Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

This is the key part, although I think it does highlight the challenge with the FOC in trying to achieve two things at once- improve balance, and make lists fit lore themes better. If you have lists for each archetype, it does make the FOC worse at balancing, although maintains its function for theming by, as you say, restricting options. Whilst restricting the options can also keep the balance better, by definition some thematic lore forces like armoured companies are just going to trend towards skew and making that not become a list that either wins big or loses badly is tough.

Well put. I might be making assumptions here, but I think that what a lot of defenders of the FOC are actually defending is the notion of a system that forces an army to fit into a broad, well-rounded shape. They want a system that prevents you from fielding oops-all-tanks, encourages you to take at least a few infantry units for your bolters to point at, etc. A lot of the defenders of the FOC seem to be okay with the idea of having a million exceptions to move force org roles around and make things troops so long as it isn't anything too crazy.

And all that makes me think that maybe what they want is a system that doesn't actually restrict theme per se, but instead just promotes balance and helps make random matchups more likely to be satisfyingly close games. Which means they don't actually want the FOC. They want something that targets and prevents/disincentivizes skew. They want something that checks an army list once it's written and goes:

"Ah. I see you're spamming tanks. Let's do something about that."
"Ah. I see that less than X% of your list is T4 or less. Let's make sure your opponent's bolters have something to do."
"Ah. I see that your list contains more models than is recommended for this game size. Here are some rules to avoid turning your game into a stat check."

The FOC doesn't actually do any of that, but I get the impression that this is essentially what FOC defenders hope it will accomplish in a roundabout way.

Almost. I think it is more that some people wanted the FOC to prevent skew as you say. I'd hazard these peoplecwere generally fine with alternative methods of achieving the same. Those people are probably also the ones that didn't like skew army lists that fundamentally rearranged options within the FOC, like biker lists or armoured companies.

Whereas other people want the FOC to keep typical forces structured a bit closer to what you might expect in the lore. This applies equally to the skew lists- an armoured company should have Leman Russes as the core with limited mechanised infantry support when they are operating in their own formations. The FOC then maintains that by shifting Russes to Troops and Armoured Fist mechanised infantry to Fast Attack (well, in some versions of the list). So you can take various different themes, but the themes are still structured internally into something approaching typical.

These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but they do come into tension for themes that naturally translate into skew lists. The "balance" folk would prefer to exclude skew themes with FOC (or other mechanisms), the "theme" folk prefer to allow the skew with its own restrictions in the FOC.

I think the key is mission design, which someone mentioned above. You can build in extra mission requirements for thematic skew lists to balance them, like the Siege Objective for Siege Assault Vanguard lists in 5th edition. Regardless of the rest of the mission being played, if the Siege Assault Vanguard didn't hold the Siege Objective at the end of the game they couldn't win. That said, this does run into the other problem already mentioned in which a lot of people don't find wargaming satisfying if they can't destroy enemy units, so winning through surviving and objective management does not make for an enjoyable game for many.

I don't think it is possible to balance all of these concerns. Not everyone wants the same thing out of a wargame. I like FOCs accompanied by multiple missions that interact with the FOC in different ways and don't rely on destruction to win, and multiple themed lists per faction representing archetypes that fill the FOC in a way that makes sense for each archetype. Others do not.

While I do think mission design can be a big help (10th was actually pretty successful in making people want to take a mix of units), I'm reluctant to put too much of the burden on mission design. Partly because it's a big ask to get right in the first place, partly because it's hard to make a mission for every general sort of matchup (this seems to be sorta kinda what 11th is going for?) and partly because playing the same mission against your opponent with the limited collection every game would get dull.

The approach of missions encouraging a mix of units is what I mean. You can take skew, but it will not perform well in some missions that it cannot do effectively. If missions are selected randomly, on-the-whole people will naturally make their lists more balanced. Equally, skew lists can be given conditions to balance them in missions they might otherwise dominate. I think the funniest example of this was the 3rd edition Grey Knight rules. They had a bunch of buffs against daemons specifically, so to make it so they didn't just steamroll Chaos players the Chaos player also got buffs to their daemon units like recycling killed units of lesser daemons. Obviously if the Grey Knights were there it was a particularly massive warp rift...

I wonder if there's some confusion of terms here?
When I say "force organisation chart" I mean the general concept. But I wonder if others are using it to mean literally GW's exact implementation from prior editions?
I also think GW's previous tendency to hand out special rules undermining their FOC is a slightly separate matter, and certainly in no way inherent to the FOC.

Good catch. When I use the term "FOC," I'm generally referring to the whole 1-2 HQ, 2-6 Troop, 0-3 of other stuff setup we had for the longest time, though I sometimes use the term to refer to the idea of a series of "slots" that can/must be filled by certain types of units.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:


And all that makes me think that maybe what they want is a system that doesn't actually restrict theme per se, but instead just promotes balance and helps make random matchups more likely to be satisfyingly close games. Which means they don't actually want the FOC. They want something that targets and prevents/disincentivizes skew. They want something that checks an army list once it's written and goes:

"Ah. I see you're spamming tanks. Let's do something about that."
"Ah. I see that less than X% of your list is T4 or less. Let's make sure your opponent's bolters have something to do."
"Ah. I see that your list contains more models than is recommended for this game size. Here are some rules to avoid turning your game into a stat check."

The FOC doesn't actually do any of that, but I get the impression that this is essentially what FOC defenders hope it will accomplish in a roundabout way.

I think I'd agree with the characterisation... but what system would you propose? How would the game control what forces you bring unless it has some kind of structure about your force organisation?
A force organisation chart can absolutely do all of those things.
"You can't spam tanks, you've only got 4 tank slots", "you need to bring some infantry, there's a compulsory slot/you don't have enough tanks not to", "You can't bring that many conscript blobs, there aren't enough slots for that" -- or whatever.

A few high-concept approaches that I think would work:
A.) Largely free form unit selection, but with some sort of additional cost or downside to taking certain combinations of options. So imagine something like 10th's army building rules, but you have X% fewer points if more than Y% of your army has a toughness greater than Z. Or the "Aim for their weak spots!" rules kick in if X% of your army points is put into monsters/vehicles which gives models with low strength weapons ways to use their gear effectively against tougher targets, etc. I'm being intentionally vague here, but the idea is basically just to say that people are allowed to field more or less whatever they want, but that there's enough of a cost to doing so that everything balances out. You saw something sorta kinda like this in a tournament format that existed back in 7th where someone had essentially gone through and created a massive list of units and combinations of units that added to a score representing how powerful/meta a list was and imposed penalties if your score was too much higher than your opponent's.

B.) Basically option A, but instead of trying to balance everything out with penalties/rewards, you just straight up say that an army is only allowed to take a certain level of spice. So building a skew list adds to your spice level. Taking meta units adds to your spice level. Taking units with particularly good synergy together increases your spice level. Your list can only have up to X spice points. More than that, and it's no longer a valid list. Of course, this still isn't a perfect approach. Lists that happen to have very low spice levels are arguably at a disadvantage for not incorporating more spice, and some army themes might still not be playable under this approach. My Iybraesil list that fields banshees and not guardians could probably fit within a given spice limit. An armored company that uses leman russes instead of guardsmen might not.

C.) The "Boarding Actions Approach." Basically, have a somewhat extensive list of detachments representing various broad army themes. Then give each of those detachments their own bespoke force org chart. Some of the mandatory slots in those charts will be for units that closely fit the theme, essentially requiring you to take a certain number of "on brand" units based on your selected detachment. Other (optional) slots in those detachments let you take pretty much any unit in your codex, possibly with a few exceptions.

So the "sneaky marine" detachment might have a few mandatory slots requiring me to take either some phobos armor units (infilitrators/whatever the other option that kit builds are called) or some scouts. Then it would have a number of non-mandatory slots that could be filled by pretty much anything, but might not allow me to bring something like a dreadnought or heavy tank under the premise that such big, loud war machines would ruin whatever stealth my army was trying to employ. Or it might allow those units, but in very limited numbers. So the detachment might look something like:
1+ Sneaky characters
3-9 Sneaky units (infiltrators, reivers, eliminators, scouts, etc.)
0-2 Loud and Clumsy units (dreads, tanks, etc.)
0-5 Anything else.

This creates structure the same way people like to say the traditional FOC does (but arguably doesn't), but that structure is tailored for a specific theme. So the Saim-Hann (speedy craftworld) version of this would be able to fit plenty of jetbikes of various flavors and vypers together in the same list, but it might not let you field many (or any) wraith lords because of their slow and land-bound nature.

This is sorta kinda what the 10th edition detachment rules were going for except they attempted to bribe you into taking lots of thematic units by giving you an extra layer of buffs instead of just saying, "Hey. Your army needs to look like it fits your chosen theme."

 Wyldhunt wrote:
They want something that checks an army list once it's written and goes:

"Ah. I see you're spamming tanks. Let's do something about that."
"Ah. I see that less than X% of your list is T4 or less. Let's make sure your opponent's bolters have something to do."
"Ah. I see that your list contains more models than is recommended for this game size. Here are some rules to avoid turning your game into a stat check."

I believe there are two ideal ways to incentivize diversity and discourage skew.

The first is to give those units diverse and mutually supporting roles on the battlefield, while also implementing strong hard-counters. Skew works because you can overwhelm your opponent's ability to counter any particular threat, but if you start from the premise that three scissors should lose to one rock, it gets much harder to overwhelm the enemy's rocks by just spamming scissors. And if taking all scissors means you can't hold objectives or fight effectively in terrain, your army is functionally non-mission-capable.

If the game is set up such that you feel incentivized to take a variety of units, if you have multiple different roles you need filled, then you have natural reason to deliberately avoid skew without the rules needing to impose artificial limitations or penalties. I actually think this is one area where modern 40K has done well- you want some melee to take objectives, some anchors to hold them, some shooting to do damage early, some board presence to screen out deep strike, some fast units to block the enemy and hit their vulnerable points. It's much harder to win with Oops, All Gunline like you could in 8th and earlier.

Regardless, the second method is to move away from the listbuilding-in-a-vacuum structure to the game. If a sideboard mechanic meant that you could, when faced with all tanks, swap out all your specials and heavies for anti-tank weapons before the battle begins, that would help a lot with keeping skew from becoming overwhelming. If the designers were smart about allocating options, they could even create a game state where all those whizzbang elite/fast/heavy units have relatively little flexibility, while humble troops have the most capacity to tailor to match the threat, and that would inherently favor taking some regular dudes as a backbone to any force.

One other point of comparison, which I know I've mentioned in the past, is Dust Warfare's battle builder. Rather than determining the objectives and deployment at random, you and your opponent bid on various conditions. The more of a one-trick-pony your army is, the easier it is for your opponent to bid the conditions into something that really screws you over. So sure, you can take a static gunline and plan on shooting the enemy off the board, but it'll be trivially easy for your opponent to ensure the objective requires a lot of mobility, or that you'll be deploying very close to each other, or fighting in limited visibility.

But as always, the main question should be what problem we're trying to solve. With the homogenization of unit profiles, compression of board size, and decent mission/objective design, I don't feel 40K is in as much need of this sort of hard-correction as it used to be.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
So the "sneaky marine" detachment might have a few mandatory slots requiring me to take either some phobos armor units (infilitrators/whatever the other option that kit builds are called) or some scouts. Then it would have a number of non-mandatory slots that could be filled by pretty much anything, but might not allow me to bring something like a dreadnought or heavy tank under the premise that such big, loud war machines would ruin whatever stealth my army was trying to employ. Or it might allow those units, but in very limited numbers. So the detachment might look something like:
1+ Sneaky characters
3-9 Sneaky units (infiltrators, reivers, eliminators, scouts, etc.)
0-2 Loud and Clumsy units (dreads, tanks, etc.)
0-5 Anything else.

This is why I'm partial to the WHFB Core/Special/Rare system for thematic listbuilding, since it essentially followed that pattern. Later editions also used points percentages rather than numbers of slots, so it didn't have the issue of some factions or units being more points-dense per slot than others.

So then you just need each archetype to define which units are considered Core, Special, or Rare, maybe prohibit some units altogether or require certain characters, and off you go.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
So imagine something like 10th's army building rules, but you have X% fewer points if more than Y% of your army has a toughness greater than Z. Or the "Aim for their weak spots!" rules kick in if X% of your army points is put into monsters/vehicles...

Ages back we played around with something borrowed in part from spearhead.

After armies were revealed each player could take one upgrade per full 500 pts IIRC, only on basic troop units and only one per unit. Anti-psychic, anti-transport, anti-deepstrike, etc. It had mixed results but it did make footsloggers more attractive.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Respectfully, Hellebore, I'm having a little trouble pinning down what your position is. Earlier, it seemed like you were making the case that the FOC was good because it was "fluffy" for forcing people to take some number of troops. Now it seems like you're acknowledging that the fluff can vary wildly and shouldn't be used to justify army building rules.

So are you saying that balance rather than fluff should be the driving factor in army creation rules? If so, then that means the FOC probably wasn't a very good system, right?
Or are you saying that even though fluff (including the fluff of many canon subfactions) shouldn't be a driving factor for the army creation rules, you still want to impose a certain flavor of fluff-based restrictions that happen to force everyone to take some number of troops?
Or am I missing your point entirely?

I am saying personal headcanon can be invented at the drop of a hat for someone to justify making an army list with ridiculous things in it. I am saying 40k has a scope within set limits and your freedom is to be found inside that. The game gets to determine what that scope is, you get to determine what variations you want within that scope.

So:
40k has a scope limitation. The game creates army building design that allows you to work within that scope, but not outside it. You can't have gretchin carrying plasma cannons, you can't deploy nothing but commissars and sentinels.
Different armies work in different ways, and thus their scope is different. The game gives you that scope for that faction and your freedom is found working within it. The game is balanced alongside that. It's not a freedom to play a deathwing force with nothing but scouts in it.

The FOC rearranging units meant some things were now troops, but also some things were either missing or reduced. It wasn't just now you can take elites as troops while your friends are suckers stuck with a boring FOC. It was also 'now this unit is 0-1 or just not available, these units are heavy support causing more competition etc'. Because the army fought within a scope that was unique to it which included advantages and drawbacks. Haighus posted a bunch of examples.

If you wanted to use a unique army list, you had to take the drawbacks. And as I've said before, it wasn't perfect but at least it made 40k armies look like 40k and not magic the gathering decks in 3d.

I feel like this thread has a bit of a strawman going about what the FOC actually was and how it worked when it was introduced in 3rd ed. I notice people take the approach if GW dropped a rule then obviously it was bad and tar it, and then act like it was the second coming if they add it back in again 10 years later (not aimed at you).

Challenge also comes from limitations and the FOC provided that. How do you work within your limitations to overcome the enemy. The game still uses limitations but they are absolutely disconnected from the setting the game is set in and their only consideration is whether you have too many sets of uber rules combos on the table.

You can make a game that represents the setting more accurately and is balanced. It's not an either/or. And in the setting. no amount of big name clout lets you just magic random combinations of units together without their own CNC, or limited access, or cost restriction. That's just as much a part of the setting as whether marines should be able to punch on 3+ instead of 4+.

At this point there is plenty of lore and rules to support skew lists.

Deathwing, armoured companies, crusher stampedes, two whole Knight codexes.

If the FOC were to come back tomorrow, it would do little to limit skew, because most skew lists already have detachment support and thus are within the scope of the IP.

Maybe that would work? Everyone gets half a dozen or more FOCs to replace the current detachment system. But at the same time as many have said before I struggle to see the actual practical benefit.

Skew lists are only a problem if they don't have downsides built into them.

When they released the WD armoured company, they had special rules that helped balance fighting them.

When they first did codex daemonhunters, they allowed the opponent to take daemon units as a counter balance. You can argue whether that was good or not, but having downsides built into the list is part of the design balance.

Skew lists are only a problem when you're using a generic system not designed to deal with skew, and when the list building allows you to fill in your weaknesses with free selection of other units.

An FoC like system gives you hard downsides you can't list build your way out of. Some previous implementations have been more or less successful at that.


With the current strategem paradigm, you've actually got a built in balancing mechanic already in place - if you deliver a skew FoC, one of the downsides is a set of strategems your opponent gets acccess to that are good at taking on that list.

similarly to how cities of death, where strategems were born, created the ecosystem with the advantages of cities and then the specialist opposing abilities you could use there.

catbarf wrote: I actually think this is one area where modern 40K has done well- you want some melee to take objectives, some anchors to hold them, some shooting to do damage early, some board presence to screen out deep strike, some fast units to block the enemy and hit their vulnerable points. It's much harder to win with Oops, All Gunline like you could in 8th and earlier.

Agreed, and this is one of the things that makes the idea of returning to the classic FOC feel really undesirable to me. The FOC made me take troops that I frequently wasn't excited about. 10th edition made me excited to take troops even when I didn't technically have to.

Regardless, the second method is to move away from the listbuilding-in-a-vacuum structure to the game. If a sideboard mechanic meant that you could, when faced with all tanks, swap out all your specials and heavies for anti-tank weapons before the battle begins, that would help a lot with keeping skew from becoming overwhelming. If the designers were smart about allocating options, they could even create a game state where all those whizzbang elite/fast/heavy units have relatively little flexibility, while humble troops have the most capacity to tailor to match the threat, and that would inherently favor taking some regular dudes as a backbone to any force.

One other point of comparison, which I know I've mentioned in the past, is Dust Warfare's battle builder. Rather than determining the objectives and deployment at random, you and your opponent bid on various conditions. The more of a one-trick-pony your army is, the easier it is for your opponent to bid the conditions into something that really screws you over. So sure, you can take a static gunline and plan on shooting the enemy off the board, but it'll be trivially easy for your opponent to ensure the objective requires a lot of mobility, or that you'll be deploying very close to each other, or fighting in limited visibility.

Side boards and pre-game "strategic phases" both sound cool to me!

But as always, the main question should be what problem we're trying to solve. With the homogenization of unit profiles, compression of board size, and decent mission/objective design, I don't feel 40K is in as much need of this sort of hard-correction as it used to be.

Agreed. I'm largely coming at this thread from the position of griping about the flaws of yesteryear and enjoying discussing hypotheticals for how things could be done better.

Hellebore wrote:
I am saying personal headcanon can be invented at the drop of a hat for someone to justify making an army list with ridiculous things in it. I am saying 40k has a scope within set limits and your freedom is to be found inside that. The game gets to determine what that scope is, you get to determine what variations you want within that scope.

So:
40k has a scope limitation. The game creates army building design that allows you to work within that scope, but not outside it. You can't have gretchin carrying plasma cannons, you can't deploy nothing but commissars and sentinels.
Different armies work in different ways, and thus their scope is different. The game gives you that scope for that faction and your freedom is found working within it. The game is balanced alongside that. It's not a freedom to play a deathwing force with nothing but scouts in it.

I don't want to be reductive, but it kind of sounds like you're just pointing out that list building rules exist. Which, yes, they do/did. But I think what the rest of us are saying is that the specific of those list building rules left a lot of room for improvement. And for the reasons laid out by plenty of people earlier in this thread, the classic FOC kind of fell down both in terms of being a source of balance and in terms of representing lore-friendly armies.

The FOC rearranging units meant some things were now troops, but also some things were either missing or reduced. It wasn't just now you can take elites as troops while your friends are suckers stuck with a boring FOC. It was also 'now this unit is 0-1 or just not available, these units are heavy support causing more competition etc'. Because the army fought within a scope that was unique to it which included advantages and drawbacks. Haighus posted a bunch of examples.

Well, sort of. It depends on which edition and codex you're talking about. In some editions, the big drawback of getting to spam bike marines instead of tactical squads was that you had to field a bike character that you probably wanted to take anyway both for mechanical and thematic purposes. In some editions, you could take more of slot X at the cost of slot Y, which wasn't really a drawback if you weren't planning on using all of your Y slots to begin with.

I agree that, in theory, if a variant army (bike marines, armored company, whatever) has an innate advantage over other ways of building your army that it should probably come with some kind of trade-off. However, I think where we might be diverging is that I question whether many of the styles of army that the default FOC rendered impossible actually needed to be non-options/restricted/have drawbacks in the first place. So to use one of the examples I keep harping on, the classic FOC prevented fielding my Iybraesil list that features banshees instead of guardians. Banshees are probably better than guardians in most editions, but I'm not sure they're so much better that you necessarily need some kind of baked-in nerf to account for me not paying the troop tax.

And as I've said before, it wasn't perfect but at least it made 40k armies look like 40k and not magic the gathering decks in 3d.

I mean, I partly agree, but now you're just kind of shaming people for disagreeing with your aesthetic/fluff preferences, right? Even when people have pointed out that there's plenty of lore supporting certain types of armies that wouldn't work with the classic FOC.

Challenge also comes from limitations and the FOC provided that. How do you work within your limitations to overcome the enemy. The game still uses limitations but they are absolutely disconnected from the setting the game is set in and their only consideration is whether you have too many sets of uber rules combos on the table.

How good you are at beating opponents isn't really relevant to this discussion though, right? No one has actually been making the case that they want to be allowed to field oops-all-tanks because they want to steamroll opponents. The modern system has the issue of hypothetically letting you field 9 captains or whatever, but it also has the strength of letting Iybraesil players field their banshees without forcing them to field guardians. Neither system is perfect, but I'm struggling to see much of a case for the classic FOC. If 9 captains bug me, I can just not field 9 captains. If my opponent really likes the idea of fielding 9 captains, I'm probably not going to yuck his yum. And in the meantime, I can field my banshees without needing to field guardians.

ccs wrote:

Breton wrote:

The problem with knights is something that makes them worse not better. They have a harder time playing the mission lacking infantry to capture objectives in terrain they can't walk into. They don't have "action monkeys" either. They were designed for the earlier game - the I Kill You Before You Kill Me game, and that's no longer how its played.

You are 100% wrong about Knights not having access to infantry/action monkeys.

Imperial Knights can dip into Agents of the Imperium for cheap bodies.
And they might(?) have some detachment that grants access to some sort of infantry? (I dont recall, I dont play Imperial Knights as a faction so dont really oay attention to them)

Chaos Knights can dip into Demons.
And they most definitely DO have a detachment that allows infantry from CSM - units with the Damned KW. This one i play.

I'm the odd (chaos) Knights player in that i do play with infantry tag alongs.
And if I had to, or I felt like it, I'd dip into demons.

Everyone else? Loyalist or traitor?
They seem quite content to just spend all their points on more Knights....

Those aren't Knight units. They have access to (Something Else) that has access to Infantry. They are specifically allowed to soup as a band-aid for the problem with their own design. This doesn't negate the fact that they have a problem in their own design.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BanjoJohn wrote:

I will say that I have never seen any Troops units as "Bad" so they don't feel like a "Tax" to me.

If you have good troops they're not a tax, but rarely did armies have good troops. A TROOPS unit should be a Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none - meaning Troops should be (some level) effective against all targets. Its ok if this troops unit is shooty and that troops unit is fighty, but they should all be able to damage a tank, a swarm, and everything in between at some bare minimum level. The Elites, FA, and HS should be Master of SOME or ONE as they specialize in a role - with the rare unit being Just more expensive all-rounder-better-troops.

I want to build a list that spams Canoptek Wraiths, I take the super duper fast detachment, but oh no, I cannot take Monoliths in that detachment, except that limitation is meaningless because I wasn't trying to include Monoliths.

I want to spam Flyers, I'm not allowed to take C'tan in the Flying Circus Detachment, oh no except I wasn't trying to take C'tan in the first place.

Ditto for rules that make Monoliths/C'tan weaker in some way. Going back to 4th edition to find a skew detachment with a real downside has shown that GW have done a piss poor job of managing things. Riptide spam formations when the lore still said they were developmental, they should have been 1 per army if you really want to talk about lore coherence. Blood Angels did not have more Assault Marines than Ultramarines, oh no, I have to take a vehicle support HQ before I can spam infinite vehicles? The horror /sarcasm.

Necrons are forced to take Tomb Blades to get a magical +1 to their FNP... Because... Tomb Blades were a new kit that needed selling. Feth right off and let me decide myself whether I want Tomb Blades or Battleline units in my list, start by giving the units a fair price and fun rules and there's no reason why I wouldn't take fluffy and diverse armies. Show me dioramas with Tomb Blades and troops, put them in starter boxes, that's how minis should be sold, not with detachments that force units or worse skew on you.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Because reading the quoted portion above, my head goes to the leafblower list. It used the FOC. It was a skew list. The FOC was itself a "generic system not designed to deal with skew," and the closest thing to a "hard downside" for the leafblower was that you had to take a few dirt cheap units to unlock the rest of the FOC

Leafblower is a good example of a system not working when the different designers aren't on the same page about it.

At 2500pts it only used a dozen FOC slots and the codex had elites in troops, artillery in elite, heavy weapons in fast, and double/triple/multi-stacked units. With the earlier 3e booked you'd have likely run out of slots half way through trying to make the same list.

 catbarf wrote:

The first is to give those units diverse and mutually supporting roles on the battlefield, while also implementing strong hard-counters. Skew works because you can overwhelm your opponent's ability to counter any particular threat, but if you start from the premise that three scissors should lose to one rock, it gets much harder to overwhelm the enemy's rocks by just spamming scissors. And if taking all scissors means you can't hold objectives or fight effectively in terrain, your army is functionally non-mission-capable.

This is absolutely the ideal way of doing things. But I just don't think 40k has the bandwidth of mechanics to make it happen, Nor can it reasonably get that being a 32mm scale wargame played on a dining table in an afternoon.

Videogames do this well where you're basically required to bring multiple unit types to have any success. Common reasons are;
1. You need infantry because there are large areas of the board that tanks cannot operate in (eg woodland)
2. You need infantry because tanks are bad at spotting, so need help finding targets and avoiding threats
3. You need tanks because they bring much heavier weaponary than infantry
4. You need tanks because map sizes are so large infantry can't cover the ground sufficiently
etc

But 40k can't really use 1 because boards aren't big enough for that level of terrain diversity. It can't use 2 at all because spotting mechanics are basically impossible in a tabletop wargame without an umpire. You can't use 3 because we already have established and entrenched many infantry squads with firepower comparable or even exceeding the typical firepower of a tank. And you can't use 4 because, again, boards are too small and turn-limits too short.

Your skew detachment giving the enemy strategems would probably be the best way in keeping with the current paradigm, although you'd probably need some form of force organisation system to determine when a list is skewing to grant those!

Breton wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:

I will say that I have never seen any Troops units as "Bad" so they don't feel like a "Tax" to me.

If you have good troops they're not a tax, but rarely did armies have good troops. A TROOPS unit should be a Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none - meaning Troops should be (some level) effective against all targets. Its ok if this troops unit is shooty and that troops unit is fighty, but they should all be able to damage a tank, a swarm, and everything in between at some bare minimum level. The Elites, FA, and HS should be Master of SOME or ONE as they specialize in a role - with the rare unit being Just more expensive all-rounder-better-troops.

"Troop Tax" is often not a fixed concept but one based on perception.

It's basically a term for unwanted models based on a presupposition of how someone wants to build an army. Maybe they want and all tank force and they only take 2 units of infantry because they have too - now its a tax. Doesn't matter if those troops are good or even better than the tanks - its a tax.

Troops don't perform on paper as good as other choices - its a tax.


Keeping in mind even performance isn't a fixed concept and can vary a lot on player skill; tactics; opponent army choice and so forth.

So you might well see niche or situational units called a "tax" because they aren't "generically good"

If I remember correctly, troops were usually kept to a minimum (5 man las plas anyone?) to have more points for deadlier stuff.

Which is a different issue to discuss and tackle. Troops can be made desirable in various ways, if the game surrounding them allows it.

 a_typical_hero wrote:
If I remember correctly, troops were usually kept to a minimum (5 man las plas anyone?) to have more points for deadlier stuff.

Which is a different issue to discuss and tackle. Troops can be made desirable in various ways, if the game surrounding them allows it.

If you were doing MSU ( multiple small units), then having six 5-man tactical squads with say... a lascannon, and a razorback transport with a lascannon, then that would be a form of... min-maxing, instead of minimizaing the "tax" you pay, you maximize the lascannons per points, because lascannons were cheaper in a tactical squad than they were in devastator squads.

EDIT: OR 6 scout squads with either a missile launcher, or autocannon (scouts could have autocannons in 3rd)

 a_typical_hero wrote:
If I remember correctly, troops were usually kept to a minimum (5 man las plas anyone?) to have more points for deadlier stuff.

A mix of three reasons, not always applicable - better non-troop stuff, more benefits for more/smaller units, and some troops choices were just poor.

With las/plas there was no real benefit to having more bodies to protect the special weapons as the weapons themselves were relatively cheap and you could have twice as many with two squads - covering two objectives, two firing lanes, only one could be shot at a time and marines didn't particularly care about being above half unit strength.

That said even with expensive weapon squads like devastators they were often taken without ablative wounds. I think the effectiveness of pieplates discouraged massing up of anything that wasn't chaff or which benefitted from the numbers (like big resurrecting necron blobs)

BanjoJohn wrote:
Daemonhunters: Inquisitor stormtroopers/ grey knight squads, both good
There's no bad troops in 3rd edition, or at least, from my point of view none of them are bad

I think this may be the first time since 3rd edition was launched that I have seen DH-era power armoured grey knights called 'good' :p I mean relative to the BS3 transportless 3e battle sisters perhaps.

ccs wrote:

You are 100% wrong about Knights not having access to infantry/action monkeys.

Imperial Knights can dip into Agents of the Imperium for cheap bodies.
And they might(?) have some detachment that grants access to some sort of infantry? (I dont recall, I dont play Imperial Knights as a faction so dont really oay attention to them)

Chaos Knights can dip into Demons.
And they most definitely DO have a detachment that allows infantry from CSM - units with the Damned KW. This one i play.

I'm the odd (chaos) Knights player in that i do play with infantry tag alongs.
And if I had to, or I felt like it, I'd dip into demons.

Everyone else? Loyalist or traitor?
They seem quite content to just spend all their points on more Knights....

Part of me would love to see Agents and Daemons/Cultists rolled into a codex with their Knight counterparts. Both stand to really benefit from the other, though of them I think Daemons and Chaos Knights have the strongest individual identities that we would be in danger of losing if they were put in the same codex.

I am so surprised they haven't added Household Guard yet. They exist in canon, they're there.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Knight_Household_Guard

I wonder if GW is afraid Knight players will feel the army loses some of its character if it's no longer just big stompies?

At least as I remember it Guardians were quite bad in 3rd edition and stayed bad for the whole of Middle-Hammer. While they'd eventually get BS3+, right now they are expensive Guardsmen with a 12" range gun. Yeah you can bring 20 of them and try to melt some Space Marines. But you better roll well, because there's a very real risk of a Marine Sergeant charging you next turn, winning the combat and proceeding to run down the whole squad.

I didn't play DE in 3rd edition, but I can't remember warriors being much good. Said it before - but flashbacks to my first 3rd edition game and being told the marines functionally had a 3+ ward save. Whereas the DE didn't get a save at all against bolters. "yeah, seems balanced..."

Pretty sure Hormagaunts and Termagants were also kind of bad and in some editions losing Synapse was crippling.

Pretty sure base CSM were kind of... meh on release, and it was 3.5 edition and a bunch of extra options that made them interesting. (And even then you were probably keeping it minimal to harvest the good stuff.)

Tyel wrote:
At least as I remember it Guardians were quite bad in 3rd edition and stayed bad for the whole of Middle-Hammer. While they'd eventually get BS3+, right now they are expensive Guardsmen with a 12" range gun. Yeah you can bring 20 of them and try to melt some Space Marines. But you better roll well, because there's a very real risk of a Marine Sergeant charging you next turn, winning the combat and proceeding to run down the whole squad.

I didn't play DE in 3rd edition, but I can't remember warriors being much good. Said it before - but flashbacks to my first 3rd edition game and being told the marines functionally had a 3+ ward save. Whereas the DE didn't get a save at all against bolters. "yeah, seems balanced..."

Pretty sure Hormagaunts and Termagants were also kind of bad and in some editions losing Synapse was crippling.

Pretty sure base CSM were kind of... meh on release, and it was 3.5 edition and a bunch of extra options that made them interesting. (And even then you were probably keeping it minimal to harvest the good stuff.)

I didn't play until 5th, but my experience has been that guardians (specifically defenders) were always kind of bad until 10th. If you wanted to spam shuriken attacks, dire avengers did it better. If you wanted an MSU squad, guardians were one of the few units in the book that had to be taken in squads of 10 instead of 5. If you wanted a heavy weapon, you were paying about 100 points (varies by edition) for a single gun and then a bunch of weaker guns that would be and should be out of range and which couldn't shoot at a different target than the big gun until 8th edition. BS3+ closed the gap with avengers somewhat, but they were still the less good shuriken squad and still more expensive on the low end than other units.

10th made them desirable in the index by finally giving them a special rule that helped the rest of your army (fate dice generation on objectives) rather than trying to carve out a niche for them in terms of offense/defense. I would probably be down on them again now post-codex except that 10th made it so that guardians are the only units most of our non-phoenix lord characters can join, and it gave us the guardian battle host. So guardians have a niche as a unit that isn't baseline as good as other options but which you can turn into an expensive (but decent) death blob with lots of support shoved into it. Which feels like cheating in terms of game design, but it works.

DE warriors were pretty decent when I played them in 5th both before and after they got their 5e codex. They weren't amazing, but they essentially gave your raider a bunch of extra splinter attacks, an extra blaster attack, and maybe an extra dark lance if you felt like holding still long enough to shoot it. I don't think I ever took the raiderless version that could bring an extra lance but couldn't bring a boat.

Tyel wrote:
I didn't play DE in 3rd edition, but I can't remember warriors being much good. Said it before - but flashbacks to my first 3rd edition game and being told the marines functionally had a 3+ ward save. Whereas the DE didn't get a save at all against bolters. "yeah, seems balanced..."

3e DE were BS4 and piled high with anti-marine weaponry.

Their problem is that the better part of the FOC could run out before their points did, though not quite as rough as some of the smaller factions (i.e. GK who had one fast attack choice... which was their troops choice, but not scoring)

If you really really hated Eldar troops in 3rd edition, you could take two units of 3 Eldar Rangers (6 rangers total, 114 points total) to fill in your 2 troops in 3rd edition.
Dire avengers were 5-10
Storm guardians were 5-20
Guardian defenders were 5-20
Rangers 3-10

Granted, shuriken catapults should have been 18" for all Eldar.


For dark eldar, you can have a 10 man warriors squad with 2 dark lances (100 points total)
Or a 5 man raider squad (in a raider), 95 points before upgrades but you'll probably take a blaster (5 points) and splinter cannon (10 points) so that your dark eldar can keep firing while the raider zooms around)

Grey Knights/Daemonhunters were an odd duck, you basically had a lot of upgrades/wargear forced onto you, a justicar was 50 points, but if you look at a space marine sergeant (15 points) that is veteran (+15 points) with power sword (+15 points) and storm bolter (+5 points), you're the same points cost as a regular space marine veteran sergeant, except you gain +1 strength in combat, you are fearless, you have true grit, you have the aegis, you have the shrouding, and you have a squad of other grey knights with storm bolters going along with you instead of a squad of marines with regular bolters. Grey knight troops were really good, they just cost a lot of points.

Tyel wrote:
Pretty sure Hormagaunts and Termagants were also kind of bad and in some editions losing Synapse was crippling.

I remember how comically badly Slugga Boyz beat down Hormagaunts around 4-5e despite being the same price.

They had better stats in basically everything. The Hormagaunts were kinda faster but only really when Waaagh wasn't up.

I spammed Boyz back then and Gaunts did not have a good time, it felt blatantly unfair.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

10th made them desirable in the index by finally giving them a special rule that helped the rest of your army (fate dice generation on objectives) rather than trying to carve out a niche for them in terms of offense/defense. I would probably be down on them again now post-codex except that 10th made it so that guardians are the only units most of our non-phoenix lord characters can join, and it gave us the guardian battle host. So guardians have a niche as a unit that isn't baseline as good as other options but which you can turn into an expensive (but decent) death blob with lots of support shoved into it. Which feels like cheating in terms of game design, but it works.

Giving units something to do other than kill and not die has been very good for the game.

A.T. wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I didn't play DE in 3rd edition, but I can't remember warriors being much good. Said it before - but flashbacks to my first 3rd edition game and being told the marines functionally had a 3+ ward save. Whereas the DE didn't get a save at all against bolters. "yeah, seems balanced..."

3e DE were BS4 and piled high with anti-marine weaponry.

Their problem is that the better part of the FOC could run out before their points did, though not quite as rough as some of the smaller factions (i.e. GK who had one fast attack choice... which was their troops choice, but not scoring)

Does seem like you could tool them up with darklight. I just have no memory of it. Its possible the few people who dabbled in DE never got the metal blisters to add such weapons - and games tended to be WYSIWYG back then.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Hellebore wrote:
I am saying personal headcanon can be invented at the drop of a hat for someone to justify making an army list with ridiculous things in it. I am saying 40k has a scope within set limits and your freedom is to be found inside that. The game gets to determine what that scope is, you get to determine what variations you want within that scope.

So:
40k has a scope limitation. The game creates army building design that allows you to work within that scope, but not outside it. You can't have gretchin carrying plasma cannons, you can't deploy nothing but commissars and sentinels.
Different armies work in different ways, and thus their scope is different. The game gives you that scope for that faction and your freedom is found working within it. The game is balanced alongside that. It's not a freedom to play a deathwing force with nothing but scouts in it.

I don't want to be reductive, but it kind of sounds like you're just pointing out that list building rules exist. Which, yes, they do/did. But I think what the rest of us are saying is that the specific of those list building rules left a lot of room for improvement. And for the reasons laid out by plenty of people earlier in this thread, the classic FOC kind of fell down both in terms of being a source of balance and in terms of representing lore-friendly armies.

And as I've said, it's better than the current one in regards to lore. Which is what the comparison has been about. I have also repeatedly made it clear I am not claiming it was perfect. But the current system has 0 connection to the setting. and even 0.1% better representation is still better.

The basic statement is that the game has a setting where things work a certain way, and rules that at least attempt to model that are better than abstract rules with no grounding at all and rely entirely on combo management, is a comparatively superior system. Not perfect, not must immediately go back to, but simply better at being used in a game representing an IP.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Well, sort of. It depends on which edition and codex you're talking about. In some editions, the big drawback of getting to spam bike marines instead of tactical squads was that you had to field a bike character that you probably wanted to take anyway both for mechanical and thematic purposes. In some editions, you could take more of slot X at the cost of slot Y, which wasn't really a drawback if you weren't planning on using all of your Y slots to begin with.

I agree that, in theory, if a variant army (bike marines, armored company, whatever) has an innate advantage over other ways of building your army that it should probably come with some kind of trade-off. However, I think where we might be diverging is that I question whether many of the styles of army that the default FOC rendered impossible actually needed to be non-options/restricted/have drawbacks in the first place. So to use one of the examples I keep harping on, the classic FOC prevented fielding my Iybraesil list that features banshees instead of guardians. Banshees are probably better than guardians in most editions, but I'm not sure they're so much better that you necessarily need some kind of baked-in nerf to account for me not paying the troop tax.

But you see how you're arguing from implementation though right? It's the equivalent of saying because devestating wounds was broken, the whole gun mechanics in 40k are broken. Poor implementation of an FoC system attempting to model at least notionally the IP it is being used to play, doesn't then = FoCs are bad.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

And as I've said before, it wasn't perfect but at least it made 40k armies look like 40k and not magic the gathering decks in 3d.

I mean, I partly agree, but now you're just kind of shaming people for disagreeing with your aesthetic/fluff preferences, right? Even when people have pointed out that there's plenty of lore supporting certain types of armies that wouldn't work with the classic FOC.

Well no. Pointing out that there are facts about the 40k IP is no more shaming people for their preferences than pointing out a speed limit to someone who wants to speed. Fact's don't care about your feelings. And the 'plenty of lore supporting' argument is usually headcanon, which isn't lore. When GW has explicitly described an unusual army composition in past versions of the game, they then made an FoC to represent it. But the current unit restriction rules are not present in any 40k general's manual, nor do they reflect even a little of how armies are formed and fight.

And you're ignoring that the classic FoC allowed multiple FoCs to be taken in one army as a deliberate feature of the system and not a rules lawyery work around. But to come back to my previous point, whether the FOC was perfect or not is less important than whether it did the job of making a game that represented 40k (the setting we are playing in) better than 'only get 3 of each unit in your army' does. and to me that is a big yes.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Challenge also comes from limitations and the FOC provided that. How do you work within your limitations to overcome the enemy. The game still uses limitations but they are absolutely disconnected from the setting the game is set in and their only consideration is whether you have too many sets of uber rules combos on the table.

How good you are at beating opponents isn't really relevant to this discussion though, right? No one has actually been making the case that they want to be allowed to field oops-all-tanks because they want to steamroll opponents. The modern system has the issue of hypothetically letting you field 9 captains or whatever, but it also has the strength of letting Iybraesil players field their banshees without forcing them to field guardians. Neither system is perfect, but I'm struggling to see much of a case for the classic FOC. If 9 captains bug me, I can just not field 9 captains. If my opponent really likes the idea of fielding 9 captains, I'm probably not going to yuck his yum. And in the meantime, I can field my banshees without needing to field guardians.

Tyel wrote:

A.T. wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I didn't play DE in 3rd edition, but I can't remember warriors being much good. Said it before - but flashbacks to my first 3rd edition game and being told the marines functionally had a 3+ ward save. Whereas the DE didn't get a save at all against bolters. "yeah, seems balanced..."

3e DE were BS4 and piled high with anti-marine weaponry.

Their problem is that the better part of the FOC could run out before their points did, though not quite as rough as some of the smaller factions (i.e. GK who had one fast attack choice... which was their troops choice, but not scoring)

Does seem like you could tool them up with darklight. I just have no memory of it. Its possible the few people who dabbled in DE never got the metal blisters to add such weapons - and games tended to be WYSIWYG back then.

The bigger issue was probably just that you straight up couldn't use dark lances if you moved, and your defense depended on things like keeping the raiders moving. At least in 5th edition. Which is why I ran (and saw others run) plenty of blasters (assault), but whether or not to spend points on a dark lance was a real question.

 Hellebore wrote:

And as I've said, it's better than the current one in regards to lore. Which is what the comparison has been about. I have also repeatedly made it clear I am not claiming it was perfect. But the current system has 0 connection to the setting. and even 0.1% better representation is still better.

The basic statement is that the game has a setting where things work a certain way, and rules that at least attempt to model that are better than abstract rules with no grounding at all and rely entirely on combo management, is a comparatively superior system. Not perfect, not must immediately go back to, but simply better at being used in a game representing an IP.

But to come back to my previous point, whether the FOC was perfect or not is less important than whether it did the job of making a game that represented 40k (the setting we are playing in) better than 'only get 3 of each unit in your army' does. and to me that is a big yes.

I want to first say that I hear you, and that I hope none of the following comes off as disrespectful!

I think I just simply disagree with you on some of this. Which is fine. You obviously get something out of ye olde FOC that I just don't. To me, the FOC was annoying because the limitations it put in place not only didn't represent certain armies very well but also actively got in the way of representing some canon armies. If you wanted to play something like Deathwing, you needed a special rule to work around the problems that the FOC itself introduced. Whereas the 10th edition approach gives you more freedom to build a lot of those flavorful (often canonical) armies, and if your group wants to include troops, they're free to do so. So to me, the option that lets you build the army that matches your fluff is preferable to the option that gets in the way.

All of this is of course setting aside the issue of balance, where I still feel like the FOC got in the way more than helped, but it sounds like balance isn't really part of the point you're making.

But you see how you're arguing from implementation though right? It's the equivalent of saying because devestating wounds was broken, the whole gun mechanics in 40k are broken. Poor implementation of an FoC system attempting to model at least notionally the IP it is being used to play, doesn't then = FoCs are bad.

That's fair. As I've been saying with the Boarding Actions examples, I'm open to some form of army building rules that utilize a form of force org chart. I'm mostly arguing against the "classic" one-size-fits-all force-org approach of yester-year.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

And as I've said before, it wasn't perfect but at least it made 40k armies look like 40k and not magic the gathering decks in 3d.

I mean, I partly agree, but now you're just kind of shaming people for disagreeing with your aesthetic/fluff preferences, right? Even when people have pointed out that there's plenty of lore supporting certain types of armies that wouldn't work with the classic FOC.

Well no. Pointing out that there are facts about the 40k IP is no more shaming people for their preferences than pointing out a speed limit to someone who wants to speed. Fact's don't care about your feelings. And the 'plenty of lore supporting' argument is usually headcanon, which isn't lore. When GW has explicitly described an unusual army composition in past versions of the game, they then made an FoC to represent it. But the current unit restriction rules are not present in any 40k general's manual, nor do they reflect even a little of how armies are formed and fight.

I feel like I may be missing what you're trying to communicate. Using the Iybraesil example, I think the option to take banshees as troops was missing after whatever point the Crafworld Eldar book from 3rd edition stopped being valid. So 4th edition onward? A version of this didn't really come back until like, 7th edition when one of the Forge World(?) books gave you the option to pick an aspect warrior to act as troops in your army again. So there was a significant portion of time there where the FOC was kind of getting in the way of conveying the idea of a craftworld that uses banshees in the places that other craftworlds would instead use other troops.

Basically, there's nothing stopping a person in 10th edition from running an army that would have fit into the oldschool FOC. So while I understand that you might dislike someone running 9 captains (not that anyone is really doing that), that dislike is based more in your personal sensibilities than in any restriction from the lore or any concern about balance, right? 9 captains in a land raider sounds like the chapter master called a very unusual meeting to discuss something important, and the enemy took advantage of this opportunity to make an assassination attempt. It's certainly unusual to see 9 captains in one place, but it's not exactly impossible either. So to me, disapproving of how many captains someone takes is kind of just a less extreme version of complaining that someone has the wrong number of, idk, devastator squads in what's meant to be a gladius strike force or whatever.

And you're ignoring that the classic FoC allowed multiple FoCs to be taken in one army as a deliberate feature of the system and not a rules lawyery work around.

Oh. I thought I had acknowledged that a while back. In case I didn't, I'm happy to do so now. However, while multiple FOCs make it possible to open up additional force org slots, it still comes with the other problems related to the troop tax that I've brought up.

Sure but then what game are you playing? If you think 40k can be anything, you aren't playing 40k. That's not an opinion any more than me turning up to X WIng with B5 ships demanding I get to use Vorlons is an opinion.

The disagreement here seems to me that you have a weird quantum uncertainty around what 40k is. It has definite limitations and rules when you want it to, but then around this one particular area of the setting, it's a free for all no rules? I see 0 difference between an ethereal leading custodes as I do that an army can be 3 commissars and 10 hellhounds. Just because you can conceive of the idea, doesn't mean that idea ever appears in the setting.

And yet I also love the freedom to be super creative in my modelling and personal lore. It's just I'm happy to work within the constraints of the setting as they are provided. People who feel the need to step out of those constraints IMO are a little too ego driven for my liking. It's like turning up to a DND game with someone demanding their custom build with the most egregious Marty Stu background get to be used and take up centre stage.

It just strikes me as a real personal fiat that people are happy with being limited by the Fluff to not using culexus assassins in necron armies, not having sisters of silence with pet blood thirsters, not allowing gretchin to carry plasma cannons, but somehow the in-universe limitations that make it impossible to equip gretchin with plasma cannons don't apply when I want to equip my army with nothing but 15 captains a 9 land raiders.

I'm kind of struggling with how to address this portion because I don't want to be rude, but it kind of feels like you're strawmanning people here. I don't think anyone has been making the case that they want to be able to take datasheets regardless of faction or wargear regardless of datasheet. But the main reason that I personally would be reluctant to allow that sort of thing is because of my concerns about how it would impact gameplay and balance; not so much because of the impact on fluff.

Your other points seem to be rooted mainly in fluff and how the gameplay represents that fluff rather than a discussion of balance. So I'm hesitant to bring crunch into a fluff discussion. But the distinction here seems to be important to the point at hand. The reason I don't want a culexus (and presumably any other non-cron datasheet) to be available to a cron army is because I worry that that would break the internal balance and because (and I think we agree on this part) having certain limitations on your army creation is part of how you shape both the mechanical and narrative "feel" of your army/faction.

But based on the arguments you've made so far, it seems like it would be logically consistent to say that you don't mind the idea of a culexus hanging out with 'crons so long as you have to take a troop tax first and take Named Overlord Scarabmandius who specializes in mindshackle scarabs. Not saying that's actually what you believe, but pointing out that it would be consistent with the idea that you don't mind changing up the force org chart provided there's some hoop to jump through while simultaneously being adamant that a troop tax must be charged.

I'm trying to say that the setting limits army formations just as much as gretchin weaponry, but people are arbitrarily giving army formation a freedom they won't give gretchin. It's not a consistent approach. Either the setting has limitations and you work within them or you don't. But to come from the perspective that it does have limitations except when it's not convenient smacks of hypocrisy.

If the game was set up as using the aesthetic of 40k but not trying to represent the setting meaningfully, and your ability to build an army was solely based on what models and personal fiat you have, well that's a position but at least a consistent one. ie, if you think your army should be as freefrom to build as it currently is, you can't then intellectually also agree that gretchin can't have plasma guns. If you can do what you want to your army, it doesn't stop arbitrarily at the number or type of units you can have.

If however, it's supposed to be representing the setting of 40k, then, neither stupid army design nor gretchin plasma cannons should be allowed. Those concepts sit within the same thematic limitations - the setting doesn't allow them. Either personal preference is paramount or it's not. Anything else is one person's personal preference gets to take precedence.


are the setting's IP and limitations relevant to the game? Then you can't just do what you want. Are they not relevant to the game? Then you can do what you want. Currently you can only do what you want if you only want ip restrictions on some parts of your game, which are arbitrary. Your culexus example fits into the 'ip is un important and just their for flavour' position.


I also don't think there's a problem bringing in balance to the discussion, just so long as it's dealt with fairly. which is to say, it's falacious to start from 'you can have fluff or balance but not both'. You can make a game that does a better job of representing the setting and is balanced. Those are not mutually exclusive. The objective is not to be 100% accurate, but to be more accurate than not.

And the current army formation rules aren't more accurate at all.