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What if you earned activations as the other player did stuff, which you could then use to interrupt them?

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:
This seems like something that can be resolved without having models act variable times based off the idea that equal activations is some how more balanced, and would strike me as being considerably more difficult with that added. If you have a game where each model has an identical number of actions it can perform in a turn(or a set number that is factored into unit cost) you should be able to balance the action economy. If a unit costs X more it's because it's that much more effective in it's available actions.

Or more simply, it's a points problem, unless you build a system in which you can just farm activations and abuse that to use your more effective units more often. Balancing from a fixed activation count per unit is relatively simple, while variable activation count per unit or fixed activation count per army make that much more difficult unless you pin your balance on something else. Say you have units that are effectively equivlent in their actions, then variable and/or fixed activations makes a lot of sense, but if we're using words like elite then I assume they're supposed to be rather powerful when they act, so if they act more often and more effectively... how is that not biasing them towards them?

This isn't a simple topic, nail down your fixed points or a particular system and there's a lot discuss about balance but as a wide topic, nah, it's not inherently biased, it just means the onus on balancing effectiveness lays elsewhere.

The crux of the problem is that if you make elite models more effective on their activation as the answer, out activating them is a trivial means of making that "more effective" completely worthless. Basically what happens is exactly what you say; the elite model has an effective activation, but without activation control, its very easy to ensure that whenever it activates, it doesn't have a target.

The core of the problem is that in most systems, once a model activates, it loses the ability to meaningfully react to the board state. The area it threatens is suddenly safe and the opponent can attack it without risking their slightly less powerful models. It's actually incredibly similar to an IGOYGO system. In many ways, that's the problem. By manipulating activation count, one player is effectively playing their important pieces as if it actually were an IGOYGO game, combing their pieces as they please without the opponent having the option to interrupt.

Sadly, I tried adding extra single action activations to Elite models, purchasable from a limited pool of resources, but it added a lot of extra rules and confusion that I'm not sure was worth it. Hence this thread, looking for other options.

As to those posting how it's not a "problem" of course it's not a quote problem unquote.

But like with any game, for those designers wanting to deemphasize the effect of activation count disparity, allowing them to play around more with wider disparity in activation counts, this thread is for us.

 Nurglitch wrote:
What if you earned activations as the other player did stuff, which you could then use to interrupt them?

The Conan & World of Smog board games do this. It's just another resource pool that you have to track.

I found it easier to simply permit a single, standard triggered reaction to being targeted in combat.

 Nurglitch wrote:
What if you earned activations as the other player did stuff, which you could then use to interrupt them?

Could it work to have the game run with non-existent turns?

essentially, you gain 1AP each time the opponent makes an action (this may need tweaking to generate more for hordes). each action costs 1AP. You can only have as many AP as you have models (or AP statistics if elite units can use more).

you activate models until;

A) you have activated all your models
B) you run out of AP
C) your opponent interrupts

either player can interrupt after the opponents makes an action, and play flips to them spending AP and the opponent gaining AP.

so the game may start with players taking whole turns t ogain enough AP to make good moves, but if you suddenly realise your model is in danger you can flip, and the opponent may sit back and let you use up AP moving every unit before making a decisive move with all the AP they accrued.

this would only work if you can't just end your turn yourself. you can trick opponents into spending all their AP at the wrong time, such a trick is less effective against elite units as they could do 1 cheap activation each and pass play back quickly.

 LunarSol wrote:
The crux of the problem is that if you make elite models more effective on their activation as the answer, out activating them is a trivial means of making that "more effective" completely worthless. Basically what happens is exactly what you say; the elite model has an effective activation, but without activation control, its very easy to ensure that whenever it activates, it doesn't have a target.

I'm having difficulty figuring how someone's managing this. If they aren't engaging your force what are they doing? If they're playing objectives, contest the objectives. Is this purely kill point logic or something else? Unless your enemy is simply avoiding all contact with you and still winning I don't see how this stays a problem. The game should present them with reasons they can't avoid you and win.

That said, control over activations is a bit different than arbitrary amounts of activations.

The core of the problem is that in most systems, once a model activates, it loses the ability to meaningfully react to the board state. The area it threatens is suddenly safe and the opponent can attack it without risking their slightly less powerful models. It's actually incredibly similar to an IGOYGO system. In many ways, that's the problem. By manipulating activation count, one player is effectively playing their important pieces as if it actually were an IGOYGO game, combing their pieces as they please without the opponent having the option to interrupt.

Which is why over lapping fields of fire is such an effective thing, why maneuvering is such a thing, position yourself to minimize blowback from anything but your current target and have other units positioned to enforce movement limitations by applying risk. Even a rather elite force should be doing this.

But in terms of activation mechanics mechanics there's a relatively simple solution, voluntarily delaying actions. Stick with single activation per unit per turn, so long as you have fewer units remaining to activate than your opponent you may choose to delay your action. Once you're both sitting at equals it turns into exchanging actions. You trade your ability to possibly eliminate a unit before it acts or claim a position before your opponent for the ability to remain an active threat to whatever they're trying to hold out with.

That said, I'm real curious how equal activations would balance out in horde vs elite and then elite vs elite games. Those same elite units that get bonus activations because the other guy has more units is just less powerful when faced with an enemy on an equal scale? It seems like it would just give a complete advantage to the smaller army without some kind of withering effect on their continuous actions, which makes the rules far more complex. Or the elite army simply isn't going to be all that elite in terms of a per-action basis and it'll only really matter when faced with larger armies that they get an inherent bonus against them.

Elite v elite is just an ordinary duel, until somebody starts losing a LOT of models to significantly change the activation ratio. But that's these same as playing fewer points of models, something that the designer isn't necessarily obligated to "fix", unless catch-up is an explicit design goal.

The question should revolve around balancing horde v elite, which I simplify to Gobbo vs Knight for illustrative purposes.

Okay, so disconnecting the number of actions from the number of models might be a way to do it.

What should be the advantage of numbers?

What should be the advantage of, for lack of better term, skill?

How much back-and-forth do you want between players?

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
The crux of the problem is that if you make elite models more effective on their activation as the answer, out activating them is a trivial means of making that "more effective" completely worthless. Basically what happens is exactly what you say; the elite model has an effective activation, but without activation control, its very easy to ensure that whenever it activates, it doesn't have a target.

I'm having difficulty figuring how someone's managing this. If they aren't engaging your force what are they doing? If they're playing objectives, contest the objectives. Is this purely kill point logic or something else? Unless your enemy is simply avoiding all contact with you and still winning I don't see how this stays a problem. The game should present them with reasons they can't avoid you and win.

That said, control over activations is a bit different than arbitrary amounts of activations.

Say you have a 4 point piece and a 6 point piece in a 10 point game and I have a list with 4 models costing 1 point, 1 point, 2 points, 6 points. Even if I go first, I don't have to activate a single valuable piece until you are completely incapable of reacting. Yes, the game should have reasons I can't avoid engagement, but that's true for you too. You can choose not to engage me, but then those factors are still in my favor. I'm actually more capable of engaging first, because unlike you, if I put a valuable piece forward, its activation will reset before both of your models can act. Overlapping fields of fire works to my advantage too. I can give you my 1 pointers and make you waste the quality of a 4 or 6 point piece to remove it, then get the full quality of my 6 or 2 or 1 (or all 3) in response. In a perfect scenario, I activate my 6 pointer last, win initiative next turn and activate him again for up to 14 unanswered points worth of activation. That's how you break these kinds of systems.

There should not be any particular advantage in choosing elite Vs horde. Elites are combat density, the unstoppable force. Horde is diffusion and depth, the immovable object. Concept a sledgehammer striking a pool of water. Hordes degrade slowly, but consistently; elites, all at once. Neither is necessarily better, but rather an expression in play style and risk tolerance. Or simply liking big models. The challenge for the designers is to get the balance right.

Note that this is a "in theory, Communism works". The practical details are non trivial

Communism, aka Marxist-Leninism doesn't work in theory. Seriously, read Lenin's speeches and writing on the subject and it's a word-salad. It's a masterful use of rhetoric to paper over the practicalities of creating and enforcing a dictatorship.

Which I like to think is relevant to games and rules, because I've noticed that there's a fair bit of hand-waving and saying "so and so should do x," but people rarely start their specifications from the position of what people would actually be doing together.

I played a weird deck-builder game recently, and I'm not an experienced deck-builder. It seemed like the experience where someone wanted to make a game out of the list-building phase in Warhammer. The cards were laid out in piles in a 5x4 grid, and then there were resource cards and enemy cards, and scoring cards. I'm not the target audience, but I could see how the design was both elegant, economical, and presented the player with interesting decisions. Actually playing it? I don't need to play it again. The set of procedures involved, accounting for the resources in my hand and then buying more resources, or defeating enemies, or drawing more scoring cards worked to kill some time rather than help me engage with my opponents.

The context for trying this game is that I'm part of a local game-designers group in Halifax, and that we gather periodically to moot ideas, and critique each other's stuff. This was a rare night where we critiqued games that none of us had designed, and was probably a good idea to practice criticism where no-one had any skin in the game.

But we get together to give that designer-style of feedback to each other about how the players engage with each other, as well as whether the rules make sense, or the game mechanically works.

I think it might be be constructive to think about activations in terms of what the players are doing with each other, rather concentrating on game elements like 'elite' vs 'horde'.

Note that I specifically called it out as such, because we all know that it doesn't. Nobody does an exceptionally good job of internal *and* external balance for a non-trivial game, either. Complexity *is* hard.

A "good" game is a lot about codifying what "works" when players actually play it, rather than working strictly from theory (a la classical Marxism-Leninism).

Activation that "works" is, of course, a series of trade-offs between resolution speed and state tracking against a particular game size and granularity, with a certain inherent scaling.

Elite v horde (whatever that means within a particular game system context) simply illustrates whether the a subsystem (e.g. activation) "works" at the extremes of that system - whether the system has been designed "complete".

In some games (e.g. 40k, WFB), it doesn't work, but it's not really intended to do so - the designers want to force the player to bring a mix of things to the tabletop, especially large, new models.

Sorry John, I'm rather hopped up on cold medication and coffee today.

Bringing it back to OP's note about delay counters, maybe we can assume something like a skirmish game where each model has an activation card, and then the difference in number of cards is made up by delay cards. This way the player with fewer activations can at least declare activations to a more opportune time.

Although speaking of Warhammer, I've noticed there's quite a tempo components to activating units in close combat. Is tempo, like in Hearthstone, the right descriptor for this sort of unit activation?

No worries.

I do think a lot of the issue of activations ties to what we mean by an activation, and how we implement it:
* Does the game want a single "activation" to be the same as a gobbo stabbing with its knife and a Knight firing a S(D) Turbolaser?
* Does the Knight get 12 Activations, where it takes 3 just to power up the Turbolaser?
* Do the gobbos group up into mobs that follow Orders?
* If using Orders, do those Orders cost a single Activation with a Measure of Success test?
* Or does an Order cost multiple Activations like powering up the Turbolaser?
* Does every model Activate per round? Or is it a fixed/variable fraction, with a possible MoS / PYL test?
* Do models reactivate?
* If so, can models transfer Activations (e.g. Infinity "cheerleading")?

And so on.

Each of those decisions balances differently, some more easily than others, and some scaling larger than others, requiring different amounts of state tracking.

So when we talk about delay actions, what are we talking about? If we're delaying a Gobbo activation, I doubt anybody cares in the least. OTOH, if we're delaying a FULL Knight activation, that can be a much bigger deal.

A lot of these things can snowball really quickly, and you kind of have to ask yourself:

JUST HOW MUCH OF THE GAME SHOULD BE ABOUT ACTIVATION?

For me, the interesting part is the player's decision-making, which is primarily driven by the options to act, not the intricacy of resolution and mechanics, more Chess than 40k.