Why troops are the key to making this game lore-friendly

[Ficinus]

Yeah, I'm more familiar with it as part of Fantasy as part of 5th Ed and 7th and 8th (I think 7th, I can't fully remember). Yeah, it wasn't super popular and I can get why people wouldn't like it. I still like the aesthetics of it.

[Captain_Krash]

Which is something from 7th that is vastly better and didn't need to go away. Formations. Now get rid of the silly special/broken rules associated with them. Demi companies, Necron Decurion etc.

 

Forced to take troops units to make a more balanced/fluffy game.

 

40k is 100% back to it's "Hero-Hammer" roots with multiple HQs by taking multiple detachments to be competitive/playable.

 

Krash

[Redtoof]

Formations and points allowances to force people to take certain units is a backwards step. There is already enough incentive to take troops, most armies have plenty even though it's entirely possible to make an army without troops at all. It's just some specific units (e.g. Tactical marines) that aren't worth their points cost. Easiest solution - just make them cheaper.

[Plasmablasts]

Interesting thread!

 

I’m with the OP in regarding Troops as the foundation stone of a faction. In my view, if a player chooses an army list which eschews Troops, it should be a positive choice for flavour (like an all-jump pack Blood Angels army), rather than a negative rejection of the Troops as useless or inefficient.

 

One thing I’ve picked up from browsing the fora is the apparent difficulty in balancing standard Troops and their elite/veteran versions (e.g. Guard or Space Marine Veterans, SoB Celestians and GK Paladins and Purifiers). They often compete for the same niches, so the choice comes down to cost efficiency (the elites may be priced higher to reflect their greater damage output but that may become outweighed by the reduced resilience, ie fewer bodies for your points) and access to command points, plus any additional special rules. Getting the points into a sweet-spot that makes both the Troops and their veteran counterparts attractive seems to be tricky (and maybe not even achievable...).

 

A similar problem exists for armies with more than one Troop choice. The troubles of Tactical squads are described above, and I can’t add to that, not being a Marine collector. However, Grey Knights and Astra Militarum, both justly cited as having solid Troops, also have forsaken options: Terminators and Conscripts. The fall from grace of the Conscript squad, from being a staple of the Imperial soup list to basically unviable, has been well-discussed. The GK Terminator squad suffers from jostling for the same niches as Strike Squads and Paladins, but not being points-efficient enough to compete with either.

[Claws and Effect]

The reason Scouts are more popular than Tactical squads is because the damage output is similar while the difference in durability is negligible, and Scouts can do something Tacticals can't.

 

I don't know a lot about the Troops options of other armies, but I imagine it's similar across the board.

 

I run 2 Tactical squads and a Scout squad myself, but I can see the appeal in them. I could run 3 Scout squads if I wanted to, I just generally choose not to.

[Skaorn]

Sadly, I don't think hero hammer is going away. People want to use their coolest units and often times HQs are the coolest because they often have the best stats, toys, powers, and look the best. I had an argument on another thread about going back to a hard army cap of 2 HQs max to deal with HQ spams and had people very much against it because they like their HQs and/or want to be able to use all their different HQ options. Fluff or strategy wise this doesn't make sense as why would such a small force have so many army commanders in one spot. I would not be surprised to see an army list that tries to fit as many UM SCs as possible anymore.

[Lexington]

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure that Troop-heavy armies are necessarily any more "lore-friendly" than an army that's more specialized. After all, specialist missions require specialist forces, and for all the upscaling with Knights and Stompas and IG super-heavies, 40K is still essentially a skirmish game that rarely adds up to more than a hundred or so models on either side. That's what specialist troops are for!

 

Also...well, 40K is just bad at representing war. It's bad at representing war even within the weirdness of the 40K setting. That's not really a knock on the game or the universe or the models or anything. It's a game whose basic scale makes almost no sense whatsoever - you have close-work units fighting a couple hundred feet from artillery, and air support that acts like a bunch of weaponized weather balloons. Even beyond that, the setups are just ridiculous - two "balanced" armies charging at each other, willy-nilly, across a tiny strip of no-man's land just isn't even a vaguely realistic idea of futuristic warfare, even in the baroque barbarism of 40K's future. It's silly. And that's fine. It's a game that makes vague gestures at representing warfare in a fun universe we all like. That's all it needs to be.

[Kinstryfe]

I think there's also a distinction to be made between Troops the detachment slot and Troops in a conventional sense. Tactical Marines make up less than half a chapter, and sure are the most common Marine in a codex chapter, but aren't really in any way common in the setting. Ork boys, on the other hand, get together in hundreds or thousands to waaaagh. If the game were designed to reflect this, Codex: Space Marines would have no Troops choices. Tactical Marines would be an Elites choice equipped with Bolters, Bolt Pistols, and Chainswords, who wouldn't suffer any penalties to moving and shooting weapons, to reflect that they've graduated thru assault and devastator training. They would be good at everything, and a solid core to any army. But they would still be elite, and Space Marines would use completely different Detachments to represent their army. But, the game is based on having a common equivalency system, where a Tactical Squad, a mob of Genestealer cultists, and Custodes are all equal in the eyes of army composition. So in elite armies, the troops are underpowered to justify having an Elites section of the codex. In armies like Orks or Militarum where the basic troop is supposed to be very weak, it seems like they're represented ok but the elite units seem to suffer to make the troops seem more viable.

 

In other words, you can't fix the system without changing the system from a relative comparison of units to an absolute comparison of units.

[ERJAK]

There used to be percentage of points requirements for tournaments in the 3rd Edition days, referred to as composition requirements or just comp for short. You still had to hit the minimum number of Troop slots for the old FOC, but youbalso had to have o think 25% of the army by points in Troops (and a max of 25% by points of HQ to prevent hero-hammer).

 

And while it worked reasonably well as a balancing mechanic, it was pretty intensely unpopular especially with those armies whose Troops are cheap on points because it meant a higher model count than a lot of folks wanted when it came to units like IG platoons and Eldar Guardians.

This is compounded by the simple fact that some army's troops are just way better than others.

 

Do you think alpha legion infinite cultists lists care about mandatory troop taxes anywhere near as much as armies like Custodes, admech, tau,space marines or eldar?

[ERJAK]

Sadly, I don't think hero hammer is going away. People want to use their coolest units and often times HQs are the coolest because they often have the best stats, toys, powers, and look the best. I had an argument on another thread about going back to a hard army cap of 2 HQs max to deal with HQ spams and had people very much against it because they like their HQs and/or want to be able to use all their different HQ options. Fluff or strategy wise this doesn't make sense as why would such a small force have so many army commanders in one spot. I would not be surprised to see an army list that tries to fit as many UM SCs as possible anymore.

Also the part where the game is built around having at least 3 hqs and some armies just cease to work with that extreme of a handicap.

[Res Ipsa Loquitur]

Wasn't that just a general rule?

 

I seem to recall sitting down, in 1996, with pen and pad and Codex: Dark Angels and figuring out how many Terminators 25% of 2000 was.

[Deathwalker]

Wasn't that just a general rule?

 

I seem to recall sitting down, in 1996, with pen and pad and Codex: Dark Angels and figuring out how many Terminators 25% of 2000 was.

You mean when Termies still had a 3+ save on 2d6 :P 

[chapter master 454]

 

There used to be percentage of points requirements for tournaments in the 3rd Edition days, referred to as composition requirements or just comp for short. You still had to hit the minimum number of Troop slots for the old FOC, but youbalso had to have o think 25% of the army by points in Troops (and a max of 25% by points of HQ to prevent hero-hammer).

 

And while it worked reasonably well as a balancing mechanic, it was pretty intensely unpopular especially with those armies whose Troops are cheap on points because it meant a higher model count than a lot of folks wanted when it came to units like IG platoons and Eldar Guardians.

This is compounded by the simple fact that some army's troops are just way better than others.

 

Do you think alpha legion infinite cultists lists care about mandatory troop taxes anywhere near as much as armies like Custodes, admech, tau,space marines or eldar?

 

 

Eldar and Tau don't care about troop tax. Tau have good troops by default with the fact their standard troop brings a pulse rifle and to the addition of that cadre fireblades make getting with 15" quite dangerous. Eldar have incredible troops in the form of Rangers, Dire Avengers and Guardians have their place and use. Rangers are great objective holders and can even help screen for days, dire avengers are decent shock troops and guardians are just stupidly good if you webway strike them in.

 

The issue is that not all troops are born equal in relative power. I will reinforce this again and again. Vanilla Space Marines are weak just in general and need a hand because they have nothing special to them. They are advertised as "Jack of all trades" yet I would barely call them novices at any of them. It is evident in many of their units, why do devastators only have a singular signum among them on the sergeant? Why do assaults just have bare minimal options for assault (note that Blood Angels let them have meltaguns...WHY? Why isn't that standard issue?) and tacticals are a joke because they have inherent non-bo (non-combo) options. If you actually look at marines closely what you find isn't a generalist army, it was designed as a melee army but stopped about 1/4 way there then added 1/3 shooting and paid double for both.

Evidence is clear: all leaders are strong melee units, EVEN TECHMARINES! Marine shooting has never been good except when we had grav-turions and even then. Our most powerful units have regularly been our melee units in the form of Vanguards, Assault Terminators and our HQs. There is little to no scare factor to marine shooting and that is why our troops suck. People take scouts because 4+ isn't that bad but the cheaper points certainly helps.

 

Space Marines as it stands are playing with half a deck of cards and without a set of any suits. GKs have even less than that (but that comes from going 1/2 melee, 1/4 shooting and 1/4 psychic then paying double for all). Marines cannot be generalists, it doesn't work really. If they were designed to be the aggressive mid-range shock troopers they are meant to be then they could hold their own but nope.

 

This is why troops aren't taken. And many have already said why these battles occur, they can be snapshots of a grander battle or whatever else.

As it currently stands, Tau have better shock troops in their fire warriors than space marines do in tactical marines.

[Melete]

 

There used to be percentage of points requirements for tournaments in the 3rd Edition days, referred to as composition requirements or just comp for short. You still had to hit the minimum number of Troop slots for the old FOC, but youbalso had to have o think 25% of the army by points in Troops (and a max of 25% by points of HQ to prevent hero-hammer).

 

And while it worked reasonably well as a balancing mechanic, it was pretty intensely unpopular especially with those armies whose Troops are cheap on points because it meant a higher model count than a lot of folks wanted when it came to units like IG platoons and Eldar Guardians.

This is compounded by the simple fact that some army's troops are just way better than others.

 

Do you think alpha legion infinite cultists lists care about mandatory troop taxes anywhere near as much as armies like Custodes, admech, tau,space marines or eldar?

 

100 Fire Warriors is an entirely competitive Tau list these days.

[Marshal Rohr]

Play ‘Centurion Mode’, which removes special characters, tanks, flyers, etc and makes the game focus on infantry combat. It’s a great time.

[Panzer]

Cities of Death also helps with Infantry-mode gameplay. :P

[Trevak Dal]

Lexington, is there a better system that you know of? A commando/elite force against a standing army falls apart when you start rolling d6s...the math drops all things with enough pounds of dice.

 

I know that 40k evolved out of a role-playing skirmish game and went sort of nuts.

 

I think maybe 40k still plays best as a smaller point game, patrol detachments and power levels with set strats.

 

Lol, instead of commander spam, you have ethereal and fireblade spam, with numerous 5 man Tau strike teams and drone squads.

 

It's like the Tau codex was written by all the space marine players who had never played Tau before, but had been beaten by Tau. "Strength 5 shooting! 30 inch range!".

 

If you are going to be relegated to bs4 anyways, get your camp on and be like "good luck getting into combat as I sit here and roll (and reroll) dice all game.

 

Take zero battlesuits, maximum drones and just play as passively aggressively as possible. Don't move and take the tenant that gives you the extra shots at range.

[Wargamer]

I think part of the issue is that Tactical squads don't have a clear place in the force. The same is arguably true of other Troops, but Tacs are easiest to go by.

Troops have traditionally been the weakest units in the roster, with no real reason to take them other than they were mandatory. Now, Troops can unlock you more CP, but not all armies have stratagems worth buying (Space Marines again).

Giving Troops a clear purpose would help here - ideally as units that aren't great out of the box, but shine when buffed with stratagems. ie: Tactical Squads being able to spend 1CP and have another shooting phase, Fury of the Legion style.

[Grand Master Raziel]

I've been playing the game since 3rd ed, and in that time, Tac Squads have only been considered worth having in more than token numbers in two editions - 5th and 7th.

In 5th edition, only Troops could score, so SM players were basing their armies around a couple of melta-toting Tac Squads in Rhinos.

 

And, of course, 7th edition brought us the Gladius mega-formation.  Say what you want about it, but it's the only time in all the time I've been playing where a SM army comprised largely of Tac, Dev, and Assault Squads was even remotely competitive.

The idea that the Tac Squad is a generalist, jack-of-all-trades unit is a relic of earlier editions that is no longer true.  A specialist shooting unit is something like Dark Reapers or Hellblasters.  A specialist assault unit would be something like Khorne Berserkers.  To be generalists, Tac Marines would have to be considerably closer to both of those extremes without equaling them.  I'd say Tacs would have to have 2 attacks each, and be able to take at least twice the heavies and specials they can currently pack before they come close to living up to their hype.

Players take Scouts instead because they require less investment of points to make up the required Troops choices for a battalion, and because their deployment ability creates a safety zone for the more formidable units in the list, protecting them from alpha strike shenanigans.

[Wargamer]

I'm increasingly preferring scouts for their sniper rifles. Being able to knock out enemy characters is incredibly useful IMO. Scouts might not be that great at raw firepower, but again that niche makes them worth taking over "some underperforming boltguns and misplaced heavy / special weapons".

[chapter master 454]

I'm increasingly preferring scouts for their sniper rifles. Being able to knock out enemy characters is incredibly useful IMO. Scouts might not be that great at raw firepower, but again that niche makes them worth taking over "some underperforming boltguns and misplaced heavy / special weapons".

 

Tacticals aren't tactical. They are in bad need of some thinking. What are they meant to be? By all accounts, the mid range units in the holy trinity of space marine units. They are meant to be the "veterans" of the chapter (they have gone through Scout, Devastator and Assault duty) and to be honest they should have one of the most extreme weapon options in the game.

 

I would go as far as to allow them some serious option selecting such as:

Replacing Boltguns with Storm Bolters at the expense of losing their boltgun and bolt pistol, only one squad per detachment allowance.

Up to four members may take special weapons (in place of their boltgun)

Up to four members may take Missile Launchers (It is a good weapon but it does lack versatility that devastators have in their options of weapons) (in place of their boltgun)

Up to four members may take Chainswords (in place of their boltgun)

Sergeant has access to Melee, Special and Heavy Weapons along with various special options like storm shields and the like

Always taken in groups of 10 however they have combat squad rule (I want to stop the whole 'take min squad' problem)

Change their statline to having base 2 attacks as well with the sergeant being 3.

Rhino option with unique rule "Tactical Deployment"

"This unit can disembark from a rhino and count as not moving for the purposes of heavy weapons. If the unit has not disembarked from a rhino in the preceding shooting phase and the whole unit is wholly within 3" of the rhino transport the unit may embark after firing. The Rhino may then make a move if it hasn't moved in the preceding movement phase"

 

Extreme but I want Tacticals to have some reason to exist and I want to throw crazy at the wall and see what people like. At least from there, even if the entire idea is nuts, some of it may work.

[Calyptra]

I'm confused by the "movie marines" thing.

 

The idea is Marines that have been powered up to better represent the lore would destroy everything, right? I don't think that's the case, provided that other armies got powered up to match their lore as well. I would have no problem playing against movie Marines if I got to play movie Dark Eldar or Harlequins.

 

Regarding troops in general, I think I more or less agree with the OP. I care more about how it feels to play an army than I do about winning or losing. If I'm playing as Marines, I'll want to bring some Tactical Squads so I feel like I'm playing as Marines. If I'm playing Necrons I want a bunch of Warriors to plod menacingly across the table. If I'm playing Tyranids I want swarms of gaunts running around and getting under foot. I can't think of an army (off the top of my head) where I wouldn't want a couple units of their troops, just to cement that feeling and sense of identity.

[Kinstryfe]

I don't want to detail it into a tactical marine thread, but it kind of goes to what I said awhile ago about both the difficulty of power differences in elite armies and that not all troops are created equal. The problem really is the detachment slot system. Going by the fluff, Devastators and Assault Marines would be troops choices, and tactics would be elites combining skills from those plus scout units. The problem is that a tactical squad who excels at combat is a vanguard squad. Similarly one who excels at shooting is a sternguard squad. Basically, rules wise, tactical squads have no reason to exist, as they would basically be almost identical to those other two units. So it's not that troops are a tax or not taken enough, but that GW has worked the fluff into a corner when adapting it to game rules. Elite troops obviously have to be better than line troops, so tactical marines are relegated to being so so. A company should realistically play something like 2 assault squads, 2 devastator squads, and 6 van/sternguard.

 

So I've changed my mind. Yes, more troops would mirror the fluff nicely. It's just that we have the wrong units as troops right now.

[Skaorn]

If you give an SM devastator weapon slots in his tactical squads, then he'll want a cooler devastator squad...

 

Troops are boring. You will always have cooler units in your army than your troops and naturally people are going to want to take the cool units. The only time I saw troops being cool was the Chaos 3.5 codex where everything was so customizable that you could really make each unit unique. The problem there was that no other army got that same degree of customization and, even if GW had continued to go that direction, it would have been horrendous to try to balance. We also ended up getting hit so hard with the nerf bat that we lost part of our army. Adding more special rules and options won't end well.

 

Likewise, just buffing and nerfing units without trying to look at the root issues will just unbalance things elsewhere. Why do people take cultists over CSM? They're cheap, they get more dice to throw, more wounds, have a better chance of holding multiple objectives, and can have their morale weakness easily mitigated. On top of that you can tap some black mana, remove one unit, and bring a full strength one on from a board edge. Tweaking points might have some affect but I think that it's likely not to solve anything because the math will still favor hordes unless regular and elite troops have their points drastically cut and then things just swing the other way.

 

Some ideas that have been thrown around that might be good places to start looking at for adjustments to make elites a more attractive option:

-Increase minimum squad sizes for hordes.

-Doing some major work on the morale system.

-Changing ObSec in ways that limit hordes supiority over elites by not allowing more than one objective to be held at once to having hordes loose ObSec when under a certain percentage.

-Reworking stratagems and CP. Personally I'd gut the system because it's yet another source of creep, but that's just me.

-Dealing with detachments.

[The Unseen]

If you want to "fix" elite armies without making drastic system changes, they need multiple wounds on their "troops", their basic weapon needs to threaten both other elite units  and hordes at the same time, at least to some extent, they need to be at least passable at both shooting and melee, and they need something to counter obsec from hordes.

 

The only system change I would recomend at this point is moving towards a points based detachment system.

If you spend 600 pts on HQ's and Troops, you should get about the same # of CP as anyone else who spends that many points on HQ's and Troops. I don't think moving to give everyone the same # of CP's dependent on game size is the right way to go, as it removes one of the few reasons to not just spam Elites all day.

But if you make a Battalion a "Must spend 10% of your army on HQ's, and at least 25% on troops, gain 3 CP" suddenly marines are bringing 4 squads of 5 intercessors and 2 squads of scouts to hit 500 pts, about the same as now. But, the horde player is going to have to bring close to a 100 infantry models if he wants to just pack in cheap bodies to fill out his roster to get to a battalion.

 

Custodes almost get there, but their "troops" shooting is absolutely pathetic, and despite their ridiculous durability and melee prowess, their low speed and lack of volume of shots still leaves them hilariously weak vs something as common as a bunch of guardsmen squads with a plasmagun in each unit. They literally cannot bring enough shots/attacks to bear in any sort of fashion timely enough to win a game vs a horde player that plops themselves onto the objectives and bubble wraps their plasma sources.

Roll Primaris Intercessors and Tacticals into a single unit like they needed to be, 1 per 5 gets a special/heavy, everybody gets a combat knife, bolter, and bolt pistol (just like they do in the fluff), buff the bolter a bit more, preferably with conditional extra shots (I personally think 1 extra shot within rapid fire range would do well, would make marines scary in a close range firefight, without turning them into firewarriors), and make their obsec count *wounds* instead of models. If they stay around 18 pts a model, you have a very well rounded and adaptable unit, that can take ground well, threaten most other infantry units, and do the job of being a "troop" in an elite army just fine, being a point efficient source of durable units, while still contributing meaningful damage if their left unmolested.

 

Marine equivalent elites need to go up to WS/BS 2+ and 3 attacks TBH. Fluffwise, a veteran marine is supposed to be about the same level as a normal custodes, and I'd say WS/BS 2+, 2 Wounds, and 3 Attacks puts them close, but the custodes still has increased Str and T, and 1 extra wound. Then it's down to equipment, in which case the custode has the obvious edge, but hey, Emps always gives the best toys to his favorites.