Army Building in 11th Edition: Points, Detachments, and the New Force Org Chart

By Carter Estes  ·  July 17, 2026

For the better part of two decades, the Force Organisation Chart was the skeleton every Warhammer 40,000 army hung its flesh on. One HQ here, two Troops there, a fistful of slots you either filled or left empty. Tenth edition quietly buried it. Eleventh edition — which dropped June 20 with the Armageddon box and its Blood Angels-versus-Orks throwdown — has salted the earth over the grave. If you're sitting down for your first real go at Warhammer 40K 11th edition army building, throw out the muscle memory. The rules for what goes in your list have changed more than the rules for how it fights.

Here's my thesis, and I don't hedge on it: the new Detachment Points system is the best structural change Games Workshop has made to list-building since I started playing. Let me walk you through why.

Detachment Points, not slots

The headline of any 40k detachments guide worth reading in 2026 is this — you no longer pick one detachment and live inside its rules for the whole game. You're handed a budget of Detachment Points (DP), and you spend it. Each detachment carries a cost from 1 to 3 DP. The cheap ones (1 DP) are narrow — a single unit archetype, a gentle conditional buff. The 2 DP options are your classic codex detachments, the ones that shape a real chunk of the list. And the 3 DP monsters rewrite your whole army's rulebook, so they eat your entire allowance in one bite.

At Incursion (1,000 points), you get two DP. At Strike Force — the 2,000-point standard most of us play — you get three. Two points buys one big detachment or a pair of small ones. Three points opens up combinations that were flatly impossible a year ago.

Mixing is the whole game now

This is where it gets interesting, and where I've spent most of my hobby brain since launch. You can now run, say, a 2 DP codex detachment for the bones of your army and bolt on a 1 DP detachment to paper over a weakness. My Thousand Sons have never had this kind of flexibility — I can lean into the cabal ritual engine and still spend a point shoring up my anti-tank, which the Sons have begged for since Magnus first threw his tantrum.

There's a governor on the chaos, thank the Emperor. Many detachments carry tags, and you can't stack two detachments sharing the same tag. So you won't see anyone bolting three army-wide buff packages together into some unholy Frankenstein list. GW learned that lesson. The design space is wide, but it's fenced.

Enhancements and unit caps

Points aren't the only thing you're budgeting. Incursion gives you two Enhancements and caps most units at two of a kind; Strike Force bumps that to four Enhancements and a cap of three, with Battleline units doubling that ceiling. Read those numbers before you buy a third box of your favorite elite — the game will tell you no.

All your points still live in the Munitorum Field Manual, now fully digital and updated online, so there's no excuse for bringing a stale list. And every faction got a free Faction Pack PDF at launch with its detachments rebuilt for 11th, including three to four brand-new 1 DP options each — seventy-plus new detachments across the game. Download yours before you spend a dime.

How to actually start

If you're new, here's my no-nonsense order of operations. Pick your points level — start at Incursion, 1,000 points, because it's forgiving and fast. Read your Faction Pack cover to cover; the detachments are the real army-building decision now, more than any single model. Spend one DP on the theme you love and, if you've got room, one more on your army's weakness. Then fill points with units that actually serve that plan — not the ones with the coolest box art. (Paint those anyway. That part hasn't changed.)

Keep an eye on July 22, too — the first monthly 40k rules update and the new healing rules are landing then, and I'd bet a good brush this becomes the rhythm of the edition. Living rules mean a living meta, so build a list you can adapt.

Whether you're cracking open the Armageddon box or refreshing an army you've hauled around for years, 11th edition rewards the player who reads carefully and plans deliberately. That's always been the soul of this hobby — the war is won at the kitchen table long before a single die is thrown.

If you're building your first 11th edition army and need the models, paints, or a table to fight over, come see us at The Game Station. We stock the Armageddon starter, the core range, and everything you need to get from grey plastic to a painted force. Our crew plays this game — ask us anything.