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Heya

7th ed, love it or hate it - i'm fleshing out an idea to deal with it: point pools.

Not percentages, not 'unbound gtfo' not going all meta on your local community, simply a self selected discipline to enable blind pick up games to be Even and Mutually Fun matches since points limit and army alliance composition won't do that for us and anti-tailoring certainly won't do it for us.

So I propose point pools to better shape the engagement. FOC or no FOC, and perhaps give a little structure to pre-game interaction, again with a focus on pick ups.

Fluff justification is that not every engagement warrants Pedro Cantor, so plan your army accordingly

Method:
No single Non-HQ, Non-Vehicle/MC model may cost more than 80 points
No single non-troop unit may cost more than 250 points - including dedicated transports. Crusaders with Crusader squads are in - Assault terminators with land raiders are out. They can swap but you can't deploy in them.

200 pt HQ, Independent character and non-troop character pool, including model profile upgrades (the LR tank commander's tank and so forth do not count as war gear for these purposes)- spread around the army.
Characters that you get as part of the unit cost don't count. 'HQ Equivalent' units which don't use up a slot (honor guard, servitors) *do* count.

80pt HQ/IC/C wargear pool.
40pt limit of bought wargear per non troop model w/o other restrictions.
100pt limit of wargear OR 40 pts shared with a transport per FOC unit for non troops.

I'd suggest narrative forgery could be quite easy to justify , since this is trying to apply the same thing the FOC pretty much failed to do - a quantitative representation of many ordinary fighters against the few and extraordinary.

Critique and point revisions welcome. I was thinking maybe an additional 25% points per pool for bound armies, but not 100% convinced it's warranted.

the non troop 250 point limit factoring in dedicated transports seems exceptionally silly. Especially when you yourself point out a way in game to get around it. (IE the elite squad just ganks someone else's transport on turn 1.)

Are terminators so good that they need to have some downside other than costing a billion points per guy that dies to six lasgun wounds?

It seems like there are a lot of other problems that would come up, but I'm too tired to look for them at the moment.

I'm gonna put this one in the "manages to be clunky, confusing and arbitrary without really accomplishing anything other than cutting down on variety" pile.

Thanks for taking a sleepy look

For the terminator issue - it would prevent the specific instance of hiding in the land raider if turn one goes to the enemy, scooting forward ,disembark 6 and charge on the owner's first turn. Swap it for assault centurions, honour guard, etc if you prefer. That level of beatstick flexibility, survivability and stopping power is certainly worth losing an FOC in addition to the points invested, so for unbound another route is worth taking.

I'm using land raider as a specific example here, but it could easily apply to anything else that has access to assault vehicles as a dedicated transport. Alternatively a ranged based transport bunker would apply just the same.

I did however streamline and nudge it around it a bit after some play tests, presented in possible evaluation bands as follows:

Shaven Groomed Beard Beyond Beard Affects: 1 2 3 6 This many troop choices are exempt from all pools - attached characters however are still affected 200 250 300 500 Shared limit for HQ choices, independent characters, and character upgrades (V.Sgt, Comissars) for the whole army. Doesn’t include transports. 50 100 150 300 Shared limit for wargear and character upgrades – includes psyker level upgrades and similar. Doesn’t include transports 250 270 320 500 Max Single unit cost, including transports and all upgrades 100 120 150 300 Wargear and stat line upgrades per non HQ unit 50 70 100 200 As above, but the unit has a dedicated transport, includes transport upgrades 30 40 50 100 Limit for any modifications to the base non-hq model