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

By Carter Estes  ·  July 18, 2026

I have written more 40K lists in the last six weeks than I did in the last two years of 10th edition. That is not an exaggeration, and it is not because I have suddenly acquired free time. It is because army building in 11th edition is actually interesting again — and I believe that is the single biggest thing Games Workshop got right with this launch.

Let me explain what changed, because the rules reveals came out in a firehose and a lot of folks are still building lists like it is 10th.

Detachment Points: The Headline Change

In 10th, you picked one detachment. That was it. Your whole army lived and died on a single set of rules, and if your codex had one good detachment and five bad ones, congratulations — you had one army.

11th edition replaces that with a budget. Every detachment now carries a Detachment Point cost from 1 to 3, weighted by how broadly its rules reach:

• 1 DP — narrow detachments. A specific unit type gets a boost, or the whole army gets something gentle and conditional.
• 2 DP — the classic codex detachment. Shapes a real chunk of your list without owning it.
• 3 DP — army-wide powerhouses. Take one of these and it is your army; you cannot pair it with anything, and it is illegal below 2,000 points.

Your budget scales with battle size. Incursion at 1,000 points gives you two Detachment Points. Strike Force at 2,000 gives you three. So at Strike Force you can run one big 3 DP detachment, or a 2 and a 1, or three 1s stacked together — provided no two share the same Unique Tag.

That last clause is where the game lives now. List building has become a genuine resource puzzle instead of a menu selection. My Thousand Sons have gone through four completely different configurations because pairing a cheap 1 DP cult detachment with a mid-weight 2 DP shell opens lines of play that no single detachment offered in 10th. My Aeldari are worse off for it, honestly — but that is a different article, and I will get to it.

Enhancements and the New Upgrade Tag

Enhancements got restructured too. It is no longer a flat three. You get two Enhancements at Incursion and four at Strike Force, which means bigger games reward actually investing in your characters rather than treating enhancements as an afterthought you bolt on with leftover points.

The genuinely new piece is the Upgrade tag. An Upgrade can be applied to as many as three non-Character units and still counts as a single Enhancement choice. You may take up to three of the same Upgrade in your list — the second and third instances do not eat additional Enhancement slots, though you pay the points cost every time.

Read that twice. It is the sleeper rule of the edition. Armies built around a strong core of identical units — Battleline-heavy lists especially — got handed a tool that rewards horde-shaped forces in a way 10th never did.

The Force Org Chart: Unit Caps and Battleline

There is no old-fashioned Force Organisation Chart in 11th. What there is instead is a cap on duplicates, and it is cleaner than the slot-counting we used to do.

At Incursion you may take two copies of any given unit. At Strike Force you may take three. Battleline units double that cap — six at Strike Force. Games Workshop clearly wants troops back on the table, and the doubled cap plus the Upgrade tag stacking is how they are getting there. If you shelved your Battleline models sometime around 2023 because they did nothing, dig them out.

Leaders, Support, and Locked Pairings

Characters are now sorted into Leader and Support. A unit can carry one of each — but here is the part that will cost people games: those pairings are locked at list submission.

You cannot see the mission, look at the terrain, and then decide your Apothecary belongs with the Devastators instead of the Tactical Squad. You commit on paper. That is a real skill test, and it is going to separate the players who write lists from the players who write plans. I lost a game at the shop three weeks ago for exactly this reason. Stapled a support character to the wrong body and spent five turns watching him do nothing useful. Cost me the game, taught me the edition.

How to Actually Build a List Right Now

My practical advice, having done this the hard way:

Start with the detachment math, not the models. Decide whether you are a 3 DP army or a 2+1 army before you pick a single unit. That choice cascades into everything else.

Check Unique Tags before you fall in love. Nothing is more deflating than assembling a beautiful two-detachment combination and discovering they share a tag.

Treat Upgrades as army architecture. If you can build around three copies of one Upgrade across nine units, you have gotten more mileage out of one Enhancement slot than most opponents will get out of four.

Write your Leader and Support pairings last, and write them twice. Once for how you want the game to go, once for how it will actually go.

Come Test It On a Real Table

Lists on paper are theory. Lists on a table are truth. We keep tables open at The Game Station for exactly this, and we stock the 11th edition core rules, the Armageddon launch box, paints, and the codexes as they land — plus the battlemats and 3D terrain we manufacture in-house, which is what most of our tables are running on these days.

Bring a list. Bring two. Find out which one survives contact.

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