January 2024 Army Composition Rules Update
1/10/2024
by Jason Soles
We heard a great deal of feedback while talking with the player community and play testers in preparation for the January update. While most of this feedback pertained to the balance of armies and models, much of it was squarely focused on the core rules. Among the topics that were highlighted to us for potential improvement were the army composition rules, especially those dealing with Cohort model requirements.
While on the surface, the requirement to include one non-lesser Cohort model in 50-point and smaller games, two at 75 points, and three at 100 points seems intuitive enough, it quickly came to our attention that these requirements did not impact all armies equally. Even these modest requirements highlighted disparities between the armies. Some armies have access to much lower-cost light Cohort models (like Cryx’s bonejacks) while other armies completely lack light Cohort models altogether (such as Dark Operations or any Khador force).
Additionally, because only the Cohort models in a battlegroup counted toward these requirements, they created a counterintuitive hurdle for the inclusion of journeyman warcasters, lesser warlocks, or anything that counted as a Cohort model outside of a Leader’s battlegroup. While players wanted to include models like Magnus and Invictus in their armies, their higher point-costs, coupled with the fact that these models did not count toward the Cohort requirements, meant they were prone to being sidelined. While the Cohort requirement was ensuring some degree of parity of Cohort models between forces at various game levels, it was neither balanced nor working as intended, especially if it resulted in some of our most exciting models feeling restrictive to include in a force.
We initially looked at just allowing them to count toward the Cohort total, but we realized this only further exasperated a bigger issue, which is that the Cohort requirements are fundamentally flawed due to the wide gulf between the least expensive models that can satisfy the requirement and the most expensive models—colossals and gargantuans. In other words, all Cohort models are not created equal, and any requirement that treats them as such indulges the larger issue of this inequality. We considered assigning different values to different sizes of Cohort models, but because of customization and the broad spectrum of possible point costs, this doesn’t work either. And finally, we looked at the possibility of requiring a set amount of points to be spent on Cohort models, which is the only way to truly balance that kind of requirement. But that imposes an artificial restriction to list-building that we are 100% sure will be universally despised. So, our solution to addressing the problems around Cohort requirements was to relax them as far as we possibly could—which is to say, a Leader requires at least one Cohort model.
In order to address the imbalance inherent in Cohort requirements, we are simply going to require that a single non-lesser Cohort model be included in the battlegroup of all Leader models, regardless of the size of the game. We believe this is the most fair and balanced approach to army composition across the armies without adding more burdensome and complicated army composition rules to the game.
We know that the immediate concern that some players may jump to is that this will result in abusive list-building that exploits a higher inclusion of units to gain unintended competitive advantages. We have evaluated this extensively and have not observed an example of such list-building that we felt was undermining to the WARMACHINE game experience. Still, we will be watching over the coming months to see exactly how this change impacts army construction, and we will be keeping a close eye on model balance, especially that of Cohort models in comparison to units, the FAs of potentially overly represented models, and the composition of forces to make sure Cohort models remain well represented on the tabletop. Should any list-building or play styles emerge from this change that do prove to undermine the experience we are intending for with MKIV, we will adjust appropriately to maintain the integrity of the play environment. In short, there is always next year.
The WARMACHINE MKIV app can be found via the links below.
The post January 2024 Army Composition Rules Update appeared first on Privateer Press.