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With the old formations rules, did you have to take specific wargear on a unit, or could you vary your wargear?

 Apple Peel wrote:
With the old formations rules, did you have to take specific wargear on a unit, or could you vary your wargear?

Usually no, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few that did. All the IG and admech ones I'm aware of let you go nuts, you just had to have specific units but they could be from mid to full size and have any combination of gear.

Its part of what made that one admech formation so good, you got a ton of free plasma guns out of it for your skitarii

 Apple Peel wrote:
With the old formations rules, did you have to take specific wargear on a unit, or could you vary your wargear?

Formations varied greatly in power and requirements with no set pattern as to restriction vs reward.

They were almost always unit based. Occasionally there would be a minimum wargear requirement like toxin sacs in the hypertoxic node, exarchs in the aspect host, etc.

Here's to hoping they don't make another War Convocation with AdMech that will be OP and will see our next codex nerfed to death because "obviously there were power issues".

But no AdMech didn't have any wargear restriction, it was more along the lines of "Have 2 Kastelan Maniples and 1 Dominus" or "2-3 Breacher squads and 1 Dominus" and you had nice little boni. And then there was the War Convocation from the White Dwarf which gave FREE GEAR to ALL THE UNITS from the Formation so you were playing with 400 pts more than your opponent basically.

 Aaranis wrote:
And then there was the War Convocation from the White Dwarf which gave FREE GEAR to ALL THE UNITS from the Formation so you were playing with 400 pts more than your opponent basically.

It was in the region of 600-650 free points of wargear for the basic formation (around 1500pts of units before wargear) with a few more points on offer for discount plasma servitors from the Imperial Agents book. The shared special rules and no overheats on top really pushed the formation up into the 'almost challenging the eldar' category.

That having been said admech were overpriced and the convocation/gladius formations for all their free points and rules still didn't quite reach the insanity of daemon summoning. 7e really was a mess.

Yes some wargear was required, but only as exceptions, usually it was only about units and not their loadout.

For example in the Council of the Waaagh formation one of the nobz must have the waaagh banner.

The Chaos Legions had to take a specific mark or weren't allowed to take any mark at all.

And I think The Eight from Farsight had a detailed desrciption how every single suit of the Eight had to be equipped.

More often than not you found that the formations rules benefited certain options rather than mandate them. For instance, the Windrider Host only gave benefits to Shurikan weapons but didn't actually require you to load up on Shurkan Cannons/Catapults (and is also the reason why no one ever ran this formation, Scatter Lasers were far and away the better option).

It was usually the "named" formations that specified the weapons and wargear on units - the formations included in Stormclaw (Space Wolves and Orks), Deathstorm (Blood Angels and Tyranids) and Death Masque (Deathwatch and Harlequins) are examples.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
It was usually the "named" formations that specified the weapons and wargear on units - the formations included in Stormclaw (Space Wolves and Orks), Deathstorm (Blood Angels and Tyranids) and Death Masque (Deathwatch and Harlequins) are examples.

They weren't formations though, they were units with pre set loadouts, you could use them in any of the respective force orgs available to those armies.