With the announcement of Warhammer 40K 11th Edition, Games Workshop announced that on day 1 they would be adding 70 new and updated detachments

From what I can tell, most people in our community are very happy about this.

That’s awesome, I really hope you enjoy it. It’s your hobby baby girl.

But me? I think it sucks. Here’s why:

Back in the olden days of 9th edition, the prevailing complaint was that there was too much bloat and not enough variety.

During army creation you got to pick a simple sub-faction ability such as getting a 6+ Invulnerable save army wide (I miss you Ulthwe,) and sometimes it even came with a stratagem or two.

Then you’d get all the other 30~ stratagems for your army.

Commonly this lead to there being 4 stratagems you’d use every game ignoring all the rest. This was lame.

Course correction came in 10th edition as you currently know it. Day 1, every army got a detachment, each with their own bonus army rules, and 6 stratagems along with the promise with more detachments coming in your codex.

I can’t stress it enough, this was really awesome! The idea that every stratagem and rule was valuable unlike the codex’s of old was very exciting.

But then reality hit. The Tyranid and Space marine codex’s came out and the cracks began to show.

Firstly, 4-5 detachments per army is going to add a lot of rules to the game. Second, without fail, you get 1 good detachment. 2 if you’re lucky. The rest were either not as good as (INSERT 10TH GLADIUS EQUIVILENT) or completely unplayable (Cursed Legion).

“Josh. Can you get to the point?”

There is 190 detachments in the game. That’s 1140 stratagems in the game with minor overlap. Maybe 25 of these are genuinely good. Don’t believe me?

Count the Space Marine detachments for non-Divergent chapters and tell me if you’d take any of them competitively over Gladius right now. Maybe you’ll find one or two, but if we’re honest, you’re still playing Gladius.

In 9th bloat was a problem for sure, but eventually you knew what every faction did because they always had the same tricks minus a strat or relic. Now, you have a reasonable chance to go to your 2000th event of 10th edition and play against a detachment you’ve never heard of, with strats you don’t know, and get knowledge checked by the guy who brought Kroot Hunting Pack.

The bloat never went away. It was just repackaged and by the time we noticed: it was too late.

Compound this with another 11th edition announcement: Some detachments are modular.

We don’t fully know what this means but what I can tell you is that this will go one of two ways, and spoiler, they both suck.

The first is that they nail the balance (which is good) and there are a ton of combinations which are valid, causing bloat to expand even further with infinite rules combinations you have to remember.

Do both detachments combine their stratagems? Do they get 3 from each? Do they compound their army rules or do you pick and choose? I fear the answer to these questions.

Alternatively we return to 9th editions custom chapters (Hail of Doom please come home, the kids miss you) and only see one combination that matters because it’s min/maxed into oblivion.

I’m not going to get into how mission scoring is tied to detachments/armies now. I think I’d get too mad.

There is no winning with this system in it’s current form. But I am a wizard of solutions if nothing else.

Deep lore about Josh, I’m hard addicted to a little TCG called Hearthstone. If you don’t know how card games work, every X amount of months they release a new set of cards. Eventually though, to diversify the metagame they rotate which of those sets you can play.

In Hearthstone when they release their first new set of the year, they cycle out sets until it’s only the four newest. It keeps the game interesting and keeps down bloat.

If you can’t see where I’m going with this, I can’t help you.

I am a firm believer that every 6 months in a competitive season of 40K, they should limit what detachments are playable.

Gladius? Not for the next 6 months. You can pick from X, Y, and Z detachments only.

Sure, you’ll still get instances of X detachment being the best in a given army, but when there’s only three, the ability to balance them around each other is a lot easier than against 30 others (Why do space marine have so many.)

“BUT JOSH I WANT TO PLAY MY NICHE SPECIAL INTEREST DETACHMENT” – Stream chat, probably

Good news! The boardgame police aren’t going to break down your door and beat you up for your crimes, go play with friends or in casual games.

This is an article about competitive Warhammer, where most of the time you’re already not able to play your niche special interest detachment if you want to do consistently good at events.

Tighter balance, less rules bloat, and your army remains fresh.

It’s not perfect, three viable detachments doesn’t cut down on bloat as much as I’d like. Realistically, It has the very real possibility to actually increase rules bloat substantially if GW nails balance and every detachment in a rotation is viable.

But if they can somehow hit that level of balance, there’s more ups than downs.

They won’t, by the way. Please read the Admech codex and tell me they know what they’re doing.

I guess my problem isn’t so much that the bloat is unmanageable, more so that 95% of the current bloat is useless until it isn’t. Which inevitably leads to a frustrating experience trying to learn and keep up with the rules.

If each army was cut down to three detachments we’d be down to 78 detachments (Maybe I missed one, I didn’t count Red Corsairs lol) and the game would still feel huge, because 78 detachments is insane. But also more approachable and bloat would feel more like meaningful options.

tl;dr less is more.

That’s just me. Don’t @ me. Subscribe to my Youtube.

Thanks for reading.