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Have you actually played a game that uses AA? I get the sense that a lot of you have not.

Yes. I almost exclusively play beyond the gates of 40k. I played mechwarrior way back when it first came out. Others...

Have you?

<sarcasm>No. None at all.</sarcasm>

General Malarky, you really need to take critique better.

While I won't say everyone else in this thread has been perfect, you've reacted with hostility to the idea that your proposal ain't perfect. That's not how someone refines an idea and makes it better-that's how they alienate others and end up with ideas that are exactly as good as they started out.

That could not have been sent in a PM?

I've played four games that have alternating activations across multiple phases.

-X-Wing constrains heavily the number of entities on the board and defines order of activations by a stat on your units' cards rather than making you choose, which makes play proceed a lot more smoothly than needing to debate which unit to activate when.

-Kill-Team always seems to have either warbands of five models or warbands of fifteen models; and when both players have a similar number of models it feels like alternating activations are kind of relevant, but if one player has five models and the other has fifteen it feels like the player with the smaller number of models just gets to go first.

-Adeptus Titanicus has alternating activations across three phases (move/shoot/damage control), and feels to me like it gets slowed down a lot by needing to pass priority three times per unit per turn.

-Aeronautica Imperialis has alternating activations across two phases (move/shoot), but because actually getting to shoot is quite difficult (you need the enemy in a 60-degree front arc) it ends up feeling more like one phase worth of alternating activations.

Of games that have single-phase alternating activations (where you switch off activating units, but the "activation" consists of "do an entire turn") I've only really played Bolt Action.

And I've found that alternating activation games work best when everyone's trying to participate in the game on basically the same level. 40k wants to be able to have factions where the cheapest unit is 400pts and factions where the cheapest unit is 40pts, factions with no guns at all and factions with no melee weapons at all, factions with a bunch of psykers and factions with no psykers, factions with multi-role units that are intended to both shoot and fight as often as possible and factions with single-role units that either fight or shoot but don't do both...

By contrast X-Wing, AI, Titanicus, and Bolt Action armies tend to consist of a similar number of units to each other, do a good job of giving units of different sizes different roles rather than doing the same thing in the same way only with more/fewer dice and hitpoints, and give factions and units access to a broad spectrum of mechanics rather than trying to build factions/units that can't interact with certain bits of the game.

I draw your attention to Beyond the Gates of Antares, which is Warlord Games' latest sci-fi project (built by the old-school Warhammer crowd that left GW around a decade ago). It is in many ways what Warhammer would look like if it used alternating activations. It has six army lists. Most core infantry ranges from 80pts/squad to 120pts/squad (outliers are the Ghar, who have 40pt grunts so you can field your 180pt battlesuit teams without a disadvantage in order dice). There is, as far as I can tell, one unit in the game whose primary purpose is melee. Everyone has access to jetbikes, multiple-order-dice vehicles, and team weapons. Everyone has access to support teams with single-target anti-tank weapons, rapid-fire machine guns, and explosives/mortars to root targets out of buildings.

Armies in Antares are not entirely symmetrical, but it's way more symmetrical than Warhammer because every unit in every army is analogous to an equivalent unit in every other army whose role is the same, even if their stats and rules aren't. You don't have to worry about the core rules borking one army over another (as 40k does by buffing/nerfing psychic/melee/shooting and disproportionately impacting armies that care more about that approach to the game).

More importantly when you're doing alternating activations in Antares a unit is allowed to do one of six things: stand still and shoot, move and shoot, run/charge and fight, hold its shot for later, remove pinning markers, or go down and improve its cover, and because the game and all the army lists are designed around the assumption that shooting is the major function of most armies/most units not being able to move-cast-shoot-charge/fight the way you can in 40k isn't really a limitation.

Addendum: Considering Lance and Mithras' Beyond the Gates of 40k (https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/733472.page, the "advanced rules" with the d12 conversion and pin markers are on the 2nd page).

40k used to have two damage mechanics, one for non-vehicle units (do an operation on Strength v. Toughness to determine the target number on a d6) and one for vehicles (d6+Strength, damage if it's equal to or greater than the target's armour). 8e 40k has gotten rid of the second and uses only the first, but Antares and Bolt Action got rid of the first and use only the second, and I almost like that better because it's a little easier to explain/keep track of and allows you to make some units invulnerable to some weapons (lasguns v. vehicles, for instance).

I find that Bolt Action/Antares pushes a little to far to small units = better the way they handle pin markers (a unit hit by a weapon that could damage it takes a pin marker, which forces them to make a Ld test to do anything, penalizes Ld tests, and destroys the unit if they take too many pins). Lance addresses the issue some in his conversion by requiring an attack to actually remove a wound to do a pin, but I think the issue of spamming Guardsmen to get more chances to put pins on things is still something that requires tweaks to the army lists to address.

The other thing the wild disparity in army sizes does is make gaming the order dice system an issue. For the sake of hyperbole imagine I'm playing a Space Marine army and I have about six units in my 1,000pt list, but my opponent has a Baneblade, ten Guardsmen squads, and two Guard officers. When I have six order dice and he has thirteen the Baneblade gets to fire first every turn, which sort of defeats the purpose of alternating activations, to my mind.

As a concession to units that pay a lot of points to have melee and guns BTGo40k's "Charge" order allows a unit to move, shoot, cast, charge, and fight, which defeats the purpose of trying to make the game faster by letting you do five things per unit per turn, and makes the standard "Advance" order (move, shoot, cast) redundant because it's the same thing but lets you do more stuff.


Let's consider for the moment what you'd to to army lists if you wanted to make 40k more alternating-activations/Antares-rules friendly:

The first issue is melee-only armies and shooting-only armies. Melee-only/shooting-only units aren't as much of a problem because your army has responses to your opponent engaging in a fashion that unit isn't ready for; if your opponent has some way to rush up and get Tau units in melee you don't have a melee unit to screen with/counter-charge with, but if your opponent runs up and locks a Dark Reaper unit in melee the rest of the army has melee units that can respond effectively.

Right now Daemons and Tau are the only army books that are that one-dimensional; everyone else has tools/options that can do melee and tools/options that can do ranged (even Harlequins and Custodians have gunboats to back up all their melee troops). The short-term solution to Daemons is (unfortunately) soup, either taking multi-god Daemon armies so you can mix in all the Tzeentch stuff that lets you engage at range, or mixing Daemons with CSM so you have the option to use guns. As for Tau I had a core rulebook rewrite back during 6e based on some ideas from the leaked early playtest 6e rulebook where I defined "melee" as including close-ranged shooting and gave shotguns, carbines, and the like melee profiles to differentiate them from equivalent rifles; that would allow Breachers, carbine Fire Warriors, and maybe Crisis suits to engage in "melee" without throwing out the aesthetic of the Tau by giving them models with swords. Imagine Crisis suits in melee look like the Tau Commander in Dawn of War 1 ducking, dodging, and unleashing short-ranged gun-fu blasts. If pistols were "melee weapons" it'd have the added bonus of making them more relevant since you can actually use them without sacrificing the chance to walk out of melee and shoot the unit with other things the way you do in 40k.

If you were to rejigger the damage mechanic back to something resembling Antares' die+pen v. armour you'd have to address unit type spam. Most of the time you can do that just by restricting people to a Battalion-equivalent FOC; if the game requires you to take infantry before you can take tanks you'll have infantry and tanks in your army rather than just skipping the infantry and taking the tanks, and requiring/encouraging a reasonable distribution of unit types also requires/encourages a reasonable distribution of weapons rather than spamming just the broken things.

Army-book-wise the only real casualty of requiring people to take infantry is Knights; my opinion on Knights as a Codex rather than individual really big AdMech things that other Imperial armies can borrow is well-documented, so I don't regard it as much of a casualty.

The last problem is trying to constrain people to a narrower range of army sizes so as to prevent the gaming of order dice. At the moment there are squads that cost 4pts/model and squads that cost 100pts/model, and squads might have a minimum anywhere from 3 to 10 models, so I could spend thirty points on one squad (five Dark Eldar Warriors) or a thousand points on one squad (ten Dawneagle jetbikers).

Considering the numbers in Antares the vast majority of basic units are 5-8 models at 17-20pts/model; factor in weapon costs and except for a couple of outliers the cost of adding another minimum Troops squad to your list is between 90 and 130pts. Discarding extreme outliers the cost of adding another minimum Troops squad to a 40k army ranges from 30pts to 110pts for 5-model squads or 40pts to 80pts for 10-model squads.

In 40k a basic rifleman is defined by a nine-number statline and a six-number primary weapon statline, and the difference between two units could be as much as 12 changes there (Guardsman->Intercessor, +1 to WS, BS, S, T, W, A, Ld, +2 to Sv, +1 weapon range increment, weapon S, weapon AP) even independent of special rules. In Antares a basic rifleman is defined by a six-number statline and a four-number weapon statline; outside of the Ghar nobody's basic troops deviate from the unit statline by more than two points (Boromites have +1 Str/Co but -1 Ref/Init so the total is the same), and all of those models' rifles are either the one with 1SV and +10" extreme range or the one with the 2SV mode and the 0SV/2-shot mode.

In practice trying to keep model counts relatively equivalent to current 40k while also trying to constrain the number of individual units you have so as to make Antarean order dice/pin markers work would require essentially the platoon system from 3e-vintage Imperial Guard to return. I'd almost rather consider what 40k models would look like if you tried to port them wholesale over to the Antares statline/resolution mechanics. The statlines are a little less granular (an Antares model has 6 stats rather than 40k's 9, and standard infantry all use the 5/5/5/7/7/8 or deviate by net 0 points (+1 to 2 stats, -1 to 2 stats) while in 40k it's hard to define an average statline at all (the difference between the conscript at the low end and the Intercessor at the high end is 14 net stat points)), but you'd be able to constrain army sizes such that the Bolt Action dice-pulling mechanics might actually work.

Yeah, Mithras had a few redundant orders in there at the beginning. The orders I play with is basically a full turn, cover, recover (remove pins), overwatch with embarking/disembarking and falling back being situational orders.