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So today the info about command points dropped. It looks good, and it'll be okay for the game; I don't want it changed or anything- this is a semantics/ attitude thing. And it's this:

"An army drawn exclusively from the same Faction and comprising a single Detachment is the most strategically flexible on account of their experience fighting alongside one another, and therefore offers the most Command points."

Again, for the game, I'm cool with that.

But it is absolutely not true in the real world. You're on a battlefield with your one detachment. The HQ bunker is hit, and the command team is killed. You're done.

Now you're on the battlefield with two detachments. The HQ bunker is hit, and one command section dies. The other command section assumes command and battle continues.

You've got a fast attack unit in a battalion. They are never deployed on their own, so the pilots have never pushed their machine to its actual limit, merely the limit at which the fast attack unit can continue to coordinate with the rest of the battalion. So you get a battalion commander who, in crazy circumstances says, "Look, this is outside of the standard playbook, but can your atmospheric craft get high enough to be out of range of the perimeter defense guns without the high altitude conditions dangerously impacting the ship.

The fighter from the battalion goes, "Sorry commander, that's not my typical role- usually I just provide air support to infantry."

The independent command of the airwing, on the other hand, says, "Perimeter defense guns? What perimeter defense guns? Relax battalion command, flying is what we do. It's ALL we do. We're already on the other side, waiting for confirmation that your ground troops are in position."

If you work in a factory, is HR controlled by the guy who is your line foreman, or is HR a separate department?

If you go to high school or college, do you have separate departments for Arts, Math and Science, or is there just one big department for all subject areas.

Again, good for the game. Not objecting to the rules. But don't say that a diverse group of skill sets governed by single organizational structure has more tactical flexibility than it would when each of those skill sets has it's own command, because it just isn't true.

Sorry to start a semantics thread... Just a personal pet peeve.

PenitentJake wrote:

Again, good for the game. Not objecting to the rules. But don't say that a diverse group of skill sets governed by single organizational structure has more tactical flexibility than it would when each of those skill sets has it's own command, because it just isn't true.

Sorry to start a semantics thread... Just a personal pet peeve.

I disagree. Usually, I find a lot of the later edition wh40k rules do sacrifice verosimilitude for ease of application.

However, I would say that having multiple detachements offers tactical flexibility at the cost of organizational hurdles. This idea is well captured with fewer CPs.

That said, "stratagems" are not related to anything strategic but simple wombo combos; that bit I dislike a lot.

Throughout the current edition people were arguing in the opposite direction: Why does an army comprised of 3 different military branches(SM, IG, Knights for example) is easier to command (more CP) than a single elite group with clear hierarchy (monocontingent of X faction)?

PenitentJake wrote:
But it is absolutely not true in the real world. You're on a battlefield with your one detachment. The HQ bunker is hit, and the command team is killed. You're done.

Now you're on the battlefield with two detachments. The HQ bunker is hit, and one command section dies. The other command section assumes command and battle continues.

I think you're downplaying the difficulty of crosstalk. This is exactly the situation that led to the US Army adopting the Brigade Combat Team model, which integrates useful assets under the direct command of the brigade, rather than liaising them from organizationally separate units.

If you have platoons from two different BCTs they can coordinate, but it's not going to be as seamless as if they were under the same BCT and reporting to the same command. If the command structure for one is disrupted, suborning the orphaned unit under the other so that the surviving section can assume command is a non-trivial task.

When you start blending wholly independent services (Army/Air Force/Marines, or Guard/Knights/Marines), then things get actually slow. Each has a separate chain of command, usually with liaisons at a command staff level, and requests for support need to go up the chain, over, and then back down the chain. Organic coordination at a tactical level is basically impossible.

The fewer hierarchies you have operating in the same battlespace, the easier the elements are to command.

I can definitely see the point cross faction- you see inefficiencies when various law enforcement organizations working together due to matters of jurisdiction.

I don't have any actual military experience, so I am kinda speaking from a position of ignorance. If this is how actual military units function, then it must be legit.

I always thought that the one with greatest number of tools in the box could do the greatest, most diverse collection of jobs, but I suppose there is a point at which the number of options leads to hesitation, communication breakdown or analysis paralysis.

This gets back to Sgt Cortez as well: in your example, my response in the case of the multifaction army would be that CP don't represent how easy it is to command the army; they represent the army's range of capabilities.

So a IG/SM/Knight army gets big CP because it can opt to set up its gunline, and assault with its marines and knock over buildings and crush tanks with your knight.

Whereas each of the individual component armies would only be able to more of the thing they were good at on their own. Hence fewer options, hence fewer command points.

The reason that gw had to come up with multiple ways to nerf soup (battle brothers, doctrines and now CP cost) is proof positive that in 40k at least, multiple detachments from different factions actually is more tactically flexible. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have to nerf it.

But I guess the difficulties of communication can diminish the returns of multiple options in the real world.

Perhaps my error is seeing command points as a representation of capability rather than a representation of capacity for swift decisive action. Real world military would have to find the balance between those two factors. In a tabletop game where models are under the direct control of a single player, the capacity for swift decisive action is moot; it requires the abstraction of a rule system in order to adequately reflect how important this would be in an actual battle, hence command points.

Thanks for the debate. I think I can see the other side now.

It's generally a balancing act.

If you’ve different groups of specialists under different hierarchies working together you would expect each group to be better at their specific roles than a single team of which is more generalist and it obviously gives you more tools to use. However command and control is going to be much harder between the different sub-groups and you’re going to get some friction where they don’t have the same intuitive sense of how each other operates.

Getting the benefits of different faction traits (from multiple detachments, representing specialisation) and covering gaps with other factions at the cost of command points would represent the above quite well I would think.

Swapping command is anything but easy to be honest. It's not just telling that or that unit to move over there, it encompasses supplies, current positions, losses, knowledge of your men and their limits/skills... And to react to live fireaction, most likely if the bunker got ground to dust, which is already hard enough with your standard 8-men sized group on the line (dunno how many per group in your armies folks), just imagine at a company level...

Now, in the case both commands for both companies would be working, coordinating with one another is just as hard, because tht means you have to manage your all own supplies and stuff but adapt it to what your counterparts of the other unit are during, once again in realtime. Relaying intel from the field, taking into account, and then taking the appropriate decisions out of them is also a time consuming process....

I've little experience yet but during my basic allrounder army formation it really apeared to me that way.

All in all to me more CPs to lone detachment makes sense: they trade support (less slots) units for ease of use.

PenitentJake wrote:
Perhaps my error is seeing command points as a representation of capability rather than a representation of capacity for swift decisive action. Real world military would have to find the balance between those two factors. In a tabletop game where models are under the direct control of a single player, the capacity for swift decisive action is moot; it requires the abstraction of a rule system in order to adequately reflect how important this would be in an actual battle, hence command points.

I see CP as a very abstract representation of support assets, command efficiency, and units functioning at optimal effectiveness.

You can have a unit of high-speed-low-drag USSOCOM operators conducting a kinetic operation, busting down doors and stacking bodies. A SOCOM-only operation is a quick and bloody affair. Then you try to integrate them into regular operations, and now the operators are stuck under fire because the Army assets they were supposed to link up with have been redirected elsewhere, and their liaison at the command post is trying to figure out how to get them out of their situation while being low on the brigade commander's priority list. (40K terms: you don't have the CP for a unit-specific stratagem)

You can have air assets on standby, integrated into a joint tactical fires coordination system, where any friendly unit is able to pass along coordinates for fire and get an airstrike inside of two minutes. But wait, now we've got an ally calling for fire, and in addition to not having direct access to that fires system, there's a language barrier too. So now the request has to be done the old way, slowly, by radio, and then approved by the relevant authorities within the owning chain of command, and now by the time the air asset is on-station it's no longer relevant. (40K terms: you don't have the CP for an army-specific stratagem)

You can have a command staff in a forward-deployed TOC composed of trained and experienced professionals who can manage the coordination of thousands of soldiers with speed and precision, delegating low-level command decisions as necessary and ensuring that all officers are in the loop, giving the combined unit the ability to operationally run rings around their adversary. Then you throw in liaisons from six more services and eight more countries, and they all have their own way of doing things, and their own assets, and their own requirements, and their own obligations, and everything grinds to a crawl. (40K terms: you don't have the CP for rerolls or an army-specific stratagem)

Basically, the more moving parts, the harder it is for those assets to coordinate. The simpler and more pyramidal the chain of command, the more efficiently everything operates. Combined operations are always a balancing act between leveraging the innate strengths of the different elements while also mitigating the friction introduced by forcing them to operate in the same space. I think the decision between being stuck with a limited set of units versus having to give up some CP is a pretty good representation of that trade-off.