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The thing is is warping the balance of the game isn't the allies system. Well thats not the worst offender. Its building death stars by stacking multiple strategems with war lord traits and sometimes relics.

Its net lists. Its turning warhammer into a collectable card game. Instead of a tatical table top game.

Of all the possible combinations you can put together with imperium only 1 is really game breaking. And that one is very specific. Its not just a big knight with troop support. Its Raven guard Castilian, with cauls wrath, and a 3+ 4++ save.

Of all the possible ork lists the one that does well is a hug mob of double fireing lootas, with a screen o grots.

Eldar are more balanced but very very good. Meaning you see multiple builds doing well. But the one that out preforms has word of the phoenix.



In order to balance the number of possible combinations inherent with allies, limit them. With knights don't let them take aritfacts house traits of warlord traits unless they are fighting with out support.

Orks need their stats buffed and their strats nerffed. Actully many armys need their stats buffed and their strats nerfed. But there are a few that don't have overpowering strategems.



You could also buff single codex armies by letting them take anextra warlord trait or something. Or give them all a default regain cp trait. Call it 'intergated fighting force' or something.

The balance problem is how units in 40k scale.

Stratagems and powers are infinitely better on big giant point sinks with a lot of wounds (mass infantry, knights, etc.) then they are on a single 75pt model.

On the other side of the equation, some factions have tiny tiny point sinks that let them rack up CP.

Currently you cannot balance the game due to soup.

Not without a major change to CP generation (which in turn unbalances a lot of strats).

If you give everyone a set amount of CP, you can then balance strats and until strats are balanced, soup will not be balanced.

hmmm...I agree on certain points, but not on others.

as a quick example: Imperial Guard codex stratagems. What've they got? +1 to save on an infantry unit, some crappy mortal wounds stuff, a morale roll on a D3..some of the regiments have half decent stratagems, but to me, on the whole it seems they were designed with the fact that they get a billion CPs due to their cheap as chips infantry in mind.

Now look at knights. Look at the knights' stratagems in the light of them having 9CP total for a whole army.

Now look at their stratagems if they have 20+regen with guard allies. It's a little bit of a different picture.

I do agree that fixing soup does not INSTANTLY fix army imbalance. But it will fix a major recurring problem of armies designed around a small number of CP suddenly having access to a ton.

Guard have a strat to deploy troops from a Valkerie after it moves. Anyone who has had a big pack of tooled up orgyns suddenly drop in 3" from their lines turn 1 can tell you how much fun that isn't. Concentrated Fire (or whatever that to-hit bonus is called) is pretty good too.

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Soup also cannot be balanced as long as there is no downside to taking allies, and that hurts efforts to balance mono-codexes as well.

"Marines are bad? What do you mean? They're showing up in tournament lists, how bad can they possibly be?"

GW also seems to be pretty bad at 'package balancing' within books. Ultramarines have Guilliman and a bunch of other really good characters, they should have the weakest strat, chapter trait, warlord trait, and relic in the book to compensate for that. We all know that isn't the way things are.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Currently you cannot balance the game due to soup.

Not without a major change to CP generation (which in turn unbalances a lot of strats).

If you give everyone a set amount of CP, you can then balance strats and until strats are balanced, soup will not be balanced.

Right. If you give a set amount of CP, then balancing strats becomes easy. If everyone has the same CP then we can easily compare their utility and adjusts costs accordingly. Knight stratagems can be expensive and guard ones can be cheap. This would ensure that knights always function at the same level whether they are solo or with Guard.

Dandelion wrote:

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Currently you cannot balance the game due to soup.

Not without a major change to CP generation (which in turn unbalances a lot of strats).

If you give everyone a set amount of CP, you can then balance strats and until strats are balanced, soup will not be balanced.

Right. If you give a set amount of CP, then balancing strats becomes easy. If everyone has the same CP then we can easily compare their utility and adjusts costs accordingly. Knight stratagems can be expensive and guard ones can be cheap. This would ensure that knights always function at the same level whether they are solo or with Guard.

DING DING DING! Winner!

Well, its not strategems specifically, its control points and how you generate them.

The problem is that to get the most CPs you have to play cheap high body count armies, which encourages everybody to just include a huge blob of guardsmen in every list so they can generate CPs for their dudes to use. And conveniently, blobs of cheap models are also the strongest thing in combat because 6s always wound.

GW needs to bring back vehicle armor and/or make it so 6s don't always wound. There should be many big scary things that are immune to lasgun/bolter fire.

Then they need to penalize taking allies in some way and give ways for small elite armies to generate more CPs.


IMO, specific models and units should generate CPs not just force org charts. And the more expensive and elite the model, the more CPs it generates.

IE: A Space Marine Chapter Master should generate 3+ CPs, maybe with a regenerating CP, while an Imperial Guard Command Squad should only generate 1. This would compensate for elite armies not being able to fill force org charts.

And taking allies from different factions should have a -2 CP penalty per force org chart that doesn't share keywords. So soup armies get penalized.

I've said it several times.. to fix this:

All 2K armies get 15 CP. Remove 1 CP for each detachment beyond the first, and remove a second if the detachment is a different faction from the first.

IF 15 is too generous, set it to 12.

Once you have this platform, then you can find a way to balance stratagems.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Well, its not strategems specifically, its control points and how you generate them.

The problem is that to get the most CPs you have to play cheap high body count armies, which encourages everybody to just include a huge blob of guardsmen in every list so they can generate CPs for their dudes to use. And conveniently, blobs of cheap models are also the strongest thing in combat because 6s always wound.

GW needs to bring back vehicle armor and/or make it so 6s don't always wound. There should be many big scary things that are immune to lasgun/bolter fire.

Those are both good points that deserve to be in the discussion.

In 4th the to-wound rule was "roll a 4 + [attacker's S] - [defender's T] or better", I'm not sure that would really improve things though. It would mean that an S6 weapon wounded Marines on a 2+ and it would make Knights even harder to kill for most armies. I think the more reasonable approach is to recognize that armor values and wounds aren't worth as much due to the current AP system and adjust armor values to cover a broader range (say, 2+ for ordinary Marines, 1+ for termies, maybe even into 0+ for tank armor) with 1s always failing and at the same time pull back on the invuln saves. 4++ should be vanishingly rare and nobody should have better than a 4++. Then adjust wounds up here and there if that isn't enough.

All things considered GW should probably adjust T values to cover a broader range as well to give themselves more breathing room.

On the second point I've said since the first game I played that holding objectives should be based on the number of points you have on the marker rather than the number of bodies, and 3" from an objective is probably not enough. I have a 200 point dreadnaught sitting on that objective but you get the control point because of 2 gretchin? How [expletive deleted] ridiculous.

Dandelion wrote:

Right. If you give a set amount of CP, then balancing strats becomes easy. If everyone has the same CP then we can easily compare their utility and adjusts costs accordingly. Knight stratagems can be expensive and guard ones can be cheap. This would ensure that knights always function at the same level whether they are solo or with Guard.

Yes, absolutely this!

I'm not opposed to fixed CP, but i'm of the opinion that if you stopped people just slotting in filler Battalions for CP, that would fix a lot of issues in a way that wouldn't precipitate 8.5th (because of all the stratagem re-costings). Maybe taking Battalions after the first one only grant 2(?)CP?

Soup makes stratagems a lot better though because you can use one faction to generate CP if necessary and the once per phase restriction can be bypassed if the core units of your list are from different factions with different good stratagems.

In order to balance mono vs. soup (for worse because the power creep is high enough already), each stratagem should be usable 3 times.

Valentine009 wrote:The balance problem is how units in 40k scale.

Stratagems and powers are infinitely better on big giant point sinks with a lot of wounds (mass infantry, knights, etc.) then they are on a single 75pt model.

On the other side of the equation, some factions have tiny tiny point sinks that let them rack up CP.

maybe stratagems should have a cp cost relative to the PL of the unit that they're being used on. It might mitigate some of the broken usage. A limit on how many cps can be used per round/phase could help.

I also think that all armies start with the same but then pay for detachments that do not include your warlord.

I agree that CPs should be fixed or set according to army size, not doled out by detachment. I could see some detachments costing CPs to deploy.

From there, stratagems can be balanced on their cost (and frequency).

It should have been the case from the start that Stratagem enabled Codex armies were balanced to Index-only armies. That they weren’t always told me there was something fundamentally flawed with GW’s approach.

Allies still have issues beyond CP farms, but this will cut into some of the more egragrious issues in the game right now.

Racerguy180 wrote:

Valentine009 wrote:The balance problem is how units in 40k scale.

Stratagems and powers are infinitely better on big giant point sinks with a lot of wounds (mass infantry, knights, etc.) then they are on a single 75pt model.

On the other side of the equation, some factions have tiny tiny point sinks that let them rack up CP.

maybe stratagems should have a cp cost relative to the PL of the unit that they're being used on. It might mitigate some of the broken usage. A limit on how many cps can be used per round/phase could help.

I also think that all armies start with the same but then pay for detachments that do not include your warlord.

How about no. It penalises armies with high PL that aren't good, not everything that costs 400pts+ is a castellan.

Karol wrote:

Racerguy180 wrote:

Valentine009 wrote:The balance problem is how units in 40k scale.

Stratagems and powers are infinitely better on big giant point sinks with a lot of wounds (mass infantry, knights, etc.) then they are on a single 75pt model.

On the other side of the equation, some factions have tiny tiny point sinks that let them rack up CP.

maybe stratagems should have a cp cost relative to the PL of the unit that they're being used on. It might mitigate some of the broken usage. A limit on how many cps can be used per round/phase could help.

I also think that all armies start with the same but then pay for detachments that do not include your warlord.

How about no. It penalises armies with high PL that aren't good, not everything that costs 400pts+ is a castellan.

Then perhaps those models should be recosted to more accurate point values.

GW doesn't buff stuff, they only nerf stuff or replace it with a different army. My army does not need another nerf just because knights are too good. Nerf knights, I have no problem with that, but how about we stop nerfing marine tanks because of Gulliman, deep strike because of BA etc that somehow always end up hurting my army too.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Currently you cannot balance the game due to soup.

Not without a major change to CP generation (which in turn unbalances a lot of strats).

If you give everyone a set amount of CP, you can then balance strats and until strats are balanced, soup will not be balanced.

You can't balance 17 different armirs. Even if there are no allies you can't balance 17 different books against each other.

And you know what thats fine. You can get close. A far, far, far bigger issue for balance is the: I go, you go, nature of the turn. And we live with that. The goal isn't perfect balance. Chess has perfect balance, but thats not what we are going for with this game.

I like allies (I play a single dex army). The guard should be calling in support from Space Marines and Knights. Chaos should have deamons supporting renegade Marines. Genestealer cults should have infiltrated guard divisions. It makes sense. Yes it makes it impossible to balance, but it was impossible to balance before so you really having lost anything.

If you want to see more mono codex armies at the top tables the thing to do is give armies that only come from one book a small advantage.

And to balance the game be more surgical about the specific combinations that are causing the problems. Cause its not all soup, just a couple specific soups.

Taking soup wont be as much of an issue if everyone gets set CP and strats are rebalanced is what im saying.

The Newman wrote:
Guard have a strat to deploy troops from a Valkerie after it moves. Anyone who has had a big pack of tooled up orgyns suddenly drop in 3" from their lines turn 1 can tell you how much fun that isn't. Concentrated Fire (or whatever that to-hit bonus is called)

Overlapping Fields of Fire is regiment-specific, 2CP, and does require you to cause an unsaved wound before you can use it. Definitely pretty good, and scales like absolute trash into apocalypse, but not something every guard army has access to (especially if they are running catachans).

Grav Chute Insertion is not a stratagem, it's an ability that the valkyrie has. also, it has a 2/3 chance of insta-popping one of your bullgryns assuming you load it up with 4. There's a stratagem that allows you to avoid that rule, it costs 1cp to unlock the specialist detachment that contains it and 1cp to

I am exactly as afraid of a grav-chuted squad of bullgryns as I would be afraid of a 300 point vehicle equipped with nothing but 6 autocannons. Except less, because the bullgryns can only charge what I put in the very front of my army.

Headlss wrote:
The thing is is warping the balance of the game isn't the allies system. Well thats not the worst offender. Its building death stars by stacking multiple strategems with war lord traits and sometimes relics.

Even without strategems allies outbeat mono. Soup can take best of multiple factions. Best shooters from shooty faction, best h2h from h2h factions etc. Mono blood angels would have worse shooters as their trait is all about h2h. With soup you don't take blood angels for shooting. You take rather cadian or catachan basilisks etc. Mono cannot compete with that one. Unless they have naturally same variety but imagine how big necron codex would be if they would have same options as whole imperium...

Even without strategems allies outbeat mono. Soup can take best of multiple factions. Best shooters from shooty faction, best h2h from h2h factions etc. Mono blood angels would have worse shooters as their trait is all about h2h. With soup you don't take blood angels for shooting. You take rather cadian or catachan basilisks etc. Mono cannot compete with that one. Unless they have naturally same variety but imagine how big necron codex would be if they would have same options as whole imperium...

My problem with this line of thinking that it implies rock-paper-scissor which should not be in any game design.

That someone has good H2H and takes allies with good shooting means they take less good H2H and it should even out unless you are implying that the game benefits from shooting beating H2H and H2H beating something else. Not to mention that this type of thinking means that it is good to have OP units in certain types of armies, ie. a shooty faction should have an OP shooter to justify the shootiness and an OP H2H to a Melee army to justify its meleeness.

Armies shouldn't counter armies, period. It is a horrible way of balancing a game.

Also, for the record we already have armies that do everything very well. We call them Craftworlds and we call them Ynnari; both have a lot of everything. Even Drukhari does everything(except psychic) rather well, and Orks and Chaos can bring the pain when they put their minds to it on all fronts. Most armies have capabilities to bring in a varied force. In no way should a Tyranid player be asked to not take their firing units because someone thinks that Tyranids should be bad at shooting.

Because the soups that we are seeing the most are not breaking the theme of the core army. Aeldari allying with other Aeldari is just more of the same in many ways. Imperial Guard allying with IK is also just more shooting.

The funny thing is that if you were to magically remove allies from the game you would still have to contend with Ynnari: the largest mono-faction in the game.

the_scotsman wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Guard have a strat to deploy troops from a Valkerie after it moves. Anyone who has had a big pack of tooled up orgyns suddenly drop in 3" from their lines turn 1 can tell you how much fun that isn't. Concentrated Fire (or whatever that to-hit bonus is called)

Overlapping Fields of Fire is regiment-specific, 2CP, and does require you to cause an unsaved wound before you can use it. Definitely pretty good, and scales like absolute trash into apocalypse, but not something every guard army has access to (especially if they are running catachans).

Grav Chute Insertion is not a stratagem, it's an ability that the valkyrie has. also, it has a 2/3 chance of insta-popping one of your bullgryns assuming you load it up with 4. There's a stratagem that allows you to avoid that rule, it costs 1cp to unlock the specialist detachment that contains it and 1cp to

I am exactly as afraid of a grav-chuted squad of bullgryns as I would be afraid of a 300 point vehicle equipped with nothing but 6 autocannons. Except less, because the bullgryns can only charge what I put in the very front of my army.

Then your opponent isn't playing it right. At 1000 points, two Valks with Bullgryns and Commisars capable of dropping into your backfield and charge you turn 1 is really hard to deal with. (And yet again IG has a way around one of GW's blanket fixes.)

Didn't realize that was built into the Valk rather than a strat, so I'll concede that it doesn't apply to whether Guard has good strats or not.

The problem isn't allies themselves, it's allies giving access to stratagems and CP that can be used on those stratagems.

That's why you see most things attacking "soup". The problem is you can take a Loyal 32 guard battalion and a Castellan auxiliary, get access to both guard stratagems AND knight stratagems as well as getting cheap CP from the Guard battalion along with the 3 for Battleforged, and then using them on the Knight stratagems.

The Newman wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

The Newman wrote:
Guard have a strat to deploy troops from a Valkerie after it moves. Anyone who has had a big pack of tooled up orgyns suddenly drop in 3" from their lines turn 1 can tell you how much fun that isn't. Concentrated Fire (or whatever that to-hit bonus is called)

Overlapping Fields of Fire is regiment-specific, 2CP, and does require you to cause an unsaved wound before you can use it. Definitely pretty good, and scales like absolute trash into apocalypse, but not something every guard army has access to (especially if they are running catachans).

Grav Chute Insertion is not a stratagem, it's an ability that the valkyrie has. also, it has a 2/3 chance of insta-popping one of your bullgryns assuming you load it up with 4. There's a stratagem that allows you to avoid that rule, it costs 1cp to unlock the specialist detachment that contains it and 1cp to

I am exactly as afraid of a grav-chuted squad of bullgryns as I would be afraid of a 300 point vehicle equipped with nothing but 6 autocannons. Except less, because the bullgryns can only charge what I put in the very front of my army.

Then your opponent isn't playing it right. At 1000 points, two Valks with melee Bullgryns and Commisars dropping into your backfield turn 1 is really hard to deal with.

Didn't realize that was built into the Valk rather than a strat, so I'll concede that it doesn't apply to whether Guard has good strats or not.

Melee...commissars? Like, with powerfists?

At 1000 points, two valks with melee bullgryns and commissars is over 600 points, which generate exactly 0 CPs. I'm sorry, but that is laughable to deal with. if you cannot handle 5 bullgryns (Because on average 1 will die jumping out) charging into your 1000 point army, your army construction is gakky. 5 bullgryns deal 7 damage to a rhino with their bonus attack on the charge. They kill 4 MEQ on average. FOUR. For 600 points.

If you are letting bullgryns land "in your backline" it is not your opponent playing well, it's you being bad. They must get out of the valkyrie 9" away from enemy models. They can still move afterwards, so you can't keep them from getting to your units, but you absolutely can keep them out of your backline, unless you're leaving gigantic 20" diameter holes in your deployment against a strategy that's more telegraphed than a punch in a looney tunes cartoon.

What units could bullgryns possibly charge that they could cause anywhere near enough impact to justify their crazy points cost? They are just not an offensive unit. They're great at standing in front of stuff and not dying.

Protip: If your opponent shows up to the game with 600 points loaded into two planes and 400 points of guard actually on the table, deploy your army in relatively close formation, and put marines, rhinos, guardsmen, lesser demons, fire warriors, literally anything but your exceedingly vulnerable gunline units out front. Boom, you win that game.

Okay, so I just read some pages of a thread about how a player at the LVO couldn't play a strategem on a single Knight Castellan because it was in an Auxiliary Super-Heavy Detachment. I don't use super-heavy units (knights, etc) so I hadn't been aware of this, but I think it goes some way to validating my idea of having Command Point silos - each detachment has their own Command Points they can only spend on their own strategems, and then armies have 3 general ones they can spend on anything.

The problem isn't allies themselves, it's allies giving access to stratagems and CP that can be used on those stratagems.

That's why you see most things attacking "soup". The problem is you can take a Loyal 32 guard battalion and a Castellan auxiliary, get access to both guard stratagems AND knight stratagems as well as getting cheap CP from the Guard battalion along with the 3 for Battleforged, and then using them on the Knight stratagems.

The problem is variable CP which means its exchange rate is variable between armies. Make CP an absolute value(ie. every player just gets a fixed number of CP per game) and then make stratagems costed according to this absolute value. This way CP can be costed justly regardless of CP batteries.

Let's say one mono-army has on average 12 CP with ton of 1 CP stratagems and another army Y has on average 6 CP with a ton of 1 CP stratagems. If you make it so both are running on 12 CP(ie. no allying and no batteries) through the entire game then you can make those 1 CP statagems for army Y cost 2 CP. It normalizes CP cost across armies and no longer can use batteries to generate ton of CP.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Okay, so I just read some pages of a thread about how a player at the LVO couldn't play a strategem on a single Knight Castellan because it was in an Auxiliary Super-Heavy Detachment. I don't use super-heavy units (knights, etc) so I hadn't been aware of this, but I think it goes some way to validating my idea of having Command Point silos - each detachment has their own Command Points they can only spend on their own strategems, and then armies have 3 general ones they can spend on anything.

You read those several pages wrong then. The controversy was about a player not being allowed to use the army trait on a unit from the Aux detachment - the equivalent of the Chapter Tactic.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
Okay, so I just read some pages of a thread about how a player at the LVO couldn't play a strategem on a single Knight Castellan because it was in an Auxiliary Super-Heavy Detachment. I don't use super-heavy units (knights, etc) so I hadn't been aware of this, but I think it goes some way to validating my idea of having Command Point silos - each detachment has their own Command Points they can only spend on their own strategems, and then armies have 3 general ones they can spend on anything.

You read those several pages wrong then. The controversy was about a player not being allowed to use the army trait on a unit from the Aux detachment - the equivalent of the Chapter Tactic.

Quite possibly. Wasn't it that the strategem was specific to the House Raven army trait?