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I feel that the idea of the AOS/8th system of "reserving points for summons" defeats most the point of summoning in the first place. For the points involved in getting a summoner and a wildcard unit you might as well just buy two units.

"Free Points" have existed since 3rd edition (Tomb Spyders, Without Number, Tervigons, etc) and haven't broken 40k ever. In fact, Tyranids were considered one of the weakest armies in 5th despite being the only one with a summon mechanic.

However, there are those other examples, be it Flying Circuses, Biker Conclaves, etc that lead to so much summon hate. Thus, an alternate proposal/what-if discussion is as follows (based loosely on 7e rules though the idea could apply to 8th as well):

* To use a Conjuration power, you cannot move in the prior Movement Phase for any reason; summoning takes ritual concentration after all! Be it changing from swooping to gliding, embarking/disembarking a transport, etc. No having a Lord of Change fly in from reserve and drop a Screamer unit down a vulnerable flank!

* You must declare exactly what you wish to summon before harnessing Warp Charge. It's less likely to bluff/draw aggro if your foe knows exactly what you want to summon.

* You must place a marker down for models that arrive by Deep Strike before rolling to harness. Genestealer Cultists that arrive by summoning roll a D3 on the Cult Ambush table before you roll to summon.

Getting reinforcements doesn't innately break 40k (alas, poor Hellrain Brigade), but certain combos do lead to saltiness. Some tweaks would let it remain a viable tool while reducing the sodium intake.

PS: For those upset about Wrath of Magnus, units that are newly generated by Split do not generate WC for a turn, as if summoned.

I'll admit I am biased, because orks don't get free anything, anywhere, but I am 100% on board with new summoning. No more free units.

Also 100% on board with no more free vehicles or unit upgrades. Want to bring it, you pay for it. That seems fair to me.

Furthermore, I think has its place. Reserving X points for summoning, depending on what you can summon, of course, seems like it has quite a bit of tactical flexibility.

Being able to bring exactly what you need, when you need it, seems like a great option, especially in tournaments, but still isn't an unfair advantage because it's part of your army's points cost.

No, I think the flexibility of summoning whatever you need at the time is enough. You shouldn't be able to go over your point total under any circumstances.

Basically, I'm saying "summoning=attrition", especially for those armies that can't spend equivalent points on guns. Eliminate a fair few of the positional tricks that it enables and you neuter a lot of its power. There's a reason Without Number didn't mean much for Tyranids in an objective game after all or why Mech Guard mattered more in 5th than, say, Cheknov-Guard.

The way this system works, rather than, say, Fateweaver showing up and dropping a Flesh Hound unit at your doorstep, he would fly one turn, switch to gliding on the second turn, then summon on the third turn. Or he would Deep Strike in, and summon on the next turn...assuming he's not shot or assaulted before then.

PS: Meant to add a "not engaged in close combat" qualifier as well. Maintaining a portal to the Warp does require quite a bit of concentration too.

Played 2nd edition as a note, so none of what I'm saying is really new.

Why not settle with a points reduction for units that are summoned? They're never going to be on the board for a full game, but they're likely to be rather devastating unit when they do get there. And the further you do down the "I want cheaper units" rabbit hole the more likely you are to get tabled and/or not be able to summon the units onto the board. Heck, back in second you had to declare them in the list and needed to summon them to get them on the board at all as I remember.

But free units doesn't ring great with me. A tervigon can be weighed on how likely it is to produce how many termigants and it's own abilities and costed as such, just like blue horrors can be pointed so that their split forms are taken into account as a unit. Summoning either requires a mass point cost for access to the ability or just bampfs free points onto the field for whoever was lucky enough to roll it up(in 7th at least).

You will get no pity from me, and I run tyranids.

The point cost for summoning should either be paid for summoned units or built into the summoner.

There could be a small discount because these units start in reserve and if something happens to the summoner, you can't bring in the units you purchased.

If anything, you should pay points for summoned units, but they can either be brought on as regular reserves of the summoner counts as a Deep Strike drop point. That way you don't completely lose the points if the summoner gets axed before you can bring in the "summoned" units. Further, it doesn't have to be psychic power even - no action on the summoners part to throw phases out of whack. Summoned creatures show up when Deep Striking units do, and go from there.

The problem with current summoning is that it doesn't scale with game size and that the units it brings are not equally viable. But if built around, it's a very annoying strategy to play against. And it's easilly spammable with some armies like daemons and with some imperial formations. Ironically, csm are the weakest army for summoning.

As for scaling with game size, in larger games summoning just eats up a ton of warpcharges and you get a bunch of squishy units here and there and it doesn't switch the point of balance too much. But in smaller games, every summoned unit can be a sizable proportion of the total point cost.

I think that the 'pay points for summoning' is going to be good because:
1. The scale problem is completely solved.
2. You still get to choose what you want to summon.
3. It's gona be way less dangerous and reliable than it currently is. 3 wc not only eat up a lot of your pool but also cause almost guaranteed perils. If the summoning is going to be somewhere around 4+ or 5+ on 2d6, it's going to be quite reliable and way less dangerous.

So, i'd not treat point cost for summoning as a straight nerf. It's a change of mechanics. You loose the pseudo-free (you still pay for your psychers) aspect but get the reliability one with still having tactical variety.

I've killed 1000 points worth of summoned units in a 1650 point game before so that I could grab a win by 1 point.

You shouldn't get an extremely high amount of free stuff that's tailored to your enemy's list without any major draw backs. The amount of annoying cheese I've seen summoning do is crazy. I should not be playing this game going "oh boy, I know I can win, but golly gosh, it's going to be an annoying match." Also im sick of seeing burning chariots be used as a flamer psychic power that just also happens to be a chariot, which are annoying to kill.

Yeah, I think you're a bit off the mark. We don't know which armies summon and how that will work. Right now it's almost entirely psychic powers with a few exceptions (Chaos Cultists respawning, and Imperial decurion respawning). In the future, it might not be. I'd love to see Space Marines get summoning in the form of Drop Pods. You buy a pod, and can "summon" the pod in with the unit inside!

In that kind of example, you can summon without a "summoner", so you get around the "buy 2 units instead of a psyker plus a possible unit to summon" issues. Now, for a few more points, instead of getting two somewhat larger units, you get two somewhat smaller units of your choice. That'd be pretty good.

I don't think we have the info yet to really disseminate summoning.

Now that we know about how summoning actually works in AOS, and that it's both the aforementioned "move restriction" that I wrote on this proposal, and reinforcement points, I think now is a better time to discuss the implications of such rules.

Another thought I had considered, on top of the initial proposed restrictions is: You can set aside points for a summoning pool, but those points return when the summoned units get destroyed. Other things, like horror splits/etc are extremely fiddly.

Personally I disagree; I think preallocating the points is the right move as the whole balancing act is that you're trading certainty for flexibility.

Sure, you don't have the unit on the table for the entire game, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, so not worth a points reduction, because the whole point is you can pull the unit in right where you need it at full strength. If you're summoning units that need to be on the table for the entire game to be effective then you're doing it wrong. Another way of looking at it is that you're eliminating the need for transport, and the risk of being shot to pieces before getting to the target.

The only thing that needs to be clear is the strength of the summon (not necessarily what the specific unit will be), so that your opponent has some idea of whether or not to try and block it somehow.

Points cost for a summoning 'sidebar' seems fine. But all the other loops that are tacked on to daemonic ritual make it too weak.

Wounds Penalty
A mortal wound on any double is a fairly significant penalty when rolling three dice, ~42%. Maybe it should just cause a standard wound on double (which can be saved against), and D3 mortal wounds on a triple.

Movement Penalty
Daemonic ritual (summoning) may be a strong mechanic for any melee characters (khorne daemon for instance) only when they are engaged in combat or already close enough to charge that turn--where giving up a movement phase is essentially a non-factor. Otherwise giving up a turn of movement is typically too detrimental for a character that can only do damage in melee. Whereas a character such as a tzeentch herald can still use spells or ranged weapons/abilities without as much of a loss when giving up a movement phase.

It's very situational for specific characters and chaos armies as it stands. Especially when considering most units which previously had an option to deep strike now have the new 'just outside of 9" placement' rule and the ubiquitous drop pods that most marine units can take, daemonic ritual seems overly restrictive.