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Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
You have to make them actually flexible and offensively worth taking. Look at Scions, Battle Sisters, Intecessors, and (at least to me with Raiders) Kabalites. None of the entries are perfect, obviously. However they're in the end Troops that hold objectives and contribute killing power to the rest of the army.

I love how you said BSS and Kabals when they are only taken in the minimals b.c they have to be, not b.c they are good.

I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

 Denegaar wrote:
I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

Yeah, Kabalites were tolerable in 8th just by virtue of being relatively cheap (though even then, I didn't see a whole lot of lists taking significantly more than the bare minimum). Now they and their transports got a whole lot more expensive, but (unlike Marines) they didn't get any more durable and their guns are the same pieces of overpriced arse they were before.

 Denegaar wrote:
I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

While I agree overall, I take great issue with accusations of cheesy/spamming. Firstly we have relatively few units to pick from, and not all are in any way useful. Secondly, we are conceptually based around troops in transports, of which we have a choice of two. Of those, Venoms due to only having a capacity of 5, have to be taken in largeish numbers because we need some way to transport our useless HQs.......rant over

 harlokin wrote:

 Denegaar wrote:
I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

While I agree overall, I take great issue with accusations of cheesy/spamming. Firstly we have relatively few units to pick from, and not all are in any way useful. Secondly, we are conceptually based around troops in transports, of which we have a choice of two. Of those, Venoms due to only having a capacity of 5, have to be taken in largeish numbers because we need some way to transport our useless HQs.......rant over

This is also a good point.

I'm reminded of back in 8th edition when I saw a great many people say that Archons must be good because near enough every Dark Eldar army included at least one. Most such people were apparently unaware that the Archon was the only generic HQ choice available to Kabal (and until late-8th, the special characters were even more of a tax than he was).

 vipoid wrote:

Okay, let me rephrase - does "Troops" still represent any sort of meaningful distinction?

Or is it just a holdover at this point which could really do with being ditched for a term that has more meaning relative to the current state of armies and the FoC?

Vipoid is asking the right questions here. To my mind, distinguishing between "troops" and the other battlefield roles (elites, fast attack, etc.) is basically pointless these days. We used to be forced to take certain units in an army, and now we're not.

There are plenty of armies (ravenwing, deathwing, Iyanden, Siam-Hann, white scars, etc.) where the main body of a small force is made up of units that don't have the battlefield role. It's arguably more fluffy to not field "troops" in those armies. So if you take the lore considerations out of the picture, what is a "troop," and how and why should it be treated differently from a non-troop?

Is a troop just a unit that's relatively crappy for it's points compared to another unit? That doesn't sound like something I want to field in most armies. The troop will just be a "tax" that I avoid taking as much as possible, and armies with cheaper or less crappy tax units will be at an advantage over other armies. Or worse, maybe I'm an Ulthwe player and I actually like the idea of fielding a bunch of basic guardian troops, but I'm shooting myself in the foot by doing so because it means the fluffy way to field my army is to take a bunch of suboptimal units. Intentionally designing troops to be crappier than other units is a bad idea.

Troops should be just as valuable as other units. Not necessarily as lethal, but as valuable. Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table." So maybe "troops" end up having access to abilities and wargear that make them especially good at screening out deepstrikers or holding objectives. Maybe troops buff non-troops or facilitate the use of other wargear (I'm thinking of markerlight firewarriors and seeker missiles at the moment). Maybe troops can intercept charges for their more valuable allies, or make it easier for characters to pass along buffs at a distance (vox carriers?). Or maybe they just have bad stats and a low points cost making them good at asserting board presence and diving onto objectives.

TLDR; "Troop" is a useless term, but I do believe we should start thinking of most "troops" as "support units" rather than just "crummy units." Or alternatively, if your troops are your army's best frontline fighters, then the rest of your codex should be the support to them.

Wyldhunt wrote:
Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table."

Why would an army field a lot of units that are not particularly lethal? Their bread and butter should be killers.

I think the way MEDGe handles troops is best.

A detachment has a maximum of 4 troop choices (it's a smaller scale game).

The number of fast attack, elites, and heavy support units is limited to 3 each. Also, this may never exceed the number of troops units in a detachment.

The typical structure is:

1-2 HQ

1-4 Troops

0-3 Fast Attack

0-3 Elites

0-3 Heavy Support

Adjust for the scale of 40k and presto! Troops are everywhere!

More restrictive list building leads to a healthier, more interesting game.

Hecaton wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table."

Why would an army field a lot of units that are not particularly lethal? Their bread and butter should be killers.

That's just not how armies work. For one thing, soldiers spend most of their time doing everything except for fighting; they patrol, train, stand watch, maintain their equipment, and enjoy their free time with actually shouldering arms and shooting taking only the barest fraction of their time. Even then, your average soldier is armed with the cheapest thing that works and can be adapted for more than one battlefield with a squad of soldiers perhaps having an LMG or Grenadier in the mix for suppression. The job of your average soldier is to hold ground, not to kill.

When they need something dead they call in support units like planes, tanks, artillery, etc. to do the job. This is why things like power armour probably won't be as much of a thing as people would like it to be because if your soldier becomes too heavy they start to have a nasty problem the moment they need to search a home and find the floor unable to support them. It's also why deaths on the battlefield tend to be from artillery, disease, malnutrition and not rounds from riflemen. War simply doesn't come down to mashing equal forces into one another and seeing who's deadliest.

Hecaton wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table."

Why would an army field a lot of units that are not particularly lethal? Their bread and butter should be killers.

In terms of fluff? It varies. Craftworlders simply don't have a ton of super lethal aspect warriors, so they fall back on their guardian millitia and ranger pals. Space marines seem to have a limited number of special weapons, so they give first dibs on the combi-bolters to the veterans and hand out normal bolters to everyone else. With tyranids, it's presumably just more efficient to have a bunch of gaunts and rippers rather than fielding all exocrines all the time. Etc. etc.

In terms of game design, "troops" should be units that make your army as a whole better at achieving victory without necessarily being as killy as your non-troops. So something like a dire avenger squad should have access to strats and special rules that let them protect or otherwise support my heavy hitters. Dire avenger shooting should not be as lethal as dark reaper shooting, but my army should be accustomed to performing maneuvers involving dire avengers because they're the most common and flexible aspect warriors around.

Synergy. The army should be greater than the sum of its parts. "Troops" should be the glue that holds the army together but not necessarily the guys who do the most damage. If there isn't a reason for me to want to field a bunch of them, then why should the rules force me to do so?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Blastaar wrote:
I think the way MEDGe handles troops is best.

A detachment has a maximum of 4 troop choices (it's a smaller scale game).

The number of fast attack, elites, and heavy support units is limited to 3 each. Also, this may never exceed the number of troops units in a detachment.

The typical structure is:

1-2 HQ

1-4 Troops

0-3 Fast Attack

0-3 Elites

0-3 Heavy Support

Adjust for the scale of 40k and presto! Troops are everywhere!

More restrictive list building leads to a healthier, more interesting game.

Okay. Now show me a Deathwing-themed army that doesn't have non-Deathwing in it.

Wyldhunt wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Blastaar wrote:
I think the way MEDGe handles troops is best.

A detachment has a maximum of 4 troop choices (it's a smaller scale game).

The number of fast attack, elites, and heavy support units is limited to 3 each. Also, this may never exceed the number of troops units in a detachment.

The typical structure is:

1-2 HQ

1-4 Troops

0-3 Fast Attack

0-3 Elites

0-3 Heavy Support

Adjust for the scale of 40k and presto! Troops are everywhere!

More restrictive list building leads to a healthier, more interesting game.

Okay. Now show me a Deathwing-themed army that doesn't have non-Deathwing in it.

I said "typical." Want to know how we make sure we can field our DW and/or RW without the greenies? HQs- like it was pre-8th. Tie the detachment structure to its commander.

Increase/decrease the allowed number of units from one of the four categories, only allow units with a certain keyword, or disallow them, give certain units rules that make them troops if X....




I did make an error in the detachment structure, however:

1 HQ

1-4 Troops

0-2 Fast Attack

0-2 Elites

0-2 Heavy Support


But again, this is for a game where each side has around 20-30 models.

Hecaton wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table."

Why would an army field a lot of units that are not particularly lethal? Their bread and butter should be killers.

Because creating killers requires tons of time and money to invest in training and equipment. Armies during war times maybe can't afford that luxury.

Their bread and butter should be cannon fodder, it's more realistic. Unless they are designed to be specialists/elites only.

 Blackie wrote:

Hecaton wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
Any value the term "troop" has, I think, is as a shorthand for saying, "units that a conventional army wants to field a lot of because of the non-lethality-based merits they bring to the table."

Why would an army field a lot of units that are not particularly lethal? Their bread and butter should be killers.

Because creating killers requires tons of time and money to invest in training and equipment. Armies during war times maybe can't afford that luxury.

Their bread and butter should be cannon fodder, it's more realistic. Unless they are designed to be specialists/elites only.

*smacks Blackie with the codex astartes*

some armies are, even at the troop level, intended to be elites. tactical marines are, outside veterns, supposed to be the BEST most experianced Marines in the chapter. I mean yeah some armies absolutely SHOULD have troops that are cheap and disposable whose soul purpose is to take a bullet instead of the important stuff. but well... not everyone wants to play the guard

 harlokin wrote:

 Denegaar wrote:
I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

While I agree overall, I take great issue with accusations of cheesy/spamming. Firstly we have relatively few units to pick from, and not all are in any way useful. Secondly, we are conceptually based around troops in transports, of which we have a choice of two. Of those, Venoms due to only having a capacity of 5, have to be taken in largeish numbers because we need some way to transport our useless HQs.......rant over

I'm in love with our fluff and I like being able to transport our troops to battle, that's why I always bring 3-4 Venoms and a couple Raiders to all my 1000+ games, but Venoms were spammed for a while without fluff in mind... I remember a little more than a year ago, while I was starting to get into 40k from KT, that were lists with a core of:

2 Archons
5x5 Kabalites with Blaster
3 Ravagers
10 Venoms

Those Venoms were not there to transport Troops or being fluffy, I guess they were there just an hyper efficient way to bring Poison to screening chaff so the Blasters and Dissies did the job, while being super fast and durable for their cost.

I'm all in with our Troops synergising with our transports, but we need Kabalites to be better, so their 9pt cost is justified. Same with Wyches.

As an answer to the original question:

Just make troops good. It's the most simplest and most straight-forward answer. If troops are good units then they are used. There is no need to make troops some sub-standard unit that is there as a hindrance. Give troops some punch and make them good enough to use and you'll see troops en masse on the battlefield.

BrianDavion wrote:


some armies are, even at the troop level, intended to be elites. tactical marines are, outside veterns, supposed to be the BEST most experianced Marines in the chapter. I mean yeah some armies absolutely SHOULD have troops that are cheap and disposable whose soul purpose is to take a bullet instead of the important stuff. but well... not everyone wants to play the guard

Those elite oriented armies are not supposed to have "bread and butter" units though. I mean I'd consider appropriate 1-2 troops at most for those kind of armies, especially for those ones like SM which have tons of datasheets available. So maybe 5-6 infantry units in a 2000 points with 1-2 troops, that's what I'd expect from "The Best of the Best" in the imperium.

Harlequins are also elite oriented but having just 8 datasheets in total I can understand using Troupe guys like bread and butter.

Maybe it would be appropriate to completely remove troops from elite oriented armies. They'd play with superbuffed dudes at the loss of Obj sec and (maybe) some CPs. Honestly I struggle to accept units like Intercessors (and all the other primaris troops), Custodian Guard or Troupe as troops.

 Blackie wrote:


Because creating killers requires tons of time and money to invest in training and equipment. Armies during war times maybe can't afford that luxury.

Their bread and butter should be cannon fodder, it's more realistic. Unless they are designed to be specialists/elites only.

What about armies that do not train or have cannon fodder? Like a court of young kings led army of just aspect warriors or custodes army. there is no such thing as cheapest equiped GK, all of them are psykers which is rare, each one has a suit of termintor armour, which again is very rare and each one has a psycho active weapon attuned to him which puts them at worse at the lowest level of aspirants of other chapters librariums.

What about an army that does nothing but breed perfect killing machines? Equipment grown into their flesh. Their every cell built to perform their singular function?

Every cell in my organism was built to perform their singular function and I'm still a total mess of an individual.

 Lance845 wrote:
What about an army that does nothing but breed perfect killing machines? Equipment grown into their flesh. Their every cell built to perform their singular function?

That's not how genetic engineering works. You still need to build off of what is biologically possible, what you consider optimal, the materials you have to work with, etc. Thus every unit you make won't be perfect even if that was the intent.

 vipoid wrote:

 Denegaar wrote:
I don't think Kabalites are a good example of proper functioning Troops. With the price hike for them and the Venoms, they are not efficient anymore.

- Don't live enough to hold objectives.
- Not able to kill anything.
- No synergy whatsoever in the Codex for using them (no stratagems, buffs, combos...)

In 8th you could spam them in Venoms because the loadout was cheap and durable enough... but Venom spam was pretty much a cheesy list and right now is way more expensive, so people is abusing other stuff.

Yeah, Kabalites were tolerable in 8th just by virtue of being relatively cheap (though even then, I didn't see a whole lot of lists taking significantly more than the bare minimum). Now they and their transports got a whole lot more expensive, but (unlike Marines) they didn't get any more durable and their guns are the same pieces of overpriced arse they were before.

I was taking Typically like...6 - 5 mans with a blaster in Venoms? They were the stars of the list.

Right now though - best to ignore them. They got hikes for no reason and wont have a proper codex for a while.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
What about an army that does nothing but breed perfect killing machines? Equipment grown into their flesh. Their every cell built to perform their singular function?

That's not how genetic engineering works. You still need to build off of what is biologically possible, what you consider optimal, the materials you have to work with, etc. Thus every unit you make won't be perfect even if that was the intent.

Perfect combination of possible and optimal with the materials available.

But Custodes are perfect. They have no flaws.

Karol wrote:
But Custodes are perfect. They have no flaws.

Did you ever ask one to count to 11 without taking their boots off?

I don't understand the question. I am assuming it is some sort of idiom I don't know or it is a joke, which generaly don't get.

Custodes are the divine perfection of the human form, taken above what a human could ever be, perfected and then taken a level above. And with humans being the most perfect life forms, their perfection is impossible to question.

The problem with Troops, I agree, is that they have no meaning anymore.

The problem comes down to 40k not having any real way to interact with the game besides [point on battlefield to stand on] and [enemy models to kill].

Looking at total war (the types of wars fought in 40k) the primary benefits of line troopers were:
1) Cheap and cheerful power projection. If ground was unoccupied by resistance, they could go take it.

2) Durable for their cost, allowing them to be used to pin enemy attention and restrict enemy mobility with their fire while more lethal assets engage-to-destroy.

3) Capable of engaging all target types with different degrees of effectiveness, and as cheaply as possible.

Points 1 and 3 really only apply at a different echelon than 40k is played at; 40k operates at the company level (ish). Therefore:
1) moving out into empty territory in a Race to the Sea-style march isn't helpful. At the tactical scale, that sort of maneuverability is always going to belong to specialists/mechanization.

3) The ability to cheaply engage and deter enemy assets from success until heavier elements can be brought in only matters when those assets aren't immediately available. Given that you get to pick your own assets in 40k, rather than being assigned assets, you can simply pick the more lethal, more capable asset.

Troops exist "in real life" because armies are required to hold territory, and expending a heavier, more lethal asset to do so is a waste of resources. Games of 40k are absolutely not like that though; you can have as many of the lethal asset as points allow.

The clear solution might be to make troops cheaper pointswise, but the problem is simply that they still don't have a role. They will either continue to be useless, or they will drop so far in price that they become the lethal asset, which isn't correct either.

I was going to make a big post but Unit1126PL hit the nail on the head. The value of basic troops in real life is in doing things other than killing, but 40K doesn't incentivize or provide particularly complex mechanics for that role.

IRL you have the troops holding the line while the specialists act as force multipliers to exploit the weak point... but the scale of 40K means that your entire battle is the 'weak point', and what you're fielding on the table is just those specialists. Play something like Epic or Warmaster and suddenly those basic troops that stop you from getting surrounded are really important. Heck, Warhammer Fantasy did that well- most armies had viable Core units because maneuver was so important that just stopping the enemy from flanking your expensive elites was valuable in itself.

ObSec and objective-focused games is a sort of nod in the right direction but it's very one-dimensional. Zoning out deep strike and screening against chargers is viable, but anything can do it, not just basic troops.

And at a fundamental level, paying hundreds of dollars and spending dozens of hours of time on units whose primary value is just existing is not super rewarding.

Very broadly, you could design Troops to be the jacks of all trades, while the other slots contain units which are highly specialized and outright need support in order to function. But that means changing most of the game, not just the Troops.

Edit: Thinking about Fantasy more, what worked there is that there were critical functions that any unit could perform, so a jack-of-all-trades that wasn't especially great at anything was still valuable. You wanted to get a rank bonus by having big units, you wanted to flank the enemy to deny their rank bonus, and you wanted to keep gaps filled so the enemy couldn't do the same to you. The game had some balance issues, but generally most armies performed best with a mixture of good troops (or monsters, or characters) to do the heavy lifting and cheap troops to do those vital functions. 40K has... screening out chargers and preventing deep strike, I guess? The problem being that your expensive main combatants can do it on their own, so you don't suffer for not having chaff. There is ObSec and holding objectives, but unlike the Fantasy mechanics I mentioned those don't actually contribute to winning the fight.

To make Troops useful in 40K, you need to find a way for basic dudes to contribute to a fight just by being there, rather than as a function of raw firepower and durability.

 catbarf wrote:
I was going to make a big post but Unit1126PL hit the nail on the head. The value of basic troops in real life is in doing things other than killing, but 40K doesn't incentivize or provide particularly complex mechanics for that role.

IRL you have the troops holding the line while the specialists act as force multipliers to exploit the weak point... but the scale of 40K means that your entire battle is the 'weak point', and what you're fielding on the table is just those specialists. Play something like Epic or Warmaster and suddenly those basic troops that stop you from getting surrounded are really important. Heck, Warhammer Fantasy did that well- most armies had viable Core units because maneuver was so important that just stopping the enemy from flanking your expensive elites was valuable in itself.

ObSec and objective-focused games is a sort of nod in the right direction but it's very one-dimensional. Zoning out deep strike and screening against chargers is viable, but anything can do it, not just basic troops.

And at a fundamental level, paying hundreds of dollars and spending dozens of hours of time on units whose primary value is just existing is not super rewarding.

Very broadly, you could design Troops to be the jacks of all trades, while the other slots contain units which are highly specialized and outright need support in order to function. But that means changing most of the game, not just the Troops.

Edit: Thinking about Fantasy more, what worked there is that there were critical functions that any unit could perform, so a jack-of-all-trades that wasn't especially great at anything was still valuable. You wanted to get a rank bonus by having big units, you wanted to flank the enemy to deny their rank bonus, and you wanted to keep gaps filled so the enemy couldn't do the same to you. The game had some balance issues, but generally most armies performed best with a mixture of good troops (or monsters, or characters) to do the heavy lifting and cheap troops to do those vital functions. 40K has... screening out chargers and preventing deep strike, I guess? The problem being that your expensive main combatants can do it on their own, so you don't suffer for not having chaff. There is ObSec and holding objectives, but unlike the Fantasy mechanics I mentioned those don't actually contribute to winning the fight.

To make Troops useful in 40K, you need to find a way for basic dudes to contribute to a fight just by being there, rather than as a function of raw firepower and durability.

Yep. More restrictive army-building won't do it alone. For every "how do we fix X in 40k?" question, the answer is always "rewrite the game." The shallow core rules are the, you guessed it, core problem.

Which is why the fantasy 40k in my head uses front and rear arcs, suppression, and objectives and missions similar to Malifaux, MEDGe, and Infinity.

I'm shocked - SHOCKED! - that shallow rules make for a shallow game.

 catbarf wrote:
To make Troops useful in 40K, you need to find a way for basic dudes to contribute to a fight just by being there, rather than as a function of raw firepower and durability.

Well, one attempt was to make them the mission-focused units by handling most of the Objective work via Objective Secured. That wasn't enough. Honestly, asides from just points, one should WANT to have Troops on those Objectives. It may be because they gain a certain bonus or two when they are on an Objective, or they improve the army's performance by their presence, or something similar, but that won't help a player in situations where Objectives simply do not exist.

It would be helpful if they could "camp" an area and make them key points for one's specialists to go out from, or make it murder for opposing specialists to dislodge. Increasing range of weapons, accuracy, or even rates of fire could be a couple other methods as well.