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Is there a reference or guide to support how "long" a turn actually is.

For example in DnD a wizard may take 10 minutes to decide what they do but in reality it is only 6 seconds.

So this is my question. Is there a reference to how "long" a turn actually takes?

There is no canon answer and no single turn length that makes sense. Based on aircraft movement speeds it's a couple of seconds, based on how long it takes infantry to move the distance of a rifle's range it's a few minutes.

This question (or versions of it) pop up regularly.

Here was the last iteration as far as I am aware:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/809956.page

As per my post in the thread above, I think 40k battles are meant to be short, bloody firefights of about 5 minutes duration total at a critical point in the overall battle. A single turn is ~1 minute. 40k battles are very abstracted though.

Honestly its way too abstract.

Nothing in the game is true-scale to anything else. From the models to each other (tanks are notoriously undersized); to terrain (most buildings aren't much bigger than a garden shed); to the board (you have aircraft and long range artillery trading shots whilst infantry are charging front lines all within a few inches of each other).

You could envision it as 5 mins of utterly brutal combat skirmish style; or it could be each model represents a vast number of troops and each inch is vast distance and you are commanding vast forces. Though even then you'd have to break it up unit by unit - eg 1 marine might be 1 marine; but 1 termagaunt could be 10,000 termagaunts etc...


There's so much abstraction that its really down to how you want to imagine the setting to be and how the games play out.

I picture battles only lasting a minute or two, with a given round being about 10-20ish seconds.

My logic being that if you drew the battle as a cartoon and kept the camera on a single infantry unit, that's about how long I'd expect the end result to be.

A squad of banshees spends a few seconds of screentime running, a second or two shooting their pistols, and a few seconds screaming/slashing. Wash, rinse, and repeat about 5 times.

Or put another way, what do you think the act of a dreadnaught lifting its lascannon and firing looks like? Or the act of a basilisk loading a shell and firing. Now multiply that by 5, and you have the time it takes for 5 rounds of battle to occur.

thank you for responses, so i suppose then this adapts the question. How do you envision it? In your own headcannons how does your mind interpet it?

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I picture battles only lasting a minute or two, with a given round being about 10-20ish seconds.

My logic being that if you drew the battle as a cartoon and kept the camera on a single infantry unit, that's about how long I'd expect the end result to be.

A squad of banshees spends a few seconds of screentime running, a second or two shooting their pistols, and a few seconds screaming/slashing. Wash, rinse, and repeat about 5 times.

Or put another way, what do you think the act of a dreadnaught lifting its lascannon and firing looks like? Or the act of a basilisk loading a shell and firing. Now multiply that by 5, and you have the time it takes for 5 rounds of battle to occur.

Thing is that works for shooting, but fails for close combat. There's so little time that you're basically expecting everyone to already be in combat position to start with, let alone have time to actually swing their weapon.

The game has no ground scale or time scale. Its an arbitrarily long (or short) period of time.

Personally, I've always envisioned a game as being a relatively short minor skirmish, maybe 20-30 minutes at most, with each turn covering the span of a few minutes (prob ~5 minutes each), which does not necessarily flow linearly from phase to phase. In the real world, combat has a certain rhythm or tempo to it. Its often long periods of low intensity punctuated by short periods of high intensity. The idea that a turn is 20-30 seconds and a game represents ~2 minutes of warfare isn't really realistic.

Movement would be cautious, often done in a low crawl or a slow steady creep forward continually assessing your exposure, etc. punctuated by brief periods of short-distance sprints that would be done sequentially, one or two members of the unit at a time, rather than a short burst of the entire squad running across an open field with reckless abandon, or you're going to be moving using a bounding overwatch technique where smaller subgroups are taking turns moving while the other groups cover them. Movement under contact is typically slow, progressive, planned/calculated, and deliberate - there will be bursts of speed, where if you really need to advance or move from one piece of cover to another you move as quickly as possible as short a distance as possible between them in order to minimize exposure time, but thats less preferable than taking a slower approach on a less exposed and safer path, and you're not going to put an entire fireteam or squad in harms way by doing it simultaneously - you're going to have some of the unit putting down covering fire while others move and take up positions, and you take it in steps so that you don't accidentally put the entire unit into a killzone at once.

Exchanges of gunfire are often a lengthy drawn out affair, especially in the modern day ("the empty battlefield" where engagements occur at long range with both sides heavily dispersed under heavy cover and concealment for extended periods of time). Its reasonable to assume that a turn represents a few short bursts of gunfire. The entire team/squad, etc. isn't standing up and unloading a full magazine of ammo at the enemy in a single burst - they are taking cover, popping their heads up quickly to try to assess range and bearing of the enemy (possibly by drawing counterfire to themselves in the process), minimizing their own exposure to enemy return fire by positioning themselves in a way to minimize opposing sightlines and taking short quick bursts.

The only part of the turn I really think happens quickly is the Assault/Fight phase. Running into close contact with the enemy and CQB'ing until one side breaks or is defeated is going to be done quickly and with great violence.

Given that weapon ranges make more sense if you assume they're on a log scale I suspect turn time is also relative.

How long is a game? About as long as the set piece battle at the end of an action movie. That is what you are seeing. So a turn is about 1/5th of that. Scale is in action movie scale, which is why you can run as far as a pistol can shoot in one turn.

chaos0xomega wrote:

The only part of the turn I really think happens quickly is the Assault/Fight phase. Running into close contact with the enemy and CQB'ing until one side breaks or is defeated is going to be done quickly and with great violence.

Even then I think things happen at the power of plot.

If it is a character vs. character duel then it will take longer in order for each character to dodge, parry, take it on their invulnerable or armor, or take a non-fatal wound.

If it is a character vs. a mook grunt, then it could be less than a second, especially if we are talking about some of the traditionally super-fast characters like Harlequin Solitaires:

Yupp, action movie scene analogue feels about right. If I want to imagine how a battle played out in real time, I'd first play the battle from beginning to end, then write it down as a script, converted into a storyboard, after which I'd have some sort of duration for it all

How long does a single turn take? Depends on the turn

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:
There is no canon answer and no single turn length that makes sense. Based on aircraft movement speeds it's a couple of seconds, based on how long it takes infantry to move the distance of a rifle's range it's a few minutes.

Actually there is an insight. It's in the Epic Armageddon rulebook.

An entire game of 40k is simply an Assault order being given in Epic, zoomed in. Given that is a small part of a whole large scale game, then the answer is "not long at all".

Epic Armageddon rulebook page 24 wrote:...if you think of an assault as covering everything that happens in a typical 4-6 turn game of Warhammer 40,000 you won't go far wrong!

So based on that I'd say a whole game of 40k in realtime would roughly be 5-10 minutes in length, extrapolate what you will for individual turns.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Given that weapon ranges make more sense if you assume they're on a log scale I suspect turn time is also relative.

They're all out of whack anyway. I think it is in the WHFB 5th rulebook, where Rick Priestley said if they gave an archer an accurate range to the scale of the model the board would have to be the size of a car park.

There is no ground scale or time scale because trying to extrapolate either leads to madness.

You cannot rectify the movement values of aircraft against the movement values of infantry against the ranges of weapons against the requirements of squad coherency against the implied timescale of orders/morale and come up with anything that makes any sort of sense.

Also it entirely falls apart when you consider that activations and damage are done per unit per player. In real war you'd never just stand there and let your opponent do something without responding instantly to that something; let alone allow a whole army to do something before you respond.

Apoc actually came closer to resolving some of that by having damage assigned be taken at the end of the round; which more closely resembles real war where both sides would fire at once and both take casualties at the "same time" and tries to allow for a unit to deal back damage even if its already been "killed" by damage dealt to it that turn.

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Is there a reference or guide to support how "long" a turn actually is.

For example in DnD a wizard may take 10 minutes to decide what they do but in reality it is only 6 seconds.

So this is my question. Is there a reference to how "long" a turn actually takes?

What a nerd.

ERJAK wrote:

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Is there a reference or guide to support how "long" a turn actually is.

For example in DnD a wizard may take 10 minutes to decide what they do but in reality it is only 6 seconds.

So this is my question. Is there a reference to how "long" a turn actually takes?

What a nerd.

Anyone posting here is a nerd.

To the OP-about what's been said. You could picture it a lot of different ways. For me, I love close combat, so I like to focus on there and kinda base narration on that.

For me, it's all malleable. But I generally like to go epic with my mind's eye theater and 40k games.

I prefer to think of my games, not as a sliver of a larger battle, but practically the whole battle, with real world consolations made for practicality. The table often representing a country sized area. With individual buildings thought as whole cities. While the units' footprint is more of their threat presence or patrol area rather than individual members of a squad. As well as possibly being multiple squads. Though, for the more elite units, I might consider a whole squad to actually just represent the presence of a few or even one member to better match the lore. Again, with models' footprint just being an indication of their presence, patrol and/or close combat threat at any given time during the turn. Additionally, vehicles are often a squadron represented as a single model. The point is, the physical models almost never represent a 1:1 status on the table. With everything on a sliding scale dependent on the factions, the mission, table setup, etc.

As such, the turns can be anything from as short as less than an hour up to and possibly exceeding days to better fit scale/scope, lore considerations to the rules and even the IGOUGO structure. What I'm looking for is something that best fits the narrative presentation of the setting with rules and physical practicalities of playing at 28-32mm. And my preference is still for the aesthetic details of 28-32mm models (I just like them better) compared to a better fitting smaller scale of model, such as Epic, to fit this vision.

As mentioned, I don't think there's any good way to round that square. And many ways to go about it. Me, I go the route I do to make the games feel grander as opposed to minutes long park skirmish. Which just doesn't feel as satisfying for me.

Thats a hell of a lot of abstraction needed to view the game as being a larger scale than it actually is. I can understand taking the approach that 1 mini equals multiple guys or whatever but seeing the battlefield as an area the size of an entire nation and each building representing an entire city is a stretch. The rules focus on the actions of individual minis/members of squads in many areas also makes that level of abstraction kinda of immersion breaking/counter-logical to the narrative that the rules encourage as well.

The time and distance scale in 40k is simply 'No.'

Way back in the intro to Rogue Trader they were completely honest that horizontal movement and weapon ranges were not related. The weapon ranges were limited for gameplay reasons, not for any conversion ratio that was 'realistic' and the movement scale was not relevant to weapon range.

And models were explicitly (iirc) 1:1. A squad of 10 marines was 10 marines. With the background (especially for loyalist chapters) it really can't be anything else. A battle was a couple heroes, a few squads and maybe a vehicle or two on each side.

It may work better for some to rationalize it to a different scale, but its very much not the assumptions of the system.

 Overread wrote:
Also it entirely falls apart when you consider that activations and damage are done per unit per player. In real war you'd never just stand there and let your opponent do something without responding instantly to that something; let alone allow a whole army to do something before you respond.

Yep. This is the fatal problem for any "it's really a huge scale" interpretation. IGOUGO makes at least some sense if you assume a 1:1 scale between units and models, with turns being a few seconds long. Yeah, you should have everything happening simultaneously but alternating 5-second turns is as close as you're going to get in a game with physical dice and miniatures. But if each tank is a whole squadron and a ruin represents an entire city IGOUGO is complete nonsense. You have units sitting in place unable to shoot for days at a time while an enemy unit moves through their field of fire between cities, only getting to act once the enemy is done moving and it's their turn again.

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Is there a reference or guide to support how "long" a turn actually is.

For example in DnD a wizard may take 10 minutes to decide what they do but in reality it is only 6 seconds.

So this is my question. Is there a reference to how "long" a turn actually takes?

Not really - I mean its a "battle" so you could assume something like 4 hours per Battle Round (each player getting a turn) in a 5 round game becomes about a 20 hour battle. But you're still pretty much making it up.

Voss wrote:
The time and distance scale in 40k is simply 'No.'

Way back in the intro to Rogue Trader they were completely honest that horizontal movement and weapon ranges were not related. The weapon ranges were limited for gameplay reasons, not for any conversion ratio that was 'realistic' and the movement scale was not relevant to weapon range.

And models were explicitly (iirc) 1:1. A squad of 10 marines was 10 marines. With the background (especially for loyalist chapters) it really can't be anything else. A battle was a couple heroes, a few squads and maybe a vehicle or two on each side.

It may work better for some to rationalize it to a different scale, but its very much not the assumptions of the system.

Yeah, I've always got the impression that - while everything else is abstract in the extreme - the actual units on the board were meant to represent exactly what was "there" in the battle. Given that 40K has always been pitched as representing one key battle in a wider war (or similar) I guess it makes sense that your armies are represented fairly literally.

there is literally no way in virtually any wargame for the terrain to be the same scale as the models

e.g. most of the "towering ruins" on a 40k board are smaller than a typical house for example

time wise well its basically "however long the actions that occurred in that turn took", e.g. a turn that was mostly movement with a bit of long range shooting could represent an hour or more, one with a lot of melee stuff a few seconds

do not try to reconcile this with weapon rates of fire

leopard wrote:
there is literally no way in virtually any wargame for the terrain to be the same scale as the models

There literally is. It's called math.

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Is there a reference or guide to support how "long" a turn actually is.

For example in DnD a wizard may take 10 minutes to decide what they do but in reality it is only 6 seconds.

So this is my question. Is there a reference to how "long" a turn actually takes?

If you play GK and want to do it properly you have to check and know all the ranges to all cover, all potential and sure movment of your units and those of your opponent, and then adjust those for charges out of Rapid Ingress, movment buffs, teleporting etc. This makes the turn last, on a new table, around 30-45 min. If you are quick and don't care 100% about making errors. A skilled player, that knows the table lay out, the match up, has play tested the match ups a lot etc could probably drop the turn to something like 25-30min

ccs wrote:

leopard wrote:
there is literally no way in virtually any wargame for the terrain to be the same scale as the models

There literally is. It's called math.

I'm guessing that he means that the terrain would be so big that it's unreasonable to use. Slapping two correctly scaled houses on the board and that's most of the board doesn't sound great to me.

 Afrodactyl wrote:

ccs wrote:

leopard wrote:
there is literally no way in virtually any wargame for the terrain to be the same scale as the models

There literally is. It's called math.

I'm guessing that he means that the terrain would be so big that it's unreasonable to use. Slapping two correctly scaled houses on the board and that's most of the board doesn't sound great to me.

I'm not convinced that is true- a typical UK pair of semi-detached houses would fit into a footprint of approximately 6"x12" (houses are relatively small here), probably less actually given the average square footage of 1033 includes upper floors. A typical small apartment block with, say, two flats per floor for 3 or 4 floors would fit into a similar footprint. You could fit quite a lot of such buildings on a classic 6'x4' board to make a village.

Industrial buildings do tend to be larger, but the interiors can be a mix of open spaces interspersed with industrial equipment or pipes/ducts for cover.

ccs wrote:

leopard wrote:
there is literally no way in virtually any wargame for the terrain to be the same scale as the models

There literally is. It's called math.

nice, have a biscuit, yes its theoretically possible, as long as your terrain is say the interior of a building and nothing else. have a look at the size of a tree for example against a model. or a house, very few of which have the size appropriate for the table top, e.g. the [i]average UK home is apparently 688 square feet over two floors, at say 1:56 this is about 6 square feet of footprint, for a 3 bedroom UK spec house, slightly larger than what would usually be seen. Roads (without pavements) are about 12 feet per lane, about 2.5 inches, so 5" for a road, plus the pavements so 6"-7", again not that often seen but at least possible

oh yes, and is there a tabletop wargame out there which has ranged weapons where the ranges are the same scale as the models?

probably not

hence you get an abstraction at some point, so you have a few seriously undersized buildings representing several more much larger actual buildings, trees which are at best saplings etc

and thats before you get into the relationship between weapon ranges and rates of fire

Just did some very quick rough calculations, but the building I currently live in has 24 apartments, and is about 40x15m footprint with 3 floors.

That would be ~28" by 10" at 1:56 scale (arguably a little big for 40k scale). That is a large building, but it is also a large building in reality. You could still comfortably fit 3 or 4 of these on a classic 6' by 4' board. This building was an office block until a couple of years ago, so is a direct stand in for a smallish Basilica Administratum

The reasonably-sized semi-detached houses on the next street are 15m by 10m for two houses (one building), which is ~10" by 7" at 1:56 scale. Again, you could fit a lot on a classic board.

Trees are often undersized (with the caveat that trees grow to a variety of sizes), but I think that is partly because people don't realise how big a full-grown tree is, and those tend not to interact with a tabletop game very well with a small footprint but an annoying, big canopy.

Edit: no dispute on weapons ranges, those are obviously abstracted. As are weapons rate of fire- clearly a heavy bolter fires more than 3 shots in the timescale of a turn. I see a 40k "shot" as the equivalent of whatever the basic combat-effective use of the weapon is. So for a typical rapid fire rifle, it is one aimed burst of fire at long range and two bursts at closer range. A heavy bolter rattles off three bursts of fire in the same time. Something like a meltagun probably does only fire a single shot, and a volcano cannon definitely does.