I also tend to think it is a good thing. I fear cherry picking if allies/mercenaries/whatever become less restricted. Another thing I would fear is this: "My army sucks!" "Just take ally xyz and ally zyx and ally yxz!" "But I want to play MY army. I want GW to actually balance the frickin' game!!" GW: "there is balance in the game! Even the worst armies can win if they take enough SCE as allies!"
Imperial soup would be the other extreme and definitly not better. But I would like to at least be able to field an entire battalion of allies at decent strength and slightly more choices than sigmarines. I feel like currently there's more cherry picking with respect to allies as you simply can't bring enough of em to build up synergies, and with most abilities revolving around keywords the support from your own wizards and whatnot often doesn't affect them reducing the viable choices to whatever units need no synergies to work, like most artillery pieces. Bringing something like a host of witch aelves is pointless if you can't also bring enough DoK heroes to buff them up, which is a shame as often the battleline can fill certain interesting tactical gaps. As for t he whole "my army sucks" vs "no it's balanced you just need ally X", imho that has more to do with the SCE getting all the love and some other factions getting no new stuff than with any possible mechanic for allies.
But... allies being worth it would basically mean that some armies have units that - without buffs because synergies are missing - are good enough so they are worth taking over own units that do benefit from buffs. That's the critical point, because to me that means: if a unit from another army, without synergies, is better than all of mine that synergize with each other, then my army has a serious problem. ...and what kind of badass unit would that be? How would it fight in its original army, with synergies? I see the point of allies, for specialist units. I play a faction that has no artillery at all, or no wizards at all. I can play pure lists, without artillery or magic, and those are still balanced in a way so I can win. OR I can take allied artillery or a wizard, so I can use them as a tactical option. But a whole detachment? Some line units and buffed up by their own heroes? I don't know.
Many army's have Battalions that use other army's units. This allows for "detachment" style addons as those units don't pull from ally points. Perhaps an expanded version of this would be suitable.
Don't bother with the vulkite they got nerfed, bring Hearthguard berzerkers.... they are the offensive version of what our GUARD should be.... 2 wounds, 5+ save, 6+ FNP(4+ if within 10" of a fyreslayers hero), 2 attacks 2"range (3 for alpha) 3+/3+/-/1, on 6 to hit inflict 2 mortal wounds and continue the attack sequence. 5 bodies 120 points bring two for 21 attacks , bring the runesmiter (120 points) on foot with Prayer of ash and they will have the 4+ FNP, +1 to save rolls, and reroll wounds... 120x2 +120 360 ally points
Well what I'd like to use would be stuff like bringing a battalion of heavy infantry when your army mostly just fields fodder. Or a glass cannon when all you have are tarpits that win by attrition, not by ripping through your enemy. Cavalry when most your stuff is slow. Or even just swapping out a tarpit horde of 40 for a 10-20 multiwound models so my tarpit is less unwieldy. That sorta thing. It'd still be specialist units as far as your original army is concerned. Depending on the circumstances a battalion of these "specialists" could be increadibly usefull for playing certain objectives or dealing with a specific threat from your opponent . As for ensuring your own troops stay best. The allegiance abilities should be what encourages you to stick with your own troops. What would also help would be for buffs to be changed to "does X, if the target has <keyword> also does Y" instead of currently where they usually only affect <keyword> units. (e.g. priestly rights allows re-rolls of 1 for all allies, but re-rolls of all failed rolls for seraphon instead of the current version that only does anything if the ally is a seraphon). It'd both make taking allies easier (as at least they're not gonna be completly unsupported) and while ensuring your own stuff stays the best stat-wise. And there are of course other mechanics that could be put in place to balance out allies, a great example is HoM&M's disadvantage of a morale penalty for your army when you start mixing factions. That shouldn't exactly be impossible to implement in a tabletop. This is also a good solution, especially if the battalion gives a few options and isn't too rigid. I also like how Slaves of Darkness can take keywords to fit in with the major chaos gods and still benefit from (some) of their buffs cuz they now have the correct keywords.
Yep, this is a good point. For example, Fyreslayers are now a solid army, but one of their weakness is still the lack of move to reach those objectives which are far away from my main effort.... something that can force my opponent to be aware of the danger, so he cannot leave unguarded a portion of the battlefield. For Fyreslayers, it's not that hard to take a couple of 3xflying SCE (prosecutors with javelin), or a couple of Gyrocopters. But it's a specific issue, that can be mitigated by a specialized unit allied.
400 points of allies allows for 2x Abhorrent Archregeants. That's 4 additional spell casts and unbinds and 2x summons of 20 Ghouls and/or 3x Flayers... this seems pretty ridiculous.
That's slightly hilarious. To be honest it says more about how powerfull flesh courts are than about mercenaries. I hope that they won't end up banning (or ruining) the mechanic in its entirety cuz they can't be bothered to balance the abusive cases. Though given GW's tendency to go for broad bandaid "fixes" for these kinda issues I fear it won't be so...
Indeed. A great example is the nerf of Endless spells (cannot profit from range extension abilities) that ruins some nice tactics for us, because Morathi could abuse it.
The problem with Mercs is that there are units which are strictly better than other units without their allegiance abilities. These units will end up being the new loyal 32 for all armies in AoS if it isn't addressed. Matched play points have, up until the point, been constructed around the limits and strengths of armies in conjunction with their currently available allies. If Mercs stay matchplay legal for events then the new GH2019 will have to make some massive points adjustments to compensate.
Imho the best example of it is the rule of one for spells. To stop people from spamming arcane bolt they ended up making building an army around casters awkward cuz they all need unique spells to achieve anything, not to mention effectivly invalidating strategies revolving around the multiple use of certain spells that weren't abusive, we ended up with a 1000 different variations of arcane bolt that end up doing basicly the same thing & nothing was done about other abusive cases of mortal wound spam. It's such a weird fix. Yeah, point values will need a fairly massive overhaul. Either that or mercs need to have secondairy restrictions taht haven't been announced yet. But that was to be expected when opening up this many new units to every single army. It's kinda inherent to gaining acces to any allies, merc system or not.
The reason the rule of one exist is mostly due to Nagash. He could nearly grantee that all skeletons and Graveguard would be under the affect of Vanhel's Danse Macabre. I actually think Arcane Bolt and Mystic Shield should be the exception to the rule or one. Maybe each Wizard should still only get to cast each only once, though.
Meh, even per wizard it'd be awkward the moment you have more than 1 available cast. I like how they do it with Kroak's celestial deliverance getting progressivly harder to cast. A mechanic like that would have my preference as long as they can manage to find some balance in between "too easy so certain models with excessive acces to modifiers succeed anyways" and "too difficult, so without modifiers getting more than 2 casts off is basicly impossible". The way the new arcane bolt works, being more effective with a better casting roll, also helps curb abuse simply cuz if it succeeds multiple times, a bunch of those are probably not going to be too impressive. Meh, as long as Nagash retains his ridiculous volume of spellcasts and his modifiers he'l Always break any halfway interesting magic rules. A model that has 9 spellcasts when the average wizard has 1 and a +3 bonus to all of those spellcasts is just ridiculous… The first thing they should do if they want to make magic interesting is nerf him into the ground (or at least, his casting abilities). I'm not surprised he's one of the prime reasons for the rule of one.