Once again in my travails across these wild and wooly internets I have found someone who wants to rebalance the game. This system, called "S3" (or Strategem Selection System) is basically a cap on what you can take in a variety of ways. S3 (which I can't think of without thinking S2 Organs and thus Evangelion) gives you ten "stratagem points" which allow you to lift restrictions they place on your army- how generous.
The general guidelines should be familiar to anyone who's encountered FAAC players: no duplicates of HQ, EL, FA, or HS units, including units that are originally from one of those slots but moved to Troops by a character. It also forbids characters costing more than 200pts as a rule, albeit with many exceptions. One does have to wonder about armies with no customization options, however- how can I differentiate my Hive Guard squads from each other? Which options are my Immortals supposed to take, exactly? But, of course, this is largely lost on the Marine-focused nonsense that usually results from these things, as clearly every other army plays and is built just like MEQs.
Let's look at some of the other gems:
- Transports are all 2 Strategy Points (hereafter SP) each. Yay, let's go back to 4th edition!
- Grey Hunters are 1SP per unit. So are Long Fangs and Scouts. TWC are 1SP per model. Hope you didn't want to play Space Wolves!
- Blood Chalices are 2SP each. Between this and the transport penalty, someone really hates variant Marine armies.
- If you build Deathwing or Ravenwing, you cannot take ANY other units. So your DW army is NOTHING but Terminators and maybe a single Land Raider if you're lucky. If you built RW, you get bikes and Speeders and absolutely nothing else.
- IG, as always, gets a million penalties for basically everything in the book. OMG Autocannons so unfair wtf!
- Witch Hunters, hilariously, have no penalty for their transports. So spam Immolators away, guys, it's only fair!
- Oblits are 2SP/model, because clearly getting rid of a T4/2+ guy is impossible.
- Crisis are 1SP/model and Broadsides are 2, because fudgemuffins Tau.
- Dark Eldar have no penalties because they clearly suck and no one likes them.
That's not the best part, though. Having slapped all these restrictions onto armies about not being able to take elite forces or transport-heavy armies, suddenly it seems that everyone is fielding infantry hordes for some reason. Well, we can't have that! So there is a hard cap on the number of models you are allowed to have in an army, which varies between 55 (for Marines) and 100 (IG). Orks are limited to 90, so if you decide you want to field units of Boyz... well, you can't bring more than three. Not even that, since you need an HQ, etc. How dare they try and make a big mob of boyz running across the field- that's totally against the fluff! How dare Tyranids bring large swarms of identicallly-engineered creatures- must be another WAAC asshole! Grr! Rage! Time to make a bunch of rules so no one is allowed to bring the army they want!
Of course, as always, the rules are so laughably full of holes that you could drivea Baneblade through one without even scuffing the paint. I can clock in a pretty standard Space Marine list at 5SP (Libby, 5 TH/SS, 2 Rifledread, 2 Meltabunker Tacticals, 3 Dakka Preds, some Land Speeders), so I bet a lot of other armies could do likewise. The rules are apparently aimed at 1500-1700 pt play, so may seem a bit cramped, but there are still plenty of ridiculous things you can do.
