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So with the new Chaos Daemons overview on the community website we have confirmation that you'll have to pay for Blue and Brimstone Horrors to appear when a Pink Horror dies, at least in Matched Play. I put a poll up top for the general idea of paying for summoned units in general, like with Tervigons and Tomb Spyders, but personally consider Pink Horrors to be in a unique category since they actually have to die to spawn the new unit, so that whole "infinite daemons" problem doesn't apply. Even though you get 2 Blue Horrors per Pink Horror, the buck stops there. You get 1 base of Brimstones per Blue Horror slain, if anything I consider it more of an infantry equivalent of wearing down a monstrous creature in Age of Sigmar (and soon to be 40k), but what do you think?

Personally, having the utility to be able to summon anything with enough points available is nice. Paying for them the full amount is... okay.

I'd be interesting to see summoning actually reduce the amount of points they cost by a small margin, 20% maybe?
While it may not seem like much (100 point unit goes to 80), I can see it giving a slight benefit to an army that relies on summoning heavily.

Of course, that would also mean the summoned unit shouldn't come with upgrades, and if anything, has the normal penalties for summoning (in AoS at least, they cannot move in the subsequent movement phase).

It's not a perfect solution, and I could see it causing problems at some point, but it makes Summoning a more attractive choice than simply having a unit on the field from the start.

It all comes down to the cost / benefit of summoning / spawning new units.

The questions that need to be answered first are:
- Odds of successfully summoning vs odds of denying the summon
- cost of the summon - including the cost of the psyker who isn't casting other spells.
- abilities of the summoned unit after being summoned - can they charge?
- what can be summoned including upgrades
- what the alternatives look like - ie Demons can deepstrike. What benifit does summoning have over this?

Depending on these answers is how much summons or spawned units should cost.

I'd say first that the Pink Horror split rule is way, way too low-level granular to be included in a 40k-scale game. To me it's the rough equivalent of giving Space Marines a weapon profile for their acid bite attack, it's a cool bit of lore that just clogs up gameplay to an unacceptable degree.

As for summoning more generally the summon points may be more flexible than normal points but you've got to get a spell off that can be dispelled, you've got to worry about the rule-of-one spellcasting attempts gibberish (no confirmation that it's going to be present in 8e yet, but I'm guessing it will be), and you've got to worry about keeping your casters alive until you use your summon points with a smaller main army starting on the table; it doesn't seem like there's really a good reason to be using them. Personally I'd restrict summoning by requiring the sacrifice of existing units (a la Sacrifice/Possession) and/or allowing a given psyker to maintain one summoned unit in existence at a time, which vanishes if they die. The summon points are a weird and inefficient answer to the problem.

They could have even used the new Command Point system, rather than have them cost points, requiring you to expend a Command Point after successfully passing a Psychic Test in order to Summon a unit.

That way in small games you can summon a small number of units (or none at all if you are using the Patrol Detachment) and it costs the opportunity to use the Command Point on other effects in response to your opponent.


With what we currently know it sounds like Summoning is going to be as dead (if not more so thanks to Deep Strike being a thing for positioning) as it currently is in Age of Sigmar.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:
They could have even used the new Command Point system, rather than have them cost points, requiring you to expend a Command Point after successfully passing a Psychic Test in order to Summon a unit.

That way in small games you can summon a small number of units (or none at all if you are using the Patrol Detachment) and it costs the opportunity to use the Command Point on other effects in response to your opponent.

That's not a bad idea!

@AnomanderRake For some units it is useful as a transport. Think about this: What if you put a CSM sorcerer in a rhino and then sped that thing across the board and started summoning in Plaguebearers? It's basically a guaranteed scatter-free deep strike across the board, at the risk of the sorcerer being gunned down, of course. You're mostly right, though.

P.S. I don't care if the Split rule is too granular, as a Chaos Daemons player I think that it's ridiculous in the best way.

Go back to the way it was in 2nd ed. regarding horrors.

First off - no brimstone horrors. That's stupid and no one needs to paint that many little puffs of smoke/fire. Just dumb and money-gouging. Secondly the reason Pink Horrors became Blue Horrors was because Pink Horrors did not have a save - as most daemons did (a 4+ invulnerable was standard across the board with only a few exceptions). The daemonic save was not available to the pink horror, so it's longevity was that it split into two blue horrors when initially slain.

Cool, fluffy, simple. It's really silly that GW manages to continually feth up gak they got right/simple previously.

I would say that rules like Split (where a unit farts out other units under certain conditions that may or may not ever happen) are a bit different from psychic summoning. That is, in turn, similar to but not exactly the same as things like Tomb Spyders or Tervigons generating units. Because they're not the same, I don't think that they should be handled in the same way.

Summoning is fine as a more flexible but more risky reserve mechanic, I think. It's a tradeoff: conventional reserves give some guarantees that you'll get your reinforcements (and hopefully more reliably than in 6/7e), but no flexibility about what those reserves consist of. Summoning gives you what you want, where and when you want it, at the risk of failing the psychic test or having the psyker die. This probably needs some tuning around the edges, but it's not bad, as mechanics go.

Unit generator units should have that capability built into their cost. A Tervigon can potentially give you unlimited gaunts over the course of a game, or it might give you three and then poop out. It's not a reliable reserve gateway. It doesn't give you a choice about what you get or when you get it - it just does its thing, and you get what you get, based on the luck of the dice. That seems like it should be handled by baking the cost of that capability into the unit's points cost, not by setting points aside: the risk of never seeing any of those points you set aside is too high, unless you change the poop-out mechanic.

Splitting? Well, that's an awfully fiddly little rule, and fiddly things are what slows the game down. However, it seems like something that should be baked into the cost: a unit of Pink Horrors can't split and give you Blue Horrors without dying. It's "free models" in some sense, but you "pay" something to use it in the form of losing your Pink Horror unit. It's also controlled by the opponent! You can't choose to explode your own unit to split it, after all. I would make Split happen on a unit-by-unit basis, though, not model-by-model - the interaction of per-model splitting and Warp Charges from Brotherhood of Psykers is why this was such a source of rage.

I think the AoS implementation (and it looks like 40K will be the same) is pretty bad. It feels like they didn't know how to balance summoning.
If you increase the cost of the summoners by a tremendous amount to account for the potential summoned units, the caster becomes an easy target (killing it early in the game would cripple the summoner's army).
If you reduce what summoning does by a lot, and transform it into a mediocre thing (what they did), you have something much easier to cost, but you end-up with something that just feels "meh".
I don't have any better idea than what they did, and nerfing summoning by a lot is probably the least of two evils, but it feels like the summoning armies (daemons, necromancers) lost a lot of their specific identity.

Edit: Can't move in the prior movement phase you wish to summon, and you must declare exactly what you wish to summon before you attempt to harness Warp charge. GSC Summons only roll a D3 on the Cult Ambush Table.

I was thinking about having summon work like the old ghost arks (or new tervigon, apothecary) where you cast summon and you can replace say 5 wounds into a unit with the daemons special rule. So you can either use that to have say 5 dead horrors come back (but you don't get extra and you can't form a new unit if an old one dies) or you get regen D3 wounds on a LoC.


Daemons get a way to keep they daemons on the mortal plane like other armies and importantly you don't get free models?

Sd.Kfz wrote:
I was thinking about having summon work like the old ghost arks (or new tervigon, apothecary) where you cast summon and you can replace say 5 wounds into a unit with the daemons special rule. So you can either use that to have say 5 dead horrors come back (but you don't get extra and you can't form a new unit if an old one dies) or you get regen D3 wounds on a LoC.


Daemons get a way to keep they daemons on the mortal plane like other armies and importantly you don't get free models?

I kinda like this idea.
I would expand on it though.

First, Daemonic Ritual should not prevent the Summoner from moving. No Shooting or Casting Psychic powers would have felt more appropriate
Second, paying points for *new* units is fine, however,
Third, it would be cool if you could simply bring lost models back to units within 6" for free.

This could work just like it does now: must have the same aligned character, you roll for PL to add to the unit and you cannot add more models that the unit started with.


For Split, I kinda hate that you have to pay for the new models. That really should be part of the model's cost. Pinks should be about 14-15ppm, Blues 6ppm and Brims 2ppm
And you could drop Ephemeral Form rule entirely, as the Split rule would be how they survive

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How about you don't pay for models set up using daemonic ritual but you can never summon a model with a higher power level than the model doing the summoning?

You could also say if there is a character within 6" of the model doing the summoning they can join in the ritual and add their power level to the summoning character to summon more powerful daemons?

A sorcerer summons a handful of lesser daemons but then a bunch of sorcerers get together and summon a bloodthirster or something. Sounds fluffy