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In tourneys, players tend to field or approximate tourney-winning armies.
If the new CA does not change the meta, we will see more and more Imperium soup lists of the same type.
This would be funny, but I guess not the intention of GW.

Why might the book already be at the printers?

Well, when I used to manage production schedules at a publisher, there was the classic time/cost balance when choosing your printers. Opting for a Chinese printer meant good quality but long shipping lead-times. My guess is that, because books are a cash cow for GW (and something that's really holding 40k back imo), they go for the most profitable option, meaning they need to supply files 8-12 weeks ahead of time.

Indeed, the book has already been printed.
So we cannot be sure whether GW has addressed the Imperium soup lists, or better the rules that made these lists very strong.

Would be funny if FAQ would change things and then CA, already printed, would change things right back GW would need to errata the CA right away

I expect them to nerf some units to death to get people some more models but I don't think they will stop soup. It's too good of a marketing for GW to allow people to field multiple armies. The soup goes for GW's goal so tiny change is most likely there. GW doesn't want people to build mono armies.

CapRichard wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Hell no! I want to choose myself what models to bring, instead of being forced to use some custom made bundle GW desperately needs to sell!

Mind that stratagems already have this built in. Like Killshots works on Predators, so you have to take 3 predators in order for it to function, same with the Vindicator Stratagem. If you don't use those models, you can't use the stratagems. I would just organize it better.

Edit example: like, why only Azrael, Guilliman and some other guys give out bonus CPs? This "forces" people to take them (ok, they have other useful abilities, but let's ignore them for now). You can create a "Astartes Command" formation, that makes people get a +1CP if they bring in a Chapter Master (named or custom), +2CP if they have a Chapter Master and a couple of Liutenants to help and other things. This way you can arguably use whatever model you want instead of always looking at the names characters. It's a matter of well designing the system. Still it's GW so, it's not like I have any hopes, I mean, it's my idea not theirs XD. (this is just an example, to make it work I would change a lot around, like the whole army building blocks, don't focus on this alone).

Personally, I’ve always maintained that Chapter Masters should give +1 CP, named or otherwise, and Named ones that currently give 1 CP would give boosted to +2 CP.

I also think that this should be the case for the majority of army named Character “generals”. Yriel, Asurman and Eldrad. Straken and Yarrick. Farsight, Aun’Va. Swarmlord etc. Not every character would get the bonus, as they aren’t “leaders” per say, but, I’ve never really understood why they don’t give some kind of “command” benefit for being…. The commanders.
As for old school formations, I don’t think we need them anymore. Stratagems allow you to build armies around certain ideas, and I don’t think it’d be in the best interest of the game if we started stacking a “formation” bonus, on top of a detachment bonus, on top of a selection of stratagems.


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Personally, from the hints we’ve heard about C.A so far, I don’t think it will touch soup at all.

C.A will be all about points changes, the trial Sisters codex and probably more new missions, alongside some random stuff like “how to build your own landraider part 2”.

Soup will be addressed via Big FAQ errata and beta rules. This allows them to be flexible throughout the year and trial things, whilst C.A tackles some of the more “fixed” issues, such as points.


At least… That is how I would do it if I was running things logically and efficiently… But… S.W codex.. so…

Tournament players trying to him tournaments of this size will get new models even at the tiniest change in the meta, no need to put extra effort into it. The past FAQs and CAs caused massive changes in the meta, as did codex releases.

WH40k is not yet in a place where they need to changes just to shake up the meta. Just nerfing things that are too powerful and buffing/reworking things that don't work will already cause enough shake-ups.
If soup doesn't provide enough CP to fuel both the castellan and the TH jump-pack captain, meta will change, models will be bought.
If GW for some reason decides that guardsmen should be 10 points now, half the lists in that top 10 will disappear and new models will be bought.


There is no reason to piss off players who will not/cannot change their army at the drop of a hat.

Kdash wrote:
Personally, from the hints we’ve heard about C.A so far, I don’t think it will touch soup at all.

C.A will be all about points changes, the trial Sisters codex and probably more new missions, alongside some random stuff like “how to build your own landraider part 2”.

Soup will be addressed via Big FAQ errata and beta rules. This allows them to be flexible throughout the year and trial things, whilst C.A tackles some of the more “fixed” issues, such as points.


At least… That is how I would do it if I was running things logically and efficiently… But… S.W codex.. so…

Yea I agree with this and it seems like a safe bet. If CA is already printed, which we assume it is, it likely won't touch soup. It'll focus more on the Sisters pre-dex and probably how to make your own terrain/run a narrative campaign. Then again, contrary to this is the fact that the mini-dexes for Rogue Trader must have been printed some time ago and both of those have the rule regarding '+3 CP only to be used on this detachment'.

The big FAQ is for the real meat and potatoes of the meta shift though. That's where they'll introduce global, wide ranging rules and sure up things like the rule of 3/deep strike restrictions.

It certainly seems that the biggest issue in the game right now from a competitive standpoint is soup. Maybe I'm just being ignorant, but wouldn't the easiest fix simply be to make it so that you can only use Stratagems available to your Warlord's faction, and those out of the main rule book? Doing this would significantly inhibit the current top list, and would prevent soup from being auto-take while still not removing it from the game. With the current most problematic list, you would have to make a choice:

Want lots of CP's through Grand Strategist/Kurov's Aquila (which should probably be radically altered anyway)? You have to make that Guard character your Warlord, which means no Stratagems (including extra relics) for your Blood Angels or Imperial Knights, other than those out of the main rule book.

Want those amazing Captains Smashface? Make one your warlord so you can have access to BA stratagems, but lose out on most of your CP regeneration through the Guard stuff, and no stratagems for your Knight. You can still take that Battalion of IG to get a few extra CP, but without the regeneration, you won't be swimming in CP every turn.

Need that 3++ Imperial Knight BS? Cool. No Stratagems or Relics for BA or IG, but hey, you can get the extra CP's from a couple small Battalions, just no regeneration at all.

That kind of kills armies which legitimately play half one army and half another.

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
It certainly seems that the biggest issue in the game right now from a competitive standpoint is soup.

Honestly? I think Soup is probably giving a lot more stuff a viable place in the meta than its taking away. I think without it we'd see a pretty large amount of stuff vanish completely. There's definitely some big issues that need resolving, but most of them are just individual stuff that's over the curve some of it is specific, problematic interactions and not a big sweeping change that throws the baby out with the bathwater.


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 grouchoben wrote:
Why might the book already be at the printers?

Well, when I used to manage production schedules at a publisher, there was the classic time/cost balance when choosing your printers. Opting for a Chinese printer meant good quality but long shipping lead-times. My guess is that, because books are a cash cow for GW (and something that's really holding 40k back imo), they go for the most profitable option, meaning they need to supply files 8-12 weeks ahead of time.

Printed physical books are just a terrible way to manage a game these days. They probably always have been, honestly, but they certainly don't hold up to the ever evolving landscape of modern gaming.

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
It certainly seems that the biggest issue in the game right now from a competitive standpoint is soup.

Top tournament lists are transient - look back through the history of 8th edition for all the other 'biggest issues' from tournaments.

The trick is to locate and fix the specific problem, so that you can move onto the next biggest issue with minimal collateral damage.

A.T. wrote:

 CommunistNapkin wrote:
It certainly seems that the biggest issue in the game right now from a competitive standpoint is soup.

Top tournament lists are transient - look back through the history of 8th edition for all the other 'biggest issues' from tournaments.

The trick is to locate and fix the specific problem, so that you can move onto the next biggest issue with minimal collateral damage.

If GW fixes one issue, the tourney players will move from one maxed out army to another preferably with minimum effort.
This was always the case in the GW history, as said.

 Jidmah wrote:
That kind of kills armies which legitimately play half one army and half another.

Yeah, and it is even worse for the weaker books. A top tournament player may not like to play a field where 50%+ of armies consists of more or less the same combination of models, but he will buy in to it or a counter to it. If meta changes he will just switch. A non tournament player, who is affected by the changes in the same way, may not want to hear that the soultion to his [insert army name] is just to find 800$ and buy another army, and he better do it fast, because the next faq/errata are coming in a few months and your new army may get nerfed then. It is like asking people to spend 800$ or more on GW products every 2 months, just to be able to play the game.

Non tournament players can do whatever they like in their garages. Game balance shouldn't be sacrificed so five people can play their totally fluffy three faction soup lists. Frankly they can carry on doing so in their garages anyway.

The problem is command point generation, not soup.

If your warlord's faction is the only one that earns CP when the list is constructed, that would probably fix it.

Provided, you could still use book-level super categories. For instance, there is no reason to penalize an <Imperial Fists> and <Raven Guard> force in the CP department, as they're both <Adeptus Astartes>. Or, in the case of Dark Eldar, where you pretty much have to bring more than one <Drukhari> faction in a pure list unless you go brigade (assuming rule of 3 still exists).

But even tournaments were a lot more diverse and interesting 10 weeks ago. You had horde-army holdovers from the pre-March FAQ days, still doing ok, especially in the Chaos variant. Tyranids were fielding some interesting Kraken lists that were competitive without being lazy-stupid Flyrant-spam. Tau were good, but not overwhelming so. Guilliman still made it's odd showing, but certainly wasn't dominating the Meta. TS was good, but hadn't really won anything yet. Ynnari and Dark Eldar were probably the most potent lists and in need of a slight adjustment, but nowhere near as prevalent as the Knight-lists are today. Hell, while the Guard-CP farm did exist, people didn't have quite as a no-brainer as Knights to spend it on as right now. Mostly it was used to buff Custodes and prop up struggling Dark Angels or whatever. Even Orks and armies with Sisters detachments were winning the odd smaller tournament as underdog.

Competitive 40K was, historically speaking, in one of the best spots it's ever been. Far, far from perfect, sure, but certainly more diverse than it's been most of it's time.

 Marmatag wrote:
Provided, you could still use book-level super categories. For instance, there is no reason to penalize an <Imperial Fists> and <Raven Guard> force in the CP department, as they're both <Adeptus Astartes>.

How would that apply with, say, Raven Guard, Blood Angels and Space Wolves? Still all ADEPTUS ASTARTES, but now you're looking at 3 books, not one...

Tyel wrote:
Non tournament players can do whatever they like in their garages. Game balance shouldn't be sacrificed so five people can play their totally fluffy three faction soup lists. Frankly they can carry on doing so in their garages anyway.

The obvious balance mechanism for soup is CP's the issue is Guard broke the CP rules along time ago.
Eldar and choas arn't souping for CP its either units or psychic powers. No amount of CP being locked to detachments will fix that and will break as has been said for the 5th time so please start reading and comprehending you guard apologists.

Assasins, SoS, Inquisition and any unit in an Super heavy Auxiliary detachment has 0 CP. Auxiliary Detachments can't even be taken as they have no CP to countet the -1CP the detachment costs.

Guard don't need grand strategist and Kurov's ever. Removing them would address the hyper CP generation.
Soup needs a downside the only thing common to every army is battleforged CP.
Eratta the Battle forged bonus to not give CP to armies using the Big 3 keyword of Imperial, choas or Aldari.

Tyel wrote:
Non tournament players can do whatever they like in their garages. Game balance shouldn't be sacrificed so five people can play their totally fluffy three faction soup lists. Frankly they can carry on doing so in their garages anyway.

Hell no. The top end tournament players are a tiny minority of 40K players and they play heavily houseruled version of the game anyway. Balance issues should be addressed, but any fixes that shaft the more casual players are bad fixes.

Like that previous 'soup fix' which killed the soup detachments and mostly hurt already highly uncompetitive Inquisition style builds (former Inquisition units being now scattered in various different factions in this edition.)

 Marmatag wrote:

If your warlord's faction is the only one that earns CP when the list is constructed, that would probably fix it.

That would pretty much kill any lists that draw roughly evenly from different sources and make the most logical soup warlord, an Inquisitor, even more impossible choice than it is now.

Ice_can wrote:

Guard don't need grand strategist and Kurov's ever. Removing them would address the hyper CP generation.
Soup needs a downside the only thing common to every army is battleforged CP.
Eratta the Battle forged bonus to not give CP to armies using the Big 3 keyword of Imperial, choas or Aldari.

Yes. This is the sensible fix. It would probably still up hurting some fluffier soup builds disproportionately, but at leas they would remain playable.

We could just make it so that those CP generation things can only ever generate a certain amount of points in a given turn. Grand Strategist only gets you a max of 1 a turn, and the Aquila only gets you 1 a turn.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
We could just make it so that those CP generation things can only ever generate a certain amount of points in a given turn. Grand Strategist only gets you a max of 1 a turn, and the Aquila only gets you 1 a turn.

It would be better, but the problem would still be with stacking them in the soup. You can potentially have loads of CP regen sources. If CP regen needs to stay then you could limit battleforged armies to having only one source of CP regen in total. Then soup and mono armies would be even on that regard.

 Marmatag wrote:
The problem is command point generation, not soup.

If your warlord's faction is the only one that earns CP when the list is constructed, that would probably fix it.

Provided, you could still use book-level super categories. For instance, there is no reason to penalize an <Imperial Fists> and <Raven Guard> force in the CP department, as they're both <Adeptus Astartes>. Or, in the case of Dark Eldar, where you pretty much have to bring more than one <Drukhari> faction in a pure list unless you go brigade (assuming rule of 3 still exists).

^This.
There are so many ways to fix it too.
You can either make only your WLs faction generate CPs
Or reduce detachment earned CPs to very little and have Battle Forged outright grant more CPs
Or restrict use of generated CPs to the faction that generated them.
The list can go on.

-

 Crimson wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
We could just make it so that those CP generation things can only ever generate a certain amount of points in a given turn. Grand Strategist only gets you a max of 1 a turn, and the Aquila only gets you 1 a turn.

It would be better, but the problem would still be with stacking them in the soup. You can potentially have loads of CP regen sources. If CP regen needs to stay then you could limit battleforged armies to having only one source of CP regen in total. Then soup and mono armies would be even on that regard.

??? You can't have loads of CP regen sources. They're all Warlord traits except the Aquilla. The only reason Grand Strategist is ubiquitous is that its pointless better than all the others you can potentially take.

 LunarSol wrote:


??? You can't have loads of CP regen sources. They're all Warlord traits except the Aquilla. The only reason Grand Strategist is ubiquitous is that its pointless better than all the others you can potentially take.

Blood Angels at least have a CP regen relic too.

 Crimson wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:


??? You can't have loads of CP regen sources. They're all Warlord traits except the Aquilla. The only reason Grand Strategist is ubiquitous is that its pointless better than all the others you can potentially take.

Blood Angels at least have a CP regen relic too.

Oh right. I always forget it, since it currently effectively costs 2 CP to take. In general I'm of the opinion that Imperium seems to be all about the CP regen Warlord traits, so there really shouldn't be relics that do it as well. Then again, I'd rather see CP regen as a general rule for having your Warlord on the table than be tied to either relics or traits.

If CP regen is the issue... why not just have it as a rule in the CP section that an army may only contain one source of in-game CP (re)generation - i.e., just Grand Strategist, or just Kurov, or just the Vitae thing in the IG/IK/BA build?

 Dysartes wrote:
If CP regen is the issue... why not just have it as a rule in the CP section that an army may only contain one source of in-game CP (re)generation - i.e., just Grand Strategist, or just Kurov, or just the Vitae thing in the IG/IK/BA build?

Because Guard get cheap acess to CP and one of the best regeneration traits.

 Dysartes wrote:
If CP regen is the issue... why not just have it as a rule in the CP section that an army may only contain one source of in-game CP (re)generation - i.e., just Grand Strategist, or just Kurov, or just the Vitae thing in the IG/IK/BA build?

Or, perhaps no army should have the ability to regen CP? Make spending CP on stratagems an actual decision rather than an automatic process.

It also makes it much more balanced for those armies that can't regen CP.

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
If CP regen is the issue... why not just have it as a rule in the CP section that an army may only contain one source of in-game CP (re)generation - i.e., just Grand Strategist, or just Kurov, or just the Vitae thing in the IG/IK/BA build?

Or, perhaps no army should have the ability to regen CP? Make spending CP on stratagems an actual decision rather than an automatic process.

It also makes it much more balanced for those armies that can't regen CP.

If the system remains as it is now - it simply makes no sense that the army that generates CP the easiest through detachments also has the best regeneration ability. That is an easy fix - remove CP regen from AM and give to to Custodes (the army that has the hardest time generation CP through detachments). CP regen in other armies starting with 8-10 CP is really not an issue.

Space marines for example with 5+ regen triat are only expect to regen 3-4 points with that trait for a total of 14ish. Which is likely less than an IG force started with. Again - the issue is not regen. The issue is starting CP number and ofc - multiple sources of regen (which should not be allowed.)

I've been thinking about it and I think there are two simple changes that fix the CP problem almost entirely: 1) cap the number of CP you can start the game with to 12 at 2000 points. 2) Make it so the CP regeneration abilities can only be used on <faction> stratagems.

The first limits CP to a number almost any army can get to, and the second makes reroll abilities bad if you're not spending CP on your faction's abilities.