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Seriously, what gives? I see so much whining about "soup" armies and I just don't understand it at all. Admittedly this may be because I played DH and WH extensively when I first started 40k many moons ago, so the idea of "soup" isn't new to me (my DH Grey Knights were essentially non-functional outside of a "soup" army), but even still the opprobium seems way out of whack to me.

So, yeah. What's up with that?

Maybe because a couple of factions, imperium and chaos, get the opportunity to chose among 300 different units?

The real whining about soups is about major factions included in the same list. Things like DH and WH should never be independent factions but part of a single codex with GK, SoB...

You get to cherry pick the best units, from every faction, for your list.

They tuned it down a tiny bit in the latest FAQ - but there are a fair number of armies that can't ally or soup AT ALL, such as Orks, Tau, Necrons, etc.

A new Imperial codex comes out? ALL Imperials get to use those units.

A new Xenos codex comes out? ONLY that Xenos gets to play with those toys.

It's fairly powerful and people see it as a source of imbalance; particularly since last edition there was some severe issues enabled by the Ally table. There's also a subset of people who are just offended by the lack of faction purity.

The problem is that Dakka thinks that because a few tournament players abuse it to cherry pick units then EVERY soup player must be abusing it in the same way.

I expect to see many imperial knights up for sale now that they're useless for 90% of the owners

Morkphoiz wrote:
I expect to see many imperial knights up for sale now that they're useless for 90% of the owners

How are they useless? Because you have to take them in a super heavy auxiliary detachment instead of in a supreme command detachment? If you're that bothered about losing 1CP you weren't taking imperial knights anyway.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
There's also a subset of people who are just offended by the lack of faction purity.

Yes, the badwrongfun crowd are quite vocal on this one.

Soup is the idea that getting to choose from multiple sources gives enough imbalance to make single source forces unable to compete

 BBAP wrote:
Seriously, what gives?

Blood Angels captain smash being powered by CPs generated by cheap guardsmen rather than expensive blood angels, being screened by Celestine and flanked by a half dozen wolf lords.


The tiny sub-factions and remains of the carved up WH/DH books are a different but significant problem (especially for inquisition players who have been cut down to the bone with all of this).

 BBAP wrote:
Seriously, what gives? I see so much whining about "soup" armies and I just don't understand it at all. Admittedly this may be because I played DH and WH extensively when I first started 40k many moons ago, so the idea of "soup" isn't new to me (my DH Grey Knights were essentially non-functional outside of a "soup" army), but even still the opprobium seems way out of whack to me.

So, yeah. What's up with that?

basically, as noted earlier, the rules let you pick and choose the best items from a selection of different armies and use them in ways unintended, resulting in hideously powerful armies that have to make no choices or sacrifices and get all the boons of multiple armies, some unintended new ones, and none of the downsides.

The old DH/WH rules required you to take a limited selection and number of units, and basically couldnt share much o anything with the allied army.

I think someone posted a theoretical list where you take 9 relics with a chaos soup.

I don't get it, personally. From what I've seen, it seems like the whole soup complaint is mostly limited to tournament players, and could be solved by, more than anything else, the slightest bit of sportsmanship and actual enjoyment of the game and it's fluff rather than just winning (which is the main reason I don't play tournaments).

 skchsan wrote:
I think someone posted a theoretical list where you take 9 relics with a chaos soup.

You can still do that, especially that battalions are +5.

The only change is that you cant intermix a single detachment anymore, and even then you can still get away with it with other faction words (e.g. nurgle faction keyword crosses three books, pretty easy to mix with that). In the end all this really does it stop people from shoe-horning celestine into a astartes detachment, or throwing in mortar squads to fill slots in other detachments etc. You can still bring a neat little celestine+troop patrol detachment, or a mini battalion of IG with your Custodes. You just have to commit more to the soup elements, since they will need their own detachment most of the time.

edit: TBH this is not that dramatic of a change, and is easily circumvented. The beta rule only mitigates the extreme cases of cherry picking a single unit here and there, as you can still comfortably mix different detachments since your army faction remains unchanged.

Brigade Detachment of AM / Guard costing around 700points. It can cost a tad more if you load up max mortars and grenade launchers.

1-2 other Imperium Detachments one is preferred to be a Battalion for more CP
Each additional army has some special Character or Ultra elite unit that combines with a special Stratagem and possibly relic combo that destroys the rules or at very least make a mockery of normal pure lists.

In this new FAQ it’s a Soup Battery of 20 CP.

Competitive lists take the best parts of an army and run them together.

Competitive soup lists take the best parts of many different armies and run them together.

Some people don't like the latter.

To me, soup has always been the fluffy side, diffrent imperial sections fighting together, in apocalypse size. To me, this restriction does not affect, as I collect these forces as a Detachment. So, no problem.

the issue is that soup is something you do for the fluff or gameplay variation.
to create a campain, to create a narrative scenario, to play a doubles game, basicly to play games you NORMALY dont in matched.

soup belongs only in open play just as apocalypse does.
match play should be restricted for mono codex only.
while this means that GW must make alot more new codex, in the long run it is mutch better for the game as it is the only way to begin the prossess of balancing each codex.

every major nerf now is done whit soup in mind, not codex.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
soup belongs only in open play just as apocalypse does.
match play should be restricted for mono codex only.
while this means that GW must make alot more new codex

They need to consolidate the smaller factions that they have been dividing up into actual armies. The most recent example being custodes and SoS who would have complimented each other well in a single book as 'codex: talons of the emperor'

Although this FAQ helped reducing the soup thingy, it didn't mess with another important thing soups do: letting people use Stratagems from another codexes. You should only use Stratagems from your Warlord's codex...

 Vector Strike wrote:
Although this FAQ helped reducing the soup thingy, it didn't mess with another important thing soups do: letting people use Stratagems from another codexes. You should only use Stratagems from your Warlord's codex...

It didn't really help reduce soup, either. How many people were missing out on traits/stratagems by running a single detachment with multiple factions? The issue with "soup" was taking multiple detachments with multiple factions and then using Imperium/Chaos/Aeldari as the Battle-forged shared keyword. That appears to be untouched as the rule seems focused on only in the same detachment, which misses the point of the issue entirely.

It's not so much with game balance as with what's dominating the meta right now. This happens in MTG a good bit. In MTG, if you're seeing the same decks over and over again in the top 16 and especially the top 8 and these decks are causing almost all players to have to build their decks around trying to beat these top 8 to top 16 decks, Wizards of the Coast will ban a card in these top decks to make the meta more diverse. Also, it's done so players don't have to build their decks to beat these particular overpowered decks.

It's the same thing with Warhammer 40K. I have a feeling that LVO and AdeptiCon were not the only sample sources. So, to keep people from building overpowered lists that other people are having to design their armies around beating, GW changed the rules.

The problem is that GW went about doing this completely the wrong way. It makes many units/models useless in Matched play. Yes, they are still allowed in Open and Narrative play, though I would venture to guess that the amount of people who play Open and Narrative games is quite small compared to the people who played matched games.

More or less, GW has now made some units completely unplayable now... which was never the way it was supposed to be. From my first time into GW (coming from an MTG environment where card sets rotated out of legality each year), I was told that all of my models will be usable throughout the years regardless of the Edition.

Unfortunately, at least in Match Play, that's no longer the case for me. I have boxes full of unusable MTG cards (bulk commons, uncommons, and rares) that aren't useful in any format. And, for the first time in my GW history (started in 2015... almost 3 years ago), I have models that I can no longer use in Matched play.

Did the issue of Imperial Soup need to be fixed? Yes. They needed to come up with something. But, by applying the same rule across the board for Chaos, Ynnari, and more, they have pulled these armies completely out of the fluff and grand story arcs that they have been written around. GW really screwed up, and they need to change this rule. Is it something that still needs to be addressed? Sure! But, GW needs to find a different way to do it.

SG

AnFéasógMór wrote:I don't get it, personally. From what I've seen, it seems like the whole soup complaint is mostly limited to tournament players, and could be solved by, more than anything else, the slightest bit of sportsmanship and actual enjoyment of the game and it's fluff rather than just winning

+5

It'll never happen though.

Vaktathi wrote:basically, as noted earlier, the rules let you pick and choose the best items from a selection of different armies and use them in ways unintended, resulting in hideously powerful armies that have to make no choices or sacrifices and get all the boons of multiple armies, some unintended new ones, and none of the downsides.

I haven't been back in the game long but looking back over the last year of 8th, most of the meta armies seem to be mono-Codex. Mortar Guard weren't soup, neither were Flyrant spam Nids - Ynnari is a funny one, because while technically soup it was in reality Asuryani with Ynnari power-ups.

People keep telling me soup armies are "hideously powerful" and have no downsides - but if that's true, why aren't they sweeping the board everywhere?

The old DH/WH rules required you to take a limited selection and number of units, and basically couldnt share much o anything with the allied army.

Every Imperial player I knew in 5th Edition would take 2 IST Melta death-rides in their army, even in armies like mech Wolves where dual-Melta deathrides were readily available. They were just so damn cheap for what they could do - hose down tanks with Melta - that it made little sense not to bring them. A lot of vehicle spammers also took advantage of SoB to bring a bunch of Immolators, which were also cheap as all-hell Razorbacks that could move 12" and still drop RRTW Heavy Flamer templates (back when vehicles mostly weren't able to fire anything if they moved more than 6"). So, yeah - the Allies of old were comp restricted, but that did little to dent their impact.

FrozenDwarf wrote:match play should be restricted for mono codex only.

[...]

every major nerf now is done whit soup in mind, not codex.

... and yet most of the big events are being won by mono-book armies. Maybe it's mono-book that's the problem? Also a lot of the FAQ changes seem directly tuned to reduce the effectiveness of Flyrant spam, and spam in general.

This new rule means I can't take 2 assassins to support my Sisters force without either dropping something to buy a 3rd assassin or having to pay 2CP for the assassins.

Add to that the deep strike beta rule, Assassins are worse than useless.

Soup lets you fix all the inadequacy of a single codex.

All of the inherent downsides of an army like having space marines with "elite" units can be taken care of with a briefcase full of conscripts or other chaff unit

its ususally not the other way around. its mostly because guard stuff is really affordable and cheap screens.

like custodes are individually really strong but they suffer in the objective game. so you take extra chaff to at the least grab the back field stuff.

at least from what i gather. i dont like soup. im more of a pie guy.

 ServiceGames wrote:
It's not so much with game balance as with what's dominating the meta right now. This happens in MTG a good bit. In MTG, if you're seeing the same decks over and over again in the top 16 and especially the top 8 and these decks are causing almost all players to have to build their decks around trying to beat these top 8 to top 16 decks, Wizards of the Coast will ban a card in these top decks to make the meta more diverse. Also, it's done so players don't have to build their decks to beat these particular overpowered decks.

It's the same thing with Warhammer 40K. I have a feeling that LVO and AdeptiCon were not the only sample sources. So, to keep people from building overpowered lists that other people are having to design their armies around beating, GW changed the rules.

The problem is that GW went about doing this completely the wrong way. It makes many units/models useless in Matched play. Yes, they are still allowed in Open and Narrative play, though I would venture to guess that the amount of people who play Open and Narrative games is quite small compared to the people who played matched games.

More or less, GW has now made some units completely unplayable now... which was never the way it was supposed to be. From my first time into GW (coming from an MTG environment where card sets rotated out of legality each year), I was told that all of my models will be usable throughout the years regardless of the Edition.

Unfortunately, at least in Match Play, that's no longer the case for me. I have boxes full of unusable MTG cards (bulk commons, uncommons, and rares) that aren't useful in any format. And, for the first time in my GW history (started in 2015... almost 3 years ago), I have models that I can no longer use in Matched play.

Did the issue of Imperial Soup need to be fixed? Yes. They needed to come up with something. But, by applying the same rule across the board for Chaos, Ynnari, and more, they have pulled these armies completely out of the fluff and grand story arcs that they have been written around. GW really screwed up, and they need to change this rule. Is it something that still needs to be addressed? Sure! But, GW needs to find a different way to do it.

SG

Most people only last about 3-4 yrs in any gw game. They get tired of the poor rules writing and nonsensical meta gaks.

3yrs in , are you starting to see it now too?

I think people just like to complain. Also, there are a lot of things some people would like to do with a given piece of fluff, that wasn't thought out very well so they have to mix and match.

For example, I've always like the Imperial Fists chapter. They are supposed to be siege masters, but they don't really have anything particularly siegey. Basically you have to borrow Basilisks from the IG and paint them yellow and call them auxilary units. Which I for one think is perfectly fluffy, but technically "soup". Their chapter tactic, which is sorta seigey, doesn't even apply to such things anyways, just infantry, bikes and Dreads, which is also kind odd.

Basically as long as I don't see a Tyranid swarm overwhelming my ranks, blasting 20 smites with a few squads of Dark Reapers at their back I'm fine. But really with the number of units we're talking about in these engagements, they are small but very intense clashes between extremely elite units, which I would imagine would be optimized for their effectiveness in what I have always imagined were decisive actions in a much larger battle.

Part of the problem is that 40k has a very poor concept of what a faction is. They have a good number of them (though that number has been hazy at times) but a lot of them reuse a pretty large number of kits or have pretty abysmal selections; sometimes going to pretty hilarious lengths to pad out their content. Where most games would release a new unit for an existing faciton; GW gives it a couple weapon options and releases it as a new faction along side a couple solos. From my POV, soup is more a step towards fixing this lack of meaningful variety for most of the game than anything.