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So 40k is not my main game, and accordingly this may be really obvious and I am just missing it. In 8th detachments gave CP, in 9th they went to costing CP, but did/do either of these methods actually make the game better? Both cases seem to me as a means to add an incentive to running troops and a disincentive to spam, but obsec and rule of 3 already do that (and do it better). I can't really see a benefit to detachments costing CP, and would even go so far as to say that with purity bonuses moving to army-wide there may not even be a reason to have them at all.

Sort of tricky to answer as it depends on what you want out of the game and how you feel about battlefield roles. As you point out, the current system is partly there to encourage people to take troops. However, what is and isn't a troop is pretty arbitrary and doesn't seem to necessarily tie into the fluff OR the power of the units involved. For instance, I play craftworld Iybraesil who are all about fielding Banshees to the point you'd expect them to be a troop choice for the craftworld. Banshees are pretty comparable to harlequin troupes in that they can both take a bunch of good-AP attacks and can move/charge long distances, but one is a troop and the other is not. This was true even when banshees were considered "bad", so their non-troop status doesn't seem to be a reflection of how powerful banshees are.

So what's the point of the detachment rules encouraging us to field troops if what is and is not a troop doesn't necessarily support fluff or correspond to the power of the troop units? And at that point, what's the point of having battlefield roles at all except maybe for Lords of War and Fortifications? And if battlefield roles mostly don't matter, then what's the point of detachments? Why is it easier for an Iyanden player (lots of elites) to fit into a batallion than a Saim-hann player (lots of fast attacks)? Are bike units so much better than wraith units that the Saim-hann player should have to start the game at a CP disadvantage?

Now that said, the current system does do a couple things I kind of like:
* It lets you take allies while also baking in a cost for doing so. That is, you have to pay CP for those allies' detachment. Granted the need for this is somewhat mitigated by the purity bonuses, but I think a strong case could be made for getting rid of doctrines, strands of fate, etc.

* Organizing armies via detachments makes it pretty clean-cut whether or not you have access to chapter tactics, stratagems, etc. Although again, I think a case could be made for getting rid of or overhauling stratagems and chapter tactics.

So charging CP for detachments has its merits, but not a lot of merits. There are probably better ways of doing things.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So 40k is not my main game, and accordingly this may be really obvious and I am just missing it. In 8th detachments gave CP, in 9th they went to costing CP, but did/do either of these methods actually make the game better? Both cases seem to me as a means to add an incentive to running troops and a disincentive to spam, but obsec and rule of 3 already do that (and do it better). I can't really see a benefit to detachments costing CP, and would even go so far as to say that with purity bonuses moving to army-wide there may not even be a reason to have them at all.

Detachments are less hassle than purity bonuses and it is therefore purity bonuses and not the detachment system that needs to be removed. Having both is indeed silly. GW test fired purity bonuses in 8th with SM 2.0 and it went awfully, it should have been immediately scrapped, SM 2.0 could have been released as a set of beta rules like the previous SM buffs and GW wouldn't have looked so bad for printing more and more OP SM gak for months and months.

The 8th system rewarded soup which a lot of people used and a lot of people disliked either having to use soup to be competitive or having soup used against them. Having each soup ingredient be led by an HQ is really cool, instead of a trio of Plagueburst Crawlers just crawling in on their own. You can make the argument that keeping track of three different purity bonuses is too hard and that the simplest armies can handle the extra complexity of a purity bonus, that ignores the fact that the simplest armies will often be piloted by newbies who will have a hard time dealing with all the other rules. People that are souping three factions probably have an idea what they are doing so there is no need for allied Drukhari to not gain power from pain in order to reduce complexity for the player. The purity restriction is redundant. Drukhari happen to have the one purity rule that should just be turned into a regular rule like it was in 8th, the remaining purity rules should be chopped up for parts and used for inspiration in other systems like Relics (because a +1 pistol locked into <sub>is bad game design).

Battlefield roles need an overhaul and should follow a simple set of rules as for which role a unit has based on its cost, mobility, unit size and weaponry, two nearly identical units should not have different roles whether that is Iybraesil Banshees, Iyanden Banshees or a Harlequin Troupe. Some armies consist mostly of Elites and the current Detachment system can deal with that. A lot of factions have super cheap Elites choice Characters, I think the increased number of Elites slots in 9th ed Battalions was to account for those. This would allow Detachments to more ably fight spam, because 3 Battlewagons and 3 Squigbuggies is more problematic than 3 Squigbuggies and 3 Lootas and should could do with a small additional cost in addition to the support that missions can do in order to combat spam.</sub>

It was fine, assuming you're going to have multiple detachments and varying CP at all instead of going back to a single battalion like it used to be. The issue with having detachments giving CP is that it incentivizes stuff like the loyal 32, taking a minimum size detachment purely to gain more CP from it. Having to pay for detachments may give you the same total most of the time but you're only taking a detachment if it contains a legitimate force.

But really, dump CP and stratagems entirely if you're going to make house rules. It's a terrible system.

Yes and no, IIRC, the cost gets refunded if you are battle forged right? IE all of your army is from the same codex?

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Yes and no, IIRC, the cost gets refunded if you are battle forged right? IE all of your army is from the same codex?

Close, but not quite. IIRC, you get refunded the cost of the Patrol or Batallion detachment that your warlord is in. So even if you're playing mono-codex, you can still end up starting with fewer CP if your army is inside a Vanguard/Outrider/Spearhead detachment or if you took multiple patrol detachments or whatever.

Basically, the current system (combined with purity bonuses) gives you a reason to not take allies, but that's about the only thing it has going for it. Theoretically, it's rewarding you for fielding troops, but that's a flawed goal/approach per my first post.

The answer is "Yes, absolutely!"

And the reason is that paying for detachments limits skew and multi codex armies, which is always a good thing. And at the same time it doesn't remove those builds completely, which is also good.

So there's a tradeoff, more specialist slots available at the loss of CPs. Sounds great to me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

CadianSgtBob wrote:
It was fine, assuming you're going to have multiple detachments and varying CP at all instead of going back to a single battalion like it used to be. The issue with having detachments giving CP is that it incentivizes stuff like the loyal 32, taking a minimum size detachment purely to gain more CP from it. Having to pay for detachments may give you the same total most of the time but you're only taking a detachment if it contains a legitimate force.

Not only allies, it also incentivized spamming cheap troops and HQs to make the rest of the army perform better. I hated 8th edition since the best ork lists were built around 6 HQs and 9 troops, which is insane. To me even 4 HQs and 6 troops is insane as the bare minimum required to have a functioning army. Now with 1-2 HQs and 1-3 troops as bare minimum "tax" units things are much more reasonable.

I think so. I much prefer 40k when players can mostly (DE and Knights are some high profile exceptions) just stick with a single patrol, battalion or Brigade detachments (referred to as 'core' for the remainder of my post) to frame their army around. With the other specialty detachments or doubling/tripling up on 'core' detachments being more an expression of a player's reference toward a particular theme. Especially if that them isn't a more powerful/optimized army list because of it.

I am not saying that armies moving past the 'core' detachments should be crippled or inherently much weaker. Just that drifting off the main path of FoC list construction should be more about theme than accumulating power. And often skew is its own kind of power here, and that tends to lead to uninteresting (read: not close) games.

Almost all my army lists for 2000pt games are built off a Battalion. I also try to take at least a unit or two for Fast Attack, Elites and Heavy Support for a well-rounded army. It just feels like how 40k should mostly work (note: but certainly not 24/7). I firmly believe that FoC should be guides to strong armies, not straight jackets to force tax units upon players that don't like them for whatever reason.

I can't say 40k has ever been able to accomplish that. Me, I actually like fielding lots of Troops, but even with my lackadaisical concern toward optimization, even I don't like fielding a bunch of hack units that are far weaker per point because they 'have' to be in army lists. And this feeling only gets worse for the factions that have only a couple of Troop options and they are all just terrible.

It still shocks me that 40k is as old as it is with Troops being the (supposedly) backbone of armies. Yet so many factions have so few choices. Many of which, are pretty garbage. So I completely understand why certain faction players skip the 'core' detachments in favor of stuff that allows them to win games.

My hope (yes, I can hear Tzeentch cackling) that the reduction in pre-game CP moves players back to the 'core' detachments and GW adjusts the factions suffering from doing so. I'd prefer GW to be more active in catching these things, but if it has to be passive, at least it is something. I have heard too many players complaining that CP change cripples their army. Which, to me, sound like not seeing the forest through the trees. I highly doubt that GW meant for these factions to work by jury-rigging a bunch of detachments together. I think it is more that GW gave these factions a poor reason to build on a 'core' detachment frame and had to patch-together a workable army by exploiting multiple detachments.

Saturmorn Carvilli wrote:


It still shocks me that 40k is as old as it is with Troops being the (supposedly) backbone of armies. Yet so many factions have so few choices. Many of which, are pretty garbage. So I completely understand why certain faction players skip the 'core' detachments in favor of stuff that allows them to win games.

To solve this I wish things were handled like in WHFB, where pretty much every light infantry and light cavalry was listed under the core units, aka the equivalent of troops in 40k. Especially now that codexes have 60+ datatasheets but only 2-3 troops and 10-12+ elites, HS, FA, etc... too many choices in the specialists roles, not enough in the basic ones.

In 3rd edition the ork codex had 24 datasheets + 3 retinues but 6 troops (including stuff like tankbustas and burnaboyz) and no more than 5 elites, FA, HS in each section. In the following codex basic troops were just 2 but under conditions other 4 units could have been selected as troops. Current codex has 3 troops out of 61 datasheets. Not counting FW stuff, which doesn't include any troops.

With the current armies design in mind the detachments costing CPs is a decent compromise to allow players fielding models from multiple kits without going totally unbound. But I wish some specialists and bikers were just troops.

I feel like detachment costs should be revised after all the CP changes.

As a guard and GSC player, no. To bring scions with my guard costs cp's for a separate detachment or they are significantly nerfed (in an underperforming army). Likewise to bring brood brother guard (already nerfed) likewise costs me cps in a GSC army.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
As a guard and GSC player, no. To bring scions with my guard costs cp's for a separate detachment or they are significantly nerfed (in an underperforming army). Likewise to bring brood brother guard (already nerfed) likewise costs me cps in a GSC army.

But this way you get bespoke bonus for all the subfactions involved. Wouldn't it be worse if you could take everything in a single detachment but with a subfaction bonus that might be useless for some models? It's a tradeoff, you pay a handful of CPs but you get allies or more appropriate subfaction bonuses for all your models.