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So a topic I don’t really see about 40K is the force organization chart. For something that’s been around for whole editions, its recent loss in mainstream 40K is noticeable for me.

What are other people’s opinions on it?

I think the limits make sense but the Troops requirement was always a one size fits all deal that didn't really fit everyone well. Similarly, the categories are neat, but also inconsistently applied, creating a lot of odd limitations on armies that don't have a good spread of roles.

I think its a fine idea, but ultimately Rule of 3 is a fine replacement. I really don't miss FOC.

Made sense for some armies, in particular Space Marines and their extremely rigid and limited Chapter system. Didn't make much sense for more adaptable factions.

Moreover there was a have and have not escalation of ways to ignore it that started all the way back from the very beginning.

I preferred it on the whole, especially when different game types had different FoCs. Missions with asymmetric FoCs really helped with the narrative feel.

Good idea that never saw its potential fully developed. I'm not a fan of the recent direction GW is going in regards to army composition. I think I saw a legal army list consisting of only multiple character models somewhere and I rather have some more restriction.

 Tyran wrote:
Made sense for some armies, in particular Space Marines and their extremely rigid and limited Chapter system. Didn't make much sense for more adaptable factions.

Moreover there was a have and have not escalation of ways to ignore it that started all the way back from the very beginning.

It generally represented resource allocation, so even for armies like Tyranids there was some logic. This is bearing in mind that the basic FoC was for balanced, take all comers forces in a meeting engagement, which is a very rare scenario in the lore. The alternate FoCs represented how forces would shift in different mission roles.

The early campaign systems (3rd and 4th) definitely followed this resource allocation paradigm- if a veteran unit accrued too much experience during the campaign, it would become an elites choice if it wasn't already. The reduced availability was to represent such a valuable unit being frequently requisitioned for other fronts/missions by higher command.

FoC altering shenanigans were very rare in 3rd, they started to take off in 4th. The ones that did exist in 3rd generally came with some kind of restriction. For example, Cult Chaos Marines were only troops (and therefore less restricted) if the Chaos HQ matched them in mark, which required taking the army down a certain path; or Imperial Guard platoons, which allowed for large numbers per FoC slot but also required significant minimum investments reducing flexibility.

FoC was much better than the ‘take whatever’ garbage we had now.

The main issue was with troops across codexes. Some were cheap while others cost as much as 10%+ of your points total. Some were good and others overwhelmingly useless, and rarely would you see expensive and good.

 morganfreeman wrote:
FoC was much better than the ‘take whatever’ garbage we had now.

The main issue was with troops across codexes. Some were cheap while others cost as much as 10%+ of your points total. Some were good and others overwhelmingly useless, and rarely would you see expensive and good.

That is more of a balance issue than FoC issue though. Without FoC those units still wouldn't be taken.

 Haighus wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Made sense for some armies, in particular Space Marines and their extremely rigid and limited Chapter system. Didn't make much sense for more adaptable factions.

Moreover there was a have and have not escalation of ways to ignore it that started all the way back from the very beginning.

It generally represented resource allocation, so even for armies like Tyranids there was some logic. This is bearing in mind that the basic FoC was for balanced, take all comers forces in a meeting engagement, which is a very rare scenario in the lore. The alternate FoCs represented how forces would shift in different mission roles.

The early campaign systems (3rd and 4th) definitely followed this resource allocation paradigm- if a veteran unit accrued too much experience during the campaign, it would become an elites choice if it wasn't already. The reduced availability was to represent such a valuable unit being frequently requisitioned for other fronts/missions by higher command.

FoC altering shenanigans were very rare in 3rd, they started to take off in 4th. The ones that did exist in 3rd generally came with some kind of restriction. For example, Cult Chaos Marines were only troops (and therefore less restricted) if the Chaos HQ matched them in mark, which required taking the army down a certain path; or Imperial Guard platoons, which allowed for large numbers per FoC slot but also required significant minimum investments reducing flexibility.

The issue then is what is the difference bewteen Elite, Heavy Support and Fast Attack lore wise?

Representing scarcity of something is fine, but then you only need Troop, Elite and Super Elite (and maybe Super Duper Elite (and arguably Super Cheap Fodder for stuff like Termagants)).

At least for Tyranids it felt very arbitrary why some units, in particular monsters, were Elite or FA or HS. Specially as the Elite slot was often overcrowded with all the good options.

Double post, my bad.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
Good idea that never saw its potential fully developed. I'm not a fan of the recent direction GW is going in regards to army composition. I think I saw a legal army list consisting of only multiple character models somewhere and I rather have some more restriction.

Legal doesn't mean playable though. Battleline is needed to secure objectives and wiping out your opponent doesn't get you a win in 10th. So while you can do the Super Friends, the chances of winning the game are minimal unless you aren't playing the actual missions.

 Tyran wrote:
The issue then is what is the difference bewteen Elite, Heavy Support and Fast Attack lore wise?

I think this is fine to be a gameplay first, lore second element. Broadly speaking:
HQ - The leaders of your army.
Troops - The type of unit that is most common in your army.
Elite - Units with strong/exotic gear/stats, alternative deployment option fit in here like deep strike or infiltration.
Fast Attack - Everything that goes fast but doesn't carry heavy weapons.
Heavy Support - Units with multiple heavy weapons; single tough models with heavy weapons.

The differentiation serves as a natural limit on how much your army may skew in one direction.

 Gert wrote:
Legal doesn't mean playable though. Battleline is needed to secure objectives and wiping out your opponent doesn't get you a win in 10th. So while you can do the Super Friends, the chances of winning the game are minimal unless you aren't playing the actual missions.

I assumed so, but I prefer the opposing army to look like one, instead of a Kill Team.

I mean the chances of that are going to be pretty rare. In the entire time since Unbound was introduced in 7th and now I've never actually played against a Super Friends army.

In terms of force orgs, I think that the way 40k is in terms of army size, it's not really important anymore because the chances of you reaching that are pretty slim.

Things like 6 of each Battleline, a minimum of 1 Hero, and the rule of 3 work fine because the chances of you having to actually put those rules into effect are pretty rare.

As long as there is a base to work off i.e. not just unbound like 7th had, then most people are going to stick to normal army composition anyway because to do otherwise isn't going to actually let them win the game.

 a_typical_hero wrote:

I think this is fine to be a gameplay first, lore second element. Broadly speaking:
HQ - The leaders of your army.
Troops - The type of unit that is most common in your army.
Elite - Units with strong/exotic gear/stats, alternative deployment option fit in here like deep strike or infiltration.
Fast Attack - Everything that goes fast but doesn't carry heavy weapons.
Heavy Support - Units with multiple heavy weapons; single tough models with heavy weapons.


The differentiation serves as a natural limit on how much your army may skew in one direction.

Part of the issue is that such system kinda stops working once the roster is big enough.

Again I'm looking at my Tyranids and half of the faction is a monster, meaning in 9th I could put a monster in each slot outside of troops and skew hard into nidzilla.

In fact, Tyranids have been able to do that since 4th that allowed Carnifexes in Elite and Hive Tyrants have always been HQ.

Or look at Imperial Guard that has been able to flood the table with vehicles since 5th.

It does feel as one of those things that made sense when everyone was limited to a dozen units of which only 2-3 were tough models instead of the current game in which everyone (outside of the most newest armies) has 50+ units to choose from.

I disliked the old FOC. It was basically a way to force you to pay the troop tax, and the troop tax was more expensive/inefficient for some factions than others. In 5th-7th edition, I fielded guardians because I *had* to. In 10th edition, I field guardians because I *want* to. Going hand-in-hand with that, the FOC frequently felt like it was an excuse for the designers to make troops bad for their points because they knew people would be forced to take them anyway. Whereas now, "troops" have to be designed in a way to make them innately desirable.

And what was and wasn't a troop is a whole rant unto itself.

The FOC was also an attempt at reigning in spam. In theory, your opponent can't load all their points into a bunch of long-ranged artillery pieces if all the artillery is in the Heavy Support slot. But in practice, only allowing three heavy support hammerheads doesn't mean much when you can still take three elite riptides.

And then conversely, the FOC could actually get in the way of pretty reasonable combinations. If a Saim-Hann list wanted to field a couple units of shining spears backed up by fire support from vypers, they were kind of out of luck because they only had 3 fast attackslots for their spears and vypers to share. And Isha forbid they want to run some swooping hawks too!

Basically, the Force Org Chart suffered from painting with too broad a brush. It was an attempt to deter skew and spam that failed at the former and was only about as successful at the latter as the rule of 3 is today.

 Tyran wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Made sense for some armies, in particular Space Marines and their extremely rigid and limited Chapter system. Didn't make much sense for more adaptable factions.

Moreover there was a have and have not escalation of ways to ignore it that started all the way back from the very beginning.

It generally represented resource allocation, so even for armies like Tyranids there was some logic. This is bearing in mind that the basic FoC was for balanced, take all comers forces in a meeting engagement, which is a very rare scenario in the lore. The alternate FoCs represented how forces would shift in different mission roles.

The early campaign systems (3rd and 4th) definitely followed this resource allocation paradigm- if a veteran unit accrued too much experience during the campaign, it would become an elites choice if it wasn't already. The reduced availability was to represent such a valuable unit being frequently requisitioned for other fronts/missions by higher command.

FoC altering shenanigans were very rare in 3rd, they started to take off in 4th. The ones that did exist in 3rd generally came with some kind of restriction. For example, Cult Chaos Marines were only troops (and therefore less restricted) if the Chaos HQ matched them in mark, which required taking the army down a certain path; or Imperial Guard platoons, which allowed for large numbers per FoC slot but also required significant minimum investments reducing flexibility.

The issue then is what is the difference bewteen Elite, Heavy Support and Fast Attack lore wise?

Representing scarcity of something is fine, but then you only need Troop, Elite and Super Elite (and maybe Super Duper Elite (and arguably Super Cheap Fodder for stuff like Termagants)).

At least for Tyranids it felt very arbitrary why some units, in particular monsters, were Elite or FA or HS. Specially as the Elite slot was often overcrowded with all the good options.

It doesn't seem particularly complicated?
HQ: leaders
Elites: powerful, versatile units
Troops: basic units
Fast attack: fast units
Heavy support: slow but hard-hitting units

In 3rd edition, this was pretty logical for Tyranids IMO. Here are some good examples from the mutable genus rules:

I think it only started to get wonky once GW decided to add loads of monstrous creatures and didn't want them to all be Heavy support, when most of the ones marked as Elites should've been Heavy support. Would that constrain unit choices? Yes. But a swarm with large numbers of really big bugs is one that has invested an awful lot of resources and isn't your typical meeting-engagement force, it is more like a specialised siege swarm.

 Tyran wrote:

Part of the issue is that such system kinda stops working once the roster is big enough.

Again I'm looking at my Tyranids and half of the faction is a monster, meaning in 9th I could put a monster in each slot outside of troops and skew hard into nidzilla.

In fact, Tyranids have been able to do that since 4th that allowed Carnifexes in Elite and Hive Tyrants have always been HQ.

Or look at Imperial Guard that has been able to flood the table with vehicles since 5th.

It does feel as one of those things that made sense when everyone was limited to a dozen units of which only 2-3 were tough models instead of the current game in which everyone (outside of the most newest armies) has 50+ units to choose from.

100%. The broad strokes approach of the FOC made sense enough when every faction was basically just their army's equivalent of tacticals, assault marines, devastators, dreadnaughts, predators, and rhinos. But once you get enough variety, it stops making sense as an approach. And that's without going into rules that change force org roles .

"Fielding more than 3 bike units would be broken and needs to be disallowed by the rules... Unless you put an extra special boy on a bike; then it's totally fine if you have 6 units instead. Also, here's a dreadnaught that's an HQ for your space wolves, and here's a "master of the forge" that lets you field 6 dreadnaughts instead of 3."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Haighus wrote:

I think it only started to get wonky once GW decided to add loads of monstrous creatures and didn't want them to all be Heavy support, when most of the ones marked as Elites should've been Heavy support. Would that constrain unit choices? Yes. But a swarm with large numbers of really big bugs is one that has invested an awful lot of resources and isn't your typical meeting-engagement force, it is more like a specialised siege swarm.

I don't know. I think my shining spears/vypers example illustrates that the roles were pretty vague and confused before that. Are a short-ranged partially melee unit made up of T4 bikers and a vehicle unit that wants to shoot heavy weapons from the other side of the table really competing for the same role even though they both happen to move fast? The FOC was *trying* to identify the general job of units and force you to diversify, but it just wasn't very good at that. My falcon was just as fast as my vyper and only had a single extra gun defensively. If HS is defined by firepower and FA is defined by speed, then it seems like you could easily put either of those units in either category.

There's also a discussion to be had about whether specialized force like a "siege swarm" or oops-all-terminators or oops-all-wraith-constructs should be a thing. If so, the FOC just kind of created an obstacle to any list that didn't revolve around "troops", and past editions had to make special rules to circumvent the FOC for such armies.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I disliked the old FOC. It was basically a way to force you to pay the troop tax, and the troop tax was more expensive/inefficient for some factions than others. In 5th-7th edition, I fielded guardians because I *had* to. In 10th edition, I field guardians because I *want* to. Going hand-in-hand with that, the FOC frequently felt like it was an excuse for the designers to make troops bad for their points because they knew people would be forced to take them anyway. Whereas now, "troops" have to be designed in a way to make them innately desirable.

And what was and wasn't a troop is a whole rant unto itself.

The FOC was also an attempt at reigning in spam. In theory, your opponent can't load all their points into a bunch of long-ranged artillery pieces if all the artillery is in the Heavy Support slot. But in practice, only allowing three heavy support hammerheads doesn't mean much when you can still take three elite riptides.

And then conversely, the FOC could actually get in the way of pretty reasonable combinations. If a Saim-Hann list wanted to field a couple units of shining spears backed up by fire support from vypers, they were kind of out of luck because they only had 3 fast attackslots for their spears and vypers to share. And Isha forbid they want to run some swooping hawks too!

Basically, the Force Org Chart suffered from painting with too broad a brush. It was an attempt to deter skew and spam that failed at the former and was only about as successful at the latter as the rule of 3 is today.

This is why I think the 3rd edition approach worked best with FoCs- generally, rather than shifting FoC options round, you had new lists instead. Those lists had different restrictions to make up for the unusual composition.

As a great example, the Eldar biker list:

Extra Fast Attack, but two are compulsory. Elites are much more limited to compensate, with Swooping Hawks changed to Elite. Bikers were also pricey in 3rd, so being forced to take some would mean a smaller army.

This is much better, IMO, than the later paradigm of "leader on bike makes bikes troops". I think 3rd understood the FoC better.

 Haighus wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I disliked the old FOC. It was basically a way to force you to pay the troop tax, and the troop tax was more expensive/inefficient for some factions than others. In 5th-7th edition, I fielded guardians because I *had* to. In 10th edition, I field guardians because I *want* to. Going hand-in-hand with that, the FOC frequently felt like it was an excuse for the designers to make troops bad for their points because they knew people would be forced to take them anyway. Whereas now, "troops" have to be designed in a way to make them innately desirable.

And what was and wasn't a troop is a whole rant unto itself.

The FOC was also an attempt at reigning in spam. In theory, your opponent can't load all their points into a bunch of long-ranged artillery pieces if all the artillery is in the Heavy Support slot. But in practice, only allowing three heavy support hammerheads doesn't mean much when you can still take three elite riptides.

And then conversely, the FOC could actually get in the way of pretty reasonable combinations. If a Saim-Hann list wanted to field a couple units of shining spears backed up by fire support from vypers, they were kind of out of luck because they only had 3 fast attackslots for their spears and vypers to share. And Isha forbid they want to run some swooping hawks too!

Basically, the Force Org Chart suffered from painting with too broad a brush. It was an attempt to deter skew and spam that failed at the former and was only about as successful at the latter as the rule of 3 is today.

This is why I think the 3rd edition approach worked best with FoCs- generally, rather than shifting FoC options round, you had new lists instead. Those lists had different restrictions to make up for the unusual composition.

As a great example, the Eldar biker list:

Extra Fast Attack, but two are compulsory. Elites are much more limited to compensate, with Swooping Hawks changed to Elite. Bikers were also pricey in 3rd, so being forced to take some would mean a smaller army.

This is much better, IMO, than the later paradigm of "leader on bike makes bikes troops". I think 3rd understood the FoC better.

I never played in 3rd, but I do see the appeal of that. However, isn't that approach notorious for the "false downside" of not letting you take slots you weren't planning to take anyway? I.e.

"Oh gosh. Is it really worth taking this fourth predator if it means I can't field that fast attack unit I wasn't planning on taking anyway? And two of the heavy support slots in this detachment for people who want to field lots of heavy supports are mandatory? Really twisting my arm here, GW."

EDIT: Which is to say, bespoke detachments that change how much of what you can field aren't a bad idea, but there probably needs to be some additional restriction or change in playstyle to make the downsides an actual trade-off. 9th edition's approach of letting you spam a certain slot, but only at the cost of CP was far from perfect, but the downsides of spamming FA or HS and not having to pay the troop tax were apparent.

I preferred the FOC over what we have now.

The FOC provided a sense of structure when collecting and building an army, helping out newer players (start with 1 HQ and 2 Troops, and build out from there) and leading to an overall nicer and more varied collection of units for modeling and painting in my opinion.

Gameplay-wise, I think it helped reduce unit spam and encouraged fielding a wider variety of units. Things started to go off the rails a little bit around the time of 5th edition I think, but there were some issues with 3rd codexes as well, when some codexes allowed bringing in Elite or Heavy units as "troops" or other categories leading to problems with heavy artillery/tank spam. I seem to recall issues with the Iron Warriors in the Chaos 3.5 codex allowing more Heavy units, and the 5th edition Imperial Guard codex being another example, with that codex allowing a lot more leman russ tanks and artillery than what was previously permitted under the normal rules of the FOC.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

This is why I think the 3rd edition approach worked best with FoCs- generally, rather than shifting FoC options round, you had new lists instead. Those lists had different restrictions to make up for the unusual composition.

As a great example, the Eldar biker list:

Extra Fast Attack, but two are compulsory. Elites are much more limited to compensate, with Swooping Hawks changed to Elite. Bikers were also pricey in 3rd, so being forced to take some would mean a smaller army.

This is much better, IMO, than the later paradigm of "leader on bike makes bikes troops". I think 3rd understood the FoC better.

I never played in 3rd, but I do see the appeal of that. However, isn't that approach notorious for the "false downside" of not letting you take slots you weren't planning to take anyway? I.e.

"Oh gosh. Is it really worth taking this fourth predator if it means I can't field that fast attack unit I wasn't planning on taking anyway? And two of the heavy support slots in this detachment for people who want to field lots of heavy supports are mandatory? Really twisting my arm here, GW."

EDIT: Which is to say, bespoke detachments that change how much of what you can field aren't a bad idea, but there probably needs to be some additional restriction or change in playstyle to make the downsides an actual trade-off. 9th edition's approach of letting you spam a certain slot, but only at the cost of CP was far from perfect, but the downsides of spamming FA or HS and not having to pay the troop tax were apparent.

I think there are two things here.

Firstly, I think the "false downside" thing is overblown. Sure, some taking a Heavy support-focussed Iron Warriors list or a Fast attack-focussed Night Lords list probably wasn't planning on taking much Fast attack or Heavy support respectively, but that is because it is part of the theme of the force. They do lose out for not having that flexibility, unless they only play one mission type. The missions in 3rd and 4th often played around with deployment and reserves based on FoC, so a force focussed on one part of the FoC could find itself really disadvantaged in some missions. For example, the defender in a Bunker Assault mission had to put their Fast Attack, Elites, and Heavy support in reserve. So if they didn't have enough Troops to hold the line, they were likely to have an uphill battle. Heavy support was also less likely to be useful the turn it arrived from reserves so was especially problematic in that mission.

Secondly, this is somewhat an issue of internal balance. If the Heavy support is obviously better than the Fast attack choices in most scenarios, then one alt list will be better most of the time. That isn't a problem with the FoC though. Without the FoC you would also see one of those units taken much more than the other.

One benefit of what we have now with the "rule of three" is that its so simple even GW don't really mess with it. Collection wise this can be a boon because you basically have a hard-cap on most units. You know you can only take 3 so you know not to buy more than 3 for gameplay purposes.


The FOC however was a more refined tool and if GW approached rules from a more structured approach and allowed them to last more than 3-6 years it had a chance. I think what simply happened is that GW doesn't allocate resources not have the focus on rules that allows a FOC system to actually flourish.

Especially in modern times where armies have a LOT more choices than in the past. In 2-3rd edition the FOC worked well because most armies didn't have a vast number of options to draw from so the limits still let you take a good portion of your army variety and collection.

However it steadily got worse and worse. Tyranids, for example, gained a lot of specialists which were all put into the Elite slot. Suddenly having only 3 different elite units gets really limiting when you've lots of specialists that each have a purpose and place in the army. Esp when you've got specific counters becoming more and more a thing in the game with more niches (eg remember early aircraft that needed AA units to counter them). The more niches, the more requirements the harder it is to make a choice or to take a good representation of the army.


Now GW tried toget around that at one time by just letting you take more FOC's per side. However with no limit on subfactions that led to the messy era where things got confusing as one army might be 3 or 4 different sub-armies and things like "Well actually your paint scheme matters now and each sub army should be different" started to rear their heads.


The FOC needed an overhaul but it also needed a stable long term game to have that overhaul. Especially because I think part of it is that it needed to be more varied for different styles of army and different factions.



In the end games DO have a problem in general with trying to encourage people to take varieties of units to create diverse armies; when many times spamming one unit or units of the same kind can often be very powerful in a common setting. Or when focusing on a very specific tactic can.

It becomes even more challenging as armies get wider in model diversity and creators find more and more challenge in filling in the niches whilst gamers have more diverse collections and honestly want to bring those models to the table.

This leans into army size in general, which directly impacts army composition constructs. Systems that can work for a 1K point game might break on a 2 or 3K. Meanwhile systems designed for a 3K might not have the right design to really function at 1K etc...




I'd love to see the FOC return, but at the same time I think with how GW as a firm approaches balance and rule writing right now (and historically); I don't think we'd necessarily benefit from it. Indeed having unit limits jumping around could be a nightmare. You buy that 3rd monolith for a cool army and then BOOM GW restructures it to only 1 per army. Then the next edition its up to 2 then back to 1 then infinite etc....

That leads to unsure gamers; confusion and such.

Like most of GW's good ideas, they managed to ruin it eventually and then just gave up and replaced it with an inferior bodged fix to a problem of their own making (the Rule of Three).

 Overread wrote:
One benefit of what we have now with the "rule of three" is that its so simple even GW don't really mess with it. Collection wise this can be a boon because you basically have a hard-cap on most units. You know you can only take 3 so you know not to buy more than 3 for gameplay purposes.

Until GW re-consolidate units which are currently just different weapon configurations...

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Like most of GW's good ideas, they managed to ruin it eventually and then just gave up and replaced it with an inferior bodged fix to a problem of their own making (the Rule of Three).

Pretty much.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Like most of GW's good ideas, they managed to ruin it eventually and then just gave up and replaced it with an inferior bodged fix to a problem of their own making (the Rule of Three).

 Overread wrote:
One benefit of what we have now with the "rule of three" is that its so simple even GW don't really mess with it. Collection wise this can be a boon because you basically have a hard-cap on most units. You know you can only take 3 so you know not to buy more than 3 for gameplay purposes.

Until GW re-consolidate units which are currently just different weapon configurations...

I feel like that's a slightly different aspect.

As a Tyranid player I'm certainly not happy that GW took something like all the Tyranid Warrior close combat weapons and broke them down into 1 close combat profile.
At the same time I can see where GW are kind of potentially going with some of those choices. In the past, certainly well into 3rd edition - many armies had few models but a LOT of toolbox options. Tyranids were famous for it - Carnifex, Warriors and Hive Tyrant could each pull multiple battlefield roles depending on what upgrades and weapon choices you made. You could go from a close combat monster to artillery to anti tank ranged to anti infantry ranged and so forth. It worked because all those roles had a place on the battlefield and there were no other Tyranids in those slots that could do those roles.


Today the army is VASTLY bigger and there are lot more specialists kicking around. Eventually the toolbox models start to have an issue that they are tripping over the specialist choices. This becomes a balancing nightmare (even if GW were really good at it and didn't obliterate it every 3-6 years).

So one approach is to limit the toolbox models into specialist slots; creating new gaps that new models can fill.



It is not ideal for those with existing models and there are some choices kicking around that don't feel quite right. Some of this might just be GW making outright bad choices; others might just be that they are good choices, but they need more years so that GW can plug the gaps that the simplifications have created. Eg what if we lose lots of closecombat warrior options but then in 2 or 3 years we gain the "Tyranid Slasher" a close combat devil that has loads of close combat blades and is an anti-infantry scything monster; filling the slot warriors used to have when equipped for that role.

I mean isn't that just a Ravener/Leaper/Lictor/Trygon/Mawloc/Screamer-killer/Haruspex/Toxicrene/WowThatRoleisAlreadyOvercrowded?

 Tyran wrote:
I mean isn't that just a Ravener/Leaper/Lictor/Trygon/Mawloc/Screamer-killer/Haruspex/Toxicrene/WowThatRoleisAlreadyOvercrowded?

Hah yes somewhat already! It's the same for the Carnifex as well - though after the Screamerkiller model and Lictor models I wonder if we might see GW doing things like dedicated Thornback and other "named" carnifex variation kits in the future; and if they let whoever did the lictor kit at those named carny kits they could even have a decent amount of pose variety (Which the current screamer killer certainly lacks - though likely mostly because it was designed for a push-fit structure)

At least for the Carnifex there is more design space for anti-tank roles both at long range but also in melee. Specially for anti-super-heavy.

E.g. a return of the Stonecrusher variant to kill super-resilient stuff like Knights and C'tan shards.

Yeah for a while the carny felt kind of in a bit of a tough spot in terms of being overshadowed, but having played some games I agree there's a very valid slot for it to be anti-tank; both close combat and ranged wise as you say. Anti-heavy/super armour is a weakness for Tyranids right now.

The Tyrannofex is the best at it, but its also very big and very costly; Zoanthropes are good but they don't have the best range and are very slow to move so can have issues getting into the right position.

Tyranids seem to have almost an over-abundance of marine/medium armour level counters, but heavy and superheavy is a gap (even more so now that the Hirodules are both gone from formal events)

Some level of restrictions on what you take beyond rule of 3 made the game more interesting imho.
Limiting the number of elite/specialist units was good and meant that units like intercessors actually filled a role in the army list