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Imperium Keyword is the most wide spread Keyword in the game, affecting hundreds of units.

Should Imperium be separated?

I have to say yes. The fact that Space Marines have multiple chapters and chapter specific units bothers me. Even the fluff states that much of the Imperium doesn't like itself.

Astra Militarum has a lot of sub-groups. You also have the Ministorum, the Inquisition, and Mechanicus which are all have their own sub-factions with their own goals.

I think there needs to be some overlap but it would be tricky to do so. Perhaps make it so in matched play, units within a detachment that has the IMPERIUM common keyword must also have a second faction keyword common.

e.g. I can include a detachment of Astartes and a Detachment of Guard but not Leman Russes in the Astartes detachment.

That being said, there has to be a way of including the small factions in with the large without too much penalty otherwise they become unusable. Assassins, Custodes and Auxiliary come to mind.

If I was running a tournament I would like to limit the scope of the keywords that you could employ in building your army, but I'm not sure how that works out in practice. If the Imperium is too big, then what about the Eldar or the Ynnari? What about Chaos?

There are too many clunky conglomerations in the game to say the Imperium is significantly more offensive than any of the others. I would prefer to just get rid of all of them, but that would require writing entire factions so it's obviously impractical as a tournament house rule.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
I think there needs to be some overlap but it would be tricky to do so. Perhaps make it so in matched play, units within a detachment that has the IMPERIUM common keyword must also have a second faction keyword common.

e.g. I can include a detachment of Astartes and a Detachment of Guard but not Leman Russes in the Astartes detachment.

That being said, there has to be a way of including the small factions in with the large without too much penalty otherwise they become unusable. Assassins, Custodes and Auxiliary come to mind.

There's no real limit to amount of Keywords a model has, Cypher and Fallen are a good example as they are in Chaos and Imperium
It would basically be the same


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Saber wrote:
If I was running a tournament I would like to limit the scope of the keywords that you could employ in building your army, but I'm not sure how that works out in practice. If the Imperium is too big, then what about the Eldar or the Ynnari? What about Chaos?

There are too many clunky conglomerations in the game to say the Imperium is significantly more offensive than any of the others. I would prefer to just get rid of all of them, but that would require writing entire factions so it's obviously impractical as a tournament house rule.

Eldar is 2 major factions and 2 minor factions
Chaos is 2 major factions and 1 minor faction

Imperium is like 8? major factions and 10? minor factions (exaggeration, but I bet the real number is fairly close)

no, no it shouldn't. chapter tactics are going to require pure detachments, and we're seeing everyone getting their ownm, taking the long view the fix is already coming.

If the game would remain as it is right now, then yes, they should be separated.

However, as we are pretty certain that Chapter Tactics will place some limits on this, and as similar rules for other factions might do that as well, I think it's a bit too early. If there are more benefits for taking a pure <Keyword> army instead of a mixed Imperium one, I don't really see the necessity.

I think it should be separated into those that see G-marines as heresy and those who do not. Who is the traitor? Hard to say.

Hell yes it should be separated. It's too big and ungainly, and it's destroying the special flavour of every army in it.

A few of the tiny faction should get absorbed for ease of use, but I don't mind humans having options. I do mind that non- humans have no such options but the community disapproves of getting more teamwork.

Feels odd that they can all intermingle so easily. An <Astartes> and <Imperium> split seems appropriate to me.

Yes. We need to go back to the pre-6th way of doing it. You have one FOC, taken from one codex, period. No allies, no mixing armies in a single detachment, you pick your faction and play that faction.

BrianDavion wrote:
no, no it shouldn't. chapter tactics are going to require pure detachments, and we're seeing everyone getting their ownm, taking the long view the fix is already coming.

I agree with this. As a starting point the 'IMPERIUM' keyword is fine, more flavour is on the way.

Yes, I think this really needs to happen. At the very least you should only get access to stuff like Chapter Tactics if your whole army has the right keyword, not just a detachment, because detachments are hardly restrictive at all. The reward for forgoing all of the options in other Imperium subfactions should be substantial to encourage players to actually do this, especially since that's probably what most of them want to do anyway.

Here's what strikes me as a major potential problem with the upcoming Marine codex, where we've been told that you access their special stratagems and Chapter Tactics just by having a pure detachment:

A pure Raven Guard list gets some nice bonuses. They get -1 to hit on a lot of stuff, which is great. It leaves them pretty vulnerable to CC and things like plasma drop squads, of course. And then they can probably pay 2 CP to infiltrate a unit. Probably this can only be used on Raven Guard units. They also have access to various other Marine stratagems, like an orbital bombardment. Presumably this is something like "nominate a unit and do mortal wounds around it". Probably a lot of these aren't going to care about keywords, or at best will require that a Marine unit be within some (fairly large) distance. These stratagems seem pretty powerful, but the Raven Guard player has to be careful with them because he probably only has 6 or 7 CP total at 2k points.

Meanwhile, a Guard player can take his normal tournament list, consisting of maybe a Brigade and a Vanguard detachment for extra drop squads and some Assassins or whatever, and tack on a cheap Marine detachment. Maybe just pay the 1 CP to take a single Raven Guard unit as an auxiliary. Maybe a nice Contemptor Mortis Dreadnought to stand behind a bunch of Guardsmen and shoot 4 BS2+ Lascannons while being hard to hit from past 12" (which is where everything has to be because of all the Guardsmen). Or maybe he takes a real detachment and includes some scary CC things. He's got 14 CP, so he doesn't have to think too hard about budgeting for these stratagems. He can drop 4 CP to infiltrate 2 scary units and then use 2 CP (or whatever) each round for three rounds on orbital bombardments, and he still has almost as much CP as the pure Marine army started with.

Basically, I worry that synergies between different subfactions make allying even more mandatory with Chapter Tactics, and also that stratagems are either going to be pretty lackluster in Marine armies or are going to be super-overpowered when used by allied Guard brigades with more than twice as much CP to spend.

 JJ wrote:
Feels odd that they can all intermingle so easily. An <Astartes> and <Imperium> split seems appropriate to me.

God forbid death watch and grey Knights work with the inquisition, aye?

 Jaxler wrote:

 JJ wrote:
Feels odd that they can all intermingle so easily. An <Astartes> and <Imperium> split seems appropriate to me.

God forbid death watch and grey Knights work with the inquisition, aye?

yeah or space marines and the imperial guard fight along side each other I mean that never happens

I think you should be able to make an army that's joint imperium but each faction needs it's own detatchment, with the exception of more minor factions like custodes, and assassins, who should have a special rule that allows them to just join to one army or another....

I like the idea of being able to play a small army without a lot of choices in tandem with units from other imperium factions to fill the gaps.

I don't like picking the best units from each codex and making a cheeseball army.

I'm not sure what the balance is between the two. Hopefully they offer some bonuses to each faction for making a "pure" detachment, with some minor exceptions (assassins, for example).

There's honestly not enough differences between Dark and Blood Angels to warrant their own codex.

Roll them up into the basic Vanilla codex, make certain options available to all Chapters, and them remove the bloat of unnecessary units (Sanguine Priests, Deathwing) but keep a couple, and then leave Space Wolves, Deathwatch, and Grey Knights as their own thing.

Also pretty sure everyone agrees Scions should never have gotten a codex for themselves.

I'm going to say yes, the Imperium keyword (and to a lesser extent the Chaos keyword) should not be a thing.

There's a reason GW got rid of the allies chart and system that existed in 6th and 7th. It broke the game. It made for insane combos that were never meant to exist and gave armies ways of plugging the holes they're designed to have (Tau getting access to psychic, SM getting access large numbers of bodies, Guard getting access to extremely durable and tanky characters/HQs, etc.). Ask players what the main problems with 6th and 7th were and you're almost guaranteed to hear "allies" in there somewhere. So GW made the right call and removed the whole thing from the game.

Except they didn't. They removed it for half the armies in the game, but left it in for the other half. Thanks to the Imperium keyword, Imperium armies still have access to allies. In fact, they have more access to it than ever before, as they don't have to worry about allied detachments or whatever, they just make an Imperium army and everything can go in the same detachment no problem! Xenos armies can't take anything but their own faction, but Imperium armies have access to half the factions in the game now. And before people try to argue "oh but humans work together in the fluff so its ok" pretty much every possible combination of factions and units has worked together in the fluff, that doesn't mean they can on the table. Blood Angels and Necrons worked together in the fluff, that can't exist on the table. Tau and Dark Eldar worked together in the fluff (for a short time), that can't happen on the table. Inquisition and Harlequins worked together in the fluff, that can't happen on the table. Fluff is propaganda meant to get you excited to play your army. It is not, and should never be, used to justify bad rules and game design. Nothing works on the table the way in works in fluff.

GW intended to remove allies from the game, they said so in the lead up to 8th and wrote the rules to reflect that. But they missed a spot here, intentionally or not. If allies are bad for the game, and 6th and 7th definitively proved that they are, then the Imperium keyword needs to go.

I don't know about "separated".

I do appreciate people's concerns that the "Imperium" keyword is too broad with how it seems to apply to detachments.

That said, I still think there should be ways to build thematic detachments that pull together units from across Imperial factions. It's fluffy and cool - when done right.

So I'm fine with that possibility remaining but being balanced differently - maybe with certain special requirements or drawbacks. The way chapter tactics seem to work in the upcoming marine 'dex looks like a step in the right direction. Guess we'll see how it goes.

At the end of the day though, I want to be able to field the auxiliary Imperial forces I'm collecting alongside my main armies. Being able to do so is the whole reason I have/want armies for factions I don't otherwise wish to invest heavily in such as Inquisitorial factions, Knight houses, the Mechanicum, etc.

Is it being broad an actual issue? Is it being abused and used to break the game like super friends was in last ed? If not then I don't think we've a problem.

Also other factions like xenos having less options than 'imperium' is fine so long as they get benefits for sharing more key words, or their key words do more and synergize more. Right new few units from larger factions seem to buff or interact with the 'imperium' tag so things seem fine IMO.

 Jaxler wrote:

 JJ wrote:
Feels odd that they can all intermingle so easily. An <Astartes> and <Imperium> split seems appropriate to me.

God forbid death watch and grey Knights work with the inquisition, aye?

You could have them have different core keywords and share a secondary smaller secondary keyword similar to how Fallen works for both Chaos and Imperium

BrianDavion wrote:
yeah or space marines and the imperial guard fight along side each other I mean that never happens

Eldar, Necron, and Tau have also fought alongside the Imperium multiple times

I guess they should also get the Imperium keyword then.

I think there needs to be ways to discourage it, which hopefully the codices will bring.

To me either the Imperium needs to be split, or the smaller factions need more answers and attention than they currently have. Imperium consists of half a dozen different kinds of marines, guard, sisters, ad mech, knights, etc... Everyone else is either on their own or at best three factions like Eldar and Chaos.

The problem is that just about any imaginable combination can be made with Imperium, any weakness in one sub faction covered by another, while the rest are simply out of luck.

Shas'O'Ceris wrote:
A few of the tiny faction should get absorbed for ease of use, but I don't mind humans having options. I do mind that non- humans have no such options but the community disapproves of getting more teamwork.

Well no, Space Marines and Astra Militarum working together is a very different thing in the lore than, say, Necrons and Tau. Frankly I think the problem is that the number of human "factions" have gone completely out of hand, the Xenos equivalent would be if the Canoptek Harvest and Destroyer Cults were their own factions separate from the main Necron stuff with over a dozen units each.

List of Major Factions in Imperium
Space Marines/Ultra Marines
Blood Angels
Dark Angels
Space Wolves
Grey Knights
Imperial Guard
Skitarii
Sisters of Battle

List of Minor Factions
Imperial Knights
Assassins
Custodes
Sisters of Silence
Death Watch
Inquisition

Am I missing anything?
Any in the wrong place?


List of Major Factions in Eldar
Eldar
Drew Carey

List of Minor Factions in Eldar
Ynnari
Harlequins


List of Major Factions in Chaos
Chaos Space Marines
Daemons

List of Minor Factions in Chaos
Chaos Knights

Yep.

9th should feature civil war in the imperium.

Each major faction should be aligned with a minor faction, and these allies can be combined in a single army through multiple detachments.

Yes, this we feth over a bunch of people who have created armies that can no longer be fielded as/is, but this is true of barkstar or taudar before.

 Talamare wrote:

 Jaxler wrote:

 JJ wrote:
Feels odd that they can all intermingle so easily. An <Astartes> and <Imperium> split seems appropriate to me.

God forbid death watch and grey Knights work with the inquisition, aye?

You could have them have different core keywords and share a secondary smaller secondary keyword similar to how Fallen works for both Chaos and Imperium

BrianDavion wrote:
yeah or space marines and the imperial guard fight along side each other I mean that never happens

Eldar, Necron, and Tau have also fought alongside the Imperium multiple times

I guess they should also get the Imperium keyword then.

Perhaps you could start by naming some of these power combinations you keep alluding exist but never naming?


I literally can't think of many game breaking combinations, certainly not ala 7th edition super friends.

BrianDavion wrote:

Perhaps you could start by naming some of these power combinations you keep alluding exist but never naming?


I literally can't think of many game breaking combinations, certainly not ala 7th edition super friends.

I'm not sure that people are complaining about power combinations. But the different Imperium subfactions have different strengths such that it's just kind of stupid not to take certain specific things from each of them, unless you're aiming at a very particular sort of spam list or one where you're planning on packing absolutely everything into the 6" around Guilliman or Azrael. I feel like many of these were obvious to everyone as soon as we saw the indices, but certainly we all know about them now that we've played a few games. Here are some that I think should be pretty uncontroversial; to the extent that most players are not taking advantage of the below, when applicable, it's because they're aiming at a very particular kind of cheese or because they don't want to feel dirty, or because they're bad:

1) Scion and Elysian command squads are completely broken. They bring fantastic anti- heavy infantry and anti-tank firepower to any Imperium list. Basically every Imperium list that isn't just Stormraven spam should include several of these. Certainly nobody should be taking lots of special weapons on tactical marines with these around.
2) Ratlings and Elysian sniper squads are by far the best snipers in the game. There is really no reason to take Space Marine Scouts with these available.
3) A unit of Conscripts is the best protection you can get for your gunline.
4) It is pretty much a no-brainer to slot Celestine and maybe a unit of Sisters into almost any Imperium army, because Acts of Faith are a fantastic force multiplier and operate at full efficiency on just those 2 units, and Celestine herself is significantly undercosted.
5) Several of the Assassins are extremely competitive choices in many lists. The Eversor and Culexus stand out as valuable inclusions in basically any Marine or Guard list. The Eversor in particular is an extremely reliable way to tie something up, and he does very well against infantry.
6) Space Marines themselves don't actually have a whole lot that everyone else wants, although their flyers outclass Guard flyers and a Guard list would have a lot of reason to take Xiphons or Contemptor Mortis Dreadnoughts if they want to shoot Lascannons at long range.

With the exception of command squads, none of these are really that bad as strong in-faction choices, although some could probably stand to be toned down. Acts of Faith add to the Sisters' identity. Guard should have lots of bodies protecting their guns. Marines should have really high-quality fire. But when you destroy all real distinctions between factions, except for some 6" auras, you destroy factions' identities. Acts of Faith are actually better for other Imperium armies that include just a couple Sisters than they are for Sisters armies. Everyone has access to cheap bodies to guard their guns. Everyone has access to ancient dreadnoughts that fire BS2+ lascannons. Obviously some of these are supposed to be showing up in other armies -- there's no other way to use Assassins. Likewise I really only want to see the occasional Knight in another army rather than lots of all-Knight armies. You've got to at least allow for these minor factions to show up somehow. But it's a problem when the clearly correct choice, other than obviously unintended things like Stormraven spam, is to play Imperial Soup. If the game is to be balanced then that has to work out to be about as good as what other factions can bring. Either Imperial Soup ends up being way overpowered or the individual subfactions like Space Marines end up being way underpowered.

Like I said, I don't think that fixing this requires saying that Marines can never be in the same army as Guard. But it does require that you give people a reason to take an army entirely from one subfaction. Detachment restrictions like Adeptus Mechanicus have don't really cut it -- detachments just aren't very limiting. They're definitely not very restrictive if it's only some of your units that need to be in pure detachments -- come the Marine codex you're still going to be able to take Celestine and command squads and Assassins in the same detachment no problem, and it's still going to be kind of stupid not to do this if you can get your Chapter Tactics and stratagems just by having your other 1 or 2 detachments be pure Marine. As well, like I said earlier I'm concerned about the potential for Marine stratagems and Tactics to actually favor mostly-Guard lists over pure Marine lists. I think most Marine players want to be playing Marine armies, and they should be meaningfully rewarded for forgoing the other Imperium options.