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BanjoJohn wrote:
Modern army selection is clunky and random, FOC is the true way to make armies from a more sophisticated age.

Missions determined the kind of FOC you could use, and may or may not change based on whether you were attacker or defender.

Many armies had some kind of sub-faction that changed the units available in different FOC slots, or changed the total number of FOC slots you could take (deathwing, ravenwing, saim han, etc).

The system worked, it worked for more than 15 years, it wasn't clunky, it wasn't broken. The only things that were broken were the same things that are broken now, GW pushing sales of new miniatures/kits so they get better points or rules or whatever, old units getting ignored for balancing or updates or more options for that unit because they don't want to sell those minis any more.

Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1. You could take 0-1 archon lord, the archon is jealous and won't fight along side other archons, you could have drachons or lesser wyches join you.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

I do not agree with this.

I just made a 2,000 point 11th Edition list, for my Nurgle Daemons. It has...

GUO [Warlord]
Daemon Prince
Six Heralds, one for each Plaguebearer squad
Six units of Plaguebearers
Two units of Nurglings
Three units of Plague Drones

That feels pretty reasonable to me. Big horde of character-supported Battleline/Troops, two big boys, some boys on bugs, and a couple of Nurglings to taste.
If Nurglings are Troops (as they are Battleline now) I have 8 Troops. That's more than the Force Org allowed.
If Nurglings are Fast Attack, I have 5 FA, since Plague Drones would be too.
I also have 8 total characters-each one would've been an HQ choice in some editions, and I think they most they ever might've gotten was two Heralds per HQ pick.

What is unthematic about this list?

 JNAProductions wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:
Modern army selection is clunky and random, FOC is the true way to make armies from a more sophisticated age.

Missions determined the kind of FOC you could use, and may or may not change based on whether you were attacker or defender.

Many armies had some kind of sub-faction that changed the units available in different FOC slots, or changed the total number of FOC slots you could take (deathwing, ravenwing, saim han, etc).

The system worked, it worked for more than 15 years, it wasn't clunky, it wasn't broken. The only things that were broken were the same things that are broken now, GW pushing sales of new miniatures/kits so they get better points or rules or whatever, old units getting ignored for balancing or updates or more options for that unit because they don't want to sell those minis any more.

Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1. You could take 0-1 archon lord, the archon is jealous and won't fight along side other archons, you could have drachons or lesser wyches join you.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

I do not agree with this.

I just made a 2,000 point 11th Edition list, for my Nurgle Daemons. It has...

GUO [Warlord]
Daemon Prince
Six Heralds, one for each Plaguebearer squad
Six units of Plaguebearers
Two units of Nurglings
Three units of Plague Drones

That feels pretty reasonable to me. Big horde of character-supported Battleline/Troops, two big boys, some boys on bugs, and a couple of Nurglings to taste.
If Nurglings are Troops (as they are Battleline now) I have 8 Troops. That's more than the Force Org allowed.
If Nurglings are Fast Attack, I have 5 FA, since Plague Drones would be too.
I also have 8 total characters-each one would've been an HQ choice in some editions, and I think they most they ever might've gotten was two Heralds per HQ pick.

What is unthematic about this list?

Here's the solution, take two FOC's in your army. For example, in 3rd edition, one FOC was one "detachment" which was part of your army, you needed one minimum detachment, but could have as many as you wanted as long as you met minimum requirements for each detachment.

GOC leading one detachment, daemon prince leading another detachment, plague drones are fast attack, plague bearers and nurglings are troops, and heralds can be/could be HQ, or Elite, or you could have them as unit upgrades (basically like veteran sergeants) for the plague bearers.

Da Boss wrote:Generally a dedicated transport is something that is only really good for transporting units and not much else. There's some wiggle room - both Rhinos and Razorbacks are Dedicated Transports even though the Razorback still has decent shooting ability.

I'm not well informed about League vehicles, but if you're thinking "I'd never take this without a squad to go in it" then it's a dedicated transport.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:The Saggitaur falls into that category, and in terms of application is closest to a Razorback. But, you can (or could) take two to cart about a single squad. Whereas I’ve never heard of being able to do that with Razorbacks.

That is why I asked. I see Sagitaurs as transports, since I wouldn't take them if I didn't have a unit to put in them, yet the 9e codex classified them as Fast Attack and not Dedicated Transports.

Both Sagitaurs and Kapricus Carriers split the squads that they are carrying into two five-model units. That led to people taking Sagitaurs just to split Hearthkyn Warriors up since that doubled the amount of warrior units that could be used for screening or even farming judgement tokens. It's not my favorite idea. I think that I would prefer it if Sagitaurs came in groups of two and disgorged intact squads.

Wyldhunt wrote:The charts for army composition just... kind of forgot that 40k was usually played at 2,000 points or less. So you'd have this big chart of all these formations a "typical" in-universe army might be composed of, and then you'd realize you only had enough points to fill out like, half a core detachment and one or two optional detachments.

And point 3 is relevant, I think. Often times when people talk about wanting the army they put on the table to "feel like a real army," I think they end up basing that on their mental image of their entire force on the planet; all the random battle line guys and every bit of support behind them, all in one place. But 40k battles are (depending on who you ask) really more of a smaller-scale conflict. Or at most, a zoomed-in portion of a much wider battlefield. Sure, the Salamanders chapter isn't 90% terminators, but if you're zooming in on the portion of the battlefield where 1st company launched a teleporter assault on the enemy headquarters, you might be looking at mostly terminators with minimal other support. or if you point your camera at the skirmishes happening outside of town, you might see mostly fast attack/elite units that specialize in recon/stealth duking it out.

It's fine to want your army to have a healthy number of troops and to prefer thinking of your army as one that strives to have a bunch of basic dudes at the heart of every clump of forces. But there's a tendency among some players (not you) to think that troop spam is the one true way to assemble your 40k army because, "Well, there are way more troops than specialists!" And I feel like this view really fails to consider the question of exactly what story is being told, where the camera is focusing, etc.

That is a good point. It raises the question of what is appropriate for that particular force / snapshot. Then again, if this battle is the headquarters assault or the reconnaissance element getting into a skirmish, why is my entire command element here in this one battle? Or maybe you just wave both questions away by saying the miniatures are a representative sample of the actual force because throwing down with an actual company of guys would take way too long.

I've sometimes thought about another or maybe a related problem: How often would a small unit of Deathwing Knights really show up to boost this random platoon somewhere? Aren't they out there with more important things to do? I would expect to see Deathwing Knights alongside a larger force of Deathwing Terminators.

mithril2098 wrote:in WHFB 8th ed, your army building did the FOC by % of the total points, with the different categories having upper limits by %. you had to have a minimum number of units for HQ's and basic troops with the basic troops having a minimum % you had to spend, but had no max number of units in any catagory so long as you didn't exceed the max % limit for their type.
(they broke the army down into lords (1 mandatory, up to 50%), heros (up to 50%), core units (3 mandatory, minimum 25%, no upper limit), special units (up to 50%), and rare units (up to 25%),

the problem WHFB had was they didn't have any upper limits on the individual unit sizes. so you could take a block of infantry and two blocks of cav to meet your minimum, and just cram 200 figures into that infantry block to create a deathstar.

honestly when WHFB 8th came out i expected a similar way of doing the FOC would be applied to 40k when 6th dropped. where the fact that 40K's units had hard limits on the number of figures you could take per unit would have allowed for more flexibility than the 3/6/3/3/3 setup but avoided the "lump everything into one huge unkillable unit" issue WHFB had. it would also have let you keep the catagories, you could just tweak the %'s to limit the cheese some.

That is a really interesting idea too. Is the problem that I have a lot of things that go fast on my reconnaissance force? Or is the problem that what should be special or rare is instead the entire list?

Using the terminator example again, for a First Company army, terminators would be core units, but Deathwing Knights would be special or rare.

BanjoJohn wrote:Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1. You could take 0-1 archon lord, the archon is jealous and won't fight along side other archons, you could have drachons or lesser wyches join you.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

The 0-1 restrictions or requirements speak to the same problem as special and rare units, I think, but with finer-grained controls. Don't bring units that shouldn't mix, and, before you can bring a unit of the really elite guys, you have to commit to some of the more regular guys first.

This conversation is giving me a lot to consider. I'm going to have to try putting this into practice soon, but it sounds like there are a few things for me to consider to avoid making a funky list:

1. More troops/core units than I might otherwise consider. This will probably be battleline with how 11e works.
2. Don't bring too many characters.
3. Don't bring a bunch of supposedly rare units. I'll have to think more about what would be considered rare.
4. Exclude units that are off-theme for my detachments.

Most of these are constraints, but creativity is born from constraints. I'm already liking how point #4 creates a real difference between an oathband, a prospect, and a harvest.

BanjoJohn wrote:

Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1.

Well, the only playable C'tan back then were named characters, so you could have 2 of them rather than 3. Today using just the named C'tan you could hit that same number. I suppose GW could make generic c'tan 0-1 to cut down on the total number, but at that point we're having a wider discussion about how many "rare" units you should be allowed to have in the same army. Which is kind of just a matter of fluff preference. Some people may love the idea of multiple types of c'tan coordinating together as a sort of joint prison break or as a flex from their 'cron overlord.

Similarly, if I want to recreate some of the drukhari battles from the Lukas the Trickster novel, I may want to field multiple archons to represent Maly sand Sliscus. (Ignoring the fact that Malys finally has her own model and has her own rules again today.)

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

I'm not sure what you're going for here. If you're opposed to having multiple "rare" units (like archons) in one place, then why would you want to force people to take additional rare units in a given list? Feels like you may have slipped into thinking about a different goal without mentioning it?

Also, my brain immediately goes to this creating an "HQ tax" for any faction that doesn't have particularly valuable HQs or whose HQs need specific additional units to make them work that you may not be excited about fielding en masse.


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BanjoJohn wrote:

Here's the solution, take two FOC's in your army. For example, in 3rd edition, one FOC was one "detachment" which was part of your army, you needed one minimum detachment, but could have as many as you wanted as long as you met minimum requirements for each detachment.

GOC leading one detachment, daemon prince leading another detachment, plague drones are fast attack, plague bearers and nurglings are troops, and heralds can be/could be HQ, or Elite, or you could have them as unit upgrades (basically like veteran sergeants) for the plague bearers.

Were you really able to take multiple force orgs back in the day? I don't/ remember that being a thing post-4th edition until 7th edition.

But also, I feel like this being your solution is kind of telling. Your solution is to essentially break most of the restrictions of the force org chart, but at the cost of an additional hq/troop tax. Which obviously runs into the problem of screwing over factions with less desirable HQ or troop options. But also consider that you're suggesting a system that sets up limitations, has a workaround to break those limitations, will create new problems (the tax thing), all to facilitate recreating a perfectly fluffy and thematic list that JNA was able to create in the modern rule of 3/rule of 6 rules. In other words, you're creating problems and jumping through hoops just to end up worse off than where we already are.

That is a good point. It raises the question of what is appropriate for that particular force / snapshot. Then again, if this battle is the headquarters assault or the reconnaissance element getting into a skirmish, why is my entire command element here in this one battle? Or maybe you just wave both questions away by saying the miniatures are a representative sample of the actual force because throwing down with an actual company of guys would take way too long.

It kind of depends on the army in question. Generally, if you're putting together, say, a 1500 point list and you want it to represent your little recon force, my instinct is to tell you to avoid fielding someone super rare and important. So if I specifically want my "recon list" to feel like it's a bunch of relative nobodies, maybe I avoid bringing a captain or farseer. Maybe I stick to lieutenants and warlocks instead.

But also, this is the grimdark future of the 41st millennium where chainswords and power fists are a surprisingly common weapon for no good reason. Having important, fancy commander types leading from the front is, to at least some extent, kind of just a conceit of the setting. The same a guard army will find excuses to have to reclaim cities instead of just glassing the problem from orbit.

And also also, a thing that I think about in the context of my phoenix lords a lot, is that named characters shouldn't be everywhere, but they're busy people who are frequently somewhere. It probably doesn't make sense for a captain to be personally leading a small recon force most of the time, but it might make sense for him to hitch a ride on his way to rejoin the main force he's meant to be leading. But oops! Those pesky orks attacked the recon force as they were trying to sneak their way through hostile territory, and here we are.

Taste, when it comes to such things, is on a spectrum. Some people will look at a triple riptide list and just see something cheesy that takes them out of the narrative. Some people will field that same list and love how it represents the fluff of their army representing an earth caste facility that was in the process of putting these freshly-manufactured riptides through their initial calibration tests when the enemy attacked. Some people won't care if you have three riptides but will insist that 75% of your list should just be fire warriors and kroot carnivores because "troops."

Personally, I try to lean away from telling people they're enjoying their army's fluff wrong, at which point the goal becomes finding a way to maximize freedom of list creation while still factoring in balance. Or alternatively, I swing in the opposite direction and think that if we're going to impose GW's vision of what a "thematic list" is onto the rules, we should really lean into it. Create a bunch of relatively specific detachments each with their own force org chart that allows more of certain thematic units and makes less thematic units harder to field en masse. Almost Boarding Action style.

In the 3rd ed necron codex at least, the 0-1 applied to ctan in general, not to each ctan specifically. Your army could only include 1 ctan. Army, Rather than FOC. Because they hated each other and don't work together.


As for the using multiple FOC is a break or work around. That's no more true than the battle line keyword changing how the normal 0-3 units rule works.

It wasn't a work around it was built into the FOC rules in 3rd ed. The only mandatory units were 1 hq and 2 troops in an FOC. you were told to take multiple FOC if you wanted to.

As for the idea of a tax - that's like saying the US army has a tax on infantry units rather than just deploying tanks. That's how armies work. There are limited numbers of some units, and there are units that are the core fighting force of the army.

If there was no limitations on units existing, real armies wouldn't rely on cheap infantry. Army comp free for all is like a general saying his army is just all nukes.

When the FOC interacts with the scenarios being played it also helps outline what the kind of force would actually be involved, rather than whatever composition you came up with.

FOC was a simulation mechanic to reflect that just because you the general may only want to deploy 10 shadow swords, you the general are lucky to get 1 leman Russ to go with your 10,000 conscripts.

If the logistics of your faction's men and materiel are not part of the army equation, then what are you even playing?

The fact that space Marines can take 15 captains show how divorced the game is from the setting it's supposedly representing.

Why would guard ever deploy basic guardsman if their generals could build armies out of whatever they wanted, no logistics limitations, no costs issues. No imperial guard general has the freedom to build an army as absurdly as a 40k player does, so which guard general are you actually playing then?

If you are playing the game in a way that none of the leaders running your army ever could, but you can because the rules allow it, well you aren't really playing 40k at that point.

No real army ever has taken 2 squads of tax infantry so they can spend their rest of their points in tanks and aircraft.

Yes real armies have limitations in the numbers and compositions of what they can deploy, but the FOC never simulated that. You took your 2 infantry tax and the rest could be ups all dreadnoughts and tanks.

 Hellebore wrote:
In the 3rd ed necron codex at least, the 0-1 applied to ctan in general, not to each ctan specifically. Your army could only include 1 ctan. Army, Rather than FOC. Because they hated each other and don't work together.

Fair enough! I didn't start playing until 5th and didn't play 'crons until some time after that.

As for the using multiple FOC is a break or work around. That's no more true than the battle line keyword changing how the normal 0-3 units rule works.

It wasn't a work around it was built into the FOC rules in 3rd ed. The only mandatory units were 1 hq and 2 troops in an FOC. you were told to take multiple FOC if you wanted to.

To be clear about what I meant, I was saying that taking multiple FOCs "broke" the FOC in the sense that having multiples of them essentially removes the cap on having more than 3 of a given unit or more than 3 heavy supports, fast attacks, etc. Basically, the ability to take multiple force orgs makes it so that you would need to pay the hq/troop tax an extra time, but the FOC would essentially stop limiting your ability to spam a bunch of heavy supports or elites or whatever at that point.

Which, would mean that the FOC wasn't really trying to put an actual limit on how many of such units you could take; it was just paywalling them behind the number of HQs and Troops you took. I don't necessarily point that out to condemn it but to ask whether or not limiting the number of units of a certain battlefield role is actually something proponents of the FOC want to see, or if they instead simply care about having a certain ratio of troops-to-non-troops. Which then becomes important if we get into the discussion of what makes something a troop and how troops ought to be designed...

As for the idea of a tax - that's like saying the US army has a tax on infantry units rather than just deploying tanks. That's how armies work. There are limited numbers of some units, and there are units that are the core fighting force of the army.

So there are a few directions we could go with this point. I'm tired as I write this, so I'll try to be coherent and not ramble too much.

First, I want to point out that the following are all semi-distinct ideas:
1. Troops as a "tax" because they're designed in a way that makes them mechanically undesirable compared to other options.
2. Troops as a "tax" because they don't fit your army's theme and have to be taken to "unlock" the units that actually fit your theme.
3. The notion that troops should be mandatory in a given 40k army.

In regards to 1, I'd point out that while I pretty much never felt good about taking guardians in editions with an FOC, I was frequently taking them in index 10th edition because GW gave them a role that made me want to field at least one unit. So ideally, if GW wants us to be spamming certain units (and spending hundreds of dollars on those mandatory units), they should be giving those units rules that encourage and reward us for fielding a bunch of those units. The way many troops were handled in the past was that they were intentionally designed to be less impressive than the flashier options, and you essentially had to sign on to fielding however many dollars worth of those units in every list if you wanted to play their faction at all. If there's a reason unit X is the most common sight in army Y, give them rules that make you want to fielda bunch of unit X in most army Y lists.

If there was no limitations on units existing, real armies wouldn't rely on cheap infantry. Army comp free for all is like a general saying his army is just all nukes.

I feel like talking about "real armies" always ends up leading to unproductive tangents. One person will say it's more "realistic" for the space army to do X, and then the other person will point out that the space army has wizards and lightning swords, and it ends up way off topic and not particularly helpful. So I suggest that we steer clear of that, but I'll address the idea that armies should have more than just specialists or tanks or whatever, which I think is the point you were trying to get at.

Basically, this comes back to the point I made earlier about whether you're framing your list as the entirety of your faction's presence on the planet, or if you're assuming that your list represents a subset of your faction. As I said earlier, having an entire chapter of terminators would be odd, but having a bunch of your chapter's terminators together in one place for a coordinated teleportation strike on the enemy base? That seems reasonable enough. The game has a pretty long history of encouraging the notion that more specialized forces or forces with unconventional units making up their bulk are valid in 40k. Your Death Wing type armies can reasonably show up with oops all terminators. Your white scars can reasonably show up with oops all bikes and not a single scout or tactical marine in sight. Mandatory troops essentially prevent you from fielding armies that tell those stories. Whether or not such armies should be valid and appear on the tabletop is probably getting into its own topic of discussion.

As for the "oops all nukes" part, that's why I said this:

Personally, I try to lean away from telling people they're enjoying their army's fluff wrong, at which point the goal becomes finding a way to maximize freedom of list creation while still factoring in balance.

I'm probably not going to tell my opponent that their homebrew fluff justifying why they exclusively have nukes is bad/wrong. However, balancing the all nuke army is probably going to be quite the challenge for the designers.

When the FOC interacts with the scenarios being played it also helps outline what the kind of force would actually be involved, rather than whatever composition you came up with.

Now this is an interesting point and seems to touch on something that was before my time. Was the norm back in the day to determine which mission you'd play, then write your list based on the restrictions the mission had put in place? Honestly, I'd love that. But it obviously runs into some issues for both pickup games and players with small collections.

FOC was a simulation mechanic to reflect that just because you the general may only want to deploy 10 shadow swords, you the general are lucky to get 1 leman Russ to go with your 10,000 conscripts.

Kind of covered by what I said above, but my issue with that is that it basically prevents players from running certain thematic armies by trying to make every army fit the same mold. If we did the Boarding Actions thing, you could maybe get around this by having different FOCs depending on which theme (detachment) the player had chosen.

If the logistics of your faction's men and materiel are not part of the army equation, then what are you even playing?

See above about your list on the table not representing the entirety of your force on the planet. If someone wants to play an armored company list, it doesn't mean that all guard everywhere in the warzone/planet/galaxy exclusively use tanks and no infantry squads. (If you'll excuse the hyperbole.) Rather, it means that the small force the camera is pointing at during the course of your game happens to be a tank company.

The fact that space Marines can take 15 captains show how divorced the game is from the setting it's supposedly representing.

Well. Partially agree. I'm going to risk muddying the waters here by adding additional subtopics to the discussion. First, yeah, it's kinda weird that you can do that sort of thing. And obviously most people aren't fielding 15 captains and 15 captains probably wouldn't be a particularly strong list, but I realize that's not the point you're making. Triptides are maybe a decent example here. Supposedly riptides are so rare that seeing three of them in one battlefield should be absolutely bizarre. And there's probably a case to be made for limiting certain units for narrative reasons.

That said... Once upon a time my buddy who had flirted wtih 40k off and on over the years bemoaned that what he really wanted to do was just run a whole army of canoness models so that each model could be especially badass. Obviously he didn't actually want to think of each such model as an actual canoness in terms of fluff. He just wanted a movie marines sisters army. All of which is to say, while literal interpretations of what units are can lead to some wonky fluff/crunch dissonance, it's also worth pointing out that your listbuilding options are a toolbox that can be used unconventionally to tell stories sometimes. Maybe those captains aren't actually captains. Maybe you just want your marines to feel more like movie marines, and you fluff them each as being sergeants or whatever.

Why would guard ever deploy basic guardsman if their generals could build armies out of whatever they wanted, no logistics limitations, no costs issues. No imperial guard general has the freedom to build an army as absurdly as a 40k player does, so which guard general are you actually playing then?

If you are playing the game in a way that none of the leaders running your army ever could, but you can because the rules allow it, well you aren't really playing 40k at that point.

I'm probably repeating myself too much here, but you wouldn't be playing a commander who exclusively has access to whatever units they want; you'd be playing a commander who happens to have access to enough units across the war zone that he could concentrate some of his more lethal assets into one place as part of an important mission. Sure, 99% of his forces on the planet are guardsmen, but he scraped together a bunch of tanks that happened to be helping mixed regiments throughout the area so that he could successfully hold an important bridge or whatever. Not every salamander wears terminator armor, but the captain got a bunch of terminators together for this mission because the intense heat and radiation of this battlefield would have overwhelmed conventional power armor. The hive fleet invading this planet is full of gaunts and other little gribblies, but the hive mind has called together a force with an unusually high concentration of siege beasts to bust down a wall so that the next wave of bugs have a way to access the hive city. Etc. Etc.

Or to shorten all that up, my 1500 list doesn't need to represent the entirety of my faction in microcosm.


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 Tyran wrote:
No real army ever has taken 2 squads of tax infantry so they can spend their rest of their points in tanks and aircraft.

Yes real armies have limitations in the numbers and compositions of what they can deploy, but the FOC never simulated that. You took your 2 infantry tax and the rest could be ups all dreadnoughts and tanks.

Also this, yeah. Even if we agreed that every battle in the galaxy should be fought between forces that are comprised heavily of "troops", the FOC didn't really enforce that either. It kind of just limited what you could spend the first X points of your army on.

(And made X a higher number for some factions than others depending on how cheap their mandatory units were.)

OldeSword wrote:
I got into the hobby at the tail end of 9th edition and never actually made an army with those rules, so I found the discussion about Force Organization Charts in the "11th Edition Core Rule Reactions" thread to be fascinating. I don't want to hijack that thread so...

If you were to use a FOC in 11e, what would it look like? Which FOCs worked better and why?

I happen to also think that armies are cooler with more balanced forces, and, after it was mentioned someone on the forum, I looked at the Squat army in the 2e Codex Army List book. There it imposed restrictions on Squat armies of up to 50% characters, up to 50% support, and at least 25% troops. Even that would shake up the composition of my (imagined) armies. I am not trying to propose a rule but consider a mechanism for fluffier armies. If those armies are also more effective, that'd be a nice bonus.

And how would you decide which units go where? What characteristics make a unit fill a particular role? The initial release of Leagues of Votann units had slots assigned to them in 9e, but everything that came later does not.

The 50/50/50 rule you're talking about was pre-force org. Sort of. it was closer to what we have today just more crude and unrefined. Force Org Charts started with W-X-Y-Z slots. 2 HQ, a few Elite, a bunch of Troops, a couple fast attack and a couple heavy support. Basically a Space Marine Company with just a little wiggle room. Towards the end of Force Org 1 you ended up with nested org charts. As your HQ you could take this sub-force Org that included a WhositWhatsit, and secondary Whositwhatsists (think one captain - and the captain could add another HQ called a Command Squad for free - plus one lieutenant, and one banner bearer etc) Then they reset the editions and we went back to just the basic company structure - and it failed because your Force Org didn't cap Dets, but Dets did give you spending points. So Imperials "souped" the "Loyal 32" the bare minumum guard squads and leaders to field a legal Det - and then they bought the army they really wanted to play with in another Det.

The next iteration had the same Spending Points vs Det Cost problem just reversed. Everyone started with X points, and had to buy their Dets out of it. Which punished the people who had to buy more Dets to get more slots because they ran out of slots faster than they ran out of points. But they DID add more different types of Dets. There was the Elite Det where you get the 6 extra Elite Slots (made up number for example I don't have the book here), there was the Fast Attack Det where you had 6 FA slots and the Heavy Support Det where you had 6 Heavy Support Slots. There was a Supreme Commander Det that just allowed you to take a Supreme Commander (Primarchs, and a couple few other named super characters) There was the Super Heavy Auxilliary Det that let you have one Super Heavy (Allied Knights, wraith knights, other giant walkers, thunderhawks, the ginormous Super-Heavy guard tanks,and so on (there was a separate Det for taking all Knights) It was a step in the right direction, but still flawed.

 Tyran wrote:
No real army ever has taken 2 squads of tax infantry so they can spend their rest of their points in tanks and aircraft.

Yes real armies have limitations in the numbers and compositions of what they can deploy, but the FOC never simulated that. You took your 2 infantry tax and the rest could be ups all dreadnoughts and tanks.

It's a false dichotomy. Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour. Was it perfect? No. Did I claim it was? But it provides a slightly less abstract form of game than the current free for all. And that's all we're doing, comparing the two.

As for the idea that no real army took. 2 tax squads, well no army is composed of 50 men either. Your complaint is directed at the part of the game that's true across all versions of 40k. But the fact that the core units of the army are present is the important bit.


I am firmly of the opinion that if you are going to play a game of an IP, then you are agreeing to take the possibilities with the limitations. How those limitations are modelled is less important than that they are. And for some reason people are fine with limitations like space.marine captains can't wear crisis suits, or Orks can't put their spirits in wraithguard, but guard colonels can't just make armies out of sentinels or artillery tanks it suddenly becomes negotiable

They're all part of the same fiction. You are absolutely telling people they're playing the game wrong when you won't let them use a crisis suit commander as their marine Captain.

But apparently telling them they can't deploy 15 marine captains and 9 land raiders is just really not on. You're told no about plenty of things, saying no to a free for all army list is no different.

 Hellebore wrote:

Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour.

Is it?

No one is playing around with 15 captains and 9 Land Raiders.
Hell the mission and scoring requirements plus rule of 3 means most armies are a mixed force of Battleline/Troops and specialist units.

For all the issues modern 40k has, spamming Captains and Land Raiders is not one of it even if it is technically possible.

I think, for clarity, it is probably worth showing some of the FOCs from 3rd and 4th (they remained the same, as did most the missions, more-or-less). These images and descriptions are from 4th, but there isn't much in it.

This was the standard FOC as posted above, for meeting engagements:

Essentially, it represented a fairly balanced force on manouevre. The associated core missions were Cleanse (sweeping an area of opposing troops), Secure and Control (recovering important things scattered across the battlefield- equipment, wounded comrades etc.), Seek and Destroy (attrition- aiming to kill as many of the enemy as possible), Recon (essentially reconnaissance in strength probing the enemy in prep for a major attack), and Take and Hold (a vanguard trying to secure an important point prior to the arrival of the main force). The central conceit is that both sides were launching a force into no-mans-land at the same time, of roughly equal strength (a fairly rare event in war), because this makes for easy pick-up games.

The other three missions using this FOC were Rescue (both sides trying to retrieve a key something), Night Fight (basically the same as Cleanse but at night), and Patrol (two patrols encounter each other and bring in reinforcements).

Then there is the alternative charts:

The associated Battles missions were Bunker Assault (enemy unexpectedly attacks fairly quiet part of fortification line, defender reserves rush to reinforce), Hold at All Costs (similar to Bunker Assault, but no fortifications and focused on a particular objective), and Meat Grinder (attritional assault with large reserves by the attacker outnumbering the defender).

The Raid missions were Sabotage (attacker sneaks up to important thing to blow it up, defender is on guard duty), Ambush (attacker ambushes the defender travelling in a column, who then has to break through the ambush), and Strongpoint Attack (attacker sneaks up to a fortification line to take out one or more bunkers and break the line).

The Breakthrough missions were Rearguard (heavily outnumbered defender tries to hold off waves of attackers as long as possible), Blitz (prepared attack trying to break through heavy enemy fortifications), and Breakout (attacker has been trapped in a pocket and is surrounded, objective is to break out of the defenders and escape).

The main exception to this was the Wild Rider FOC used by Craftworld Eldar bike armies (themed around Saim-Hann, but not limited to them):

They used this in all circumstances because that is how they fought. This was a bit different to other "fast" variants, who got a specific army list shuffling round the options in the FOC, like Speed Freakz, White Scars, or Ravenwing.

There were other slight variations, normally on the vein of two extra troops slots (Alaitoc could take two rangers squads as troops extra) or swapping a fast attack for a heavy support and vice versa (Iron Warriors and Night Lords).

Mid-level characters were not common yet, but they usually had a work-around where either several could be taken for the same slot (Lost and the Damned Aspiring Champions), or they didn't take a FOC slot at all (like Commissars), or were models that were part of a HQ retinue (which usually took the same FOC slot as their commander) that are now separate today. Banner bearers and apothecaries are the clearest example of the latter. Worth noting there were just a lot less mid-level characters, GW realised these sell well awhile ago and really churn them out now. I suspect they are so popular in part as painting exercises for collectors as much as their utility in games.

Expansions could also add FOCs- this one was from Cities of Death in 4th edition:

It was for an Assassination mission deep behind enemy lines, where the attacker has an elite, hard-hitting force and the target commander just has a bodyguard of mainly basic infantry because they were not expecting an attack on them directly.

There were other, special missions floating around, and a Combat Patrol mission for beginners with forces of 400pts maximum (which basically had its own FOC, but there was no pretty picture of this...).

I do think the overall goal here was for heavily themed forces for a given mission, with people tailoring their force somewhat for the situation they were fighting in. Unfortunately, that requires forward planning and does not work for pick-up games, so most people just played the core missions. Plus a lot of the extra missions required specific terrain to play, which increased the upfront preparation even more. I think the concept was very sound for a group regularly playing together in campaigns and so on, but never lived up to its potential for the majority of players who only did casual games. For them it then fell more into a chore to be worked around.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Overall, I think this gets to the core of where somebody wants a given wargame to fall on the spectrum from actual military wargaming trying to approximate reality as close as possible to just going pew pew with toy soldiers.

The FOC was from an era trying to be a bit more simulationist in how forces were expected to be structured by the writers than today (and trying to be more simulationist in general to be honest, a lot more is abstracted out now). Special cases were expected to be houseruled for a given narrative if you couldn't fit them into the options above.

 Tyran wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour.

Is it?

No one is playing around with 15 captains and 9 Land Raiders.
Hell the mission and scoring requirements plus rule of 3 means most armies are a mixed force of Battleline/Troops and specialist units.

For all the issues modern 40k has, spamming Captains and Land Raiders is not one of it even if it is technically possible.

Which is more due to the units in question not being meta. If, for example, this composition would be able to table/outscore any opponent within 1-2 turns, you would see it frequently and it would be possible by the rules. Which is why I would keep balance related issues away from the core of the discussion. The pendulum can swing anytime and suddenly every Imperial army has a Knight, 32 Guardsmen and a bunch of Blood Angel Captains.

I loved the force org chart because it made me a better player.

I started in 2E and I was terrible at list building. I played Eldar and wanted all the heroes and all the fun models, so I had things like "Maugan Ra and the bare minimum 3 Dark Reapers" as one squad, "bare minimum 10 Guardians because Guardian Tax" as another, "Karandras and 4 bare minimum Striking Scorpions" as another, and war machines, etc.

It was legal based on points percentage, but it also lead to each squad being summarily deleted by concentrated Marine fire.

However, when we all switched to the new 3E and my Dark Eldar had to use a force org, I learned to make viable armies. I'm still a lousy player, but I wasn't getting tabled so badly as I was in 2E.

 a_typical_hero wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour.

Is it?

No one is playing around with 15 captains and 9 Land Raiders.
Hell the mission and scoring requirements plus rule of 3 means most armies are a mixed force of Battleline/Troops and specialist units.

For all the issues modern 40k has, spamming Captains and Land Raiders is not one of it even if it is technically possible.

Which is more due to the units in question not being meta. If, for example, this composition would be able to table/outscore any opponent within 1-2 turns, you would see it frequently and it would be possible by the rules. Which is why I would keep balance related issues away from the core of the discussion. The pendulum can swing anytime and suddenly every Imperial army has a Knight, 32 Guardsmen and a bunch of Blood Angel Captains.

'Nobody would make an army of just flying Hive Tyrants!'

 Hellebore wrote:

It's a false dichotomy. Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour. Was it perfect? No. Did I claim it was? But it provides a slightly less abstract form of game than the current free for all. And that's all we're doing, comparing the two.

As for the idea that no real army took. 2 tax squads, well no army is composed of 50 men either. Your complaint is directed at the part of the game that's true across all versions of 40k. But the fact that the core units of the army are present is the important bit.

If we're talking about fluff/theme rather than balance (I think we all agree that balance is a good thing), then I'd argue that the "core units" being present isn't actually a good thing if your army's fluff specifically calls out the idea that they make less or no use of such units. To me, unit selection is a big part of how I represent my fluff. So if I'm trying to represent Iybraesil (known for fielding lots of banshees as the core of their army), then I want to include howling banshees where other armies might normally field guardians. If I field guardians as well as banshees, it waters down this idea and makes it feel like I just happen to be fielding banshees along with guardians the same way any other craftworld might. Sometimes jazz in the units you don't take.

I am firmly of the opinion that if you are going to play a game of an IP, then you are agreeing to take the possibilities with the limitations. How those limitations are modelled is less important than that they are. And for some reason people are fine with limitations like space.marine captains can't wear crisis suits, or Orks can't put their spirits in wraithguard, but guard colonels can't just make armies out of sentinels or artillery tanks it suddenly becomes negotiable

They're all part of the same fiction. You are absolutely telling people they're playing the game wrong when you won't let them use a crisis suit commander as their marine Captain.

I know people who have taken stabs at writing fluff for renegade marines that end up working for the tau, and while they're not wraithguard, I've played against orks that have plugged wires into the brains of carnifex to ride them into battle (used deff dread stats.) So my concern if someone wanted to field a crisis suit unit with his marine army isn't primarily fluff; it's crunch. My concern would be that if you're giving every army access to every unit, you risk some serious balance issues. But if someone homebrewed their custom marine character went around piloting a battlesuit because reasons, I'd give it a look and probably be fine playing against it if the rules were reasonable and they were excited about it.


I feel like there's kind of a spectrum of how okay people are with avoiding using troops, and where they stop being okay with it is telling. Putting it in eldar terms, it might look something like:
Ulthwe - Thematically emphasizes the use of troops and HQs. Very FOC compliant.
Iyanden - Emphasizes the use of wraithguard (normally elites). Usually has a rule to bend the FOC a little to make it easier to field wraiths in place of Troops. Well-known subfaction.
Iybraesil - Emphasizes the use of howling banshees as the core of their army. A canon but relatively minor craftworld. Not as wel known as Iyanden.
Craftworld Scorpius - Made-up fan craftworld. Like Iybraesil, they too emphasize the use of an aspect warrior as the heart of their army, but they prefer to use scorpions instead of banshees.
Craftworld Prismo - Made-up craftworld. They're like Iybraesil, except instead of howling banshees, they like to use fire prisms as their basic troops. (A more serious variant of this might be someone making the case that a machine-centric subfaction like Iron Hands would field this army or that their army happens to be an armored company, etc.)
Craftworld Wraithknighticus - Made-up craftworld that just fields wraith knights and the avatar in every single skirmish.

When discussions like this have come up before, it's not uncommon for someone to tell me that Iybraesil should maybe get a special exception so it can field banshees as troops. And then when asked about Scorpius, they get a little more iffy or they start to struggle to explain why there shouldn't be an exception for scorpions the way there are for banshees. Prismo is where most people (including myself) tend to draw a pretty firm line. And in my case, I'm drawing that line for balance reasons rather than fluff reasons. Because an all-tank army would be a skew list and come with the problems of all skew lists. I'm not necessarily opposed to some sort of armored company, but I'd want the rules to somehow acknowledge that that style of army is challenging some of the implied assumptions about the game, and I'd want it to include mechanics that make that matchup more interesting for an opponent with a conventional list.

And that circles back to why I don't much care for the FOC. It doesn't do much to address the balance issues, but it does make it harder to represent certain canonical, perfectly fluffy armies. So it's failing as a balance mechanic and it's failing as a tool for representing fluff. It doesn't even really convey the idea that troops make up the bulk of a given force very well because you can take your minimum troop tax worth of units and then have those two troop squads surrounded by elitse and heavy supports and fast attacks. Rather than conveying the idea that troops make up the bulk of a force, it instead conveys this idea that every single force regardless of their goals and theme will always have a tiny number of troops hanging around somewhere. Like the aftermath of a glitterbomb that you can't quite get rid of.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
Which is more due to the units in question not being meta. If, for example, this composition would be able to table/outscore any opponent within 1-2 turns, you would see it frequently and it would be possible by the rules. Which is why I would keep balance related issues away from the core of the discussion. The pendulum can swing anytime and suddenly every Imperial army has a Knight, 32 Guardsmen and a bunch of Blood Angel Captains.

Funny thing you mention, but 8th edition still used a FOC system. The FOC system only died until 10th.

That aside, you cannot separate it from balance discussions because the FOC was often part of the balancing issues. Did a faction have overcrowded slots? Were their troops cheap or efficient to the point they weren't a tax? Did they have ways to modify the FOC?

All that and probably more I cannot even remember were balance issues from back then.

OldeSword wrote:

Da Boss wrote:Generally a dedicated transport is something that is only really good for transporting units and not much else. There's some wiggle room - both Rhinos and Razorbacks are Dedicated Transports even though the Razorback still has decent shooting ability.

I'm not well informed about League vehicles, but if you're thinking "I'd never take this without a squad to go in it" then it's a dedicated transport.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:The Saggitaur falls into that category, and in terms of application is closest to a Razorback. But, you can (or could) take two to cart about a single squad. Whereas I’ve never heard of being able to do that with Razorbacks.

That is why I asked. I see Sagitaurs as transports, since I wouldn't take them if I didn't have a unit to put in them, yet the 9e codex classified them as Fast Attack and not Dedicated Transports.

I poked at the app last night, and, in 11e, both Kapricus Carriers and Sagitaurs are under "Dedicated Transports" now instead of "Other Datasheets," so it sounds like the designers now agree with us. And, even if we don't have Elites, Fast Attack, or Heavy Support anymore, Dedicated Transports lives on.

Haighus wrote:Essentially, it represented a fairly balanced force on manouevre. The associated core missions were Cleanse (sweeping an area of opposing troops), Secure and Control (recovering important things scattered across the battlefield- equipment, wounded comrades etc.), Seek and Destroy (attrition- aiming to kill as many of the enemy as possible), Recon (essentially reconnaissance in strength probing the enemy in prep for a major attack), and Take and Hold (a vanguard trying to secure an important point prior to the arrival of the main force). The central conceit is that both sides were launching a force into no-mans-land at the same time, of roughly equal strength (a fairly rare event in war), because this makes for easy pick-up games.

<snip>

I do think the overall goal here was for heavily themed forces for a given mission, with people tailoring their force somewhat for the situation they were fighting in. Unfortunately, that requires forward planning and does not work for pick-up games, so most people just played the core missions. Plus a lot of the extra missions required specific terrain to play, which increased the upfront preparation even more. I think the concept was very sound for a group regularly playing together in campaigns and so on, but never lived up to its potential for the majority of players who only did casual games. For them it then fell more into a chore to be worked around.

Overall, I think this gets to the core of where somebody wants a given wargame to fall on the spectrum from actual military wargaming trying to approximate reality as close as possible to just going pew pew with toy soldiers.

The FOC was from an era trying to be a bit more simulationist in how forces were expected to be structured by the writers than today (and trying to be more simulationist in general to be honest, a lot more is abstracted out now). Special cases were expected to be houseruled for a given narrative if you couldn't fit them into the options above.

This whole post was super informative. Thank you.

This makes me look at the detachments in 11e in a new light. The detachments now come with Force Dispositions that sound a lot like those core missions: "Purge the Foe" instead of Cleanse or maybe Seek and Destroy, "Priority Assets" instead of Secure and Control, Reconnaissance is still Recon, Take and Hold is the same, and Disruption is new.

But now, instead of having to work out a different themed force for each mission, which as you pointed out was a real burden for people, people take their Force Disposition with them and have worked out their armies in advance. The only thing that's missing is an actual structure around which units go with each detachment. I wonder if GW is trying to encourage one. It shouldn't take too much imagination to think about how the different force dispositions would affect army structure, and the alternate FOCs you posted should help there.

KidCthulhu wrote:I loved the force org chart because it made me a better player.

I started in 2E and I was terrible at list building. I played Eldar and wanted all the heroes and all the fun models, so I had things like "Maugan Ra and the bare minimum 3 Dark Reapers" as one squad, "bare minimum 10 Guardians because Guardian Tax" as another, "Karandras and 4 bare minimum Striking Scorpions" as another, and war machines, etc.

It was legal based on points percentage, but it also lead to each squad being summarily deleted by concentrated Marine fire.

However, when we all switched to the new 3E and my Dark Eldar had to use a force org, I learned to make viable armies. I'm still a lousy player, but I wasn't getting tabled so badly as I was in 2E.

This was one of the things that prompted me to start this thread. Another user said, roughly paraphrasing, "Has anyone else noticed that the placing armies in 10e were generally balanced armies that could fit in the old FOC?" And that made me wonder what I was missing.

 Tyran wrote:

 a_typical_hero wrote:
Which is more due to the units in question not being meta. If, for example, this composition would be able to table/outscore any opponent within 1-2 turns, you would see it frequently and it would be possible by the rules. Which is why I would keep balance related issues away from the core of the discussion. The pendulum can swing anytime and suddenly every Imperial army has a Knight, 32 Guardsmen and a bunch of Blood Angel Captains.

Funny thing you mention, but 8th edition still used a FOC system. The FOC system only died until 10th.

That aside, you cannot separate it from balance discussions because the FOC was often part of the balancing issues. Did a faction have overcrowded slots? Were their troops cheap or efficient to the point they weren't a tax? Did they have ways to modify the FOC?

All that and probably more I cannot even remember were balance issues from back then.

I think it's possible to discuss how well FOCs represent fluff as a semi-distinct conversation from balance. I'd argue that regardless of how broken or not banshees as troops would be, forcing an Iybraesil player to field other troops instead of/in addition to banshees is a mark against it as a tool for fluff. Or for a less obscure comparison, the FOC gets in the way of people fielding Death Wing armies or White Scars bike spam armies. Which is why there were workarounds to facilitate those lists pretty early on.

Wyldhunt wrote:I feel like there's kind of a spectrum of how okay people are with avoiding using troops, and where they stop being okay with it is telling. Putting it in eldar terms, it might look something like:
Ulthwe - Thematically emphasizes the use of troops and HQs. Very FOC compliant.
Iyanden - Emphasizes the use of wraithguard (normally elites). Usually has a rule to bend the FOC a little to make it easier to field wraiths in place of Troops. Well-known subfaction.
Iybraesil - Emphasizes the use of howling banshees as the core of their army. A canon but relatively minor craftworld. Not as wel known as Iyanden.
Craftworld Scorpius - Made-up fan craftworld. Like Iybraesil, they too emphasize the use of an aspect warrior as the heart of their army, but they prefer to use scorpions instead of banshees.
Craftworld Prismo - Made-up craftworld. They're like Iybraesil, except instead of howling banshees, they like to use fire prisms as their basic troops. (A more serious variant of this might be someone making the case that a machine-centric subfaction like Iron Hands would field this army or that their army happens to be an armored company, etc.)
Craftworld Wraithknighticus - Made-up craftworld that just fields wraith knights and the avatar in every single skirmish.

When discussions like this have come up before, it's not uncommon for someone to tell me that Iybraesil should maybe get a special exception so it can field banshees as troops. And then when asked about Scorpius, they get a little more iffy or they start to struggle to explain why there shouldn't be an exception for scorpions the way there are for banshees. Prismo is where most people (including myself) tend to draw a pretty firm line. And in my case, I'm drawing that line for balance reasons rather than fluff reasons. Because an all-tank army would be a skew list and come with the problems of all skew lists. I'm not necessarily opposed to some sort of armored company, but I'd want the rules to somehow acknowledge that that style of army is challenging some of the implied assumptions about the game, and I'd want it to include mechanics that make that matchup more interesting for an opponent with a conventional list.

I think the distinction between those two groups - or where the line might be drawn for many people - is the difference between "I am trying to make my army represent the fluff" and "I invented some fluff to justify my ridiculous army." Like, if someone wanted to roll their own craftworld but it played like Ulthwe, I doubt that anyone would object. Scorpius is "iffy" because it's not a canonical craftworld, but its desired mechanics is so similar as those of Iybraesil that it is probably okay - unless scorpions are just innately superior to banshees or something. I'd probably let it fly because I usually see such things in other games with people who are really enthusiastic about the lore and their part of it without any sort of ill intent.

The other two feel like cheese with a paper-thin layer of "lore" wrapped around it to try and justify the cheese. It doesn't pass the sniff test. And people know it.

Wyldhunt wrote:And that circles back to why I don't much care for the FOC. It doesn't do much to address the balance issues, but it does make it harder to represent certain canonical, perfectly fluffy armies. So it's failing as a balance mechanic and it's failing as a tool for representing fluff. It doesn't even really convey the idea that troops make up the bulk of a given force very well because you can take your minimum troop tax worth of units and then have those two troop squads surrounded by elitse and heavy supports and fast attacks. Rather than conveying the idea that troops make up the bulk of a force, it instead conveys this idea that every single force regardless of their goals and theme will always have a tiny number of troops hanging around somewhere. Like the aftermath of a glitterbomb that you can't quite get rid of.

I think you've made the best case against a strict FOC. Not that my opinion matters for anything.

Personally, I am a thematic/narrative player. The thing that really got me excited about 9e and 10e was the idea of Crusade, and, when inspiration for an army strikes, it immediately comes with lore. I then try to find an army, detachment, or whatever to make those line up. So my goals are:

1. Field a fluffy or thematic army. I want my army to be my army and not the same as the next army. I like chess, but this isn't chess.
2. Ensure everyone has fun. (Why people hate fighting all bikes or all tanks or just knights in general, apparently, is of interest to me. Especially knights since I have an idea for a Freeblad Company kicking around in my notes).
3. Be competent at it. Winning isn't everything, but I don't enjoy getting obliterated.

So I would be looking for the FOC - or something like it - to serve all three points.

There is no legitimate way to reconcile the idea of forcing armies to conform to a FoC while keeping armies like Deathwing, Armored Company, Kult of Speed, Knight Titans, and Green Tide as core cannon army concepts that players are entitled to use. If these armies are unfair and make for bad play experiences then you can't allow people to play them. If they don't then the FoC is just causing people problems without justification.

This discussion always goes the same way: Person 1 says he wants to bring back the FoC to prevent cheesy skew lists. Then Person 2 says that he plays a skew list and likes it, so he opposes FoC. Then Person 1 immediately starts coming up with a bunch of special exceptions, carve-outs, alternate subfactions, or whatever that ensures Person 2 is able to take his skew list unchanged. Never once have I seen Person 1 tell Person 2 "well that's too bad, the line has to be drawn somewhere"; the new never-explicitly-defined FoC system will only ever affect The Other Guy's army, never mine. Because there will always be a loophole for whatever I want to play.

Apparently we only need the FoC to protect us from unviable joke-armies, like 20 Primaris Lieutenants. Because anything besides a joke-army will have players who want to use it, and they won't accept the FoC if it inhibits them in some way. Do I also need the Tau codex to have rules that prohibit me from running them up the table to charge bloodletters in melee? Or that prohibit them from shooting their railguns at grots and their pulse riles at the stompa? That's also stupid and unfluffy but it doesn't cause problems because it isn't effective. The game doesn't need rules that prohibit players from doing silly stuff as a joke when they don't care about winning. To claim that you only want FoC to prevent that from happening strikes me as dishonest.

Restrictions restrict people, who then feel restricted by them. That's their purpose. The FoC would exist to prevent some people from playing the army that they want to play and they would have to suck it up and possibly buy new models. Or else it would just be pointless annoying busywork, where I have to register my terminators as Deathwing in the Cayman Islands who happen to be painted blue. Which is what FoC quickly turned into in real-life, because everyone demanded a special loophole for the skew army they wanted to play.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
Never once have I seen Person 1 tell Person 2 "well that's too bad, the line has to be drawn somewhere"

Imperial/Chaos Knights shouldn't be factions in standard 40K (at least without a fundamental re-design on how suerheavies and vehicles generally work mechanically). There you go.

The rest you can play with specific HQs making different units Troops (Tank Commander makes Leman Russes Troops choices, but you have to take at least three, or something).

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
There is no legitimate way to reconcile the idea of forcing armies to conform to a FoC while keeping armies like Deathwing, Armored Company, Kult of Speed, Knight Titans, and Green Tide as core cannon army concepts that players are entitled to use. If these armies are unfair and make for bad play experiences then you can't allow people to play them. If they don't then the FoC is just causing people problems without justification.

This discussion always goes the same way: Person 1 says he wants to bring back the FoC to prevent cheesy skew lists. Then Person 2 says that he plays a skew list and likes it, so he opposes FoC. Then Person 1 immediately starts coming up with a bunch of special exceptions, carve-outs, alternate subfactions, or whatever that ensures Person 2 is able to take his skew list unchanged. Never once have I seen Person 1 tell Person 2 "well that's too bad, the line has to be drawn somewhere"; the new never-explicitly-defined FoC system will only ever affect The Other Guy's army, never mine. Because there will always be a loophole for whatever I want to play.

I'd be willing to say that. If an canonically fluffy army is oppressive and therefore Not Fun, I think it is appropriate to say, "Sorry. This game was designed for and balanced around the idea of small forces of combined arms, and all tanks/infantry/whatever overwhelms the other players' ability to respond. You can only skew your army as far as the FOC allows." At the end of the day, this is a game, and it's supposed to be fun. Oppressive armies are bad for the tournament scene, as it upsets the meta until everyone is doing the same thing, and it's bad for casual games as my friends aren't going to want me around to throw dice, drink beer, and make sound effects if my army consistently tables theirs.

This could also be a good use of the spam tax (or a related skew tax)? It sounds like a prescribed FOC for fluffy skew lists wouldn't really work as, unless there was a single canonical army that people could field, people would find ways to push the wiggle room to the max. And people want to be able to customize their armies. If, instead, you could skew the list but each unit of X type became increasingly expensive, someone could maybe bring an "oops all tanks" list but the army would be smaller than if it was a combined arms force. That wouldn't overwhelm the opponents' anti-tank quite as much, and the rest of the army would have more options to maneuver around the tanks or even overwhelm them through volume of less-than-ideal fire.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

It's a false dichotomy. Of the two designs, the FOC is closer to modelling army behaviour. Was it perfect? No. Did I claim it was? But it provides a slightly less abstract form of game than the current free for all. And that's all we're doing, comparing the two.

As for the idea that no real army took. 2 tax squads, well no army is composed of 50 men either. Your complaint is directed at the part of the game that's true across all versions of 40k. But the fact that the core units of the army are present is the important bit.

If we're talking about fluff/theme rather than balance (I think we all agree that balance is a good thing), then I'd argue that the "core units" being present isn't actually a good thing if your army's fluff specifically calls out the idea that they make less or no use of such units. To me, unit selection is a big part of how I represent my fluff. So if I'm trying to represent Iybraesil (known for fielding lots of banshees as the core of their army), then I want to include howling banshees where other armies might normally field guardians. If I field guardians as well as banshees, it waters down this idea and makes it feel like I just happen to be fielding banshees along with guardians the same way any other craftworld might. Sometimes jazz in the units you don't take.

I am firmly of the opinion that if you are going to play a game of an IP, then you are agreeing to take the possibilities with the limitations. How those limitations are modelled is less important than that they are. And for some reason people are fine with limitations like space.marine captains can't wear crisis suits, or Orks can't put their spirits in wraithguard, but guard colonels can't just make armies out of sentinels or artillery tanks it suddenly becomes negotiable

They're all part of the same fiction. You are absolutely telling people they're playing the game wrong when you won't let them use a crisis suit commander as their marine Captain.

I know people who have taken stabs at writing fluff for renegade marines that end up working for the tau, and while they're not wraithguard, I've played against orks that have plugged wires into the brains of carnifex to ride them into battle (used deff dread stats.) So my concern if someone wanted to field a crisis suit unit with his marine army isn't primarily fluff; it's crunch. My concern would be that if you're giving every army access to every unit, you risk some serious balance issues. But if someone homebrewed their custom marine character went around piloting a battlesuit because reasons, I'd give it a look and probably be fine playing against it if the rules were reasonable and they were excited about it.


I feel like there's kind of a spectrum of how okay people are with avoiding using troops, and where they stop being okay with it is telling. Putting it in eldar terms, it might look something like:
Ulthwe - Thematically emphasizes the use of troops and HQs. Very FOC compliant.
Iyanden - Emphasizes the use of wraithguard (normally elites). Usually has a rule to bend the FOC a little to make it easier to field wraiths in place of Troops. Well-known subfaction.
Iybraesil - Emphasizes the use of howling banshees as the core of their army. A canon but relatively minor craftworld. Not as wel known as Iyanden.
Craftworld Scorpius - Made-up fan craftworld. Like Iybraesil, they too emphasize the use of an aspect warrior as the heart of their army, but they prefer to use scorpions instead of banshees.
Craftworld Prismo - Made-up craftworld. They're like Iybraesil, except instead of howling banshees, they like to use fire prisms as their basic troops. (A more serious variant of this might be someone making the case that a machine-centric subfaction like Iron Hands would field this army or that their army happens to be an armored company, etc.)
Craftworld Wraithknighticus - Made-up craftworld that just fields wraith knights and the avatar in every single skirmish.

When discussions like this have come up before, it's not uncommon for someone to tell me that Iybraesil should maybe get a special exception so it can field banshees as troops. And then when asked about Scorpius, they get a little more iffy or they start to struggle to explain why there shouldn't be an exception for scorpions the way there are for banshees. Prismo is where most people (including myself) tend to draw a pretty firm line. And in my case, I'm drawing that line for balance reasons rather than fluff reasons. Because an all-tank army would be a skew list and come with the problems of all skew lists. I'm not necessarily opposed to some sort of armored company, but I'd want the rules to somehow acknowledge that that style of army is challenging some of the implied assumptions about the game, and I'd want it to include mechanics that make that matchup more interesting for an opponent with a conventional list.

And that circles back to why I don't much care for the FOC. It doesn't do much to address the balance issues, but it does make it harder to represent certain canonical, perfectly fluffy armies. So it's failing as a balance mechanic and it's failing as a tool for representing fluff. It doesn't even really convey the idea that troops make up the bulk of a given force very well because you can take your minimum troop tax worth of units and then have those two troop squads surrounded by elitse and heavy supports and fast attacks. Rather than conveying the idea that troops make up the bulk of a force, it instead conveys this idea that every single force regardless of their goals and theme will always have a tiny number of troops hanging around somewhere. Like the aftermath of a glitterbomb that you can't quite get rid of.

I want to point out that both the Iybrasil and Scorpius examples you give could be comfortably played in 3rd (the edition that added FOCs) using the Swordwind list in Codex: Craftworld Eldar (this swapped near enough all Aspects into troops, except Shining Spears and Swooping Hawks). Whilst the list was named after Biel-Tan, the codex specifically mentioned all the lists were archetypes that could be found in any Eldar craftworld.

Looking at it, the only Aspect that couldn't be used as troops in any list was Swopping Hawks, so I suppose a homebrew Craftworld specifically focusing on Swooping Hawks would require some other units to fill the Troops slot.

Wyldhunt wrote:Or alternatively, I swing in the opposite direction and think that if we're going to impose GW's vision of what a "thematic list" is onto the rules, we should really lean into it. Create a bunch of relatively specific detachments each with their own force org chart that allows more of certain thematic units and makes less thematic units harder to field en masse. Almost Boarding Action style.

I strongly support this.

Let's go back to Formations as a hypothetical. Specifically, Space Marines, because they're incredibly well documented in terms of the sorts of armies they deploy in.

We have the "standard" deployment for nearly all Space Marine strikeforces: the demi-company. This comprises of:
- A commander (nominally a Captain, the company Chaplain, one of the two Lieutenants of the company, or maybe even a Librarian or Techmarine perhaps) - this is your 1 mandatory HQ in the old FOC
- Three Battleline squads (in the pre-Indomitus era, this was just Tactical Squads - with Primaris, it becomes Intercessors, Heavy Intercessors, and Infiltrators). This is your 2 mandatory Troops in the old FOC, plus one more. Note that Scouts, even though they were Troops in pre-7th (I want to say 7th is when they moved to being Elites?), are not part of the demi-company. More on this later.
- A Close Support squad (in the pre-Indomitus era, this was Assault Squads, Bike Squads, Assault Centurions, and Attack Bikes/Land Speeders if requisitioned. With Primaris, it opens up to Assault Intercessors of both kinds, Outriders, Inceptors, Incursors, Infernus Squads, Reivers, Invaders and Storm Speeders, the latter two treated like Attack Bikes and Land Speeders respectively). This is a single Fast Attack choice in the old FOC (except, representing a common concern about how units were categorised awkwardly in the FOC, I believe that Assault Centurions were considered as Elites?)
- A Fire Support squad (Devastators and Devastator Centurions in Firstborn, now including Desolators, Eliminators, Hellblasters, Suppressors, Eradicators, Aggressors). This is a single Heavy Support choice in the old FOC (nowithstanding that Aggressors were considered Elites when they first came out? And Suppressors were Fast Attack?)

So, this is a barebones FOC, with one of the Troops, Fast Attack, and Heavy Support slots each filled. Common features of a demi-company might also include one of the Company's Dreadnoughts (usually an Elites slot), so that takes us to a mandatory FOC, with an extra unit filling every other role except HQ (unless the player took a support HQ to back up the Captain/Chaplain who normally leads the demi-company). Throw in the options for an Apothecary and Company Heroes and that's a pretty solid demi-company!

This demi-company could be augmented by individual units or formations requisitioned from across the Chapter. Say, it has "3 auxiliary slots" which can accompany it. This could range from, say:
- Reserve Company Auxiliaries (say, 1-3 Battleline/Close Support/Fire Support units, and a Lieutenant, representing a smaller-than-demi-company detachment sent from another company to provide an extra niche)
- Recon Auxiliaries (1-3 units with either the Phobos or Scouts keywords and an optional Lieutenant, representing 10th Company assets)
- Veteran Auxiliaries (1-3 Terminator Squads, Sternguard, Vanguard, or Bladeguard Veterans, and an optional Lieutenant, representing 1st Company assets)
- Armoured Support (1-3 Tanks, not including Rhinos, Razorbacks, Drop Pods, Impulsors, or Repulsors, as those could be bought as Dedicated Transports anyways for their corresponding unit - plus an optional Techmarine, this representing an armoured division being deployed in support).
- Chapter Command (a single high up HQ, something like a Chapter Master, Chief Librarian, Reclusiarch, Master of the Forge, Chief Apothecary, so on, and a retinue for them - a single Infantry (or Mounted!) unit which they *must* join, which represents their elite bodyguard. I could have suggested that they could ONLY have a bodyguard drawn from the Veteran Auxiliaries list but, eh, customisation?)

Because there's only 3 of these "auxiliary" detachments, you sort of need to nail down cohesive groupings of extra support units. BUT, if you wanted more, you could expand the core of the army into a full Battle Company, which might unlock more auxiliary detachments (by this point, this is mostly for much larger games, but you'd be able to fill out a demi-company and 3 auxiliary detachments easily by 2k anyways if you committed to them).


So far, so good!
But what if you're one of those "weird" ways that Space Marines also fight in? A Terminator teleport strikeforce? The 10th Company taking the field in force? Armies like the Blood Angels who bring jump pack troops in their battle companies, or White Scars who may sometimes bring more bikes than usual, or even just a Codex Chapter's 8th Company, deploying en masse? An Armoured Spearhead? Well, that could be arranged!
Instead of picking the demi-company to start with, you pick from a different core formation. That formation might only allow for very specific units - a 10th Company one might force 3 units of "battleline" Phobos/Scout squads, a "close support" Phobos squad, and a "fire support" Phobos squad, and only allow for Phobos HQs. A 1st Company one might force you to take 5 Veteran units (described above). And you might only get 2 auxiliary slots to augment it (and no taking auxiliary detachments which are like the core one - no Veteran Auxiliaries for a 1st Company core!) - so you need to really double down on the choices you started with!

Maybe even insert additional gameplay restrictions into those "skewed" formations - perhaps the 1st Company force loses VP from their final total if X% of their units are destroyed/battleshocked. Perhaps the 10th Company need to accomplish an additional objective, or they lose VP. Something - something to say "hey, you CAN skew into this fluffy detachment, but you need to commit to it, and it'll be made harder in some ways to win".

This is just for Space Marines. I'm sure that the same could be done for the other armies - Imperial Guard with their platoon structure, Orks following bosses in smaller splinter warbands, etc. This is the sort of stuff I liked about formations - scrap all the "if I take these units I was already taking, I get extra buffs" nonsense.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

 a_typical_hero wrote:
Which is more due to the units in question not being meta. If, for example, this composition would be able to table/outscore any opponent within 1-2 turns, you would see it frequently and it would be possible by the rules. Which is why I would keep balance related issues away from the core of the discussion. The pendulum can swing anytime and suddenly every Imperial army has a Knight, 32 Guardsmen and a bunch of Blood Angel Captains.

Funny thing you mention, but 8th edition still used a FOC system. The FOC system only died until 10th.

That aside, you cannot separate it from balance discussions because the FOC was often part of the balancing issues. Did a faction have overcrowded slots? Were their troops cheap or efficient to the point they weren't a tax? Did they have ways to modify the FOC?

All that and probably more I cannot even remember were balance issues from back then.

I think it's possible to discuss how well FOCs represent fluff as a semi-distinct conversation from balance. I'd argue that regardless of how broken or not banshees as troops would be, forcing an Iybraesil player to field other troops instead of/in addition to banshees is a mark against it as a tool for fluff. Or for a less obscure comparison, the FOC gets in the way of people fielding Death Wing armies or White Scars bike spam armies. Which is why there were workarounds to facilitate those lists pretty early on.

@Tyran
I think the FOC in 8th is a completely different beast than how it used to be from 3rd to 5th (possibly 6th, didn't play that long enough and 7th used formations most of the time) and you won't see me defending that one because of it. I don't want to talk about balance because it is a mood point.

The old FOC sucks if your faction does not have good Troops and sees those two mandatory units as tax. The modern rule of 3 sucks if an army has multiple busted units that would fall into the same classic battlefield role, as now you won't just face 3 Elite, but 3x unit A, 3x unit B and so on. Unit and mission balance happen besides both those rules for army composition.

@Wyldhunt
I think the classic FOC with liberal ways to change what consitutes as "Troops" for your chosen theme would be a good thing. That Iybraesil list could for example be represented with something like
"Aspect Focus
- <Aspect> units can be taken as Troops.
- Non-<Aspect> Troops become Elite choices."

Ideally, no themed list would be better than the default and would come with some kind of drawback.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
There is no legitimate way to reconcile the idea of forcing armies to conform to a FoC while keeping armies like Deathwing, Armored Company, Kult of Speed, Knight Titans, and Green Tide as core cannon army concepts that players are entitled to use. If these armies are unfair and make for bad play experiences then you can't allow people to play them. If they don't then the FoC is just causing people problems without justification.

This discussion always goes the same way: Person 1 says he wants to bring back the FoC to prevent cheesy skew lists. Then Person 2 says that he plays a skew list and likes it, so he opposes FoC. Then Person 1 immediately starts coming up with a bunch of special exceptions, carve-outs, alternate subfactions, or whatever that ensures Person 2 is able to take his skew list unchanged. Never once have I seen Person 1 tell Person 2 "well that's too bad, the line has to be drawn somewhere"; the new never-explicitly-defined FoC system will only ever affect The Other Guy's army, never mine. Because there will always be a loophole for whatever I want to play.

...

Knight and tank only armies don't belong into the (standard) game. No exceptions or themed lists for them. There, I said it.

I think tank only armies have some flavour, but also like, the way people portray them as aren't -that- much of a thing in the lore either?

Tanks without infantry support are vulnerable, and as mad as 40k is, even GW seems to realise that on some level, because there is a serious focus on combined arms. The biggest tank battle in Imperial history was Tallarn where they -had- to fight unsupported because the toxic environment was unsurvivable for infantry. They don't really do that otherwise.

You could compromise by letting people tank spam with specialised armies, but also factoring in how vulnerable such an unsupported formation is. Often they have done that by being unable to claim objectives, for example.

It’s basically a subjective choice, some like them some don’t. There’s no way of saying one is better than the other. I really like army design now, and we seem to less BS than we did in the past with loyal 32 or flyrant armies. Considering there is more choice and freedom now, lists seem to me more varied and fluffy than before. But that’s maybe my experience and my preference giving me a confirmation bias. But I’ve played all 11 editions of 40K and the FOC was the worst for army design no matter how they tried to tweak it or break it.

OldeSword wrote:
I'd be willing to say that. If an canonically fluffy army is oppressive and therefore Not Fun, I think it is appropriate to say, "Sorry. This game was designed for and balanced around the idea of small forces of combined arms, and all tanks/infantry/whatever overwhelms the other players' ability to respond. You can only skew your army as far as the FOC allows." At the end of the day, this is a game, and it's supposed to be fun. Oppressive armies are bad for the tournament scene, as it upsets the meta until everyone is doing the same thing, and it's bad for casual games as my friends aren't going to want me around to throw dice, drink beer, and make sound effects if my army consistently tables theirs.

I do respect that position, to be honest I wouldn't allow Knight Titans to exist as their own codex, I think that's absurd. There simply isn't enough to interact with to make the game fun, whether they're powerful or not. I would probably combine them with AdMech or something.

But what I hate is this:

 Haighus wrote:
I want to point out that both the Iybrasil and Scorpius examples you give could be comfortably played in 3rd (the edition that added FOCs) using the Swordwind list in Codex: Craftworld Eldar (this swapped near enough all Aspects into troops, except Shining Spears and Swooping Hawks). Whilst the list was named after Biel-Tan, the codex specifically mentioned all the lists were archetypes that could be found in any Eldar craftworld.

Then why is it restricted for everyone else? GW tells me that it's not unbalanced to have 9 squads of scorpions, because that's why Biel-Tan is allowed to have it. Okay I accept that. So why am I forced to call my Craftworld Scorpius army "Biel-Tan" in order to take the scorpions that my fluff says they're entitled to? Why do I have to awkwardly explain to my opponent that my purple and orange eldar models are "counts-as Biel-Tan" but are actually my own craftworld from my blog, but they need to take a bunch of scorpions and only "Biel-Tan" are allowed to do that?

If anything the system should be reversed: the FoC should only be imposed on named subfactions, while if you have a custom army you can take whatever you want (subject to game balance (but not subject to fluff)). A custom craftworld could be all scorpions, or all jetbikes, or a mix of both. Biel-Tan would (probably) not field all jetbikes. Biel-Tan is more restricted by the fluff, not less, because they're a single defined craftworld rather than any one of hundreds. The only exception would be things like unique named characters or relics, that truly don't exist outside of that subfaction.

Predefined named subfactions should be for: A) new or casual players who want a "pre-built" army and paint scheme that works well out-of-the-box B) players who really like the fluff of the subfaction and would willingly take on extra restrictions (explicit or implicit) to be faithful to it or C) players who wanted to play that exact army-type and find it more convenient to say "White Scars" than "bike-heavy space marines". There's nothing wrong with any of those but what I don't accept is imposing unnecessary, arbitrary, and unfluffy restrictions on custom armies for the sole purpose of making predefined subfactions "feel more special". That is all the FoC turned into, and that's why I'm glad it's gone.


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 Hellebore wrote:
As for the idea of a tax - that's like saying the US army has a tax on infantry units rather than just deploying tanks. That's how armies work. There are limited numbers of some units, and there are units that are the core fighting force of the army.

If there was no limitations on units existing, real armies wouldn't rely on cheap infantry. Army comp free for all is like a general saying his army is just all nukes.

When the FOC interacts with the scenarios being played it also helps outline what the kind of force would actually be involved, rather than whatever composition you came up with.

FOC was a simulation mechanic to reflect that just because you the general may only want to deploy 10 shadow swords, you the general are lucky to get 1 leman Russ to go with your 10,000 conscripts.

Frankly I think this kind of "limited resources" argument is cherry-picked to justify the FoC retroactively.

An ork waaagh has more MANs than the entire Imperium has space marines. One splinter fleet has more carnifexes. I would assume Cadia had more Kasrkins. To say nothing of the ultra-rare Grey Knights, titans, primarchs, and one-of-a-kind relics that the game is full of. Compared to a land raider full of grey knight terminators nearly anything in the game is common as hell. And concentrating a bunch of tanks into an armored company or a bunch of stompas into a dread-mob is common, again way more common than concentrating 50 space marines in one place is. In large-scale games like Epic you see a bunch of that, and you could easily zoom-in on part of an Epic game and call that a game of 40k.

Why would guard ever deploy basic guardsman if their generals could build armies out of whatever they wanted, no logistics limitations, no costs issues. No imperial guard general has the freedom to build an army as absurdly as a 40k player does, so which guard general are you actually playing then?

Ursula Creed can't get 10 Leman Russ tanks to a single battle? Or 30 scout sentinels? Ghazghkull can't surround himself with nothing but nobs? How many monoliths does the Silent King own? Those are all valid warlord options in 40k, people who command millions if not billions of soldiers with equivalent tank and artillery support.

Games of 40k represent relatively elite forces clashing over vital objectives. That's why they're battles of annihilation, that's why space marines and eldar are there at all, that's why important named characters can take to the battlefield. It isn't Necromunda or Gorkamorka or something centered around regular grunts. And it never can be because space marines are the most popular army. They would either need to be completely changed in the fluff to a common trooper or be relegated to a limited "elite slot" choice in a mostly-IG "Imperial" army. Both are a non-starter for GW, obviously.

Ultimately the Space Marine army is itself a sort of "skew" list, into "elites", that was just so ubiquitous that it went without saying. A "troop" tactical marine was always more elite than a stormtrooper or a flashgit or even a dire avenger. And Nazdreg could much more freely send 100 flashgits into a fight than any Imperial commander could send a company of Ultramarines.

Your argument is because you can conceive of some combos they are possible and should be accessible. I can conceive of a 4 cornered triangle, doesn't give it any value. Having an idea and that idea being possible are 2 separate things.

every player has their own definition of what's acceptable from the 'lore' and plenty of power gamers used the lore to justify their broken armies because it's subjective.

The FOC or something like it is the game saying that this setting and IP has a freedom within this scope, rather than letting player fiat dictate.

No other part of the game allows player fiat and this particular part of the game is one of the most heavily tied to IP where there are actual limitations.

I can make up and bs to justify an army of marine scouts carrying plasma cannons, or Gretchin with kustom forcefields and a shock attack gun each.

The ability to invent crap to justify your army is the easiest part of the conversation. Words are cheap

No my argument is that a company of only Leman Russes is in no way difficult or unrealistic for Ursula Creed to deploy.

And on an aesthetic level I also think it's perfectly fine. It looks cool on the table, it's a classic tank company like WW2. The problem is neither fluff nor aesthetics, it's the gameplay issue of having an entire army that most of the opponent's models can barely interact with.

But if you tell me there is no gameplay issue when the all-Russ army is painted green, then don't prohibit me from playing an all-Russ army painted tan. Or tell me that I can only play an all-Russ army if Sergeant Tankius from the Cadian 123rd Armored Company is leading it. That's what the 4e and 5e FoC amounted to in reality.


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How about another example: 1 ork warboss + 500 grots

Is this a cool thematic army? No, except in the sense that it's funny.

Is this something that a warboss could choose to deploy? Yes, easily.

Is this something that you would be likely to encounter in the setting? This is actually mixed, it would be strange but I can come up with scenarios where it would happen. (Deposed by a rival and given an "army" of grots as a joke while marooned, for example). Statistically you would still be more likely to encounter this than an army of custodes, which players are allowed to field freely.

Would this be overpowered? No it would suck, they would just get pushed off the objectives because they lack any killing power.

Would this be fun to play against? No, it would be an amusing novelty at first but get really annoying if played out.

Should GW write rules specifically to prevent someone from playing this army? My answer is actually no, for the same reason that GW doesn't need to right rules forcing you to ever move a unit outside of your deployment zone. The rules are for a game in which both players are trying to win, if one player is trolling the other by deliberately losing in some absurd way then that's a sportsmanship issue.

Should GW write their rules to specifically ensure that this army can be played? My answer is also no, because this is a goofy joke-army and effort isn't needed to preserve it.