The spread of upgrades Games Workshop has announced for Warhammer 40k 11th Edition is, to put it lightly, extremely exciting. The same robust core rules we’ve enjoyed since 2023, plus better missions, better terrain rules, more army list freedom, and a bevy of subtle gameplay tweaks to breathe a bit more narrative life into games… it’s enough to get me hot under the collar, honestly. But underneath the excitement lurks a fear, and its name is bloat.
On Wednesday we learned for definite that triple detachment lists will be on the menu, and that the overall pricing of Detachment Point (DP) costs will indeed let us mix and match the 70 brand new Warhammer 40k detachments with the 100-odd existing ones we’ve accrued since 10th dropped in 2023.
Specifically, Geedubs confirmed via Instagram on Wednesday, May 6 that:
- All the new detachments it’s currently revealing in Faction Focuses cost 1 Detachment Point (DP) out of your 3DP budget in a 2,000 point game.
- Therefore, “you can take three in a 2,000pts Strike Force game.”
- You can also “combine them with your existing Codex Detachments”.
It’s the first explicit confirmation that some, possibly a lot, of the 100+ detachments already in the game will cost two or even just one DP. It means that, come mid June, 40k will have a properly combined pool of nearly 200 detachments, with several times that many possible combinations in one army list.
That’s an overnight explosion in the variety of armies you can theoretically play, and still have suitable rules to form a viable game plan – which is absolutely a thrill for many fans. It’s a huge dose of strategic freedom and flexibility in a game that’s attracted many a grumble, in the last few years, for caring too much about streamlining and balance.
It will be cool to be able to Lego-brick together armies from disparate bits of your faction roster and still be able to win. It will be refreshing to face Space Marine players running literally anything other than Gladius. It will be fun to see long forgotten units from all the Warhammer 40k factions come off their dusty shelves and re-join the fight. These are good things, and Old Hands will recognize them as pretty familiar parts of the whole ‘new edition’ experience.
The thing is, though – as Wargamer Tim argued earlier this week – we’ve been in more or less this exact spot before. In 2017, 8th Edition knocked the game down, rebuilt it simpler, and what followed was a huge surge of new players. By 2020, more experienced players were chafing at the game’s limitations, so 9th Edition layered on lots more faction and subfaction rules to mix up army building – and the result of that was a three year long migraine.
By 2023, every army’s rules were drawn from so many sources, and laden with so many confusing wordings, keywords, and interactions, that we were screaming for Geedubs to burn the whole forest back down again. 10th Edition – the most popular so far – did just that: you pick one detachment, and that gives you your core rule, three optional character Enhancements, and six stratagem buttons you can press in-game.
Every other bit of key info was baked into unit datasheets, which rolled all the possible wargear choices into one points cost. No tweaking, no messing, no taking four books to every game night. You might not like it, but that’s what peak accessibility looks like.
In 11th, the pendulum is swinging back the other way, hard. Instead of picking one playset and adapting to it, we’ll be gluing two or three of them together a la carte. Instead of six stratagem options per game, we could have up to 18 (remember, we don’t yet know how many stratagems each of the new 1DP detachments includes, or how many of the old detachments also cost 1DP). Instead of three character Enhancement options, we could have nine, and the new system even lets us dole out more points costed upgrades across multiple non-character units too.
All of this is utterly rad. All of this is going to create a bomb-burst of experimental new plays, fluff-packed armies, and generally shake up what’s become a bit of a homogenized gamefeel. But I can only see one possible way to make it work without creating the same bloated, brain-melting mess 9th Edition became: GW has to really, really come good on its promised “massive update” to the official 40k app.
When the firm announced 11th Edition in March, it said it’d be giving the official app (the full version of which still requires paid Warhammer Plus membership) a major overhaul. So far, it’s revealed two important new features: in-game score tracking, and the ability to view your opponent’s datasheets, even if you don’t own their codex. Those are great – and honestly essential for it to be a functioning digital alternative to the stack of books you’d otherwise need.
But, to my mind, the app can, nay, must, do more heavy lifting than that. It’s the only possible game changer that might help us shoulder 11th’s vastly increased cognitive load. It’s the only tool that could conceivably shoehorn this many new rules into the game, without losing nearly all the clean, simple, all-in-one-placeness that made 10th such a runaway success. And if it’s going to do that, it needs, well, a “massive update”.
In this new edition, at any one time, a single unit’s rules could be simultaneously changed by your main army rule, up to three detachment rules, multiple enhancements, two attached characters, one-off buffs and debuffs, and Emperor knows what else. I’m no app designer, but I am a keen yet mediocre Warhammer 40k player with a short attention span, and in order to pack all that complexity in, I think the app needs:
- Dynamic datasheets that seamlessly integrate all those rule mutations on the fly, so we can still look at one datasheet and know exactly what our unit can do, without tabbing out, scrolling, or giving up and grabbing the book.
- Improved tooltips – not just linking out to game term definitions, but letting us check, with one tap, where a certain rule or ability is coming from, how it works, what turns it on or off, etc.
- A user friendly, drag and drop detachment combo interface for plugging the new detachments together, that clearly shows you the resulting, combined detachment rule each time.
Basically, if we’re adding this much more interlinked mechanical information to the game, the app needs to automatically populate it, then hide it, but also make it easily, quickly accessible on demand.
If GW adds those things in, the new 40k app could genuinely be a secret weapon that magically allows a crunchier game without the moment to moment faff, elevating the entire experience. If, like many of its competitor games, it also makes the app completely free, it would be truly transformational. That might make 11th as big a leap forward, in every sense, as 10th was.
If it fails to do so? Well, I think 2026-2029 will look and feel a heck of a lot like 2020-2023 – and not in an “AI hasn’t gone bonkers yet and Biden’s still in the White House” way. In an “Oh gods what the hell is going on, let’s just play Go Fish instead” way. We shall see.
What’s on your wish list for Warhammer 40k’s app and digital support generally in the next three years? What do you think we’re actually likely to get? Come join the free Wargamer Discord community and let us know – we can’t promise GW will do it, but it’ll be fun anyway!
Source: Wargamer
