE BOARD detachments in your army list.

After revealing army lists but before deployment, you must select a single SIDE BOARD detachment and declare you'll be using it in the game. If your opponent is also using SIDE BOARD detachments, roll off. The loser must declare which detachment they'll use first.

Only the SIDE BOARD detachment you actually use in the game counts towards your total army points, starting CP, etc. Your warlord may not be in a SIDE BOARD detachment. A SIDE BOARD detachment may not contain more than half of your total army points.

This stratagem costs 1 CP per 200 points in the SIDE BOARD detachment.

So similar to your suggestion, but you have to do all the list building before you show up to the table. You could have an anti-tank side-board and an anti-infantry side board, for instance, but you wouldn't be spending 15 minutes cooking up the perfect counter to your opponent's army. And because there's not strategic reserve limitation, you don't have to worry about lowering the value of things like artillery pieces that want to be shooting from turn 1.