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I recently came across something called "Highlander rules" which are intended to balance forces for tournaments and leagues and whatnot. The idea behind the rule is that you can only use ONE of each unit entry, maximum, including troops and dedicated transports.

This seems a little crazy to me, but it's not the first time I've heard of house rules to "correct" GW's balance system by blocking things like Wave Serpent spam. What sort of rules do you use in groups in your area?

"Highlander" is more of a challenge mechanic then a balance one in my opinion.

A Highlander-Deck for example is a 100 card deck in Magic The Cathering
where you may only have 1 copy of each cards (regardless it being common or rare), with the exceptions of basic land-cards and can be played
very well againts any deck-builds and game modes.

In Team Fortress 2 there is a 9-men Highlander-mode,
where there can only be 9 players and only one class per player each.
Again, quite possible to play if played on certain game modes
like King of the Hill and maybe Att/Def.

Unless the matches played are basic game matches,
ie; beat your opponents army to win,
I can´t really see real balance use for this concept in 40k matches in it´s truest concept.
It can´t be a highlander if there can be more then one.

This is not balancing for the sake of trying to beat the meta or an attempt to keep the cheddar out, this is ruining the game for many armies that either rely on certain units to stand a chance or even succeed, or the builds with multiples because of a theme that the player has chosen to run with.

Under these rules I could not run a mechanized Imperial Guard army, because I am allowed to field only one Chimera, nor field an infantry company, because only one platoon is allowed, or to use my themed Plague Marine warband, because Plague Marines may only be taken once. emotion_donotwant

What I like the least of all is that some armies only have one or two troops choices at their disposal, or are now forced to take a second troops choice they would normally never field, looking at you, Tau Empire. Armies like the Black Templars and Sisters of Battle only have ONE troops choice. Are these armies now barred from partaking in the event because they break the rule or are they the exception?

Even worse, depending on the mission type, taking objectives will be very hard for these armies, as they only have one or two troop choices, as opposed to say, the Imperial Guard infantry platoon (One choice, but plenty of units that are all capable of holding many objectives) or the Tyranids with a plethora of troop choices, who can also afford to spread out and go for more than one objective.

These rules are rubbish, utter rubbish. talk2hand