As I was reading the latest ‘Grotmas’ detachment for Warhammer 40k, the Genestealer Cults ‘Final Day’ detachment, I realised something neat – the Warhammer 40,000 rules designers have finally figured out how to make cross-faction alliances work.
In every edition of Warhammer 40k to date, armies with a cohort of allied models have either been desperately ineffective, or unholy soups of the best parts of multiple armies. Whenever the rules have been permissive enough to make inter-faction alliances feasible for narrative gamers, they’ve also been open to distinctly non-narrative exploitation by competitive players.
Units within a faction synergise with each other, becoming more than the sum of their parts. That’s been especially important since eighth edition introduced 40k stratagems and abilities that can only affect models with specific keywords. Because allied forces don’t synergise this way, they’re at a disadvantage.
As a result, competitive players only take allied units when they provide so much value that it offsets the loss in synergy. That’s why, in eighth edition, every Imperial Knights army was accompanied by the ‘loyal 32’, a small 40k detachment of Astra Militarum that provided additional Command Points at a minimal points cost.
10th edition shifted the alliance system out of the overall army-construction system, and into the rules for each Warhammer 40k faction. It still didn’t provide an incentive for actually taking allied units unless they provided a unique advantage.
So it is Callidus Assassins are the most popular allied unit for Imperial armies, as their ability to disrupt enemy Stratagems can’t be gained by any other means. Likewise, early in the edition Chaos players would ally in multiple Greater Daemons, as the powerful beat sticks don’t need synergy to be effective – though rules erratas have stopped this practise.
However, four of the Grotmas detachments that Games Workshop has released so far are all about alliances. The Drukhari ‘Reaper’s Wager’ pairs Dark Eldar and Harlequins in a race to kill the fastest, the Imperial Knights ‘Questor Forgepact’ Chaos Knights ‘Iconoclast Fiefdom’ provide a coterie of Skitarii and Wretched cultist followers respectively, and now the Genestealer Cults ‘Final Day‘ unites the hybrid malcontents with their Tyranid ‘saviors’.
I’m not about to claim that the detachments are all winners. But they directly answer the rules challenges of creating mixed-faction armies.
Specifically, each detachments’ army rules, Stratagems, and enhancements create synergies between the core army and its allies. In Final Day, Tyranid units project a 6” aura that grants Genestealer Cult units +1 to hit. In return, the Tyranids can chow down on Cultist models to regain wounds.
The Stratagems in the detachment double down on this interdependence. For one CP, Hyperferocity lets a Genestealer Cults unit reroll ones to wound in the fight phase, or any wound roll if they’re within 6” of a Tyranid unit.
Each of the Grotmas detachments limits which units you can bring from the allied force. This helps reduce the risk of players cherry-picking the best units. But it also reinforces the theme – the Final Day represents a Genestealer Cult at the point when the Tyranid Hive Fleet actually arrives on the planet, so the Tyranid allies must all be Vanguard Organism biomorphs.
The detachments also don’t have a fixed ratio of points between the core armies and their allies. The Imperial and Chaos Knights can only take a small cohort of infantry allies, up to one quarter of the army points value, while the Genestealer Cults can take Tyranid allies worth up to half of the army points value. Again, this gives the rules designers scope to tune the army list for both balance and theme.
How well balanced these detachments are remains to be seen, but if nothing else, they demonstrate how much scope the current system has. I’m really keen on a ‘Dan Abnett power-level’ detachment – an Astra Militarum army with a small allied force of basic Space Marines who act as beacons of inspiration for the Guard, and who are way, way more powerful than when they’re fighting as a Marine-only army.
Source: Wargamer
