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Heya! I don't wander in here often, but every now and then, a thread title catches my eye or sparks a little bit of inspiration. I've noticed a couple of really good threads adapting the Decurion formation to other armies, and, well...

In all honesty, I'm torn about the formation itself. On the one hand, I'm not a fan of the huge power boosts simply for taking certain models; I'd like it more if it was something simple, or even no bonus at all, just an alternative to Force Organization. On the other, I think it's actually a fairly creative way to push players toward 'fluffy' armies, binding together a certain selection of units that fit a theme while still leaving room for customization. Sort of a new-school answer to doctrines? With that in mind, I'd like to approach this exercise with more of an eye toward theme than power level. I'm not really interested in giving Guard massive boosts...more in coming up with an interesting, alternative way to build an army, with maybe a balancing tweak or two to an underappreciated option every now and then. So please, someone smack me if anything looks overpowered

To me, this makes the most sense if it was built around the core of the codex - that is to say, the troops selections. With the exception of armored companies, IG/AM have usually been built around infantry platoons, which fits very well with the background. I'd like to continue this theme with the proposed formations, building the majority of the core around platoons specialized for different types of warfare, then using auxiliary formations as support. Here's my initial thoughts -

0-1 Command Formation
1+ Core Formation (Infantry, mechanized, armored, drop, or scout)
1-10 Auxiliary Formations (Psyker, abhuman, close assault, storm trooper, or artillery)

Comments? Thoughts? Have I missed anything that should be a formation, or do you think one of them is misplaced? I'll flesh them out after gathering a few thoughts.

That's going to be difficult with IG being as diverse as they are, unless you'd also adopt formations for cadians, catachans etc. But I'd suggest to look at the daemon kin detachment.
It has a chaos space marineish core and you can take a full demon auxilary that has quite some rules as well.
I don't actually use that in my Decurion style Chaos legions thread, as I'm not quite sure what to put in its stead. Other than copy pasting unused cult units or so. But I figured you could just as well ally those in, made more sense to me.

But in the context of IG you could have an infantry core and some themed auxiliaries like drop troopers and then make a larger mechanized based auxiliary perhaps?

Roknar wrote:
That's going to be difficult with IG being as diverse as they are, unless you'd also adopt formations for cadians, catachans etc. But I'd suggest to look at the daemon kin detachment.
It has a chaos space marineish core and you can take a full demon auxilary that has quite some rules as well.
I don't actually use that in my Decurion style Chaos legions thread, as I'm not quite sure what to put in its stead. Other than copy pasting unused cult units or so. But I figured you could just as well ally those in, made more sense to me.

But in the context of IG you could have an infantry core and some themed auxiliaries like drop troopers and then make a larger mechanized based auxiliary perhaps?

The general idea would be to focus on how they were armed and equipped, rather than their planet of origin or their style of recruitment - you're right, that would be absolutely nuts! In the background, though, you've got regiments made up of infantry, or drop troopers, or tanks...planets tend to get known for one particular thing, like Catachans with their light troops or Tallarn armor and cavalry, but they'll still raise other regiments - mixing and matching them as appropriate for particular theaters of war. You'll see an Ogryn regiment split up into squads and shipped out to commanders who actually know how to read, or armored fist mechanized squadrons being detached and loaned for infantry support. That's the kind of thing I'm going for here, really. One of Warhammer's big strengths is that it's a 'your dudes' sort of game, and I'd rather focus on that by making formations for line infantry and artillery, rather than Cadia and Krieg.

Does that sound like I might want to check out the Daemonkin detachment for inspiration? I don't really know anything about it except that they use the word 'blood' a lot and it doesn't have Kharn.

Well I guess that depends on how close to GW you want to be.
Going by the daemonkin book as the latest incarnation of what "decurion style" means, then they only offer a single core formation. That's already unlike what you propose, unless you meant doing different decurions per core role.
In which case, yes. I think it will offer a nice starting point and you get an idea of how powerful your rules can be. The idea seems to be to focus your units into doing something, which will almost inevitably buff them.
So fluffy alpha legion might be...give everything infiltrate, but that would be so broken it would almost be funny.

But its more along the lines of cadia, krieg etc than it is about different battlefield roles. Simply because they have characteristics that are "easily" transferred to a rule set.

I'm not sure how you could do a scout core with a set of rules that are capable of representing scouts trained by several different worlds.
I actually think you would be better off doing formations for the various different worlds, since you can mix and match formations at will.
You could take cadian trained infantry regiments with Catachan trained scouts in this way.

In that sense the decurion may or may not fit. Maybe it's better to provide a more modular approach for formations?
Say instead of a single core that can choose any auxiliary, it would be better to do something like this.

Command - Core (1+)
can take a small subset of auxiliaries

Infantry - Core (1+)
can take a different set of auxiliaries

you see what i mean?..kind of reflecting the army structure a bit more than a normal decurion would

Your not as flexible as the average decurion but you can better optimize it towards a certain playstyle.

...true, I didn't think of the fact that they only offered one core formation. I had been thinking of only doing one 'decurion' formation...you're right, five might be SLIGHTLY much, then. Well, that's simple enough; most of the core formations could be categorized as auxiliary instead, although I'm going to have to ponder having an 'armored' core formation. The whole point of this was themed flexibility in army design, rather than optimization.

I'm not sure how you could do a scout core with a set of rules that are capable of representing scouts trained by several different worlds.

Simple! They all get Scout or Move Through Cover or something. They're a scouting-focused regiment of Guardsmen, whether they come from Catachan or Tallarn or Tanith or a world of your own creation. Obviously there'd be some kind of difference in their training and specialization, but that sort of thing would be beyond the scope of a game of 40k, I think.

I'm not sure whether I like the modular auxiliary idea or not...it pushes players more into a certain style of selection, but it seems interesting. I'll have to think on that.

Sorry, I probably should have mentioned that I was thinking of having the player take at least 1 formation from the sets of command formations. Not, a core command PLUS a command auxiliary.
Then again...now that I think about it..its not really that different from making decurions for each planet lol


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Spinner wrote:
Simple! They all get Scout or Move Through Cover or something. They're a scouting-focused regiment of Guardsmen, whether they come from Catachan or Tallarn or Tanith or a world of your own creation.

Hmm... Then maybe a daemonkin inspired one might work, but you'd probably have fairly large formations per auxiliary. I'm guessing several units would reappear in different auxiliaries in a different role.
But overall that decurion would not be all that different in principle.

Perhaps something like this?

Core Formation:
- Central Command (1 CCS, 1 Commissar or Lord Commissar, 1-3 Priests, 1-3 Primaris Psyker, 0-4 Veterans)


Optional Formations: 1-10 of the following formations
- Infantry Platoon (1 PCS, 2-6 Infantry Squad, 0-3 SWS, 0-3 HWS, 0-1 Conscripts, 0-1 Commissar)
- Recon Team (1-2 Veterans, 1-3 Scout Sentinels)
- Mechanised Infantry (1-2 Veterans, 1-3 Armoured Sentinels)
- Militarum Tempestus Platoon (1 Tempestus Command Squad, 2-6 Scion Squads)
- Abhuman Platoon (1-6 of Ogryn Squads OR Bullgryn Squads OR Ratling Squads OR Wyrdvane Psyker Squads)
- Mounted Infantry Platoon (2-6 Rough Rider Squads)
- Tank Company (1 Tank Commander, 2-6 Leman Russ Squadrons (any variant) OR Hellhound Squadrons (any variants))
- Air Cavalry (2-3 Valkyrie Squadrons, 1-3 Vendetta Squadrons)
- Artillery Battery (2-6 Hydra Batteries OR Basilisk Batteries OR Wyvern Batteries)
- Missile Battery (2-4 Manticores OR Deathstrikes)

Roknar wrote:

Hmm... Then maybe a daemonkin inspired one might work, but you'd probably have fairly large formations per auxiliary. I'm guessing several units would reappear in different auxiliaries in a different role.
But overall that decurion would not be all that different in principle.

Yeah, I kinda like the idea of the Guard having large formations And the basic troops are supposed to be generic, anyway, so it makes sense to spread them around!

Perhaps something like this?

Core Formation:
- Central Command (1 CCS, 1 Commissar or Lord Commissar, 1-3 Priests, 1-3 Primaris Psyker, 0-4 Veterans)


Optional Formations: 1-10 of the following formations
- Infantry Platoon (1 PCS, 2-6 Infantry Squad, 0-3 SWS, 0-3 HWS, 0-1 Conscripts, 0-1 Commissar)
- Recon Team (1-2 Veterans, 1-3 Scout Sentinels)
- Mechanised Infantry (1-2 Veterans, 1-3 Armoured Sentinels)
- Militarum Tempestus Platoon (1 Tempestus Command Squad, 2-6 Scion Squads)
- Abhuman Platoon (1-6 of Ogryn Squads OR Bullgryn Squads OR Ratling Squads OR Wyrdvane Psyker Squads)
- Mounted Infantry Platoon (2-6 Rough Rider Squads)
- Tank Company (1 Tank Commander, 2-6 Leman Russ Squadrons (any variant) OR Hellhound Squadrons (any variants))
- Air Cavalry (2-3 Valkyrie Squadrons, 1-3 Vendetta Squadrons)
- Artillery Battery (2-6 Hydra Batteries OR Basilisk Batteries OR Wyvern Batteries)
- Missile Battery (2-4 Manticores OR Deathstrikes)

There's some cool stuff in there, but a lot of them just seem to be multiples of one unit. There's no reason not to spam them as formations for whatever free rule you'd get; I'd rather there be a cohesive theme made up of multiple units and some kind of tax.

New thought - different core formations, but you're only allowed to take one type. So if you decide to take a Core Infantry formation, you can't take a Core Armored formation in this particular Decurion. Thoughts? Too restrictive, or interesting twist?

Makes sense to me.