The latest Warhammer Community article just dropped and gave us a lot more information about how detachments will work in the new edition. Thankfully, it provides a lot more detail than the codex article. The new method of building armies will lean heavily into the Age of Sigmar formation. Let’s dive in.
They start by giving us a fairly straightforward guide to how army building works:
- You start by picking your battle size (e.g. points value). Power level is going away, which is another blessing of 10th.
- You then prepare your roster to record your forces
- Next you select your faction, Craftworlds, Chaos Space marines, etc. They mention that there will be a place for allies
- Next you pick your detachment abilities.
- Instead of choosing a sub faction your special abilities, enhancements, strats and unit restrictions will come from this choice
- It looks like each detachment will have it’s own set of stratagems, and probably around four enhancements. In addition each detachment will have abilities.
- You then pick your units based on the below list
- Pick a warlord and you are done!
My thoughts:
I am a little apprehensive about this latest news. On the one hand, the system is much more simplified and easy to understand. On the other, it looks like we may lose a lot of options if subfactions completely disappear. Your army abilities being determined by your detachment, rather than modifying them, will greatly reduce complexity but I am not sure it is worth the cost. This feels a bit like a return to 5th edition.
Granted, we all knew the initial releases will be basic as they are indexes. I still think this new format leans too hard into the “take whatever” philosophy of list building. You could also argue though that this just removes certain tax units that no one wanted to use anyway. But I worry a lot of units will be orphaned and without a role as GW proceeds.
I also think this will be how GW breaks the game. They will release either too many detachments gumming up the rules with new OP options and/or countless stratagems you need to remember based on what detachment you use. I think in a few years players will have to wade through countless detachment options, but will only take a very small amount based on their strats. I would be happy to be wrong though.
As 40k enters a more Age of Sigmrified list building phase I do worry that the narrative side of the game will be washed out a bit. In age of Sigmar you tend to get a lot of monster mash armies and I think you lose some of the grounded-ness by not having to take troop units. If everyone just starts spamming the best units with no in-game incentive for variety I think you lose a lot when trying to build a narrative. IDK, this might just be paranoia.
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I know I’m a little late to the party, but Age of Sigmar still requires 3 Battleline, and virtually no armies have access to crazy monsters for the Battleline spots. I’ve had many more problems in 40k 9th ed with ridiculous skew lists with the minimum cheapest possible troops with a ton of the most bent elements filling out the rest of the force. Plus, AoS’s mechanism for sub-faction and/or general making something into a battleline choice is much more interesting narratively than basically anything anyone is doing in 40k right now.
Not to argue with anything, since most of this guy’s post comes off as inane paranoia about how his game is being changed to make plebs get into it easier, but just off the top of my head: Hydras, Magmadroths, Stegadons, Leviadons, Treelords, Ghorgons, Terrorgheists, Dragon Zombies, Araknoroks, Stonetusks are all spammable monster battleline units that are all really good. There’s also large, heavy, spammable cavalry like Stormdrakes and Bloatflies. That’s not an insignificant number of huge monsters that can be turned into Battleline options – it’s almost half the list of factions, and I didn’t even count that Sons ARE just large battleline monsters.