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Combat Patrol is fun, but basically, we are looking for a way to play those fast combat patrol missions, but use custom build armies.

My friend and I came up with the following Ideas:

> Army Limit is 500 Points
> Max. 1 HQ, Min. 1 Battleline
> You choose 2 strategems from your Index as a replacement for your combat patrol strategems (only 2 because you can choose from a much larger list)
> You choose one of the secondary mission cards from the card deck. This mission is a replacement for your combat patrol - secondary.

The question is: would this work? Also would this work if one player takes a classical combat patrol (with standard rules), while the other player takes a custom army?

Sounds fast way to break it

My main concern here would be that so few limitations will make it really easy for people to spam options that work really well in small games, and then you'd end up basically invalidating all the second-string options because the potential for a bad matchup exists. Glancing at eldar, I could cram in 3 war walkers or a couple squads of wraith guard and still have room for a battle line unit and some other nasty. Guard could take about 3 tanks and have plenty of points left over for some infantry. Or tyranids could just swarm you with 80 termagaunts and win by having more bodies than you have bullets.

Similarly, swapping in any two strats of your choice could probably get out of hand fast. Those wraithguard I mentioned could be using phantasm every round to make themselves scary fast on a small table. Or those termagaunts could endless swarm their way into hitting 100 bodies.

Also, I'm not sure having more than one HQ is actually that big a deal. If you're putting a bunch of points into leaders, you're going to run out of squads for them to actually lead (and hide in) pretty quickly. And while I can think of a few nasty tricks for characters in small games, those tricks are mostly pulled off by a single character; not as a result of characters pulling off combos. If someone really wants to throw a few phoenix lords or chaos characters across the table, I feel like it's probably fine. They'll hit hard if they reach you, but they'll die fast without protection.

To avoid the above issues with army composition and strats, consider having a specific list of units that can replace each unit in the default combat patrol. Basically, you can ensure that people don't spam units with a similar job or statline by locking those options behind the same "slot." So for instance, maybe eldar can take a war walker or some wraith guard, but only in the "slot" that would normally go to the wraith lord. Maybe they can take a vyper or some warp spiders, but only in the slot that would normally be filled by the jetbikes. Sort of like ye olde force org chart, but with fewer slots, and the slots actually reflect the role/stats/power of the units that use them rather than being a vague "vibe."

You could even go a step further and slap some tags/keywords on various alternate units like "durable" or "strong shooting." Then you could add list building limitations that prevent you from taking multiple units with the same tag to avoid skew lists. So if my eldar have "durable" option in the form of wraith guard replacing my jetbikes and a "durable" option" in the form of a wraith lord, I can't field both at the same time because that would result in too much durability in the same list. Similarly, I might not be able to take both dark reapers and swooping hawks together because their combined firepower might be considered too much. (Just as an example. Not sure if reapers look better in CP than they do in 40k.)

I'm really getting into the weeds here, but I suppose I'd probably have the max number of units with a given tag be the same as the default combat patrol. So if tau naturally have three "strong shooting" units in their default patrol, your total number of "strong shooting" units after making substitutions could not exceed three.

If I were taking on this project, I'd also probably review and tweak the alternate unit options as needed. So maybe you decide to let the guardians be replaced by swooping hawks, but only if the hawks are in a squad of 3 (or whatever). Or maybe You decide that the wraith guard special rules are a bit too gnarly and need to be removed entirely. in Combat Patrol games.



For stratagems, I'm tempted to say you could do the same thing (come up with a list of strats that won't break CP), but I feel like it would be less work and better resutls to just come up with a short list of like, 3 alternate strats designed specifically for CP that you can swap out before the battle.

Obviously all that is a lot more work than what you've proposed, but I think part of the appeal of Combat Patrol is that (most of) the patrols are somewhat well-balanced against each other. You wouldn't want to lose that by turning it into an arms race of units that weren't designed with 500 point games in mind.

Ok, so we tried a few matches using our guidelines as stated above.

First game was Orks (Beastboss + 10 BeastSnaggas, 10 regular Boys, 3 Squighog Rider, 3 Deffkoptas) vs. Tyranids (40x Meleegaunts, 10x Ranged Gaunts, +warrirors +warrior hero [cant remember, but it was something like this). No one knew which army or list the other one was bringing.

In this game Orks started with a Waaagh T1 > Meleegaunts ran into melee T1, slaughtered Boys, did nothing to the Squighogs > T1 Orks kill almost all of the gaunts > T2 the game is basically over.

We tried a second game, we tried some more extreme lists. Tyranid brought something like: Haruspex, Tyrannofex, cheap warrior hero, min gaunts squad. I used the regular dark angels combat patrol. We played 2 full turns, ended the game after that, because DA didnt have much left and killed literally nothing (gaunts + hero were camping without LOS).

Our little experiment ended there.

Basically, if you wanna play combat patrol, use combat patrols

For smaller games, you could use the boarding action rules. The rules are available for free on the Warhammer community page.
There aren't any missions, but these can be easily found or just made up on the fly.
The reduced roster has lead to really fun games.
You could also use the roster as a guide for combat patrol sized games, as the boarding action rules change some core roles which might not be desired, as well as the restrictions on terrain.