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I’ve agreed multiple times that Guardsmen can be fixed via points increase, that marines can be fixed via points decrease, and that spamable 200 point OP units can *also* be fixed by points increase. Yes, correcting a subset is easier.

And I agree that having a game that focuses on a “specific” scale would be nice, but pragmatically speaking we don’t have that game. From 7th, I can appreciate the frustration of taking 75 lasguns that do nothing against a Knight list, followed by the frustration of 8th in which I can roll 150 lasgun shots at a Knight to inflict maybe 3 wounds on it, but taking up time in a dramatically wasteful manner.

I like to take a little of everything in my lists. I like building custom special characters. I naturally build and play TAC lists because that’s what I like to play. Allowing spam doesn’t mean you have to worry about balancing Grots against Landraiders. A person is free to choose a crap army comp... that’s their choice. But if they wanted to field a Grot artillery company, using just a bunch of Grots and the Zappa’s, lobbas, and whatever other guns the Orks have now I don’t have a good reason to tell them no.

I’d love to get rid of SuperHeavies, and change flyers back to skimmers. I really would, but that’s not the game we have, and I’m not expecting the genie to get put back in that bottle.


And to try and get this back on the rails, an alternating activation / randomized activation would need to work for the scope of the game GW releases, whether we like the army comp rules or not.

At 2000 points, a Super-Knight, 3 regular Knights and 4 mini-Knights is about right, if I recall. 8 units. My TAC Guard list would have... around 30 units. In practice, the game could be 5 units to 40 in a worst-ish case scenario.

Strict alternating activation is viable in that case. The 5 knights are apt to annihilate at least that many units before they get to activate. They need to commit first but they also get to deny action to their opponent. With the pass-till-equal option, they may degrade before their Ideal target presents itself... fluffy and realistic? The few units players essentially gets to choose to go first or second.

Randomized activation means that, on average, both players will be forced to activate roughly even portions of their army throughout the game turn. Removing some player agency forces the players to make the best of a given situation (requiring tactical skill) without complete information (activation order). One particular challenge would be choosing to target an inactivated unit to limit return damage vs targeting activated units that may be in better position for next turn.

It lets the player balance risk vs reward in list building, and makes wombo-combing units riskier... perhaps too risky, which would necessitate wild cards to mitigate.

balmong7 wrote:
one fix for the MSU squads giving too many activations thing, would just be to ditch the concept of MSU.

That's not necessarily a bad thing under strict AA, as MSU will activate a small portion of their force while their opponent activates all of their army. Incorporate a "hold" mechanic to defer an activation until later in the round, and there's no advantage, as the non-MSU army will have more opportunity to act in concert and en masse.

If you need a balance of activation ration, then strict card-based activation also addresses this, where each player has a card per unit shuffled into a common deck, and the players activate each unit as its card comes up. On average, each player will activate comparable portions of their army as the deck dwindles.

MSU isn't necessarily a problem, doesn't have to be one.

I just believe that some flavor of card-driven activation is the superior answer to alternating activation.
____

ALL Knights vs Guardsmen is nowhere near balanced in a strict AA system. The Knights get free reign to wipe the first X dangerous units every turn, and should never lose a single game against Guard. Every round, they have tempo advantage by activating more, sooner, and this advantage compounds by being able to efficiently destroy threats before they get a chance to react. Eventually, you get that Land Raider Crusader v Grot situation that I mentioned earlier.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
ALL Knights vs Guardsmen is nowhere near balanced in a strict AA system. The Knights get free reign to wipe the first X dangerous units every turn, and should never lose a single game against Guard. Every round, they have tempo advantage by activating more, sooner, and this advantage compounds by being able to efficiently destroy threats before they get a chance to react. Eventually, you get that Land Raider Crusader v Grot situation that I mentioned earlier.

First of all, of course the knights have an advantage in this scenario. They're an army of invulnerable god tanks capable of effortlessly slaughtering guardsmen while being immune to any return fire, and that has nothing to do with alternating activation. In a more realistic scenario, where the MSU army has legitimate anti-tank threats, the knights can be at a huge disadvantage if there is sufficient LOS blocking terrain/deployment from reserves/etc. The MSU player can keep their main threats out of LOS/off the table/whatever while the knight player is forced to activate everything and spend their turn shooting at cannon fodder, and then once the knights are committed to their positions and unable to return fire the MSU anti-tank units duck out of cover and kill their targets.

Real-game example: Armada is (with the exception of a small number of activation-altering upgrades) a strict AA system. And because of range, fire arcs, etc, simply bringing the biggest units is not always a good idea. You might be able to activate a ton of attack dice at once but that doesn't help much if there's nothing in your arc to shoot at (and you don't move until after you shoot). And then, unless you're willing to turn your back on the enemy fleet, you move forward into range of return fire that hasn't activated yet and have to sit there taking hit after hit before you can activate again. The result is that even "death star" lists like dual ISDs will take some cheap activations to stall their big guns until they have targets, and the upgrades that manipulate activation order are extremely valuable.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Baragash wrote:

 Farseer Anath'lan wrote:
Privateer Press 'Company of Iron' has alternating activations, and balances it by 'if you have less unactivated units then your opponent you may pass your activation'-thus, you can force your larger opponents force to activate first, and gain an idea of how the game is playing out (and plan accordingly), or if you have something you immediately want to do (kill an important target, withdraw a key model, etc), you can.

It works really quite well, I've found.

Most of the AA rulesets I own allow the player with less to pass until the same number are unactivated.

That is terrible design and gives every advantage to the player with the biggest units. You might as well have an explicit rule that says "MSU armies are banned".

So far as running themed armies is concerned, it's still doable, as it used to be in the old codexes. Take Orks - you wanted to run an ultra-elite list? You brought 2 warbosses t ofill your compulsory troops slots with Nobs and Meganobs. You wanted Bikers, you brought wazdakka to make them troops. You wanted a dreadbash, you brought big meks to make deff dreads troops, or you ran the IA8 dreadbash which made dreads troops and In mobs of 3.

The fluffy armies which people should be able to bring to the table can be installed in a game by the writers simply caring enough to write them in. But the armies which people want to play because they are verging on broken should be discouraged, if not made impossible to take without the game being declared a "friendly game". increasing the restrictions on list building may initially seem like it's a bit rubbish, but the long term benefits of such a system is that you can bring a TAC list to any game and feel confident that you can actually stand a chance. Nowadays, if I brought a list which used to be TAC (lots of trukk boys, with powerklaws, and lootas to back them up & attack fliers) I would get destroyed by anyone who spammed fast or heavy vehicles without the troop tax. Taking these vehicles isn't an issue, because in the past you could hide from or ignore the untouchable units, focus on their troops and try to win on objectives. Now, with 100% of the enemy force being "TFU" (Like "TFG", but "Unit") they can dismantle you completely. A single landraider couldn't guarantee you the game in the past. Taking 3 was close, but still didn't guarantee it , and was all you could do. Now, you could take 100% landraiders, and if the opponent hasn't tooled up to kill them, they will lose. Min-Max was bad, but when the Min for everything else can be 0, it's terrible. They tried to counter it by allowing everything to hurt everything, but that's just a bad fix to a lazy effort to make the game fun, which instead made the game worse. And let's be honest; it was a ploy to sell more models.

That's why I think there should be some degree of restrictions in list building.

What about the Warmaster solution? Firstly, dump the idea that there's a linear scale of time, concentrate on the action, and make it so that a single super-unit is increasingly sticking its neck out if it keeps activating.

Two rule sets I more or less remember...

One had players alternately pick units, but the catch was you could choose one of your units, OR one of your opponent's! So you could force that fire team to go before they have a viable target, but your opponent could force your assault team to go before the artillery has cleared their route. (Battletech? Maybe?)

The other I remember was IgoUgo, but you didn't remove casualties until after both sides have gone (Star Wars Starship battles?)

Do either of these stir any memories?

@Kid_Kyoto: I think Pulp Alley, a skirmish game, does that where the player with the initiative gets to choose which model, friend or foe, has to activate next. You can lose the initiative by semi-random events, or losing a combat (essentially pulp fisticuffs).

There's Battletech's solution to the problem of unbalanced forces in an alternate activation game;

The activation phase breaks down into a repetition of player1-player2 activation pairs (the rules don't explicitly state it like this, but that's what it's getting at). At the start of each pair, count the number of unactivated units on both sides. If one side has x times the number of the other, they activate x units this time round.

For example, player 1 has 10 units, player 2 has 6.
Firstly, player 1 activates 1 unit, player 2 activates 1 unit. 9/5 remaining.
Then, player 1 activates 1 unit, player 2 activates 1 unit. 8/4 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 6/3 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 4/2 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 2/1 remaining.
finally, player 1 activates his last two models, player 2 activates their remaining one. The winner of the initiative roll (i.e. player 2, who gets to move second) will always make the last activation, even if they're outnumbered by the enemy.

There's also written orders and simultaneous movement, but that's hard to do without a more structured battlefield (i.e. a grid of some sort) or an umpire.

That's so BattleTech.

Legion's order tokens do a decent job of balancing things out, but also further proves that an alternating activation system pretty much requires an even number of activations per side.

Pass tokens are a decent solution as long as they have an alternate use. They're at the very least generally mandatory first turn, but often don't do enough later one when activation priority really matters.

Alternatively, just having an activation cap isn't a terrible solution. It makes everyone build to the cap, but that can be a positive force for diversification. It means that MSU spam might not work but MSU style units still have a place padding activation counts for something like a knight or other elite style army. The trick is finding the right max for your game that everyone CAN build towards pretty easily.

I've seen some rules that have a card for each unit and a couple of jokers. Once a joker is drawn, the turn is over, and the deck is shuffled. I have also seen where it is the second joker that ends the turn.

 greatbigtree wrote:
I’m not aware of a game that does it, but giving each unit an activation card, and then shuffling the deck and drawing a card would (on average) balance out vastly different numbers of units on a side. Whenever a unit’s card is drawn, it completes one turn’s worth of actions.

If I outnumber you 2-1, then out of three draws I’ll have an average of two activations to your one. On average, we’ll both activate fairly evenly throughout the game turn.

This takes away some player agency... “I wanted my Librarian to activate before my death star unit so he could buff them!” Which is a bit of a drag. Perhaps the system could have some wild cards (1/5 units?) to increase the odds of a key unit activating first. If a unit is later drawn, just discard it and draw again.

Double-action abilities could put your card back on the bottom of the deck, or even shuffled in. Prescience powers could be used to manipulate the card deck.

I would personally enjoy the tactical reaction-ness to not knowing the order of activation.

Confrontation had that as one of its options, you both shuffled your cards into a large deck, and then whichever was drawn activated

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
There's Battletech's solution to the problem of unbalanced forces in an alternate activation game;

The activation phase breaks down into a repetition of player1-player2 activation pairs (the rules don't explicitly state it like this, but that's what it's getting at). At the start of each pair, count the number of unactivated units on both sides. If one side has x times the number of the other, they activate x units this time round.

For example, player 1 has 10 units, player 2 has 6.
Firstly, player 1 activates 1 unit, player 2 activates 1 unit. 9/5 remaining.
Then, player 1 activates 1 unit, player 2 activates 1 unit. 8/4 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 6/3 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 4/2 remaining.
Now, player 1 activates 2 units, player 2 activates 1 unit. 2/1 remaining.
finally, player 1 activates his last two models, player 2 activates their remaining one. The winner of the initiative roll (i.e. player 2, who gets to move second) will always make the last activation, even if they're outnumbered by the enemy.

There's also written orders and simultaneous movement, but that's hard to do without a more structured battlefield (i.e. a grid of some sort) or an umpire.

I thought of something that but then I thought asking players to do ratios in their head each turn would be too much. I guess the writer could do the math and then put in a chart.

Maybe something like: the player with more units can activate 1, 2 or 3 units per turn, but the outnumbered player can only activate one?




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 thekingofkings wrote:


Confrontation had that as one of its options, you both shuffled your cards into a large deck, and then whichever was drawn activated

I actually like this one a lot.

That Confrontation method was also used in the GW-Hasbro team-up Battlemasters, which included different numbers of cards for every unit, occasional group-activations, and at least one 'whole-army' activation card.

Various editions of Confrontation had one single shuffled deck for both sides, or each side had a shuffled deck of their own, or each side had a deck in theorder they chose.

The Command & Colors games and spin-offs (Memoir '44, Red Alert and the WW1 game) have a deck of cards for each player, and split the battlefield in to centre, left and right flank. Each player has a hand of several cards, which will allow you to activate a number of units of a given type in a given zone (for example, "activate one infantry unit on the right flank", "activate all units in the centre") or are various special actions/effect cards.

If you had a "power level" from 1-10 for each unit, you could use a standard deck of cards. Each player takes 3 cards (amount may vary for different armies, or could be 1 card per HQ unit in the army). Each activation, play a card and activate a unit (or possibly combination of units) up to that power level, EG if you play a 4, you can activate a single unit up to level 4, (or 2 units power level 3 and 1, if you play like that).

Option 1 means that you are more likely to be able to activate a unit if you're a horde of low level units. Having an elite army will be a gamble that you can get a high number card before the opponent has done a lot with their horde.

Option 2 means that MSU can activate a group of units, whilst elites can activate less. I prefer option 1.

You could even make it random by having each player pick a colour (black or red) or a suite (if 2-4 players) and then turn a card over at a time from a single deck of cards. As long as no army has more than 26 units, it would work.

You could complicate it (in a good way) by dealing each player 5 cards. If a Jack, Queen or King of a colour is dealt, then the player of that colour must place a card down instead. This could be to activate your own unit, or to force/tempt the opponent into committing theirs.

EG if you have a 9 in the opponents colour, and they have a PL8 unit which you want them to use before getting out of your vehicle, you could play that - do they use it, or hope to get another later?

A deck of playing cards is a pretty arbitrary limit. It's also really easy to work up play test cards by producing the layout, printing it up on letter-sized paper, cutting them out, and then putting them in Magic-style sleeves. Some cheapo Bicycle brand playing cards as stiffener and then bob's your uncle. Once you have the art assets in place then Boardgamemaker.com can custom print them for you.

Nurglitch wrote:
A deck of playing cards is a pretty arbitrary limit. It's also really easy to work up play test cards by producing the layout, printing it up on letter-sized paper, cutting them out, and then putting them in Magic-style sleeves. Some cheapo Bicycle brand playing cards as stiffener and then bob's your uncle. Once you have the art assets in place then Boardgamemaker.com can custom print them for you.

That's a good point, I generally think in terms of standard card decks as you can apply them easily and it's a known mechanic.

I have a deck of playing cards which I have stuck paper labels to. I use them to trial things, writing on the label lightly in pencil.

To expand my idea (I've been thinking about it) I'd have the players have a hand of 6 cards each, returning any picture cards to the deck, which would then be shuffled.

This means there would be 40 cards in the deck, of which 12 are picture cards and 28 are number cards. Both players would have a maximum of 20 activations per turn, so this would be the effective limit on unit count.

when your colour card is flipped, you may activate a unit up to the level corresponding to the number on the card. If your colour is flipped and it's a picture card, you must play one of your cards, which itself counts as being flipped.

if a card is flipped and the player has no units which are a low enough power level to activate, they simply skip their go.

once all units have been activated, all cards are returned, reshuffled and the players draw their cards again.

Some units might have special abilities, like "if an 8+ is used to activate this card, this model can move up to 6" further than normal" and so on, meaning weak units can have advantages for using high numbered cards. a Goblin, PL2, might state that if an 8+ is used to activate him, he can perform a sneak attack on an enemy for double damage, or something.

 some bloke wrote:
If you had a "power level" from 1-10 for each unit, you could use a standard deck of cards. Each player takes 3 cards (amount may vary for different armies, or could be 1 card per HQ unit in the army). Each activation, play a card and activate a unit (or possibly combination of units) up to that power level, EG if you play a 4, you can activate a single unit up to level 4, (or 2 units power level 3 and 1, if you play like that).

Option 1 means that you are more likely to be able to activate a unit if you're a horde of low level units. Having an elite army will be a gamble that you can get a high number card before the opponent has done a lot with their horde.

Option 2 means that MSU can activate a group of units, whilst elites can activate less. I prefer option 1.

You could even make it random by having each player pick a colour (black or red) or a suite (if 2-4 players) and then turn a card over at a time from a single deck of cards. As long as no army has more than 26 units, it would work.

You could complicate it (in a good way) by dealing each player 5 cards. If a Jack, Queen or King of a colour is dealt, then the player of that colour must place a card down instead. This could be to activate your own unit, or to force/tempt the opponent into committing theirs.

EG if you have a 9 in the opponents colour, and they have a PL8 unit which you want them to use before getting out of your vehicle, you could play that - do they use it, or hope to get another later?

That reminds me a little of the activation sequence in Wargods of Aegyptus/Hyperborea/Olumpus. That's a ranked-units game (like WFB) where you issue a secret order to each unit and character at the start of the turn, then roll for initiative. The winner gets to activate 1,2 or 3 units first (depending by how much they won the roll-off), then after that it's alternate activation. However, on your turn to activate a unit, you can nominate an enemy unit to activate, not just one of yours. That give you a chance to mess with the enemy's plans, but does then give them the opportunity to activate up to three of their units in a row.

The way I did it in Titanomachina was that each player (and there's 2-4 of those) has a deck of cards representing systems and crew on their Titan, and an initiative score.

Each round, going in order of highest initiative to the lowest, players take turns choosing to either play a card face up (discarding other cards face down to pay for it), or pass. Once everyone has played a card or passed, players resolve the actions associated with those cards, with some cards offering a choice, in the same initiative order.

If everyone passes, then the round is over, players sort their played cards to the bottom of their decks, and draw five from the top.

Attacks automatically hit whatever card is currently in play, and if a player passed on playing a card then the attacker gets a called shot. If a system is destroyed then the attacker gets that system card to add to their scoring. Where that destroyed card is still somewhere in their deck, the attacker gets the matching token as a chit when that destroyed card comes up, and the player drawing it gets to draw another, non-destroyed card.

There's a couple of hinky parts, particularly the bit where players have to announce their intention by playing a card, and then going back and resolving the card effects, but it also makes for a great brawling effects as some systems increase your initiative, blocking shots, ducking behind buildings, and so on.

Good topic! I was thinking about opening a similar one myself.

Premise: usually, the variance in army size is considered an issue in activation systems... and I think it's a mistake, because those issues are in fact about how (more or less) any activation systems implies:
1) that the player choose what unit activates, or
2) that the player activate alternatively one with another.

Both however aren't a requirement of activation systems in general.
So, you can have a number of activation systems without those issues.

Also, many other minor issues related to activation systems are caused by other factor (for example: disproportion of armies that hit very hard with a single unit are solved by removing destroyed unit in the end of the turn, rather than immediately - like in the new Apocalypse game)

So, to answer. There are a number of other good strategy to approach those rules. Just off the top of my head:

- random activation - any unit has a token and ALL the token from ALL the player are mixed together in a bag and extracted randomly. This statistically equate small powerful armies, that will act scattered, and big armies that activate more frequently, but rarely with the exact unit you need in that moment.

- battlerole activation - I posted about that a few months ago in this forum. Don't know honestly if some wargame use it (probably someone does). The idea is that the unit activate following their Battlefield role. Putting it together with the turn composition (meaning: you activate first in Movement, than in Shooting... etc. etc. - usually in activation system once activated a unit perform its entirety of available action) creates a deeper strategical relationship with the opponent and give skewed list a sort of strategical value.

- threshold activation - any turn 100 point of your army (or 1/10 or whatever) can activate. You can wait and cumulate point, or activate multiple unit up to the threshold point. For example, you can activate 2 Imperial Guard unit of 50 point each, whilst your opponent have to wait 5 full turn to activate his 500 point Imperial Knight. I don't know any wargame that use this solution, but in my opinion it's the best for a number of reason (and it works almost under any circumstances, except for those game or for those battles where the opponent have a different number of point. However, if you write it as a % of your army that activate any turn, you can manage easily also those circumstances).

- other - honestly creating an "new" or a specific activation system isn't that hard. I think that if we define exactly what are the goals of this rules we can together came up with something almost (or entirely) new.


Just to better express my thoughts: any other available solution usually discussed (like the "pass" action, or some passive action, or some sort of "overwatch" that allows you to interrupt an enemy activation with one of your own) IMHO are in general patched solutions that shouldn't be considered unless under particular circumstances or requirements. Also, I don't like very much throwing a dice to determine whatever begins when you already have a big amount of variables (number of unit, points, etc.) that you can use to decide that.

A good rules IMHO should never have exceptions by design.

I did contemplate a system once which was more of an igougo system, but which was very different. The premise was that a player will activate one unit at a time until they run out of units, run out of AP or the opponent interrupts.

Each unit costs "X" AP to activate, and their actions cost "Y" AP as well. When a player activates a unit, the opponent gains any AP the opponent spends.

You can only activate each of your units once per turn, and your turn lasts until you cannot activate anything else, or your opponent interrupts.

The result is that you can sit back and let your opponent move all his close range CC models into position, and gain all the AP by doing so, or you can stop him after a couple and start your turn. The benefit of interrupting is to try and cancel out synergies. The benefit of not interrupting is to let your opponent spend all their AP and then have it all to work with yourself.

If you are lining up a 2-piece combo, and the opponent sees it coming, then they can interrupt after the first one, and you can choose to interrupt beck (after their activation) or let them burn all their AP, with the rest of their army which might be out of position.

If you have a key move to make, you can just keep interrupting and the key features of the game will play out as alternating actions. The key to making this system work is that you cannot end your own turn - you must use all your AP or all your models to finish it. The points for a game would be the AP cost to activate each unit, so you would have a 20AP game, where your combined AP to just activate each unit is 20. this might be 20 goblins or 4 mechanical knights.

I think that this would be a really interesting way to play, and it's something I'm putting together into a skirmish game.

@some bloke: That kind of sounds like Monsterpocalypse.

My project handles the activation flow by resource manipulation, as mentioned a long while ago. However, I am a fan of:
-Allowing the player with less unactivated units to skip, until parity is reached.
-Uber-units (Baneblade analogues) having multiple components to activate, as though separate units.

We played perhaps a year and a half using token activations in 40K. While it required a different play-style (i.e. you couldn't plan to move six units together in a super-aura-bubble), it worked more or less perfectly.

Our system was simple; each unit created a token of your colour. Tokens were put in a mug, with an additional third-colour token for the bonus of "winning initiative". You would draw tokens one at a time until another colour was drawn.

You would then carry out a full normal 40K "turn" with that number of units, placing the token alongside the unit when it was activated. We had some rules for how close-combat worked, and morale was shifted to the end of the "turn" (which is actually a battle round).

Normally armies were between 12-18 tokens a pop. In this case it would be rare to go with more than two units at once, but it happened. The rarity of it happening made it a big deal when you drew 4,5,6 tokens. You had to make the most of it. If you were a Knight army or something with fewer tokens you'd be out-drawn, but each time you drew a token "more" of your army was going. Your opponent might activate three units before you...but then you'd be activating 500+ points of your army with a single token. It also made logical sense. An army of fifteen units should have more mobility/swarming than five large war machines on a battlefield the size of a normal 6x4 table. We never played a game where tokens broke (though this was before GSC and there were one or two armies we don't own). Generally speaking it was the only way I enjoyed playing 40K.

Tokens also introduced a heap of other benefits to the game, but that's for another discussion.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Two rule sets I more or less remember...

One had players alternately pick units, but the catch was you could choose one of your units, OR one of your opponent's! So you could force that fire team to go before they have a viable target, but your opponent could force your assault team to go before the artillery has cleared their route. (Battletech? Maybe?)

The other I remember was IgoUgo, but you didn't remove casualties until after both sides have gone (Star Wars Starship battles?)

Do either of these stir any memories?

Don't remember any specific games that do this, but I've been thinking about imbalance in alternate activation.

One idea was to use a delayed effect system. One army has 10 units, the other has 20. Each side activates all their units but the effects take hold at the end of the turn. So if it's a shooting game, place a marker beside each unit and resolve wounds after all activations are complete.

This system would emphasize the simultaneous nature of combat. Could be tweaked, maybe some weapons have properties that allow their effects to be felt instantaneously.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Two rule sets I more or less remember...

One had players alternately pick units, but the catch was you could choose one of your units, OR one of your opponent's! So you could force that fire team to go before they have a viable target, but your opponent could force your assault team to go before the artillery has cleared their route. (Battletech? Maybe?)

The other I remember was IgoUgo, but you didn't remove casualties until after both sides have gone (Star Wars Starship battles?)

Do either of these stir any memories?

Don't remember any specific games that do this, but I've been thinking about imbalance in alternate activation.

One idea was to use a delayed effect system. One army has 10 units, the other has 20. Each side activates all their units but the effects take hold at the end of the turn. So if it's a shooting game, place a marker beside each unit and resolve wounds after all activations are complete.

This system would emphasize the simultaneous nature of combat. Could be tweaked, maybe some weapons have properties that allow their effects to be felt instantaneously.

This one has been thrown around before, and the biggest issue is kamikaze units which know that they can break cover and run at the enemy because they are destined for death at the end of the turn anyway. I was working on a system to counter this where you are dealt face-down damage cards, and half of them do nothing - so it's all a gamble as to whether you take any damage at the end of the turn at all!

I think I mentioned it in another thread, but noodling around it occurred to me that an Epic Armaggedon-style system of activating units would be interesting so long as players could activate any units. The catch being that a unit would take a blast marker for activating (and reacting), and for being attacked. If you couldn't pass the activation test (rolling over blast markers + morale) then you had a couple of minimal actions a unit could take, including regrouping/rallying to shed blast markers. So an elite unit like Terminators could keep activating, but could be caught out unsupported if it runs into blast markers pinning them down.

Part of the notion is to develop a notion of friction, whereby a larger, less elite force can engage a smaller, more elite force by diffusing their attacks and interfering with their mobility as well as chipping away at their numbers.

 Elbows wrote:


Our system was simple; each unit created a token of your colour. Tokens were put in a mug, with an additional third-colour token for the bonus of "winning initiative". You would draw tokens one at a time until another colour was drawn.

You would then carry out a full normal 40K "turn" with that number of units, placing the token alongside the unit when it was activated. We had some rules for how close-combat worked, and morale was shifted to the end of the "turn" (which is actually a battle round).

That sounds really good, do you have it written up anywhere?

I did at one point, but I can't find it. Here is the gist of it:

1) Players take a token of their colour for each unit in the game. If you buy a "unit" that splits up, you take a unit token for each individual model that's going to split up. Likewise a tactical squad splitting into battle squads would generate two tokens, etc.). As stated above these all go into a mug. (Bonus here: Multiplayer games with 3+ people become almost seemless and work really well with tokenhammer).

2) If you decide to keep "initiative", we added a single alternate coloured token which was the bonus for winning initiative. This increased your chances of drawing your tokens, but did not generate an additional action (the winner would thus have one leftover token at the end of the first turn - and would remove the bonus token for subsequent turns).

3) Shake em up and draw them out. You draw until you draw another colour. This means you can draw a string of units...or you occasionally end up going one at a time for a stretch. As usual with a system like this, if you draw a big string of activations, your opponent's chance of doing the same goes up.

4) Example: You draw three blue tokens then a red. The red token is placed on the table. You take a full mini-turn with your three units of your choice. Each unit obviously only activates once per turn. A "Turn" in tokenhammer is a battle round (because technically you're carrying out two full player turns). So the blue player would pick three units which had not activated yet and and would activate them in a mini turn - then place a token next to the units that activated so you can remember who has gone.

5) Because of this system you cannot ever guarantee you're going to move five or six units together, so it naturally breaks up the death-star or bubbles-of-death gameplay in 8th. This requires you to change the way you design your army, though it doesn't technically break anything in the basic game mechanics.

6) An important thing: all spells, stratagems, etc. played during the turn are removed at the end of the turn. This means you'll want to cast your spells, issue your orders, and throw your stratagems early in the turn. This is done to avoid anything being abused. Because almost every spell and stratagem reads "until your next ______ phase" we just kill everything at the end of the turn, because again a turn is more or less a full battle round.

7) If a unit is slain or removed from the table, its token remains in the mug until the end of the turn. It's cleaner and easier this way. At the start of each turn players just count up their units still on the board and put that many tokens in the mug.

8) Some interesting stuff can happen, but we just address it as we go. For instance if a unit charges into an existing combat, it can get a little weird so we decided on a simple solution. If unit A charges unit C which is fighting unit B....unit A would carry out its close combat attacks as normal. Unit C would then either fight back against A as normal, or would be able to fight against unit B. However...if they decide to swing at unit B....then unit B also gets to fight. This made close combat very reasonable.

9) A big change is that we ended up doing morale at the end of the turn, which is really a battle round. All players would roll for all of their units at the same time, in one large morale phase essentially.

CONS:
-If you love 8th edition, well, this is obviously different.
-If you're a tournament player you'd probably hate it because it's sporadic and chaotic.
-If you're a meta gamer with a carefully crafter army that operates with bubbles/auras, etc...you'd probably dislike it.
-Because of the increased amount of planning/scheming and thinking the game takes longer. So, a 1,500 point game is about as long as a normal 2,000 point game.

PROS:
+This all but removes Alpha Striking from the game. I think the most tokens we ever drew in a row during a game on the first draw was between 3-4 (and that was drawing from equal sized armies). There is of course a tiny percentage chance that you somehow draw all or most of your tokens first...but unlikely.
+While I hesitate to use the word "realistic" it's a much more honest interpretation of the chaos of a conflict. It mimics the ebb and flow of a battle far better than IGOUGO.
+If you have fewer units, you have fewer tokens. But when you get a token you're activating far more of your army.
+If you try to "cheat" the system by taking a bunch of cheap or small units to gain tokens, those units are easily killed off and you lose tokens.
+You're less likely to play "God mode" suicidal warhammer because every model in your army counts. If one Imperial Guardsman is alive from his squad...that unit generates a token. It actually makes you give a gak if your units are alive.
+The drawing of the tokens is...stressful, but fun. We always found the drawing of tokens at the start of Turn 2 to be the most stressful - our armies almost always in a spot to demolish each other.
+It makes you think a heck of a lot more. If you draw one token - you have to decide what the most important unit action in your army is.
+If you're playing an army of Knights or Titans, it'll still suck...but you'll have the advantage of having more tokens drawn more often so it takes some of the sting out of it.
+Every turn there is a chance you're going to luck out and get a streak of tokens which will help save your ass if you're in dire straits. So there's almost always a chance at redemption.
+If your opponent brings a lot of small units to generate more tokens you can choose to target them and reduce your opponents tokens, so it adds a "reason" to target small units that you might ignore in a normal game.
+Because of the lack of IGOUGO it keeps both players heavily invested in the game.
+We had started to work on a scenario idea using additional colour tokens to represent moments in the scenario, so you could add any special tokens and when drawn - initiate story elements, which is something we never properly designed.
+Because of the token activation your opponent may not get off spells/stratagems/order before you're able to go, so you can concentrate on trying to prevent those things from happening.

Generally speaking it was far more enjoyable to me than normal 40K. Die hard 40K fans might hate it,but it was so much more interesting and had a lot more things to think about and consider.