Why you should stop playing the supplement detachments

 

I was doing something other than playing 40K this past weekend, but I was monitoring a local RTT a number of friends and acquaintances were playing at. A fellow Dark Angels player within the local community was playing, and he had the misfortune of going 0-3. I don't want to dissect his list, but I am going to point out he was playing an Inner Circle Task Force. 

That got me thinking about why some of our battle brothers insist on using our supplement's detachments to make lists they bring to tournaments when it's common knowledge that they are just bad. I'm not just stating that because I think so, it's what the statistics bear out. If you go on the Meta Data Dashboard on Stat-check.com, you can see for yourself how the various detachments are performing, and I'll tell you, battle brother, the supplement detachments are not doing well. 

Combined, as of this writing the supplement detachments have a win rate of 31%. The Company of Hunters has the highest at an underwhelming 39%, followed by the Inner Circle Task Force at 31%, and, and the Unforgiven Task Force at a dismal 21%.

People playing the supplement detachments are not an insignificant portion of the player base either. Inner Circle Task Force players make up 19% of the player base since the release of the supplement. I get it, there is some spicy stuff in the ICTF, and we all really want it to be good, but it just isn't. For the other detachments, Unforgiven Task Force players and Company of Hunters players make up 4% each of the player base, for a combined 27% of players using the supplement detachments as of this writing.

I can already envision retorts to the effect of, "Well, if you don't use the supplement detachment, you're not playing REAL Dark Angels!" If you are one of the people making that argument, respectfully, you are wrong, the lore proves you're wrong, the history of the game does not bear out that attitude, and Games Workshop does not agree with you. 

It is important to note that Dark Angels Space Marines are Dark Angels Space Marines. They're using the same doctrinal documents all other Space Marine chapters use (you know, the Codex Astartes, the lore kind of makes a big deal out of it), just with some unique idiosyncrasies.

For most of the actual real world history of Warhammer 40K, we did not have faction-unique detachments. Prior to (I think) 7th edition, all players were using a common Force Organization Chart, and you might have been able to unlock taking particular non-Troops units in the Troops slot by taking specific special characters. Furthermore, even when different detachments were introduced, through 8th and 9th edition they were not bespoke faction-unique detachments. We all selected our detachments from a common pool. 

Finally, if Games Workshop thought that Dark Angels players had to use only supplement detachments to play Dark Angels, the supplement would say so.  Prior to it being released, I honestly thought it would, but that the supplement would include versions of all the Codex: Space Marine detachments, since the Inner Circle Task Force and Company of Hunters clearly occupy the same design spaces as the First Company Task Force and the Stormlance Task Force respectively. I'm glad they didn't, because I'd have hated being stuck playing the detachments we have, but I suppose if we 7 bespoke detachments to choose from, at least one of them would have been good, even if only by accident.

As for why you should stop using the supplement detachments, my first argument is common knowledge: they are bad. . I don't want to get too into the weeds why they are bad here. If you want the in-depth analysis, I did a review of the Company of Hunters which you can see here, the Unforgiven Task Force here, and the Inner Circle Task Force here. Suffice it to say here they are objectively worse than the Gladius Task Force. You're apt to just straight up win more games if you take your existing lists and change the detachment to a Gladius. I'm all for competition, but most of us are not so good that we're going to have an even chance of winning playing at a deliberate handicap. Come on brothers, you want to win more games don't you?

The other reason I think you should stop playing the supplement detachments is that to send a message to Games Workshop. Say what you want about 10th edition, at least GW is paying attention to the game statistics. If we can see what percentage of the player base is using the supplement detachments, Games Workshop certainly can. They're basing what armies and units get attention off of game statistics, so if there's a clear rejection of the supplement detachments on the part of the community, Games Workshop is going to notice, and they'll be more apt to address it than if it looks like DA players will keep using the supplement detachments no matter how bad they are. It's not the most direct way to send a message to GW. For that, you can use their Customer Service email (CustServ@gwplc.com). They've stated on Warhammer-Community that players should use that email to offer feedback on the rules, and I encourage everyone to do so and do so regularly. However, individual emails, no matter how numerous, can be rationalized away, whereas statistics are hard to dismiss. A statistical drop off in players using the supplement detachments is more apt to get GW's attention than anything else we're likely to do.

Those are the two prongs of my argument: win more games, and send GW a message in the process. GW did us a disservice giving us such a lackluster set of detachments. There's no reason we should handicap ourselves by using them, and if we don't GW will be more likely to take action to fix them than if we do. Until then, we do the best we can with what we've got, and the Codex: Space Marines supplement may not be great, but they're better than the supplement detachments.