a_typical_hero wrote:

I do think, however, that players should not be able to just play with whatever units/models they want to either. Armies should be subject to some kind of comp that at least tries to not break the immersion.

 Da Boss wrote:
I'll echo Haigus, it worked really well in 3e and 4e to have alternate FOCs for different missions with attackers and defenders. Instant feeling of narrative from the list planning stage, and different tactical challenges.

Back then you also just didn't have the absurd unit variety that exists now in the game, so it wasn't as overloaded with choices for the different slots. It was common to have armies that had 3 HQ choices including special retinue squads that were taken as part of the HQ, 2-3 Troops choices, and then 3-4 Fast Attack, Elites and Heavy Support choices.

I agree that later on, the Elite slot got overloaded mainly because they wanted to put Walkers in there a lot of the time rather than have them compete with full battle tanks in Heavy Support.

We did a fun map campaign back in early 4th where different territories on the map allowed for extra slots, I thought it was a lot of fun. And players playing different lists would target specific slots that were good for them - I remember wanting Fast Attack slots to fit more Warbikers into my regular Ork list because they were really good, whereas others wanted more Heavy Support.

The FOC started to strain in 5e when lots of new units started to get introduced and it essentially broke in 6e and 7e as the game continued to balloon outward. I was pretty disgusted by what the FOC became by 7e and dropped out of the game in large part due to that.

With modern 40K I feel that to have a reasonable FOC based approach you'd need to cull units from armies with really large rosters. Armies with more than 20 units would need to be consolidated down. I don't think this is impossible though - you can combine units by making loadouts options instead of being fixed, but that requires points costs for options and so on. It'd need a thoughtful redesign, which I think 3e was and then 4e was a refinement on that.

As an aside, I'm not opposed to the percentage based systems either, but I think it works better in Fantasy where "basic troops" is more of a meaningful term. The earlier and last editions of fantasy worked with percentages for characters, regiments and support. The middle editions of Fantasy had a slot based system which allowed more characters than 40K usually had, and also demanded more basic troops than in 40K. It then split units into Special and Rare, and generally you could have 4 Specials and 2 Rares at a standard game size. It allowed them to play around a bit too, small cheap units were often two for one slot, and specialist lists could move things around into different slots to create different army themes. It added a bit of an extra dimension to list building over "What is the most points efficient unit for this role, okay I am taking 3 of them" though of course this still existed to an extent.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
It's not like the replacement system to the FOC isn't/wasn't also clunky and arbitrarily restrictive.

You can take anything you want!
Except you can only have three of any particular unit (unless having a different gun arbitrarily makes it a different unit - cry more, xenos!)
Or you can only have two, depending on the points level.
And you can only have two flying units total, regardless of how good they actually are.
Or you can have six if they've been decreed to be 'battleline' (largely unrelated to how common a unit is, or how it was previously classified).
Anything can take a dedicated transport. But you have to deploy inside it, because you're not actually supposed to give anything a dedicated transport.

Haighus wrote:I really liked the FOC and thought it was best implemented in 3rd-4th edition. This is for the simple reason that GW designed missions to interact with the FOC in those editions, which both made the FOC feel more thematic and encouraged balanced armies if playing a variety of missions. There were also FOC variants for particular mission types.

Haighus wrote:I don't think culling is strictly needed if the 3rd edition approach is used. It is actually surprising how many modern units existed in some form in 3rd, only to disappear for several editions to be reintroduced later.

The reason the army lists didn't usually feel overloaded in 3rd was more due to the fact they were carefully divided up into multiple lists in the same overall faction, with overlap between lists but not full sharing of units.

vict0988 wrote:Ask your opponent nicely to bring some basic grunts for your battles and do the same yourself. Don't build skew lists, if most of your list has T11 or T3 instead of a range of Toughness, you're doing it wrong. This creates gameplay where your army has different weaknesses and strengths and regardless of what you come up against you will be weak to some things and strong against some things. People broke the old system, people break the new system, trying to invent a system is silly if you and your opponent can come to a gentlemans agreement to play a fair game of 40k.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:The Saggitaur falls into that category, and in terms of application is closest to a Razorback. But, you can (or could) take two to cart about a single squad. Whereas I’ve never heard of being able to do that with Razorbacks.

Wyldhunt wrote:The charts for army composition just... kind of forgot that 40k was usually played at 2,000 points or less. So you'd have this big chart of all these formations a "typical" in-universe army might be composed of, and then you'd realize you only had enough points to fill out like, half a core detachment and one or two optional detachments.

And point 3 is relevant, I think. Often times when people talk about wanting the army they put on the table to "feel like a real army," I think they end up basing that on their mental image of their entire force on the planet; all the random battle line guys and every bit of support behind them, all in one place. But 40k battles are (depending on who you ask) really more of a smaller-scale conflict. Or at most, a zoomed-in portion of a much wider battlefield. Sure, the Salamanders chapter isn't 90% terminators, but if you're zooming in on the portion of the battlefield where 1st company launched a teleporter assault on the enemy headquarters, you might be looking at mostly terminators with minimal other support. or if you point your camera at the skirmishes happening outside of town, you might see mostly fast attack/elite units that specialize in recon/stealth duking it out.

It's fine to want your army to have a healthy number of troops and to prefer thinking of your army as one that strives to have a bunch of basic dudes at the heart of every clump of forces. But there's a tendency among some players (not you) to think that troop spam is the one true way to assemble your 40k army because, "Well, there are way more troops than specialists!" And I feel like this view really fails to consider the question of exactly what story is being told, where the camera is focusing, etc.

mithril2098 wrote:in WHFB 8th ed, your army building did the FOC by % of the total points, with the different categories having upper limits by %. you had to have a minimum number of units for HQ's and basic troops with the basic troops having a minimum % you had to spend, but had no max number of units in any catagory so long as you didn't exceed the max % limit for their type.
(they broke the army down into lords (1 mandatory, up to 50%), heros (up to 50%), core units (3 mandatory, minimum 25%, no upper limit), special units (up to 50%), and rare units (up to 25%),

the problem WHFB had was they didn't have any upper limits on the individual unit sizes. so you could take a block of infantry and two blocks of cav to meet your minimum, and just cram 200 figures into that infantry block to create a deathstar.

honestly when WHFB 8th came out i expected a similar way of doing the FOC would be applied to 40k when 6th dropped. where the fact that 40K's units had hard limits on the number of figures you could take per unit would have allowed for more flexibility than the 3/6/3/3/3 setup but avoided the "lump everything into one huge unkillable unit" issue WHFB had. it would also have let you keep the catagories, you could just tweak the %'s to limit the cheese some.

BanjoJohn wrote:Plus, many units had 0-1 restrictions, or requirements for another unit to be taken, when it made sense. You didn't have 3 c'tan being spammed, they were 0-1. You could take 0-1 archon lord, the archon is jealous and won't fight along side other archons, you could have drachons or lesser wyches join you.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

The system just needed some thought put into how minor characters/support characters needed to be handled, and ironically space wolves had a somewhat good example to be based on that could have been used for other factions, the 3rd edition space wolf codex said you needed to take 1 hq for each 750 points in your army (i think it was 750 points), so instead of the normal 1-2 HQ total, the points for your game determined how many HQ you had to take, an approach like that for sub-characters could be a good way to start.

BanjoJohn wrote:

Here's the solution, take two FOC's in your army. For example, in 3rd edition, one FOC was one "detachment" which was part of your army, you needed one minimum detachment, but could have as many as you wanted as long as you met minimum requirements for each detachment.

GOC leading one detachment, daemon prince leading another detachment, plague drones are fast attack, plague bearers and nurglings are troops, and heralds can be/could be HQ, or Elite, or you could have them as unit upgrades (basically like veteran sergeants) for the plague bearers.

That is a good point. It raises the question of what is appropriate for that particular force / snapshot. Then again, if this battle is the headquarters assault or the reconnaissance element getting into a skirmish, why is my entire command element here in this one battle? Or maybe you just wave both questions away by saying the miniatures are a representative sample of the actual force because throwing down with an actual company of guys would take way too long.

 Hellebore wrote:
In the 3rd ed necron codex at least, the 0-1 applied to ctan in general, not to each ctan specifically. Your army could only include 1 ctan. Army, Rather than FOC. Because they hated each other and don't work together.

As for the using multiple FOC is a break or work around. That's no more true than the battle line keyword changing how the normal 0-3 units rule works.

It wasn't a work around it was built into the FOC rules in 3rd ed. The only mandatory units were 1 hq and 2 troops in an FOC. you were told to take multiple FOC if you wanted to.

As for the idea of a tax - that's like saying the US army has a tax on infantry units rather than just deploying tanks. That's how armies work. There are limited numbers of some units, and there are units that are the core fighting force of the army.

If there was no limitations on units existing, real armies wouldn't rely on cheap infantry. Army comp free for all is like a general saying his army is just all nukes.

Personally, I try to lean away from telling people they're enjoying their army's fluff wrong, at which point the goal becomes finding a way to maximize freedom of list creation while still factoring in balance.

When the FOC interacts with the scenarios being played it also helps outline what the kind of force would actually be involved, rather than whatever composition you came up with.

FOC was a simulation mechanic to reflect that just because you the general may only want to deploy 10 shadow swords, you the general are lucky to get 1 leman Russ to go with your 10,000 conscripts.

If the logistics of your faction's men and materiel are not part of the army equation, then what are you even playing?

The fact that space Marines can take 15 captains show how divorced the game is from the setting it's supposedly representing.

Why would guard ever deploy basic guardsman if their generals could build armies out of whatever they wanted, no logistics limitations, no costs issues. No imperial guard general has the freedom to build an army as absurdly as a 40k player does, so which guard general are you actually playing then?

If you are playing the game in a way that none of the leaders running your army ever could, but you can because the rules allow it, well you aren't really playing 40k at that point.

 Tyran wrote:
No real army ever has taken 2 squads of tax infantry so they can spend their rest of their points in tanks and aircraft.

Yes real armies have limitations in the numbers and compositions of what they can deploy, but the FOC never simulated that. You took your 2 infantry tax and the rest could be ups all dreadnoughts and tanks.