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Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: Where Did The Ad-Mech & Necron Detachments Go?

4 Minute Read
Oct 17 2023
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Goatboy here. Did you notice this little tidbit in GW’s preview?  The new Ad-Mech and Necron codexes only get 5 detachments.  Where did the others go?

The Space Marine and Tyranids have 6+ Detachments. Only getting 5 for the upcoming codexes is kind of annoying right?  I mean the bigger left over question I have is with the upcoming Dark Angels book. How are the standalone Marine Chapter codexes going to work?  Still it feels kind of odd to see these new books already getting a cut.

Is Fewer Detachments a Bad Thing?

Back to Ad-Mech and Necrons. Of course if all 5 Detachments are super good then I have less to be annoyed with – but there is no way each book has 5 amazing detachments – right?  Will we see this with all the other codexes too?   Can you imagine an Ork codex without all their Clans rules?

I mean you know the Ork codex is going to have a “beast” detachment, a buggy detachment, a shooting detachment, an assault detachment, and maybe some kind of Nob force? Heck the CSM book would easily have 7 options too. But what if we only start to see 5 for most of the of their codexes?

Which isn’t to say this is all bad.  Fewer overall rules means less stuff you have to memorize if you want to be fully competent in the game. Or at the very least try to sell your opinion to people.  We also are looking at what might be a more condensed version of rules. Instead of more esoteric options for their detachments, armies may get a smaller, more broad set of decent ones.  It gets hard to cover rules for every play style but if you have fewer you could let every detachment have awesome strats to use.

Necrons & Ad Mech Updates

We’ll just have to wait and see.  The Necrons feel like a much more complete style army due to the sheer amount of unit options they have available.  GW updated Imotekh the Stormlord and they only have a few more characters left to pull from the prison of resin and into the glory that is a plastic kit.  Necrons aren’t like the Dark Eldar who need a whole new wave of updated plastics to get finally completed. But that is a hot mess for another day.

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So far both releases seem to showcase a much slimmer style of release that will probably end up doing better for them.  It means less things people to write about and learn to master.  Less things my buddies have to dissect in the community of competitive 40K.  I just wonder if both of them just have one new plastic release or are we going to see some more new things?

Oh and that Ad-mech stilt sniper, the Sydonian Skatros looks weird!  I don’t know if I like it yet or not but surely its rules seem very annoying.  If it is cheap it will be showing up as a Lone Operative for an army is a good thing – with all the other armies using them to help spread the scoring threat out and just use your army to pressure while your weirdos sit at home.

Here We Wait…

Looks like the hot mess in all of this is just that we are going to have to wait a lot longer for new codexes, new detachments, and maybe someone fixing some of the Aeldari nonsense that is still out there.  That is always the hardest thing as a player –  just waiting for our codex to get rules.  Then you worry those rules might be too good and you have to shift your army while you are building/painting it.  Thus the dream of a good army that isn’t too good is the dream we all strive too when picking our figures to do battle with.

It looks like compared to 8th and 9th Edition, we will be waiting for our codexes a bit longer than we are used to.

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