I actually respectfully disagree with ALMOST everything you said there. I did say I would like to see another pass on the points for balance reason. I think we generally agree there.
The limiting battalions thing seems at least to me to be gw's design decision atm. What I was trying to say is to just limit that to a hard number. (1 battalion at 1k, 2-3 at 2k ect, those are rough numbers of course) instead of making some battalions in accessible.
Well I disagree with that design decision cuz of the aforementioned reason of it disproportionally affecting certain types of armies. Generally speaking, I dislike hard limits on anything that just flat out says you can only bring X of Y as it tends to screw with certain play-styles. They often feel like bandaids trying to fight a symptom and don't actually solve the cause. E.g. the rule of one breaks most wizard-based armies, and stops arcane bolt spam, but doesn't actually fix the mortal wound spam if you take the right collection of wizards (take a skaven warlock engineer and arch-warlock and a random one and you still have 3 mortal wound spells with basicly the same range & casting values...)
Similarly limiting the battalions does stop people from abusing artifacts or in this case getting the first drop (though this seems to be an unintended side-effect). But it also stops armies that rely on synergies, like our own, to really get going as we simply can't afford to spend >20% of our points on battalions if the other guy only spends 5%. It'l put us at far too much of a disadvantage.. Similarly if you just say "x battalions per y points" then armies that rely on them are still kinda screwed since armies that don't rely on them just effectivly get a free battalion which they don't really need.
On a sidenote, battalions already have the limitation of requiring specific troops. I'd rather see them utilizing that to limit battalion abuse. Taking say 2 shadowstrike hosts shouldn't work well simply because it only gives you cannonfodder and some mildly effective assasins, that shouldn't form a particularly good army and should be defeated by most opponents. Now taking say a shadowstrike and bloodclaw starhost should already work better as a fullfledged army as they compliment eachother, but it's still has clear weaknesses. If you utilize that effect to balance it it'd feel much nicer I think. Admittadly, so far the only one for whom this'd really work would be seraphon as far as I've seen. It'l for example not work all that well on sylvaneth seeing as they have a mere 10 units so it'l be much more difficult to limit it. Clan pestilence would be even more ridiculous with 6 units, unless they'd get battalions that only include 1 unit type at a time....
On the point of turn order I think a smaller more organized force (lower drop) would logically be able to out maneuver a larger less organized force ( higher drop) and seize initiative. Is it perfect? No. Is it logical? Sure.
Our slann literally just materialize our entire army at the snap of a finger, sometimes they even just materialize them by dropping the entire army from the sky on top of our enemy. I don't think that the size and organization of our opponent's army will do much to catch us off-guard and seize the initiative
As for the armies led by those less capable than slanns, it's still supposed to be an enemy army. Armies aren't generally capable of sneaking up on people seeing as they're huge and relativly slow compared to scouts & refugees running away to get out of its path... Also, army size won't really matter for getting the drop, organisation does though. And organisation works, regardless of having 10 battalions or 1. An organized army would for example already be travelling in a formation that allows fast deployment.
Not to mention, this'd imply that a greenskin army, who's main tactic is running at an enemy yelling "waaaaaaaaaaaaaagh" really loudly, can manage to get the drop on highly organized forces that employ scouts like the SCE, seraphon, various mortal armies etc. simply because there's less greenskin units or cause they're "organised".
