Everyone else is talking about the Balance Dataslate and stuff. You can go read on Goonhammer or Bell of Lost Souls or one of the many other websites, and they do a far better job than me on analysis so I ain't gonna bother with all that Matched Play or Tournament stuff. Instead, I'll focus on the thing I like - Crusade. You probably know I've organized a couple of Crusade campaigns so far, just one battle left for the Octarius one. I promise I'll get that last mission done...soon. After Horus Heresy stuff. Honestly, I feel like so many people neglect the Crusade scene. Like, all they talk about is the damned meta, or tournaments, or Richard Siegler winning LVO or whatever tournaments.
Where's all the Crusade players at?
With that said, I noticed that Warhammer Community has an article on Crusades. The title is Crusades are Better with Friends, which I agree whole-heartedly. You should always play Crusade with friends, which is what I've been doing all this time. However, the content of the article is what causes me to scratch my head.
Basically, the article encourages you to take allies. Simply put, we have like five Major Factions: The Imperium, Chaos, Aeldari, Tyranids and Lone Wolves (say what?).
So that's the five major factions, and if you play any of the major factions, i.e. Imperium, for example, you're encouraged to ally your dudes. So like Astra Militarum alongside Imperial Knights, or Imperial Knights alongside Adeptus Mechanicus (basically, what I've already been doing). The kicker, though, is this. If you bring allies and mix your army up - basically what we call soup - you lose your pure army bonus. For Adeptus Mechanicus, I don't have any Cult Mechanicus units (except my Kastelan robots and Tech-priests), so I don't really care. And I don't mind not having Imperative Doctrinas. Makes it easier for me, and I often don't use them because of the degradation or whatever. Plus Knight of the Cog really helps, though I'll be honest - I just use a Super-heavy Detachment with at least 3 Knights instead and forego the Imperative Doctrinas.
However, while I can make do without the Adeptus Mechanicus pure army bonus and Astra Militarum doesn't have a 9th edition codex (and thus no pure army bonus), I can't see how I'll soup anything with Black Templars. I did that before, souping Black Templar Terminators and Contemptor Dreadnoughts with my Imperial Knights, but...well, let's be honest. The most fun way to play Black Templars is using their Templar Vows. Uphold the Honor of the Emperor is easily one of the best bonuses, and I do enjoy using Accept Any Challenge, No Matter the Odds and Suffer Not the Unclean to Live are also super fun, especially in Crusade (they suck in tournament play, to be blunt, but in Crusade games they are thematic and not out of place). But you only get Black Templars Vows if you bring pure Black Templars. As much as I would like to ally Black Templars with my Imperial Guardsmen or Knights, losing the vows means losing half of the fun of playing them. Like, why would you bring Black Templars if you're not using their Vows?
Fortunately, the Army of Faith in the Vigilus Alone book might make up for it, but even so you lose the Black Templars Chapter Tactics. Oh, well. We'll see. That's fine, though. I think it might be a bit too much to have the Black Templars preserve their Chapter Tactics while having their Templars Vow alongside Guardsmen and Sisters allies. Still, I wonder if the Army of Faith chapter/doctrine/whatever is worth it, or if I'm better off just fielding Black Templars alongside a separate detachment of Guardsmen. But yeah, it kind of sucks not to have Templars vows. They are different from the Adeptus Mechanicus Canticles and Imperative Doctrinas - they actually add flavor to the army.
Which brings me back to the article. Why are they encouraging soup and allies when the codex and army rules explicitly discourage you from doing so?
I have the feeling it might have something to do with the outrage over the new Chapter Approved rules. As you might recall, in the new Chapter Approved 2022, the Nachmund Gauntlet mission pack or whatever, the rules outright ban inter-faction souping. People were whining about how this would stifle "creative lists", never mind the fact that people were mostly doing it for min-maxing (Argent Shroud Retributors plus Bloody Rose Sisters Repentia, Lucius Skitarii plus Mars Ironstrider Ballistarii, Thousand Sons Cult of Time running with Cult of Duplicity, etc. - oh, so "creative"). So that's why they have this whole paragraph dedicated to Orks.
While you're no longer allowed to soup different Ork Klan Kulturs under the same army in Matched Play and Tournaments, the article specifically encourages you to do so in Crusade. Apparently you can "create an Armageddon-themed army for your greenskins where Goffs, Bad Moons, and Evil Sunz Speed Freaks fight together under Ghazghkull" though I'm not sure if they mean you are supposed to play them against Yarrick and Black Templars or they're asking you to soup Orks with Yarrick and Black Templars (that would be downright hilarious and illogical). Maybe they mean you're supposed to play them against each other. The problem, though, is that while Orks get their pure Orks bonuses because...they are Orks, the Black Templars lose their Templar Vows if they bring Yarrick, Armageddon Steel Legion troopers and Yarrick's personal Baneblade, The Fortress of Arrogance, with them. So...uh, yeah. Not sure if that's a good idea.
One solution to this is that the campaign master can just waive the pure army requirements. The next time I run a campaign, I'll talk to my friends and see what they want to do about this. Or we could just accept that it's fine to field a weaker but fluffier army. I mean, sure, you could argue that soup helps to preserve the strengths of the souped factions while helping them cover for each other's weaknesses, but as the current meta will tell you, the pure army bonuses are way too strong for soup to have any sort of advantage or more than makes up for whatever weakness they have. So...yeah.
I don't know, man. I have no idea what the Warhammer Community article is trying to achieve. "Play fun and fluffy and not bother with pure army bonuses!" But it's...not exactly fun to play without the pure army bonuses if you play something like, say, Black Templars. Or Custodes who lose their Martial Ka'tah, for that matter. I like soup armies, and I can deal with losing Imperative Doctrinas or Canticles, but I don't really see what Black Templars bring to the table without their Templar Vows. You might as well bring generic Marines like Imperial Fists or Ultramarines then (come to think of it, Imperial Fists and Ultramarines always work with Imperial Guard in the lore anyway). Or successor Chapters.
Then again, we have an Army of Faith in Vigilus Alone, and I suspect more Crusade supplements in future will allow us to soup armies without losing the pure army bonuses.
On the other hand, until Chaos gets their codex, I think they're perfectly fine with souping. So a win for Chaos there...maybe. I'm not a big fan of the Cabal Points for Thousand Sons, so I plan to ally them with Chaos Knights in future...will be keeping an eye out for the new Chaos Knights. Will be fun to paint them in Thousand Sons Blue and pit them against my Imperial Knights of House Yato! That will be Crusade in all its glory! There's also the option of adding a small detachment of Word Bearers and going all in on summoning Daemons, though that mechanic is absurdly outdated and needs a rework. As reinforcements, they suck, but without restrictions, they can get ridiculously broken when the opponent summons more Daemons than his original army (as you saw in my Combat Patrol against Chaos Space Marines last Saturday). In any event, I'll be speaking to friends and seeing how it goes. For now...yeah. We really need Games Workshop to work on the Crusade thing more.
Don't just tell us to ally for fun, fluffy, narrative reasons. Give us an actual reason to soup. Maybe give soup a separate soup bonus? Or allow us to have the all-army bonus, with restrictions. Sort of like Genestealer Cults! You know, maybe if you want to preserve a pure army bonus for a specific army, you can only take a Patrol Detachment for allies (the 25% does feel a bit restrictive). We're already paying Command Points to take allies, and on top of that we lose pure army bonuses. So there really isn't much of an advantage to souping, and it's outweighed by the pure army bonuses or command points anyway. If you're afraid that people will abuse it, then...I don't know, make soup bonuses for Crusade only. I honestly don't know.
Well, this being Crusade/narrative, the campaign masters can do whatever they want and make their own rules, but it'll be great if we can receive more concrete guidelines and thematic rules from official sources. I think...but yeah. I wonder how the future of Crusade will look. I might get Vigilus Alone and the Crusade supplement and see how it goes. You'll never know!
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