While we know that the next edition of Warhammer 40k will be gracing our shelves in June, theorycrafters and fans of all kinds are still spending hours piecing together exactly what the new edition will mean for generals in the grimdark far future. Fortunately, a new Warhammer Community update has given us an insight into a major new mechanic: Force Dispositions.
In the new edition, each Detachment you include in your army will unlock a different potential Force Disposition. For the uninitiated, Detachments are pre-existing army subtypes representative of army specialisms and distinctive tactical approaches within each 40k faction.
Force Dispositions take this one step further and establish the kinds of missions your army might be assigned to accomplish within the wider Warhammer 40k fiction. There are five on offer: Take and Hold, Purge the Foe, Disruption, Reconnaissance, and Priority Assets.
These attributes radically affect the sorts of mission objectives your army will be tasked with completing under the new rules. What's more, the new mission cards will sometimes provide players with asymmetrical objectives tailored to their Force Disposition.
For instance, in the Death Trap mission, a Disruption force will be tasked with setting traps when battling a Take and Hold army. Meanwhile, the Punishment mission rewards you for targeting and destroying select units within an opposing Disruption army.
Despite these changes, however, Games Workshop assures us that secondary objectives will "return much the same," allowing players to choose fixed objectives or to draw from a deck to maximise their potential score by rolling the proverbial dice on a favourable side-mission.
Tactical Objectives and Twists will return, albeit with some slight tweaks to the former. In the upcoming edition, rather than only having two of these at any time, you draw two tactical objective cards every turn and keep the ones you haven't scored yet. This is a welcome change, which will prevent players from getting bogged down in the late game.
Raise an army of your own on the Wargamer Discord.