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Hi guys,

I'm currently designing a wargame influenced by small skirmish based games such as mordheim, necro and gorkamorka. Instead of the usual turn based I go you go approach I've settled on a more involved chess like activation style. In other words instead of each player moving all of his units in his turn followed by the opponent moving all his units both players alternate moving a model untill everyone has moved.

As far as I know games like VOR and Urban War use this method.

Something thats presented a problem with this approach though is how to handle a situation where player 2 has more active units than player 1.

Here's an example.

Player 1 has 6 models.
Player 2 has 10 models.


Player 1 activates player 1
Player 2 activates player 1
Player 1 activates player 2
Player 2 activates player 2
Player 1 activates player 3
Player 2 activates player 3
Player 1 activates player 4
Player 2 activates player 4
Player 1 activates player 5
Player 2 activates player 5
Player 1 activates player 6
Player 2 activates player 6
Player 2 activates player 7
Player 2 activates player 8
Player 2 activates player 9
Player 2 activates player 10


Would this situation present an unfair advantage to one player?

Obviously the blue players will be slightly inferior if the team ratings where identical.

If so what are the alternative options that allow unit based activation without randomizing them? I want players to be able to choose for strategic reasons.

In Battletech etc if one player has more units the guy with more moves doubles until they're back to parity

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1
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1
2
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Your way lets the guy with more units hold his better units until his opponent has moved so he can use them to the best advantage. This way lets him hold back one unit if he has the initiative, but no more than that. It also gives players the options of choosing dozens of small units to gain the ability to force a player to move everything first.

What I did with Aetherverse is to create a weighted random activation system.

For every unit a player has, put a token (color coded by player) into a cup. During the activation phase, draw a token; that player can choose a unit and activate it. Repeat until all are used, and remove dead units at the end of the turn.

It avoids the problem that armies with many units end up with several "free" activations at the end of the turn.

I like the sound of both systems.

Of the two though I think the battletech one is the best, the random system could result in one player getting 10 activations to his opponents 0, unlikely but a little too random for a game I'm designed to be fully startegic with less reliance on luck than other systems. It does present a problem with my system though in that units locked in close assault forgo their activation until the end of the turn so the figure would take a little longer to work out. I'll playtest that system

The turn phase is.

1. Strategy
During the strategy phase players roll a D100 and add their teams unity, leaders stragety and skill based modifiers. The highest player chooses to activate first or second.
2. Activation Phase
The nominated player activates his first chosen fighter. If a fighter assaults during activation his actions are suspended until the Assault Phase.
This process is repeated until every fighter has taken his activation.
3. Assault Phase
During the Assault Phase, models engaged in Close Assault carry out their attacks.

leejerrum wrote:(A system) I'm designing to be fully startegic with less reliance on luck than other systems.

1. Strategy
During the strategy phase players roll a D100...

If you're trying to reduce randomness, then you need to either lower this to a d10 or d6. The higher the die number you're rolling the wider range of results you're going to see, which will cause it to be extremely random (unless the ratings you're adding to the roll are in the range of 30-40 points).

In general, if you want a system to be less random, roll smaller dice and use larger modifiers. In this case you'd roll a d10 but make sure the unity/strat/skill modifiers are fairly large. This reduces the influence of the dice on the roll, making it less random.

The ratings I'm adding can be up to 200.

I'm am considering working out an average per fighter though instead of a cumulative total. In which case I'll drop it back down to D10.

The assault phase went on the end because we encountered a situation where one guy would assault another. Then the model next to him would assault him and so on and so forth. You'd end up with a siutuation where one guy got to attack 5 times in a single turn as he bowled over countless waves of enemies. Or he'd only be able to defend which didn't make sense.


Thanks for the feedback guys

Another option, each model roles for initiative, certain models get a bonus to their initiative rolls (DnD miniatures, B5 Wars did this for example) Then you move models in Initiative order

Or you can spend leadership points to move a unit out of order, or hold him back a "move". AT-43 and Heavy Gear both do some variant of this.

So for instance
Player 1 activates Unit 1
Player 2 activates Unit 1
Player 1 activates Unit 2
Player 2 spends a Command Point to Hold back his movement
Player 1 activates Unit 3
Player 2 activates Unit 2
Player 2 Spends a Command Point to Activate Unit 3
Player 2 activates Unit 3
...

Interesting haywire.

I'm inclined to say the guy with less models can hold them back until both sides are equal.

Command points seems worth consideration though.

Rackham's original Confrontation (1,2,3) basically used this system. Each player moves one unit at a time. The player with fewer units simply had a number of passes equal to the difference between the number of units between each player. So if player 1 had 6 units, and player 2 had 10 units, player 1 would have 4 passes and player 2 zero passes. In addition each player could place a unit in reserve (to activate anytime at a later date) and the winner of the Authority roll got an extra reserve.

Awesome, thanks FOXHOUND I've been trying to find the rules for this game for a few weeks now without success.

It's good to hear my idea for an activation system was used by a hugely successful game system I wasn't aware of without influence, I guess it works.

FOXHOUND wrote:Rackham's original Confrontation (1,2,3) basically used this system. Each player moves one unit at a time. The player with fewer units simply had a number of passes equal to the difference between the number of units between each player. So if player 1 had 6 units, and player 2 had 10 units, player 1 would have 4 passes and player 2 zero passes. In addition each player could place a unit in reserve (to activate anytime at a later date) and the winner of the Authority roll got an extra reserve.

Same from RAckham in At-43 had the option to pay certain points (as in "leadership" points) in order to buy a pass action... a combination of this could give you waht you need

The 'pass' ability, can they be used back to back? The way I see it, if you can use them back to back then in a 10v6 senario, the player with 10 units will simply be forced to move 4 of his units at the beginning, leading to a pretty unfair distribution to the person with fewer units. Essentially, it is the same as if the player with 10 units moved 4 in a row at the very end, only with the person with more units benefiting.

Besides games like battletech, where each side has the same number of 'steps' to move units, there is also the activation system used by the clik games. In these, you have a set number of activations per game turn. For example, if you have 300 points and 6 activations, then if you have 4 units at 300 points you will waste 2 activations a turn. On the other hand, if you have 10 units, you will not be able to activate 4 of your units at any given time.

The limited activation setup works well for many skirmish games I would think, as it devalues pure horde approaches and deathstar approaches with only 1-2 big models at the same time. The true horde armies might have a special rule allowing for extra activations under certian conditions, and true deathstar armies likewise might be able to activate more than once in a turn under certian conditions, in order to keep both playstyles viable but controlled.

A simple solution is to allow both players a pass or activate option.

Having determined who goes first, that player may activate a unit/figure or pass. Then the second player can do the same.

Two consequetive passes bring the move to an end.

This is slightly skewed to the player with less units/figures as they get to choose when to make their play, but of course this is offset by having less to play with

One variation on the Battletech system is Mech Attack whereby players take turns alternating until one player has twice as many units as the other. From then on the play alternates with the player with more activating two and the player with less activating one.

It's a very simple mechanic that works quite well.