Themed forces

[Littha]

Not entirely sure if this is the right section to post this in but I am about to run a campaign over a few months and wondered if any of you would have any input on an idea:

One of my favorite things from warmachine/hordes are theme forces. These are generally armies with restricted choices that recieve some bonuses to make up for the penalties of the reduced choice in units. Now for my campaign I would like to impliment something similar to this in 40k.

For example in a chaos daemons army:
Army of Khorne
Tier 1: Army may contain no Slaanesh daemons.
Bonus: any result of 5,6,8 or 9 on the warp storm table is treated as a 9 instead.
Tier 2: Army contains no psykers
Bonus: Khorne daemons gain a +1 bonus to their deny the witch attempts and their invulnerable save is increased to 4+.
Tier 3: Army only consists of Khorne daemons
Bonus: Khorne daemons have the eternal warrior special rule and their invulnerable save is increased to 3+.
The bonuses are cumulative but you have to qualify for them in order. Thus a Khorne/Slaanesh force wouldnt get the tier 2 bonus even if it had no psykers.


The idea of this is to encourage armies that match their fluff and to remedy some of the failings of using only a limited selection of your codex. Khorne daemons have serious issues holding objectives (because bloodletters are t3/5++) and Bloodthirsters/Bloodcrushers/Flesh Hounds all suffer greatly from instant death effects/High strength hits.

Now this bonus should be related to the power of the units inside the limits. Tzeench daemons would get fairly mild bonuses because of things like the screamerstar.

Armies that will get some sort of bonus so far:
Eldar- Craftworld forces
Chaos Marines- Legion bonuses
Daemons- God bonuses
Dark Angels- Deathwing and Ravenwing bonuses


Now i need suggestions on other themed forces that might need bonuses (Sisters of battle orders? do they actually fight differently?), whether space marine chapters should get bonuses considering they already have chapter tactics (and what kind of bonuses) and finally some suggested bonuses would be much appreciated as I dont have a working knowledge of every theme force going and how it plays.

Thank you in advance and I appologise if this is in the wrong place.

[Xenith]

Its a good idea, but the benefits and drawbacks have to balance out, and in turn be balanced with using a 'vanilla' list, otherwise people will only use the theme list.

Infinity does this also in their sectorial lists, your unit choices are extremely limited, but you gain increased access to what you do get, and can use link teams which improve squad abilities.

It would need a lot of playtesting to get the balance right, and youre on your way to that by increasing Khorne's resilience to shooting and magic when run as mono-god.

This works for Chaos, as there are models that only one faction will use. Eldar craftworlds will use all of their unit entries to some extent, as will marines. At that point the only way to theme them is to impose unit restrictions, which is against the direction 40k is going.

You'd have to go in the direction of battle formations, which is exactly what GW is doing.

Wraith-army:Take a force of only Wraith units. No other units allowed. Wraithlords gain the wraith marking ability and all gain FnP6+ etc

[Chaoschrist]

Warmachine does a similar thing where a Warcaster can do a themed list and depending on what you run in the army you unlock certain bonusses (like give the equivalent of scout to a single unit or up the amount of squads you can take). Though I don't know how much similar bonusses would be "fair" in a game of 40k. "Scout" in Warmachine never seemed as crazy as Scout in 40k...

I remember Dark Eldar had something where there was a difference between running "pure" Dark eldar warriors or going with Wyches as troops and such. Orks could benefit from themed forces... though they kinda do considering you can unlock Ork bikes as troops (and basically run a Cult of speed) or unlock Deffdreads as troops by using a Big Mek as your HQ.

Tiered lists could even reduce the cost or lift the restriction of certain weapons in squads I guess.

I think I'd be happy if we could get themed forces in codexes again. And then we might discuss tiered forces.

[Mr.Pickelz]

For Orks, Green Tide and Speed Freakz often find themselves in trouble as Boyz are reliant on cover saves (which is either ignored or made irrelevant), and Bikerz are overcosted for what they can put out. Trukkz can be Glanced to death by Bolters, Battlewagons aren't spammable-enough, and a "Gunline" or Deff Skullz themed army suffers from mobility factors. Lootas are the goto unit in the book when it comes to overall performance, however the other clanz, Goffs (Green Tide), Evil Sunz(most Speed Freakz come from this clan), and Snakebites suffer from old book syndrome.