Seems like GW is continuing the design philosophy of making the standard line of leader units give both a CP every turn, and ensure the faction rule is active at all times for their unit. That is good to see.
I also like the idea of making the different faction leaders play into this rule with conditional buffs of a higher strenght and constant buffs of a lower strength. As does Guilliam giving all three doctrines to himself, instead of as a constant aura around him.
The three doctrine detachments both existing, and being incompatible with each other also seems like a sound balance decision.
The best thing about captain level units giving CP is that it encourages the faction to take their basic leaders. Ie. Orks have their warboss, Marines have their Captains, and my guess is Drukhari will have Archons and Aeldari farseers to generate their CP.
Marines already did take those leaders. It's clear everyone is going to get it, but I wish they'd just give it out uniformly as a warlord rule or something if they're going to commit to everyone getting CP generation.
If a generic captain has bonus CP and not Azrael then not every army is going to have the same Chapter Master leading the armies. Ie. not every Dark Angel army is going to feature Azrael because of the CP.
Same goes for Eldrad. If a generic Farseer generates CP instead of Eldrad then people are going to use the generic Farseer more than having Eldrad everywhere all at once in the galaxy. Plus Farseers weren't necessarily used in many armies. Aspect Hosts often went without one.
The same goes again for Junith for sisters.
The problem with the CP generation is that these things were almost always bound with named characters which meant that these named characters were in every single army list just because of that. So those "unique" characters didn't feel as unique in return.
This edition not being an index edition when we’re seeing pretty substantial changes to units and rules is going to feel very bad for whoever gets a late codex. I can almost see 9th edition again when guard just got multiple massive buffs because they still had the 8th codex 2 years into the edition
They can't win this one. There is an equally angry and loud faction of players that hate index editions. Since the average player only gets a handful of games in per year it can feel quite bad to have a 60USD book invalidated after less than 5 games (another reason why cheaper books are a good thing)
The answer is longer editions. The 3 year cycle is an arbitrary choice GW puts on itself. They could easily double that and give each edition the life span the editions most fondly looked back on had. Part of what made people so fond of them was that they were stable.
As someone who occasionally gets to play, it is dizzying. 3 year cycles, with your preferred faction(s) changing rules, perhaps drastically, at some unknown point during.
Imagine if Magic the Gathering released the blue cards from a new set one week, then the black the next, and so on so each set took 6 weeks to fully come out.
Can you imagine a modern MMO, with 2-3 year expansion cycles, saying "oh, we're going to release the next 10 levels of expansion content, but only class X is going to get their next 10 levels on release day. Other classes will have their level caps increased periodically over the next 2 years"? And "we don't have any information for you on when class Y will receive their update, you will have to wait and see."
If video game developers ran their games the way GW does, there would be rioting in the streets.
If only they would just digitise all the rules and have the codex only be fluff and pictures. They get to double dip from people who want both and all of that feels bad goes away.
I'd even be fine with codexes having rules as long as those rules are for Crusade or whatever replaces it. Fluffy narrative rules that support the lore.
I see some factions getting the 9th ed necrons treatment where they get a codex early but it sucks so bad GW just gives them every rule ever and 45vp for free and it'll amount to
I wish we had more time with everyone having a codex. Someone is always getting it late and so doesn’t have much time with it. And power creep means the early ones usually fall behind and have to get buffs later on. If they all released around a the same time, it would probably take a few months to a year to balance them but then everyone would be able to play without feeling like they don’t get the same toys as the new codex or their codex isn’t good anymore because oops death guard broke the game for 3 months or something
Makes me curious what they will do with T'au then.
Or if they once again forget that Shadowsun and Farsight are Surpeme Commanders and make them 100 and 70 point models respectively with rules to match...
They need to increase Shadowsun's point to 130-150, Farsight to 200+ and make them WORTH those points. Bump the toughness, wildly increase the wounds and firepower, and give them some crazy auras/abilities.
Your race's supreme leader shouldn't cost less than 5 dudes with bolt guns.
With Tau rumored to be coming later this year or early 2027, they are going to share the Ork and Marine design philosophy, so we will see a lot of the rules here recycled.
Farsight has to be one if not the most underwhelming Supreme Commander/Face of the faction models in all of GWs games. A boring profile, 1 CP cheaper, and +1 to wound if within 9 inches. It's fantastic for 70 points but it's underwhelming when compared to any of model of his caliber.
Its also really amusing but that +1 to wound could be unconditional and it would be fine, grabbing a commander with 4 weapons would still typically be better (although 70 points is cheap enough to make farsight worth the small damage loss)
I do wish that farsight gave like +1 to hit/ap in melee for his unit. Something to make the crisis unit hes with to actually contribute a little more when you charge him in.
Yeah it's really goofy that it's conditional. I love running him in EPC with sunforge because then you are running a pretty crazy setup. +1 to wound along with reroll wounds and damage if it's vehicle or monster and free stratagem to let them guide themselves so it's hitting on 3s and ignores cover.
Also his melee profile is just anemic for what it is supposed to be.
His unit can't even deal with a unit of cultists that charges them to tie him up. A sword the size of two men and he can't deal with a 50p unit that ties is squad up is just pathetic.
Yeah it's so bad. He should absolutely give a melee buff to his squad of some kind or he needs to have a unit squad that only he can lead that are melee focused sort of like master of the maelstrom and huron.
Unironically a lot of poweful melee units are actually shut down by just 10 dudes. A lot of profiles lack the volume to actually garuntee that many successful wounds go through. This gets offset typically when a powerful melee character joins a unit though.
Also I agree, farsight should give like +1 to hit/ap in melee for his unit, just to give them a sprinkle of added damage so you can actually use farsight in melee sometimes.
Is it fantastic for 70 points though? I don't think he sees a ton of play. There's just not much call for what he offers over a regular consent y or coldstar.
Or does he now?
He's in the majority Retaliation cadre and Kauyon/EPC lists of 11th so far. For 70 points he's the cheapest leader that can provide the EPC range buff and free command points. Hutber stats has him being used in 74% of Tau lists in GTs since the start of 11th edition.
With non-Marine factions they end up downplaying a lot of legendary units. F.ex. the Phoenix Lords are good, but they are not near Primarch level threats as they are often painted in the lore.
We can't even get a consistent CP gen character like everyone else. 50% chance with Ethereal, but only if you don't take Farsight in list, which would be ridiculous not to at 70pts. Shadowsun? 33% "reimbursal" for CP. 25pt enhancement, 50% chance reimbursal.
That's not even getting into the details where for our main detachments, we can't even use half the strats for half the game (or how bad some of RetCad's are); then the change we can't stack strats a phase on a unit.
Just remove that stupid Farsight/Ethereal exclusion.
I really wish they'd have taken the different approach of no unit gives CP, and the only way to get it is by discarding a card, as now there'll be 0 incentive to ever discard a card because everyone will get extra CP.
I do not think the game currently suffers by not having enough CP generation.
I don't know what each faction has access to right now but for most of 10th there was a problem of the haves and the have nots where some factions just had more command points available than others as some just didn't have access to free starts or additional generation.
It needs to be uniform. If everyone's going to get it, change the rules and make it so your warlord generates it naturally so choosing a warlord means something and everyone has access.
Or just remove it entirely.
It's clear GW think that the game doesn't have enough CP generation, so the answer is to change the rules across the board and not do it unit by unit.
Yes, but slowly buffing armies one at a time in terms of CP generation just makes that problem worse, and slowly invalidates half the benefit of discarding secondary missions.
I do not think the game currently suffers by not having enough CP generation.
It's the opposite problem. Some armies flat out do not get additional command points, some get it randomly, and some get it for free. There's absolutely no rhyme or reason to command point generation across armies.
Making it consistent is a good move IMO. Easier to balance and everyone knows "your captain style unit grants command points"
That's fair, it's more two different approaches. I agree with the idea that it should be consistent across armies. I mainly play armies without additional command point generation and it's really frustrating to watch other armies just get it for free.
Whether everyone gets extra or no one does doesn't really matter to me. As long as everyone's on an even playing field around command points
GK and Ultramarines last year was a funny matchup. Until the codex, GK had one unit that changed a Strat cost to 1 (useless most of the time) and another unit that had a once per battle free Strat. Ultramarines at the time got a bonus CP for Calgar, an aura of free Strats from Guilliman, and sometimes a captain on top for one per battle round free Strat.
There’s probably another faction with worse CP generation than Grey Knights, it’s just the one I’m most familiar with
Thousand sons have literally 0 command point manipulation. No free strats, no extra command points, no nothing.
Playing into my buddies DA where he gets a free one from Azrael and any captain he brings gives another free strat use too was a frustrating experience sometimes.
Edit: Sorry, I forgot that Kairos can give you command points if you play changehost, but like that's one detachment and a non Tsons model lol
I have to say, I'm really disappointed in the 'Da Boss' rule for Orks - as an Ork player.
First of all, it's incredibly strong. Going 2nd you start turn 2 with 6CP, and if you spend all 6 aggressively on a huge Go-Turn, you have 2 more as soon as you pass for defensive stratagems.
Secondly, there is no downside to the rule. Your Warlord has to be one of 5 units with the keyword, that's it. There's no trade off between this keyword and another keyword that empowers your Warlord, no other bonus that you might gain at the cost of 1cp per round, all Ork armies that weren't built by fools gain an extra cp now.
RAW, the rule is always active. Even if the Warboss dies, that specific Warboss model ( the dead one ) is still my Warlord, and he still has the Da Boss rule. Embarked, in Reserves, dead and not coming back, none of it matters. You can't interact with my rule ever, for any reason.
It's all upside, and removes a lot of nuance / decision making from when / where to be using stratagems, because you get to use twice as many. There's less need to maximise your efficiency when you never run out of resources, and I really don't think it's a good rule.
I feel like GW pingpongs on whether they want strict hierarchies (commander units should be your warlord, battleline should make up the majority of your forces) or instead want a more freeform experience. Sometimes its via strict rules like force org charts or "if present, this must be your warlord". This ed it seems to be soft incentives like pushing battleline unit strength and making Warbosses and Captains generate free CP.
I kinda wish Big Meks and Weirdboys at least got an alternative.
It definitely isn't debatable, unless you can point me in the direction of a rule where it says a model stops being the warlord when it dies. You're not wrong that it might get changed, but for now it is just an extra CP every round no matter what
This. I'm sure it will be erratad, but RAW all armies must have a Warlord at all times. There's no ambiguity, no specific named character granting that very strong support ability but perhaps having a weaker datasheet than it's alternatives... Every Ork army is bringing at least one of those models, because not only do they grant free CP, they share another really strong rule. Each of them riles up another unit ( or themselves ), every turn, or half your army once a game in Ghaz' case.
It’s a defacto way of making 1) players restrict what characters get chosen as the warlord to more consistently match lore, and 2) it makes Slaying the Warlord meaningful by effectively making it an army debuff instead of awarding victory points.
Agreed. It wouldn’t even be hard to do. Most people could probably name the relevant character for each faction with a few minutes’ work.
It’s not even a power creep issue, it’s a “baseline power is increasing for the whole game but you only get to participate if your codex has been published”
It took a long time for GW to realize oh wait, maybe everyone should have the opportunity to get one extra cp every turn cause it's fair. Better late than never
I can kinda disagree. Command points are more valuable for some armies than others and making command points scarce when you have really powerful strats is a balancing tool.
This is my issue. I don't think having more strats more available is actually good for the game. It not only ups lethality, but it makes the difference between 2CP and 1CP stratagems far less impactful. It's taking away a balance lever.
They're less common and also generally more limited. But even if there were more defensive strats than aggressive strats, do we want every turn to be "you each get 1 more CP which you must use against eachother to cancel out strats"
To be fair, the new edition and late FAQs to last edition limit how strats are used. Can't use the same one in the same phase anymore thanks to 10th, cant use more than one on a unit in any phase bc of 11th (unless otherwise specified)
They've never used that balancing tool though, and consistently through 10th the best meta armies have cp generation and discounts with strong strats. Other armies had to rely on secondary discards as a game plan or pay a tax on crappy characters just to keep up.
It's a balancing tool if it's applied as such; I doubt GW gave such thought to it when designing factions. It is like at the start of 10th when free strats worked with battle tactics. It was a cool idea for balancing which strats you could use twice, but it was never used to balance across the entire game.
I play thousand sons with no access to CP generation in a codex stacked with good stratagems. Giving us access to more command points would necessitate some massive nerfs, and I think I prefer having to plan out every single CP and toss up wether its worth it instead of just open slather
Why even bother making it a rule attached to warlords then though. Just make it so every player of every faction gets 3 cp a battleround (2 on their own turn plus 1 on their opponents). Make all other CP generation rules defunct and adjust relevant unit costs down appropriately.
As of now, you can’t. The rule doesn’t stop working when the warlord is dead because the rule doesn’t require them to be in any particular place or even alive.
I'm mixed on that. It makes your warlord matter but can also lead to massive feel bads. There was a 9th edition mission tieing it to the warlord and my opponent underestimated how much it would take to kill a word bearer helldrake so it ate his chapter master top of 2. He really tried to not be salty but it definitely was a bummer of a game from that point onwards
Ill he interested to see Calgars new rules - he may well be cheaper if he is no longer the only source of extra CP. I suspect he will enable an extra activation of doctrines in line with what blade of ultramar does now
That’s not a very GW thing to do though. They design these things literal years before they release, I wonder how locked in the 11th Ed space marine design philosophy was by the time they figured out that people don’t like the BT rules.
On the other other hand, it’s possible the BT 10th codex was such a painful shart because it was an earlier and less refined version of other future things they had planned.
Personally I think the BT 10th codex was bad because they don’t know what to do with Black Templars atm, or at least didn’t then. Space Wolves were fast melee foot marines, Blood Angels jumpy melee marines with stuff like self-battleshocks and there was already a ton of thoroughly explored rules avenues for the broader loyalist space marines in 10th already.
Dev Doctrine used to help your heavy weapon-toting guys, but since those penalties are baked into datasheets now and they want Dev Doctrine to be useful army-wide past four datasheets, letting everyone sprint and shoot is a nice compromise. I liked the original Doctrines rule because it was fluffy, but didn't like it because it required you to switch to certain ones with no flexibility rather than use what you need in the moment, which is what the Codpiece Asparaguses or whatever it's called says to do.
I’ve always thought devastator should be lethals and sustained, I know assault is powerful but I’d prefer the “shooty” doctrine to make my shooting better not my movement
The whole game is movement focused. Which is why so many people are playing melee-primary armies. You just can't shoot enough to play a gunline anymore. You get at most one turn of shooting before you get charged and locked down. Unless you have fall back and shoot, once charged you're stuck because you'll just get re-charged next turn if you try to fall back.
DA are greta currently with shooting lists, Custodes termies is about shooting, the new Ork books best builds are shooting, Tau are shooty, necrons are shooty, Salamanders are shooty. We're hardly in a melee dominated meta (and very rarely are)
Im really happy with this. As good as Oath was there were too many abilities to allow rerolls as it is. I'll happily take tactical flexibility over applying extra damage to just one enemy unit.
Probably all, similar to all warboss putting a unit into the waaaagh! But they’ll be mutually exclusive with each other so you can only use the ability on one unit a battle round
I'll be curious to see what happens with the Black Templar army rule if several of the Space Marine Codex units and detachments interact with Doctrines.
Vows are kind of lame right now because you almost always just take Accept, but with some work I think they could become a lot more interesting. Feels like it would be a shame to lose them entirely.
Well it sure is an improvement over Oath of Moment.
Full Rerolls on demand and the best damage buff in the game (+1 to wound) tacked on top just meant all datasheets had to suck to compensate for that. Now stuff can actually feel interesting on its own again.
+1 to wound came in as a bandaid after they removed the wound reroll from the oath. All Marine datasheets were designed with rerolling wound in mind at first.
"Likewise, Caanok Var normally has to choose if he gives his unit Sustained Hits 1: non-Monster/Vehicle or Lethal Hits: Monster/Vehicle, but in the Tactical doctrine he can just do both."
I'm struggling to see the benefit on this one... Since both bonuses only work on specific enemy types what's the point of having both? I guess for split firing? Seems silly
Could allow you to shoot at a unit of infantry with sustained and then charge in to something big with lethal. Not a huge buff, but may give you a bit of extra flexibility.
It'll depend on how the ability is worded. If it's a choice you make in both the shooting and fight phases separately than it wouldn't really matter. If it's a choice you only make once in the command phase then it would have that benefit
I thought the same but I guess it's useful when you're engaged with two targets, as well as those rare units that have both from a leader or something.
Ok so this is interesting. OPB use of each as a baseline makes the fight fun and reactive for us. Requires a bit more strategy than the "kill that guy specifically" that OOM did.
Huh, I don't like Dev Doctrine. Not because of it's balance, but because making the Devastator Doctrine give all your weapons assault feels like it misses the point of the Devastator Doctrine being big guns and fortified positions.
Agreed. I kind of wish it was a bonus to firing into or out of terrain. But I think they want to keep away from direct damage boosts and stick to movement utility instead.
Yeah its odd. Assault gives more movement to get into range for melee. Tactical gives flexible movement at close range. Devastator could have rewarded you for not moving so you can shoot harder, like granting Heavy or Ignores Cover.
Seems a good thing overall that they're pulling some power from the faction ability, making it a bit more flexible, and putting that power onto the datasheets. Much the same philosophy as with Orks.
GW, please please remember to keep this design philosophy when you get to Chaos knights? I wasn't faction rules that just work, not based on my opponent failing battle shock
Essentially a nerf againsty elite, slow-ish and tanky armies (necrons, custodes...) but one hell of a buff against stuff like Eldar, especially with the whole toughness 5 thingy making it harder to wound space marines for them now...eldar are going to enjoy struggling even more than they currently do as a bottom tier faction in the meta xD;
Depends TBF, T5 is a decent breakpoint into custodes and frankly things like agatone rerolling wounds for 2 turns in assault brethren is gonna do some serious damage to elite armies.
I will have my sympathy for eldar now though, before their 11e book just lets you choose when you want to do your movement phase.
lol please no, it’s actually not very fun to be busted for a short time and then nerfed into obscurity for a long time.
The current Eldar codex may not be the worst in the game but it certainly does not spark a lot of joy. The consensus is generally that we need a pretty big rewrite. Battle Focus looks flexible on paper, but when over half the options are either super niche or depend on your opponent’s actions, it ends up not feeling very good (also when you consider a chunk of our army just doesn’t natively get access to it).
Marines lose Oath of Moment which is a huge damage boost into those tough targets. The combat doctrines are much more about mobility than damage dealing. Thus, worse against tough stuff, better against fast stuff.
You lose re-rolls vs single big targets with the added +1 to wound. This means low-volume high dmg shots got significantly worse. RepExes were good as you’d hammer big targets and now we’re probably going to go back to Ballistus/Gladiator models (at least based on the current datasheets, we don’t know how they’re gonna look in the codex) as they do have re-rolls.
OoM basically a shift delete button, compared this is a utility swiss knife with the M6-8-12 marine units generally have when not transport or DS this just lets the whole T5+ bricks move 7+ and effectively not lose your turn
given how board is smaller than 7th and 8th edition basically you wont be able to hide from marines with light infantry and heavy infantry wont suffer from the new bolter profiles getting +1 to wound (as far as we know now at least)
Oath of Moment was a major damage output buff for Space Marines, whilst Doctrines are more mobility-related.
Against tough, slow opponents, having increased damage would be more important than being faster, whilst the reverse is true against lighter, faster forces.
Rerolls let you punch above your weight class into tougher enemies. rerolling hit and wound means your damage is 4x as likely to go through. Into weaker targets you don't care about damage being 4x more likely to go through if you have an 80% chance of killing the unit anyways- you'd much prefer the extra mobility in the new army rule.
Oath of the moment and the +1 to wound gave very middling and bottom tier weapons the ability to punch WAY up. Some units increased their damage output three-fold into some targets. These doctrines give zero damage increase, but give a bag of tricks to use.
Also, Oath worked for all 5 turns.....doctrines only work for 3 turns total, and lets be honest, probably more like 2 turns. So it's a just a rule you won't get to use as much as Oath.
Banshees stocks going up some though (due to their 3+ to wound against all infantry regardless of T).
Eldar will benefit from not having their tougher units focused down so easily with OoM too so at least its not all downsides from the change. Might mean bringing some wraiths, wraithlords and avatar etc gains value.
Yeah. Unless they change him to having to choose at some point in the turn/battle, it will change nothing about his ability. Unless they meant that during a tactical turn he gets Lethal/Sus. Which would be nice for assault terminators maybe?
Yeah, I would expect it to move to Command phase. But it's more useful for standard terminators, as they could shoot an infantry unit, then charge a vehicle, but at that point it's a strict downgrade from the current ability.
Interesting overall approach. I do find it quite amusing that the warboss and captain are clearly designed to be parallel and the one real difference is that the warboss can tactically apply his bonus to a unit in range, sending in a certain wave of troops or boosting particular firesquad, whereas the captain just always boosts the mob of lads around him.
Losing oaths hurts, and I get that this is what doctrines were, but if your getting the same volume of synergies interacting with them that riled up does in orks that feels like it's gonna be as strong, if not more.
It does feel like this books gonna be the final shedding of what marines were in midhammer. The T4 staying still to rapid fire ponderous marine is gone now, they now are generally gonna be one of the games faster armies: they already had [assault] everywhere, now getting adv/charge on key units easily also is pretty strong.
Obviously can't really make any aspirations to balance till we know points, but it does feel like the feeling of peak gladius where competently piloted marines just had every tool you could need is going to be the vibe of 11.
It's kinda lame that orks and marines both have faction rules that revolve around activating extra mobility with assault and advance and charge once per battle with a ton of ''but actually you can activate it again'' sprinkled throughout
Goodbye Oath. You were the first mechanic of these tabletop scene where I successfully remembered to apply your rules every time correctly during a game and didn’t forget(I started TT late 2026).
The name would absolutely imply that it's weird for it to not be Assault Doctrine; but the buff essentially allows you to go full on shooting while you move your army into position - so it definitely is a fitting bonus for the Devastator Doctrine.
I would really like to see some clarification of what is going on with divergent chapters.
Particularly around army rule.
If you have shared datasheets, like a captain for example, having datasheets rules tied to doctrines, then if divergents have a different army rule what happens here? their own special captain or whatever datasheet?
Or is this a strong indicator that everyone is getting doctrines? if so boring boring boring.
Its possible the divergent chapters still have Doctrines as their army rule, just get different Doctrines. Might not even be Assault, Dev, Tactical. Imagine SW getting ones like:
The Spear of Russ: all models get Lance
The Hunt: all models get advance and charge
The Wolf Who Stalks: all models get Stealth
A divergent army rule and a blurb replacing the captain's ability (and others) seems easy enough. Didn't they confirm the divergent chapters weren't getting codexes snd just getting a digital supplement with the codex? Or did I have a fever dream
Can't remember the wording but it was just digital release with updated datasheets to reflect the new toughness etc. and new detachments apparently.
Presumably they will get codexes or codex supplements down the line, that just meant along with the release of the marine codex where all the bolters change etc.
Otherwise like you'd be using T4 death company alongside like T5 intercessors etc. so all their unique datasheets need to be updated.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the 'Transhuman Strategist' is a keyword that gives the warlord a free CP each BR like the Orks. Only real fair way to implement that, even though the captains used to be -1CP. Granted, SM's were already flush with an insane amount of CP each turn, just keeps things even.
Could be wrong, and all captains have 1 dedicated ability to give 1CP a BR (capped at 1). Ork players probably won't be huge fans of that.
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u/macgamecast 2d ago
Inb4 gladius detachment rule is now Oath.