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@OP: I think the issue is that most of your games are not evenly matched. Almost all my games of 9th have gone to 5th turn and most have not been decided until turn 5. Whenever the game ended earlier than that there was either a horrible mismatch in skill/power or someone had extremely good or bad dice. Sadly, this mismatches currently happens a lot more often because 9th codices seem to be running circles around 8th edition codices.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

Siegfriedfr wrote:
As always, lethality is only a problem because of the lack of alternative activation.

This is aggressively untrue. Alternating activation does nothing absolutely nothing about lethality, and doesn't even purport to.

Alternating activation purports to reduce the first player advantage that is derived from Lanchester's Square Law and inherently exists in most turn-based wargaming system [including AA ones]. [Technically, it's the salvo combat evolution of lanchester's square law, but that's besides the point].

It doesn't have anything to do with lethality ending games on turn 3.

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

It would bring the rise of powerful single units that can split fire or effectively multi charge. Something like knight castellan could ,potentially become very good. Or 10 paladins droping down with 4 psi lancers or 4 psycannons . The second would actually be helped a lot by single activiation, specially if the LoS blocking rules stayed the same. Being able to split fire from outside of LoS, while at the same being engaged only by a single unit at a time would be huge. And I fear, not very balanced.

 Jidmah wrote:

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

Hahahaha, exalted.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

Siegfriedfr wrote:
As always, lethality is only a problem because of the lack of alternative activation.

This is aggressively untrue. Alternating activation does nothing absolutely nothing about lethality, and doesn't even purport to.

Alternating activation purports to reduce the first player advantage that is derived from Lanchester's Square Law and inherently exists in most turn-based wargaming system [including AA ones]. [Technically, it's the salvo combat evolution of lanchester's square law, but that's besides the point].

It doesn't have anything to do with lethality ending games on turn 3.

It doesn't limit lethality, but it does make it unproblematic since it levels the playing field so all participants get to play. Three turns of unmitigated IGOUGO madness can be quite one sided while a three turn AA game, even a wipeout one, has probably offered more meaningful choices for all players. So while not a panacaea for all problems, it really does help a ton in this particular case.

AA vs IGOUGO keeps on coming up, could anyone actually answer how it would help in balancing games though (specific to 40k scale)?

I can't get my head around this one as it just seems to me that you would replace 1st turn advantage (my whole army activates) to 1st activation advantage (I am incentivised to have a single massive unit/LOW to activate 1st) - other than sidelining small units and promoting a LOW/deathstar meta you still have a problem of who goes 1st.

 Insularum wrote:
AA vs IGOUGO keeps on coming up, could anyone actually answer how it would help in balancing games though (specific to 40k scale)?

I can't get my head around this one as it just seems to me that you would replace 1st turn advantage (my whole army activates) to 1st activation advantage (I am incentivised to have a single massive unit/LOW to activate 1st) - other than sidelining small units and promoting a LOW/deathstar meta you still have a problem of who goes 1st.

In general I share your perspective, but that's like a 20 page circular discussion. If anything AoS is piloting some new mechanic to increase interaction when it isn't your turn. If it works well I imagine we'll see it in 40K in 10th edition.

 Insularum wrote:
AA vs IGOUGO keeps on coming up, could anyone actually answer how it would help in balancing games though (specific to 40k scale)?

I can't get my head around this one as it just seems to me that you would replace 1st turn advantage (my whole army activates) to 1st activation advantage (I am incentivised to have a single massive unit/LOW to activate 1st) - other than sidelining small units and promoting a LOW/deathstar meta you still have a problem of who goes 1st.

Big, expensive units do throw a bit of a wrench into the AA works, but even in that example, you theoretically might still be better off than with the current IGOUGO setup. Basically, if I'm worried that one imperial knight is going to kill X% of my army with its first activation, having three knights kill 3X% of my army before I get to shoot is even worse. In theory, AA means that I'd still have 2/3rds of the force the 3 knights will eventually destroy available to work with.

So for instance, in IGOUGO, you blow up my wave serpent with your first knight, blow up the dark reapers that were inside with your second knight, and blow up a wraith lord with the third knight before I can retaliate. In AA, you would blow up my serpent, then my reapers would take a chunk out of your second knight thus reducing its offense enough that it fails to wipe out my reapers on its own, and the third knight has to finish off the reapers thus leaving the wraith lord unscathed. Or maybe I Fire & Fade my reapers out of sight as my first activation thus preventing you from shooting them at all.

And ideally there might be some system in place for activating roughly X% of your army at a time rather than a single unit. Sort of like in apoc. So after you activate your first knight, I might get to activate both my reapers and my wraith lord in retaliation.

Mission design and the importance of maneuver are great in driving the game. 40k suffers from rather lackluster maneuvering, but for example in good AA systems like Epic Armageddon and Adeptus Titanicus, you often want to make your opponent commit first so you can actually know where they can be trapped and destroyed in detail. Activating first is often detrimental in the beginning but crucial later on, when both sides desperately want to take and keep the initiative as frontlines clash.

In 40k's case the lack in maneuver stems partially from too cramped table sizes and guns with too long ranges. Fix those details and the AA opens way more interesting opportunities for actual tactics.

 Insularum wrote:
AA vs IGOUGO keeps on coming up, could anyone actually answer how it would help in balancing games though (specific to 40k scale)?

I can't get my head around this one as it just seems to me that you would replace 1st turn advantage (my whole army activates) to 1st activation advantage (I am incentivised to have a single massive unit/LOW to activate 1st) - other than sidelining small units and promoting a LOW/deathstar meta you still have a problem of who goes 1st.

This is fairly straightforward:

To start with definitions:
An IGoUGo system is the conventional system of play resolution used by the vast majority of wargames. In this method, one player takes their entire turn, resolving all actions, and then play passes to the opposition player, who in turn takes their entire turn.
An Alternating Activations [AA] system is one where one player selects a unit to complete its actions, and then the opposition player selects and acts with one of their units, and so on until all units have been used, at which point they are "refreshed" and the round restarts.

The argument is derived from and focuses on the salvo combat variation of Lanchester's Square Law [L2L]. The L2L is an intuitive supposition which claims that a smaller army needs to have a unit-to-unit advantage in capability [IE: their units are better, or they have better tactics, or something] equal to the square of the degree of their numerical disadvantage in order for the fight to be equal. This is intuitively easy to understand if I phrase it differently: If we have two armies composed of identical units, one larger than the other, on the "first salvo", the larger army will cause proportionally more damage than it takes, thus ending the salvo with an increased relative numerical advantage, and so on until at the end their remaining units will number considerably more than their initial numerical advantage.

In any system where the resolution of actions is not simultaneous, the "problem" is that the first action(s) to resolve degrade the enemy's ability to retaliate so the enemy does less damage in return, as if the first player was starting with a numerical advantage in a simultaneous system [equal to the amount of damage they did in her opening salvo]. This isn't actually strictly derived from discretizing a continuous series of events into turns, it is actually a very real consideration for real life warfare, such as a carrier battle or a nuclear exchange, where in both cases it's essentially concluded that "s/he who strikes first, wins".


The basic claim, thus, is that an AA system still has a first player advantage, but that it is reduced compared to IGoUGo, because the activation of a single unit/battlegroup/etc. can intrinsically only cause less damage than the whole of the player's force.



Personally, I do not support using a AA system. I actually think it's terribly inelegant, highly artificial and game-ist. It very much doesn't open up opportunities for "actual tactics". It does open up decision-making questions, but they're all system-interaction decisions to use the mechanics of the game, and not militarily relevant tactical or strategic questions.
And it's not actually necessarily even a mechanical problem that needs to be addressed: as observed, whether in a hypothetical global thermonuclear exchange or a tank v. tank duel on the plains of France; a tangible advantage has been historically assessed to the combatant who can act more quickly, so one could easily argue that it's working as intended and it's a problem for the mission packet to address, not the mechanics of the game.


As a side note, there are a number of ways to reduce the first play advantage of an IGoUGo system as well, such as moving the phases in which damage is assessed to ahead of the movement phase [which, actually, is the one biggest change I would make, since it also addresses the "easy responsivity" problem the game has], or having the final assessment of all damage and removal of units wait until the end of the turn, and so on.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sherrypie wrote:
Mission design and the importance of maneuver are great in driving the game. 40k suffers from rather lackluster maneuvering, but for example in good AA systems like Epic Armageddon and Adeptus Titanicus, you often want to make your opponent commit first so you can actually know where they can be trapped and destroyed in detail. Activating first is often detrimental in the beginning but crucial later on, when both sides desperately want to take and keep the initiative as frontlines clash.

In 40k's case the lack in maneuver stems partially from too cramped table sizes and guns with too long ranges. Fix those details and the AA opens way more interesting opportunities for actual tactics.

I would say it's because you can move and shoot and charge, and because units are fast compared to the size of the table, not because of the reach of ranged weapons. There are plenty of games with range that spans the board that do just fine in that respect. "I must move to make range" does not necessarily imply that you're using any higher degree of maneuver based tactics and strategy.

The basic problem is that there's no cost to move, and most units are fast enough to get where they need to be almost immediately. This means than play evolves quickly, and the amount of predictive and position-based strategy are minimized since forces are both able to commit force easily and react easily.

 Nazrak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

Hahahaha, exalted.

I may not always agree with Jidmah, but when I do, I prefer exalting.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Nazrak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

Hahahaha, exalted.

I may not always agree with Jidmah, but when I do, I prefer exalting.

Hey, be fair. Dakka/the 40k community has loads of one-sentence silver bullet solutions that probably wouldn't fix the problems they get thrown at. "Buy a different army." "Replace the d6s with d10s or d12s." "Just play (poster's favorite edition)." "Get gud." "Change the Codex release model." "March on GW HQ with torches and pitchforks." "Move to another town with a better 40k community." "Let's write our own 40k without all the problems." "Either stop complaining or quit playing." "If I say 'either stop complaining or quit playing' to people they'll go away."

(Some of these are fixes for a problem, none of them are fixes for all problems.)

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 Nazrak wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

Hahahaha, exalted.

I may not always agree with Jidmah, but when I do, I prefer exalting.

Well, AA is just one of the silver bullets that always get brought up. The other is usually "Switch to a system that uses d10s, d20s, magic 8 balls.....".

While I agree with Katherine's last point about the basic problem being rooted in the units' general ability to do everything without making choices or having to commit far in advance, the rest feels odd.

For emulating (rather than simulating, this being about games not exercises) warfare, particularily in modern times, it is hard to do justice to the subject without friction and fog of war. Neither of those is easy to do without lots of checks or complex structures, but the give and take of AA systems tends to be much better in replicating results of imperfect control of the field by any single side than what you usually get from unbridled IGOUGO laser precision in application of force.

How much the rules encourage or hinder real military tactics is not strictly bound to the activation question, but I would be terribly surprised if the IGOUGO would somehow turn out to be the more conducive option. Being able to seize the momentum by a timely interruption move or harrying action at a squad level is way, way closer to good field command as I've experienced it in the armed forces in comparison to the more common haymaker brawl you get in something like 40k as it stands.

Obligatory 'You guys are getting paid?' meme about even making it to turn 3.

 Blackie wrote:
Competitive 40k games always ended within turn 3 on average.

Yes, and that's lergely due to how open the center of the board is given most major tournies follow FLG/nova terrain layout. Those boards heavily favor long range shooting.

Usually, for our games, top of turn 4 is where both players have to really think about their move, which is when the game gets tight, not necessarilly decided. Mistakes during T4 can decide the game, however.

Jidmah wrote:@OP: I think the issue is that most of your games are not evenly matched. Almost all my games of 9th have gone to 5th turn and most have not been decided until turn 5. Whenever the game ended earlier than that there was either a horrible mismatch in skill/power or someone had extremely good or bad dice. Sadly, this mismatches currently happens a lot more often because 9th codices seem to be running circles around 8th edition codices.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

Siegfriedfr wrote:
As always, lethality is only a problem because of the lack of alternative activation.

This is aggressively untrue. Alternating activation does nothing absolutely nothing about lethality, and doesn't even purport to.

Alternating activation purports to reduce the first player advantage that is derived from Lanchester's Square Law and inherently exists in most turn-based wargaming system [including AA ones]. [Technically, it's the salvo combat evolution of lanchester's square law, but that's besides the point].

It doesn't have anything to do with lethality ending games on turn 3.

I think this is just a dakka thing of bringing up alternating activations as the silver bullet for any problem.
"The weather is bad" - "Well, it wouldn't be bad if 40k had alternating activations."

Wait, it wouldn't solve world hunger too...for shame, for shame....

 Sherrypie wrote:
While I agree with Katherine's last point about the basic problem being rooted in the units' general ability to do everything without making choices or having to commit far in advance, the rest feels odd.

For emulating (rather than simulating, this being about games not exercises) warfare, particularily in modern times, it is hard to do justice to the subject without friction and fog of war. Neither of those is easy to do without lots of checks or complex structures, but the give and take of AA systems tends to be much better in replicating results of imperfect control of the field by any single side than what you usually get from unbridled IGOUGO laser precision in application of force.

How much the rules encourage or hinder real military tactics is not strictly bound to the activation question, but I would be terribly surprised if the IGOUGO would somehow turn out to be the more conducive option. Being able to seize the momentum by a timely interruption move or harrying action at a squad level is way, way closer to good field command as I've experienced it in the armed forces in comparison to the more common haymaker brawl you get in something like 40k as it stands.

I wholeheartedly agree that recreational-purpose wargames have a hard time modelling the fog and frictions of war. This is, of course, why military analytical wargames have adjudicators and the player groups are separated into different rooms and the like.

Representing the frictions of war is something all wargames have some degree of struggle with; this is of course the entire purpose of having dice in the wargame, but a random roll still doesn't fully encompass the entirety of pressures.


As far as representing imperfect control, though, I don't see how AA does it any better. I actually think AA, as it's normally presented, represents a more perfect form of control over the forces at one's command than IGoUGo, since it discretizes the control of your units coordination and planning to a far greater degree and places much more emphasis on it, and also introduces some very highly artificial pressures and decisions into the game, like targeting player activation counts, dummy activations, or skipping on targeting units that have already activated, and so on, which in general doesn't model anything and doesn't really have a bearing on what is really a bunch of simultaneously occurring action.



The haymaker brawl problem of 40k is derived from many of 40k's mechanics, but I don't think it's derived from the activation schemes. I would trace it's origins to being from the way the missions are structured [progressive scoring is a huge driver to this effect], the size of the boards in terms of strategic depth [there's literally 0 depth of operations. It's basically just the straight front line where front line units are engaging directly to take the middle of the no-man's land, and no greater strategic maneuver or even concept of things like a penetration or exploitation], and just the straight mechanics [Close quarters combat is dramatically overemphasized in 40k and the mechanics of the game are structured around making it powerful and basically devoid of tactics besides getting to it, and this will contribute to the game being a big brawl]