Detachment Rules
Your Detachment decides your force's battle tactics, its stratagems and the Enhancements available to it. In an 11th Edition campaign, picking one brings its rules, stratagems and Enhancements with it, free on every plan, so there is nothing to type in from your codex. You will need an Order of Battle first.
What you can choose depends on your campaign's edition. The Host picks it when creating the campaign, 11th unless they choose 10th, and can change it later with Edit Campaign:
| 10th Edition | 11th Edition | |
|---|---|---|
| Detachments per force | Exactly one | Up to three |
| Detachment Points | Not used | 2 DP up to 1,000 pts, 3 DP above |
| Force Disposition | Not used | One per battle, chosen at muster |
| Detachment rules | Typed in, or imported with your list | Filled in for you |
| Stratagems and Enhancements | Typed in | Filled in for you |
Choosing your detachments
Set your faction first
The detachment list is filtered by your force's faction, so Echelon asks for that before it offers you a detachment. If you have not set one, the Detachments & Rules panel shows a faction picker in place of the detachment picker. Choose your faction there and the list appears. You can also set it from Edit Force Details in the ⋯ menu on your force banner.
- Go to Roster in your campaign, and open the Force tab, marked by a hanging standard.
- Open the Detachments & Rules panel, marked by a tree of linked boxes.
- Click Choose detachment (or Change detachments).
- Pick from the list. It is filtered to your force's faction and your campaign's edition. In an 11th Edition campaign each detachment you pick shows its rules underneath straight away, so you can read what it does before you commit to it.
- Click Save.
Detachments come from a built-in catalogue covering every faction, so you pick rather than type. If yours is missing, or you are playing something homebrew, choose Other / homebrew and give it a name. Homebrew detachments are a Supporter feature. A homebrew detachment already on your force stays there whatever your plan. Importing your list only picks detachments from the catalogue, and never adds a homebrew one.
Army rules and detachment rules
The Detachments & Rules panel shows both, in the order they apply:
- Army rules come from your faction and apply whatever detachments you take: Oath of Moment, Waaagh!, Reanimation Protocols and so on. They follow your faction, so they change only when it does.
- Detachment rules sit with the detachment that grants them. In an 11th Edition campaign they come from Echelon's catalogue the moment you pick the detachment, and stay current: when the catalogue is corrected, your force shows the corrected wording.
You can change your army rules and each detachment's rules. Click the pen icon beside them to open an editor, where you can correct the wording, add a rule Echelon does not have with Add rule, or delete one, then click Save. In an 11th Edition campaign that is a Supporter feature, because the published rules are already there: on the free plan the pen carries a hollow bolt and shows you the plans instead. In a 10th Edition campaign editing a detachment's rules is free, since there is nothing to fall back on. A rule you delete stays deleted. Echelon will not put it back.
Once you change a set of rules, they stay exactly as you left them, and the panel notes underneath that they were changed from the official rules. A later correction to the catalogue no longer reaches them, so if you only meant to fix a typo, it is worth reporting it as well (see Where the data comes from).
To go back, click Reset to official rules under them and confirm with Reset. Your own wording is not kept anywhere, so copy it first if you might want it again. Resetting is free on every plan, so if you changed rules as a Supporter and later moved to the free plan, the official wording is still one click away. Changing your force's faction puts back the new faction's official army rules.
10th Edition forces
Rule text in the catalogue is 11th Edition. A detachment that exists in both editions does not have the same rules in both, so a 10th Edition force gets no army rules, no automatic detachment rules, and no automatic stratagems or Enhancements. Click the pen icon beside your detachment to type its rules, add your stratagems and Enhancements in their panels, and put any army rules under Codex & House Rules. Importing your list from NewRecruit or BattleScribe brings the detachment's rules with it, but not stratagems or Enhancements.
Stratagems
In an 11th Edition campaign each detachment brings its stratagems. Open the Stratagems panel on your Force tab: the core stratagems come first, then each detachment's under its own name, marked Official. A few detachments have none on file yet, and if all of yours are among them the panel says so.
Official stratagems keep up with the catalogue, so when one is corrected your force shows the new wording. They cannot be edited or removed. If your group plays one differently, add your own version alongside it: click the plus on the Stratagems panel, and choose which of your detachments it belongs to, or none. It shows up marked Custom. Writing your own is a Supporter feature in an 11th Edition campaign, and free in a 10th Edition one. Ones you wrote before stay on your force and still work on the free plan.
To change what one you wrote says, press the pen on it. That is part of Supporter in an 11th Edition campaign too, so on the free plan the pen carries the bolt and shows you the plans. Moving one to another detachment is free on every plan: press Change detachment on it, pick where it belongs or none, and press Move. If your force has only one detachment, ones you wrote before stratagems were filed by detachment were put under it for you. With two or three they sit under Not tied to a detachment until you move them.
Detachment Points (11th Edition)
In 11th Edition, each detachment costs 1–3 Detachment Points, and your Order of Battle's size sets the budget you have to spend:
- Up to 1,000 points: 2 DP
- Above 1,000 points: 3 DP
A few detachments cost a chapter its own price: Black Templars, Blood Angels and Deathwatch take Stormlance Task Force for 2 DP rather than 3, and Black Templars pay 3 for Bastion Task Force rather than 2. Echelon charges your force the price for its own faction.
The panel shows what you have spent against your budget as you choose. Overspending is a warning, not a block: Echelon tells you the sum and saves what you picked. Detachment Points come from a community catalogue of an edition still in motion, and plenty of Crusade groups set their own budgets, so the app states the arithmetic and leaves the ruling to your table.
One detachment is always legal
Games Workshop ruled that a single detachment may always be taken, whatever it costs. A lone 3 DP detachment is legal on a 1,000-point force even though the budget is 2, so a force led by a 3 DP detachment will see a warning as soon as it adds a second one. That is the rule working, not a bug.
Your Order of Battle grows as you spend Requisitions on Increase Supply Limit, so a force that starts on 2 DP can cross into 3 DP later in a campaign.
Force Dispositions (11th Edition)
Every 11th Edition detachment grants exactly one of five Force Dispositions:
- Take and Hold
- Purge the Foe
- Priority Assets
- Disruption
- Reconnaissance
When you muster for a battle, you choose one from those your detachments grant, and Echelon records it against that battle. You and your opponent then compare dispositions to work out which missions you play. Echelon stores the choice, it does not pick the mission for you.
If your force only has one detachment, it grants only one disposition, so Echelon fills it in rather than asking. If two of your detachments happen to grant the same one, you will see it listed once.
Unique Tags
Detachments carry Unique Tags, and two detachments sharing a tag cannot normally be combined. Echelon does not yet check this, so verify combinations against your codex.
Assigning Detachment Enhancements
Enhancements cost points, not Requisition Points. In an 11th Edition campaign each detachment brings its own: the Enhancements panel on your Force tab lists them under the detachment's name, marked Official, and marks Upgrade on the ones a unit that is not a Character can take. You hand them out battle by battle at muster.
- To see what a unit can take, open the Units tab and expand Enhancements it can take on its Crusade Card. On a phone the tab opens as a list, so switch to card view first with the grid icon at the top of it. Echelon reads who an Enhancement is for from the first line of its rules, such as "ADEPTUS ASTARTES model only.", and matches it against the unit's keywords and name. Epic Heroes never take one.
- When you muster for a battle, click Assign Enhancement under a unit in the Current Muster panel. The Enhancements that suit that unit come first, under Suits this unit, and the rest follow. Its points count towards the battle's points target.
That list is a guide, not a gate. A unit you entered by hand may have no keywords to match, so the muster still offers every Enhancement.
Your campaign's edition decides which units are offered Assign Enhancement. In 10th Edition only Characters are, and each Enhancement goes on one unit. In 11th Edition the muster offers every unit, and lets the same Enhancement go on up to three. The rules allow that only for an Enhancement marked Upgrade, and Echelon does not check which is which yet, so keep to the marks. Both editions allow three Enhancements per army, and the muster stops offering them once you have three.
To write your own, click the plus on the Enhancements panel, give it a Name and a Points Cost, and describe what it does. Open the description with who can take it, for example "CHARACTER model only.", and the Crusade Card list picks it up. It is marked Custom, and it is a Supporter feature in an 11th Edition campaign and free in a 10th Edition one. Ones you wrote before stay on your force, and your units can still take them on the free plan, but changing what one says or costs is part of Supporter too: the pen carries the bolt and shows you the plans. Moving one to another detachment is free on every plan: press Change detachment on it and pick where it belongs. If your force has only one detachment, ones you wrote before Enhancements were filed by detachment were put under it for you.
Official Enhancements cannot be edited or removed. Their wording keeps up with the catalogue, but their points do not: an Enhancement costs what it cost when your force gained it, the same as a unit.
In a battle, the Army tab of the Live Battle Companion lists your detachment rules and stratagems under the detachment each belongs to, and each unit's card shows the Enhancement it carries.
Where the data comes from
Echelon does not write rules text of its own. The detachment list, Detachment Points, Force Dispositions, detachment rules and Enhancements come from BSData, the community-maintained catalogues that BattleScribe and NewRecruit build lists from. Stratagems are powered by Wahapedia, from its public data export. Your faction's own Agendas, requisitions, Battle Traits, Battle Scars and Crusade Relics come from Wahapedia's faction pages too, in a copy for each edition.
Both are volunteer projects tracking an edition that is still moving. A detachment added since Echelon last refreshed its copy will not be in the list yet, and a rule can lag behind a Games Workshop FAQ. When that happens, your codex is the authority, and a report in the Discord gets the wording corrected on every force that has not changed it. Reporting a wrong rule says what to include.
When a detachment leaves 11th Edition, as Freebooter Krew and Rollin' Deff did when the Ork detachments were replaced, an 11th Edition force that already holds it keeps it, under its own name and with its rules, as a homebrew detachment, whatever your plan. Swap it for a current one whenever you like.