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So, one thing I noticed while list-building...

I want to make a Night Lords list and I wanted to ally a Lord of Change. I'm not a fan of Horrors as troop choices and figured instead of trying to fit in a Aux detachment, I'd try to make a Patrol detachment work, but if Horrors are no-go, then the next obvious choice would be Tzaangors, right?

Well, Night Lords are out of the Chaos Space Marines Codex, the Lord of Change is only in the Chaos Daemons Codex, and the Tzaangors are only out of the Thousand Sons Codex, and nary a datasheet or keyword shared between the three books.

My spooky crow-based Tzeentch-worshipping Night Lords daemon-engine list wasn't going to really be possible unless I wanted to spend all of my CP before the game began for the sake of theme.
Yes, I'm aware of Open Play. A blue moon is up when I can finally get an opponent that's down for Open Play games.

But it got me thinking, especially with World Eaters around the corner, Chaos Knights with their shenanigans, and the Chaos Marines codex with more cultist units than ever before but hardly any way to use them...

How soupy should Chaos as a faction be?

It's a step in the right direction that we can take 25% of our list as Daemons and still retain faction bonuses - that's certainly nice.
But I feel that outside of Open Play, some very thematic armies simply cannot be made.

Now that we finally have Cultists and Traitor Guard, as well as the Dark Commune, Enforcer with traitor ogryn, and the Accursed Cultists (and spawn to boot), the time has never been better for a Renegades and Heretics army, and yet if you try to make one you'll spend 70% of your points on Chaos Astartes units just to take the cultist units you want to stuff in.

On the flip side, I remember early 8th edition when Imperium and Chaos soup were menaces. Guilliman handing out free buffs to Admech units while the Loyal 32 farmed up CP and held objectives for hardly any point cost at all.

Do you think that GW has hit the mark in terms of how soupy lists can be?
What would you change and how?

I would roll all Chaos into one codex and call it a day. 75 entries would cover the essentials (CSM, Daemons, Lost and Damned), then just have a buttfugg-huge list of upgrades for everyone for insane per-model customization so you can put the chaos into Chaos. For example, every single Daemon Engine can be rolled into a single entry with something like 4 pages worth of upgrades that allow you to make all kinds of crazy machines. Khorne Berzerkers with Daemonic Wings? That's an option too! Chaos should be all about this: a huge, hyper-varied soup.

By the way, I would give the Imperium the same treatment, with the change that instead of crazy customization (chaos) the Imperium would have units with baked-in powerful abilities so you have less leeway with what you can bring to the table but more straight-up force value for each unit. Sure, you can't upgrade your Space Marines to breathe fire or have wings, but their innate special rules compensate for it by being much better than the comparable CSM abilities.

And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I don't think game balance is the concern - it's interesting codexes.
If you can take everything they will just have to make everything bland to avoid combos.

I don't mind say Thousand Sons being able to take a small Tzeentch Daemons detachment. Death Guard and Nurgle etc. Arguably Word Bearers should be able to take any daemons. I think that's fluffy and with some care/attention the rules can be tuned to permit that fluff.

But I was anti-soup before, and I remain anti-soup now. The idea of "I can just grab whatever I want from half a dozen books" isn't good for the game.

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I can't say goodbye to something that hasn't been around in the first place .

 AtoMaki wrote:
I would roll all Chaos into one codex and call it a day.

^Ta daa! Solved!

This is the old school 40k way, and it was good.

The current Chaos soup rules are very flexible.

You could run:
Night Lords CSM detachment
Tzeentch mixed detachment (LoC, Tzaangor)

You would lose the CSM super faction bonus of Let the Galaxy Burn and if playing Nephilim would have to play the neutral secondaries. But you would have your Night Lords legion trait.

As Soupy as possible.

Going right back to Realms of Chaos, it’s always been a pretty wild mix. Marines, Mortals, Mutants and Mdaemons.

Whilst I’m absolutely not again mono-theme armies and I firmly believe they should remain valid options? Let Chaos players field anarchic armies.

Remember, Chaos forces aren’t quite the regimented militaries they once were. Rather they’re warbands, lead by powerful or charismatic Lords. Others seek them out, or join up after an old fashioned conquering, Orky style.

I want to see that option brought back.

Sure, the downside would be People Cheesing Their Lists. But….so what? Leave it to the players.

As soupy (or not), as they wanna be.

Tyel wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I don't think game balance is the concern - it's interesting codexes.
If you can take everything they will just have to make everything bland to avoid combos.

^Untrue! As shown by the great Chaos 3.5, one can provide internal limitations in order to reduce "power combos". An army could be Undivided, and gain access to more units. Or an army could go more of a mono-route, sacrificing some choice but unlocking new or special options and upgrades. Anything from hodge-podge renegade mercenaries to dedicated mono-legion.

Basically one $25 codex did what will soon require 6 $50 codexes to do. (CSM, Daemons, Death Guard, Tsons, World Eaters and Emperors Children)

I think the Cities of Sigmar/Slaves to Darkness approach would work well.
You pick a main army and then can take 25% of the points limit from another Codex without losing Legion/Household/Whatever. So if you wanted to run Iron Warriors with Deathguard Plagueburst artillery support or a Chaos Knight lance with a horde of Goat-Birds then you could do that. However, if you chose a specific Mark for the Warlord of army prime, then only units with the same God keyword could be allied. So if you took Death Guard as your main force, you couldn't ally in Thousand Sons but could take Nurgle Daemons or Nurgle Marked CSM. There needs to be some form of restriction in place and IMO basing it on the rivalries of the Dark Gods is the best way to do it to maintain army themes without having massive restrictions.
I also think the Cultist units and their equals in God Codexes should have their limitation removed but lose ObSec so they're not auto picks over things like actual Chaos Marines for Troops. The OG God units should also be back in the CSM Codex because taking them out was dumb.
The downside is that built-in redundancies for specific forces can then just be avoided without any issue.

Abadon is practicaly being run in every chaos army, starting from all legion ones, through demons and ending with the walk the dogs list. So aside for eldar, chaos is the most souping faction in the game right now.

The old Warhammer Fantasy game had a thing similar to this back in 5th? 7th? edition of that game. There were essentially 3 chaos armies - Slaves to Darkness (mortal followers), Beastmen (goat, bull, and monster people - mutants, essentially), and Daemons. You could have pure armies, but you could also take Core Units from either of the other lists as Elites, and Elite Units from the others as Super Elites (they had categories like Core, Rare, and Very Rare, with army percentages that could be allocated to each). But you could have these really cool, soupy lists that blended all the flavors of Chaos without over complicating the army building process.

Overall I want about 75% of lists to be mono-faction. Factions like Tau, Necrons and Orks will pull the number up, so it'd be okay if Chaos and Imperium factions were hovering around 30-50% soup in terms of representation.

I'd also like the game to not be needlessly bloated by rules, so Let the Galaxy Burn can burn and if it turns out that Chaos soup is much better than mono-faction, then apply a CP nerf to it or something like that.

Faction secondaries serve no purpose and just make the game more difficult to learn and balance, make balanced custom missions for each faction instead.

I've heard 3.5 was unbalanced, so I don't think holding it up as an example works. AtoMaki's argument of if it's broken you can't break it makes more sense to me. So very fun to have a Combat Doctrine like everyone else, very exciting and Chaos-flavoured, not to mention engaging on a strategic and tactical level /sarcasm.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Tyel wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I don't think game balance is the concern - it's interesting codexes.
If you can take everything they will just have to make everything bland to avoid combos.

^Untrue! As shown by the great Chaos 3.5, one can provide internal limitations in order to reduce "power combos". An army could be Undivided, and gain access to more units. Or an army could go more of a mono-route, sacrificing some choice but unlocking new or special options and upgrades. Anything from hodge-podge renegade mercenaries to dedicated mono-legion.

Basically one $25 codex did what will soon require 6 $50 codexes to do. (CSM, Daemons, Death Guard, Tsons, World Eaters and Emperors Children)

The 3.5 codex was very broken. I remember how dominating it was on the table.

 jaredb wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

Tyel wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I don't think game balance is the concern - it's interesting codexes.
If you can take everything they will just have to make everything bland to avoid combos.

^Untrue! As shown by the great Chaos 3.5, one can provide internal limitations in order to reduce "power combos". An army could be Undivided, and gain access to more units. Or an army could go more of a mono-route, sacrificing some choice but unlocking new or special options and upgrades. Anything from hodge-podge renegade mercenaries to dedicated mono-legion.

Basically one $25 codex did what will soon require 6 $50 codexes to do. (CSM, Daemons, Death Guard, Tsons, World Eaters and Emperors Children)

The 3.5 codex was very broken. I remember how dominating it was on the table.

99% of the complaints about 3.5 always center around the Iron Warriors list, which was absolutely the least "soupy" list in the codex. Iron Warriors were the only Legion that couldn't take any Daemons (even Night Lords could ar least take Furies), and they could only take the Mark of Chaos Undivided. The most "soupy" Legion was the Black Legion, and I rarely hear the "3.5 was unbalanced" complaints centered on them.

At least a soupy as the Imperium. I always thought that chaos should a counterpoint to imperial codices, but with more spikes. Both sides should have access to some flavor of guardsmen, admech and space marines. Chaos would get demons and stuff, while the imperium would have battle sisters, inquisitors and grey knights.

 jaredb wrote:

The 3.5 codex was very broken. I remember how dominating it was on the table.

What Godzilla666 said. But also ask yourself, has GW never released a broken codex since then?

Maybe 'brokeness' isn't so closely tied to wealth of options.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Tyel wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
And say goodbye to any semblance of game balance.

I don't think game balance is the concern - it's interesting codexes.
If you can take everything they will just have to make everything bland to avoid combos.

^Untrue! As shown by the great Chaos 3.5, one can provide internal limitations in order to reduce "power combos". An army could be Undivided, and gain access to more units. Or an army could go more of a mono-route, sacrificing some choice but unlocking new or special options and upgrades. Anything from hodge-podge renegade mercenaries to dedicated mono-legion.

Basically one $25 codex did what will soon require 6 $50 codexes to do. (CSM, Daemons, Death Guard, Tsons, World Eaters and Emperors Children)

Yes, and the suits at Nottingham will wet their pants at the thought of all the money to be had.

^You don't think they'll trade in their yacht upgrade out of the kindness of their hearts and the warm fuzzy feels?

 Insectum7 wrote:

 jaredb wrote:

The 3.5 codex was very broken. I remember how dominating it was on the table.

What Godzilla666 said. But also ask yourself, has GW never released a broken codex since then?

Maybe 'brokeness' isn't so closely tied to wealth of options.

Lol yeah, we see Leagues of Votann are broken and they don't have a ton of options. The things they have and the core game mechanics they've been given are just so freakin oppressively good.

My concern isn't really with brokenness however. I like the response about AoS that Gert posited.

The nice thing is that that sort of system could be applied to both the Imperium and Chaos. For Chaos, the limitation comes in the form of the various chaos gods, or undivided, and removing obsec from cultists would be a step in the right direction I think. That way you could take as many chaos cultists and other cultist units as you please, but if you hope to control objectives you'll either need some chaos marine allies or to swarm and beat down opponents off of those objectives - very fluffy.

For Imperium, it'd be focused more on the individual factions based around whoever your Warlord is. Your Warlord is Astartes? 75% of your army needs to be Astartes. Your warlord is Astra Militarum? 75% of your army is Astra Militarum, etc. Having that other 25% be whatever auxiliary forces you want I think is fluffy and thematic - you just don't get subfaction rules for that other 25%.

I also thank EightFoldPath for letting me know that I could indeed do the Tzeentch mixed detachment, I didn't realize I could do that. I can live without Let the Galaxy Burn, and I don't do competitive so I wouldn't be worried about neutral secondaries or anything. This would all be for Crusade. - Thanks for the advice!

I feel like chaos suffers from always being an afterthought whenever the army building rules get changed.

I think you should basically be able to soup them up as much as you want with more or fewer army-wide rules based on how soupy you are.

So something like:
* "Traditional" Night Lords: Only have access to stuff currently in the CSM codex. Gain lots of fear and jetpack benefits.
* Army of Tzeentchy Night Lords with their LoChange friend: use the "Servants of Tzeentch" rules and also have access to tzaangors, horrors, etc. if you want them. Your benefits are going to be more Tzeentch-shaped with dice manipulation, mutation, etc. Benefits are probably fewer and/or less powerful than the traditional Night Lords.
* Night Lords and Daemons hanging out with some Chaos Guard and some Berrzerkers for some reason: Not a lot of extra benefits if any. Your benefits are having access to multiple books worth of unit options, special rules, stratagems, etc.

They shouldn't need to be "soupy" because they never should have been split up in the first place.

Daemons were removed by a corporate decision, not a creative one.

As much soup as possible. I really don't like how the different Chaos factions have become so separated. For example, I miss how daemons from the daemons codex and from the CSM codex could buff each other, stuff like how the Great Unclean One could bring back Blight Haulers and Nurgle Possessed.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
They shouldn't need to be "soupy" because they never should have been split up in the first place.

Daemons were removed by a corporate decision, not a creative one.

I can understand separating certain things to aid in gameplay balance. This is part of the reason GW has made it so that each codex that comes out reprints as few datasheets as possible (the other part is to make money by selling more books till you get all the codexes)

The issue that I have is... if I'm going to go ahead and buy all the Chaos Codexes...
Chaos Space Marines
Chaos Knights
Chaos Daemons
World Eaters
Death Guard
Thousand Sons
(eventually) Emperor's Children
(potentially) Dark Mechanicum
(maybe) Traitor Guard

... then I'd expect to be able to make use of the thing that I purchased.

I like what Wyldhunt said above as well, with different flavors of soup giving you various access to certain things based on the theme you're going for - even if it's just for Narrative play!

Dear GW: stop catering to the competitive crowd if you want people to buy models - cater to the Narrative crowd, we'll buy whole extra armies just to ally with our other armies - but we won't if we can't!

drbored wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
They shouldn't need to be "soupy" because they never should have been split up in the first place.

Daemons were removed by a corporate decision, not a creative one.

I can understand separating certain things to aid in gameplay balance. This is part of the reason GW has made it so that each codex that comes out reprints as few datasheets as possible (the other part is to make money by selling more books till you get all the codexes)

The issue that I have is... if I'm going to go ahead and buy all the Chaos Codexes...
Chaos Space Marines
Chaos Knights
Chaos Daemons
World Eaters
Death Guard
Thousand Sons
(eventually) Emperor's Children
(potentially) Dark Mechanicum
(maybe) Traitor Guard

... then I'd expect to be able to make use of the thing that I purchased.

I like what Wyldhunt said above as well, with different flavors of soup giving you various access to certain things based on the theme you're going for - even if it's just for Narrative play!

Dear GW: stop catering to the competitive crowd if you want people to buy models - cater to the Narrative crowd, we'll buy whole extra armies just to ally with our other armies - but we won't if we can't!

Sums it up nicely.

I think a fair streamlining would be to mirror AoS to some extent:
Nurgle book
Khorne book
Tzeentch book
Slaanesh book
Undivided book - this will be chunky and houses the rest

Mix & match with some defined army constraints therein. If knights and guard need extra treatment slap them with dark mech in a lost and damned book.

I would not mind 40k Chaos getting the AoS treatment at all.

I could see Chaos Marines and Traitor Guard (renegades and heretics) being one book, while Chaos Knights and Dark Mech are another book.

That'd help trim the fat quite a bit.

Or, and hear me out on this, digital datasheets and point values so you don't need every single book to do a singular thing.