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As fascinating as the "But people might like having one arm tied behind their back" vs. "No they won't" debate is...

It's also worth pointing out that actual existing alternating activation games have done things like:
* Introduced the ability to 'pass' activations, particularly when the other side has more activations, to provide a mechanic to counteract the tendency to spam filler units.
* Try to balance out the number of activations on each side, to prevent the game degenerating into "Now I'm going to activate five units in a row while you sit and watch".
* Modify the initiative system to deliberately avoid (or reduce the chances of) the same player having both the last activation of one turn, and the first activation of the next turn. (And/or prohibit the same model/unit activating twice in a row.)

But, to be frank, there's an important game design point to be made. The core rules of 40k are essentially trivial compared to the number of special rules in the various army books, which means that anyone who proposes changes to the core rules (even if those changes are as radical and severe as going to alternating activation or a completely different close combat system) aren't doing any useful amount of work.

All of the hard work, the tedious and time consuming work, the work that will actually matter to the players, is going through all of the army books and redoing, redesigning, and figuring out the new point values for all of the existing models. Because only the company that sold you the game has the clout to make people play with "get you by" FAQs that just invalidate broken rules, or make everyone play with collected books that discard half the rules for units.

Even if this is all just "I want to be a game designer in the future" arguing, the point still remains that arguing over the core rules is arguing over the easy to do stuff, and that stuff remains easy to change during development. Really. You won't know how useful, broken, or playable your game mechanics are until you have actual unit profiles, and you'll end up rewriting sections of the core rules when you try to re-implement various abilities in the models.

Disclaimer: I write all of this from the perspective of an alpha and beta tester for a character-based alternating activation skirmish game that went through an edition change that redid profiles and tweaked its alternating activation mechanics. Making all of the factions still "work" in the new system (and not end up being a melee oriented faction in an edition where firepower rules supreme, for instance) is where the design work is.

That's unless you're just arguing about chocolate vs. strawberry flavored alternating activation, when the correct answer is pineapple and tomatoes.

 Sherrypie wrote:


Now, this sounds like a whole lot of assumptions. To substantiate your claims here, you'd already need to have a vision on what that initiative tiering looks like. What is this pure randomness in this context and why is it not a probabilistic question as well if there is some wibble in who gets to activate and when (BA tokens, specific unit markers, role tiers, card draw...)? If the infantry commander knows it's more likely than not that they might get the chance to activate out of harms way before the tank goes and takes that (maybe the token draw odds sit at 7-5 odds next turn or something, whatever), is that not a solid player decision point to have in the game?

This little exchange between us began with these remarks.

 Lance845 wrote:

The Deer Hunter wrote:
Anyone ever thought of AA based on battleroles of units? First fast attack, then other and ending with heavy

Yes.

One of the best features of AA is increased value in player choice. Those kinds of rules strip out the value from the player in the game and put it back onto list building. Its counter to AAs best feature.

Straight up tiering activations is what I was responding to and what you commented on. I think it's fair to say that from the beginning of this chat we had a decent idea of what this would look like. I said it doesn't work. You are saying it does. FA go first. Heavy go last. This isn't a discussion on WHEN someone gets to activate. It was a discussion on WHAT they get to activate.

Cards, dice in a bag, etc... I'm cool with all that. Thats controlled randomness and when it's your turn you still get to make your decisions. Tiering the activations based on battlefield role is what I am not for.

I get that you're for direct maximisation of agency, but that is not exactly the premise I'm interested in this case and again, not the same axis to be tweaked that could produce a strictly superior play experience. That dichotomy is false. The choices themselves are just as meaningful if not more so since following a strict plan of prescribed actions is harder. I agree that going for a simple "Fast Attack goes first, Heavy last" solution is not a workable one nor have never been advocating one as 40k currently stands without unit changes, but using the role tags for potential initiative trickery is an interesting lever that could be made to work as a filter on the general AA scheme. Since you don't seem to care much for the more simulationary style, let's look at it from the agency promoting angle. Say we use the Bolt Action method with X dice in a bag for X units, drawn randomly. Maybe bringing 1/3 or more of your army in Fast Attack units grants you extra dice in the bag to raise your chances of activating early, since it's clearly a recon force? Maybe activating Heavy Support units before others costs you two counters but remains an option? The tags are coded in the army, but that doesn't need to come at the expense of tactics at the table.

See above. I don't have a problem with modifications to WHEN you get to activate. My issue is in restricting WHAT you get to activate.

Also, deploying any units with distinct activation advantages at particular points of the battlefield is a tactical decision of its own lest we forget that. It starts to matter a heck of a lot more when the game steps out of IGOUGO.

List building and deployment are strategic decisions. Not tactical. Again, there is a difference. When you list build you generally understand who is in front, who is in back, whos moving together, and who is being kept in reserve. You may not know the full table layout in list building, but you certainly plan your list to act in a certain way and deploy it to work within the frame work of your strategy. Wen I say AA increases tactical decision making I mean TACTICAL decision making, which current 40k is almost devoid of.

Lance845 wrote:And as an aside, not all nid synapse creatures are characters. In fact my go to nid list has only 3 synapse creature that are characters. A tyranid prime and some neurothropes. The bulk of my synapse comes from tyranid warriors.

The neurothropes are meant to buff the mid/front line and baby sit the backfield artillary. So. How do the neurothropes activate early enough to buff the troops but also follow the artillary asuming heavy support will go last and troops somewhere in the middle? How do the tyranid warriors supply their synapse to the raveners when they are fast attack and moving first? This assuming that FA are going to go first in a FOC based initiative.

I am presenting these issues because these are issues that presented themselves when we went over this previously.

And again, a system like that could work great in another game that isn't 40k. It's 40k as is that prevents it from working.

Assuming such system the Neurothrope seems like a non-issue if it's a character, who could have initiative priority in the tiered system (being commanders they ought to have the best situational awareness anyway, yay for making officer status matter more). Combining this with LotR style Heroic Actions like commanding the artillery to fire on their activation seems like a trivial answer. Synapse creatures in general could have this rule, if it seems to get weird with Nids.

And here is where we start having to dig through every codex and make changes. Again, people are generally less interested in playing a whole new game that uses their 40k miniatures. They want to be able to play 40k. I am not AGAINST rewriting everything. It needs it. It's simply beyond the scope of the questions presented in the OP. It's a discussion worth having. It's just not THIS discussion.

And again, I never advocated straight-up role tiering in activation order, but tying it into the system so it could be made to matter at least a bit unlike now.

See above. From my perspective, from the first time you responded to me, thats what it's looked like you have been advocating for.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 solkan wrote:

But, to be frank, there's an important game design point to be made. The core rules of 40k are essentially trivial compared to the number of special rules in the various army books, which means that anyone who proposes changes to the core rules (even if those changes are as radical and severe as going to alternating activation or a completely different close combat system) aren't doing any useful amount of work.

I disagree here. The core rules shape the interactions of all those other rules. They shape the entire player experience. You spend your every moment playing 40k interacting with the turn structure. It makes a MASSIVE difference to the game play experience to make tweaks in the core rules.

All of the hard work, the tedious and time consuming work, the work that will actually matter to the players, is going through all of the army books and redoing, redesigning, and figuring out the new point values for all of the existing models. Because only the company that sold you the game has the clout to make people play with "get you by" FAQs that just invalidate broken rules, or make everyone play with collected books that discard half the rules for units.

Even if this is all just "I want to be a game designer in the future" arguing, the point still remains that arguing over the core rules is arguing over the easy to do stuff, and that stuff remains easy to change during development. Really. You won't know how useful, broken, or playable your game mechanics are until you have actual unit profiles, and you'll end up rewriting sections of the core rules when you try to re-implement various abilities in the models.

This is the harder work. Agreed. This is the more time consuming work. Agreed. But it's again outside the scope of the current discussion. "Can you play 40k with AA?" Not "Can we make a new game that uses 40k models that is AA?". You can do both. One requires significantly less work. It keeps the power creep and codex creep and a lot of the balance issues of current 40k (and all "current 40k" of the future). But it's a functional game that makes the game play experience better than what we currently have. If your saying the only meaningful change comes from throwing it all away and starting from scratch, well then is it 40k any more?

those that are using Bolt Action AA, have you tried Konflikt-47 subset? It's very nice I find, and has rules for walkers, powerarmour, and supernatural units.

Ive always wanted to play Konflict but could never find an opponent to make buying into it worth it.

Apparently there are adapted rules for other game systems for 40k.

@Lance845: right, I see. I agree that the original suggestion of hard tiering from Fast to Heavy would be too open to abuse without extensive rewrites. To me the more interesting facet of that idea in general was to elaborate on not why that is a bad idea but how the roles could be made to matter. For the practical purposes of getting games in with minimum fuss, though, less restricted system is of course easier to implement.

@solkan: I have to disagree with your sentiment as well, changing core rule interactions is a massive step in how the game feels at the table. The contrast between sweeping IGOUGO and various AA schemes is too vast to be overshadowed by the codex rules, given how it upends the previous choice space entirely.

Balancing the faction rules and unit stats is a harder, more intensive process, certainly, but isn't the core of the game itself. If you have to describe how a system plays to a new player, you don't start with factions because those are superficial elements in comparison (even if they make up a great part of why people keep playing said system). "This game is about sweeping battle-line maneouvers, morale and C&C friction" tells us how a system differentiates itself from some other game, which could be "a fast paced squad level activation system with heavy emphasis on cover".

I do love me some pineapples and tomatoes, though

 Sherrypie wrote:
@Lance845: right, I see. I agree that the original suggestion of hard tiering from Fast to Heavy would be too open to abuse without extensive rewrites. To me the more interesting facet of that idea in general was to elaborate on not why that is a bad idea but how the roles could be made to matter. For the practical purposes of getting games in with minimum fuss, though, less restricted system is of course easier to implement.

Maybe it's not directly tied to battlefield role but detachment?

I could see each type of detachment, similar to the way they give CP, giving dice in the bag or cards in the stack. So a Battalion gives 5, a Outrider gives 4, vanguard 3, spearhead 2, and LoW 1.

You could have more units than you have tokens for activations. But with characters joining up with other units that kind of gets taken care of a bit. Or you just run out and thats the end of your turn. Some units didn't get to go, but they didn't go by your own choice. Or all your units have gone and you still have tokens left over. Again, that was by your choice. The more tokens you have over your opponent the better your chances of going multiple times in a row. This kind of encourages minimalist detachments. But that also means you need to keep on filling out the minimal requirements for the detachment.

I could see that working very well and be a bit of a balancing act with MSU versus max sized or big expensive centerpiece units.

This builds in the layers of complications and restrictions while maintaining player agency and tactical decision making. YOU know how many dice you have in that bag. If you have more activations than dice you need to pick and choose what you're going to use them on.


And just a quick aside here: I am in no way upset or frustrated or any other negative emotion about our chat. I just think we had our wires crossed on what exactly we were talking about. I fully enjoy having these conversations. This has all been great to me.

 Lance845 wrote:


Maybe it's not directly tied to battlefield role but detachment?

I could see each type of detachment, similar to the way they give CP, giving dice in the bag or cards in the stack. So a Battalion gives 5, a Outrider gives 4, vanguard 3, spearhead 2, and LoW 1.

You could have more units than you have tokens for activations. But with characters joining up with other units that kind of gets taken care of a bit. Or you just run out and thats the end of your turn. Some units didn't get to go, but they didn't go by your own choice. Or all your units have gone and you still have tokens left over. Again, that was by your choice. The more tokens you have over your opponent the better your chances of going multiple times in a row. This kind of encourages minimalist detachments. But that also means you need to keep on filling out the minimal requirements for the detachment.

I could see that working very well and be a bit of a balancing act with MSU versus max sized or big expensive centerpiece units.

This builds in the layers of complications and restrictions while maintaining player agency and tactical decision making. YOU know how many dice you have in that bag. If you have more activations than dice you need to pick and choose what you're going to use them on.

That could be neat, the detachment system is pretty underutilized at the moment as well. To counteract a new "loyal 32" from popping up, I'd rather see bonuses from filling detachments as far as they go instead of always going for multiple smaller ones (which the current system kinda does by CP penalisation from multiple detachments). It feels aesthetically pleasing that full-strength detachments should be the ones with most established lines of command and strategic assets from higher-ups in their army. On the other hand, using small detachments would be a nice choice between getting lots of activation tokens but losing CP.

One question mark with detachment based tokens, would their number change during the game? In BA-variants, you start the round with as many as you have units available and thus destroying them will gradually wear the opposition's initiative down if one side can keep their units alive. Or did you mean the detachment choice would just give a handful of bonus die on top of the X from X units? If so, with the default being that players have more tokens than units, you could build the activation scheme to include those alternative costs in regards to timing (like activating a Heavy Support before your other units costing two tokens or somesuch).

 Lance845 wrote:
And just a quick aside here: I am in no way upset or frustrated or any other negative emotion about our chat. I just think we had our wires crossed on what exactly we were talking about. I fully enjoy having these conversations. This has all been great to me.

Likewise. Written communication is like that, sometimes it just gets a bit wonky.

 Sherrypie wrote:

One question mark with detachment based tokens, would their number change during the game?

My initial instinct is no. But if you keep losing units even though you are likely to activate first and/or often, you no longer have the units for the dice and your turn will just end faster when you churn through all your activations. I could be convinced otherwise. It's just my initial thoughts. Again, the power of MSU being more activations, but weaker ones. And then later in the game when you thought your MSU was going to be a strength it starts turning into a weakness when you blow most of your activations early in the turn.

In BA-variants, you start the round with as many as you have units available and thus destroying them will gradually wear the opposition's initiative down if one side can keep their units alive. Or did you mean the detachment choice would just give a handful of bonus die on top of the X from X units? If so, with the default being that players have more tokens than units, you could build the activation scheme to include those alternative costs in regards to timing (like activating a Heavy Support before your other units costing two tokens or somesuch).

No, I was thinking the detachments would be all your activations.

So a no frills single Battalion versus single battalion means each player gets 5 per turn. Maybe your warlord adds 1 and when the warlord is killed that one gets removed. That would also be neat. So up to 6 activations versus up to 6 activations and a dead warlord drops them down to 5.

Again, I could be convinced otherwise. Just my initial thoughts as I pondered this earlier over lunch.

I do enjoy a dynamic total for the activations, personally. It gives the players an incentive to both keep straggling units alive even though they are spent forces for any real offensives and likewise to hunt down last survivors of enemy units, sometimes to the detriment of fulfilling mission objectives at the same time. I like my games when you have to pick your poison.

In the context of keeping the system pretty universally applicable to 40k as it currently stands, there's also the issue of armies like Guard or Cults that can have 20+ units at the table facing only half of that number in marines or other elite forces. Thus I'd rather give detachments a little modifier to the X tokens every round, perhaps ranging even into the negatives for dedicated Heavy Support or singular LoWs.

Or if these horde-ish armies would be more tightly bound to their commanders, maybe give all characters bonus activations and thus require their presence in the lines to keep the regular Joes fighting instead of sulking in their foxholes.

My issue with giving characters bonus activation dice is that characters are likely being activated WITH another unit to maintain auras and the such. So it's kind of a double bonus. Not only do they give you an extra dice, they are not themselves using any dice.

I also like the idea of destroyed units eating up a dice. I am just concerned about the idea that if you have less dice than you have units, and you remove dice when units are destroyed, you could end up in a situation where you have units left in the game but also no activations.

That could be made into a every x number of units equals another dice and also every x or y number of units destroyed removes a dice. But that creates a kind of clumsy book keeping. It's not quick, simple, and intuitive. Which means it's probably detracting from the game play experience. And that leads me back to the fixed number that doesn't get reduced.

I'm not sure if it needs to be a double bonus as such. Say, give them a rule that says "CHARACTER units can activate another unit within 12" of them when they are activated. Remove one token from the activation bag if you do." This would mean if you spend your activations quickly by starting with the characters, you also make it more likely that your opponent gets a longer stretch of their activations in return.

The book keeping could be used in reverse as well. How about rewarding kills with extra tokens? When you destroy a unit, toss a token in your pool to model the side that's gaining superiority in the field getting momentum to their push.

 Sherrypie wrote:
I'm not sure if it needs to be a double bonus as such. Say, give them a rule that says "CHARACTER units can activate another unit within 12" of them when they are activated. Remove one token from the activation bag if you do." This would mean if you spend your activations quickly by starting with the characters, you also make it more likely that your opponent gets a longer stretch of their activations in return.

The rule that has worked well so far has been an expansion of heroic intervention. Basically:

When you activate a unit, you may activate a CHARACTER unit within 3/6" of that unit as part of that activation. This counts as the CHARACTER units activation for this game turn. When activating a unit, you may also activate a PROTECTOR unit within 3/6" of that unit that is capable of protecting the unit you activated. This counts as the PROTECTOR units activation for this game turn.

Then you just add the PROTECTOR keyword to units like Tau Drones, Tyrant Guard, Lych Guard etc etc...

So you activate some Necron Warriors and you can bring a cryptek and the lychguard protecting it with it.

Or Tau Firewarriors, a Cadre Fireblade, and some Drones.

It allows all the things to do their jobs in small specific group activations while supporting the AA turn structure and forces a kind of unit cohesion to make it work.

If a character is both chucking a dice into the bag to give you extra activations each turn AND can be bought along with another unit as part of it's activation then the benefit isn't +1 activation. It's really +2. Because the character does not consume a token upon activation.

The book keeping could be used in reverse as well. How about rewarding kills with extra tokens? When you destroy a unit, toss a token in your pool to model the side that's gaining superiority in the field getting momentum to their push.

I would need to math that out. I don't have anything to really say about it until I start writing out some tables.

Not sure why the character shouldn't consume a token just as anyone else, it's a unit after all and some characters are hella destructive on their own.

In the simple token activation system I'm envisioning here, when you draw your tokens to see how many units you get to activate, you'd just use one of those on the character and their rules could then allow you to pick another die from the bag to keep the cohesion up. It gives you a more coherent activation cluster but no more statistical bonuses. Main benefit being that you can either do at least something with a unit and a buffing character even if you draw only one token at a critical moment, or you could wait until you luck into a bigger draw and go for a larger surge.

 Sherrypie wrote:
Not sure why the character shouldn't consume a token just as anyone else, it's a unit after all and some characters are hella destructive on their own.

In the simple token activation system I'm envisioning here, when you draw your tokens to see how many units you get to activate, you'd just use one of those on the character and their rules could then allow you to pick another die from the bag to keep the cohesion up. It gives you a more coherent activation cluster but no more statistical bonuses. Main benefit being that you can either do at least something with a unit and a buffing character even if you draw only one token at a critical moment, or you could wait until you luck into a bigger draw and go for a larger surge.

2 things.

1) I now understand that you are saying you will fish out extra tokens for the units that are activating in conjunction with other units.

2) what do you mean by a larger draw?

My understanding of the dice/card system is that you put 1 die for every unit (or whatever gives you dice) into a bag and you take turns pulling a single die from the bag. Whichever persons die it is is the person that gets to go. But you only ever draw out 1 die at a time. Please spell out the die drawing mechanic you are envisioning that would allow a person to draw multiple dice at once.

The version I've been using, which was alluded to in the beginning of this thread by catbarf, incorporates little variations to the size of the activation pulses.

In the beginning of each round, players put their X dice for X units in the bag (plus extras for being the "first player" etc.). Dice are drawn until they change, after which that player activates as many units as indicated, usually 1-3. You don't activate dice by dice, so you see how many you get now and can thus coordinate better. After that the opponent then draws a similar batch.

As a sidenote, I haven't used any special character bonuses with this method as it hasn't yet been an issue on the table. Usually you naturally gain those multiactivation batches anyway from time to time, but I can see how +1 unit could be desirable from the agency point of view, especially for smaller armies facing hordes.

For the fun of discussing another alternative, Fireball Forward (a WW2 system) uses an interesting activation mechanic superficially similar to the second method I described.

You start with a standard 52-card deck of playing cards, and draw one card at a time, continuing as long as you keep drawing the same color. As soon as you draw a different color (red/black), you place the last card back on the deck.

The player whose color has been drawn in sequence then allocates the cards to units that have not yet activated. The numbers/faces matter, because after all cards have been assigned, the player activates those units in ascending order of value. The activation order cannot be changed once units start activating. Once the units have activated, their cards are discarded and the drawing from the deck resumes.

This repeats until one player is out of units to activate, at which point they basically get skipped until their opponent has activated enough times to exhaust all their units, and then the deck is re-shuffled and it begins again.

Because both sides have the same number of cards in the deck, having a smaller force doesn't mean you're less likely to activate. The activation order mechanic also forces you to come up with a plan before making any actions, since once that sequence is locked in you have to stick with it. This makes for harder decisions than it might sound like; if I sequence A to suppress the enemy so B can advance and fire and then C can assault, if A fails to suppress I can't activate C to cover B instead. This also helps prevent a numerically superior force from activating its remaining units at-will with perfect coordination after the numerically inferior force has fully activated; they still only get a couple units at any one time and cannot respond fluidly to unanticipated events.

As an additional rule, early-war Soviets are modeled as having inferior C&C by having the specific cards tied to specific units. You follow the same procedure of drawing until you get an opponent's card, so you know which of your units will be activating at once, but you have to go in the sequence they were drawn in. This comparative lack of control makes the Soviets much harder to manage and less effective on the table, despite their infantry using the same combat stats as German or American infantry.

It's overall a pretty simple game, one I'd consider beer-and-pretzels, kind of like Bolt Action but at a slightly larger scale and with some interesting (atypical) mechanics for the sake of playability. Even still, the activation system really shapes how the gameplay unfolds.

@OP:

I am playing it with AA for 11 years. Works perfectly. Just don´t listen to the naysayers. Try it yourself.

How would stratagems work in AA? As they can be used once per phase, how do you go about that with everyone going through each of the phases every activation? You’d surely lose track of where the strats have been used.

I do like the idea of a character activating at the same time as a unit, that fixes the aura issue I was thinking it’d have.

I’d say it’d probably be best to stay at around 1k - 1.5k games or I could see it getting very clunky as others have mentioned, with armies like guard getting so many units.

They can be used once a game turn. You use it on a unit during that units appropriate phase.

As to point limits. No. You can do whatever point limit you want. Start low if you want to but there is nothing clunky about it.

 Lance845 wrote:
They can be used once a game turn. You use it on a unit during that units appropriate phase.

As to point limits. No. You can do whatever point limit you want. Start low if you want to but there is nothing clunky about it.

Okay awesome that sounds good. Once per game turn I assume means, you use transhuman physiology on a unit in turn 2, and can’t use it again on a unit until turn 3? That may actually help to balance them a bit better too tbh.

 Tiberius501 wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
They can be used once a game turn. You use it on a unit during that units appropriate phase.

As to point limits. No. You can do whatever point limit you want. Start low if you want to but there is nothing clunky about it.

Okay awesome that sounds good. Once per game turn I assume means, you use transhuman physiology on a unit in turn 2, and can’t use it again on a unit until turn 3? That may actually help to balance them a bit better too tbh.

Correct. So if a strat you have can only be used during your shooting phase you can use it once during turn 2 during any of your activation's shooting phases.

Awesome, I’m really keen to try this out! It makes me excited to play 40K again lol.

Do you handle auras by activating a CHARACTER at the same time as another unit? Or do you have another way of handling auras?

EDIT: Also, how would stuff like “always fight first” and heroic intervention work?

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Awesome, I’m really keen to try this out! It makes me excited to play 40K again lol.

Do you handle auras by activating a CHARACTER at the same time as another unit? Or do you have another way of handling auras?

Characters are handled by expanding heroic intervention. If a CHARACTER is within x" of a unit that is activated you may activate 1 CHARACTER unit as part of that units activation. If a PROTECTOR unit that can protect a unit that is activated is within X" of that unit they may be activated as part of that activation.

So basically you can activate Tauu Firewarriors, A Cadre Fireblade and some drones. Or Necron Warriors, A Cryptek and some Lychguard. etc etc...

Each thing gets to do it's job, but you can only chain in the one extra unit for that specific job and only with they are within heroic intervention range.

EDIT: Also, how would stuff like “always fight first” and heroic intervention work?

Always fights first can interrupt activation sequences. So I have a unit that always fights first and has not been activated this turn. You charge them. Before you start fighting I choose to activate my unit and fight first. You suffer all your losses wrapping up my activation, and then you finish your activation. It makes them very threatening if unactivated yet Not something you want to be messing with.

Heroic Intervention: See above. You activate a unit that is in a combat. A CHARACTER is within x". You activate the CHARACTER with the unit and decide to charge it into the combat or whatever.