Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 emanuelb wrote:
They add a lot of depth to the game, because they add meaningful decisions.

They really don't. Most of the time you have a handful of obvious buffs on obvious units that you will use the same way every game and a whole bunch of filler content you'll only very occasionally use when you remember that a particular stratagem exists to cover that once every ten games edge case (but will use every time it happens because it's an obvious buff).

Do I use my cps to buy relics/traits or leave them for strats?

That's list optimization, not genuine depth. Most of the time you will evaluate which relics//WLTs are worth the CP and those will be your permanent choices. It's no more depth than recognizing that plasma is the best and flamers suck so you always take plasma.

Another aspect that makes stratagems great is the fact that they engage both players during both turns. Strats reduce the "now it's your turn so you do your stuff while I watch my dues being blown up", which is great.

So does removing IGOUGO. We don't need an entire layer of rules bloat to make up for the fact that GW is using a terrible turn structure that virtually every modern game has abandoned.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:


So does removing IGOUGO. We don't need an entire layer of rules bloat to make up for the fact that GW is using a terrible turn structure that virtually every modern game has abandoned.

Except they haven't though? Most computer games use IGOUGO. Most board games too.
It's almost as if GW's application of IGOUGO is what's terrible, not the system itself.
There was no issue with IGOUGO in earlier editions. It was only after 6th ed when GW started ramping up the bloat and giving units stupid amounts of firepower and alpha strike potential that it became an issue.

Agree on stratagems though, and it's barely something that gives both players "engagement". It gives no more engagement than armour saves, as they're still something reactive and honestly it actually just ruins the pacing and pads out the game's length as you now have to interrupt whatever you're doing to resolve whatever effect the stratagem has.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:


So does removing IGOUGO. We don't need an entire layer of rules bloat to make up for the fact that GW is using a terrible turn structure that virtually every modern game has abandoned.

Except they haven't though? Most computer games use IGOUGO. Most board games too.
It's almost as if GW's application of IGOUGO is what's terrible, not the system itself.
There was no issue with IGOUGO in earlier editions.

1. Those computer games usually have you facing a computer, not a person.
2. Board games have more player interaction. Even Monpoly lets you do more than 40k does on an opponent's turn.
3. Yes, IGOUGO was bad even back in the day. Take off the rose tinted glasses.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Except they haven't though? Most computer games use IGOUGO. Most board games too.

I don't know about board games, but most computer games with IGOUGO also have far more turns, and for obvious reasons each turn tends to be far faster to play.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Except they haven't though? Most computer games use IGOUGO. Most board games too.

Board games, maybe, but PC games? No. Most PC games have simultaneous play, with the handful of turn-based games largely being nostalgia games aiming to copy an old game. And if you narrow the scope to miniature wargames like 40k, where the structure of the game is at all comparable, IGOUGO disappears. Even GW's own games have abandoned it when they're free of the baggage of previous editions and fans who can't cope with change. AI and AT are both alternating activation games with much better turn structures.

There was no issue with IGOUGO in earlier editions. It was only after 6th ed when GW started ramping up the bloat and giving units stupid amounts of firepower and alpha strike potential that it became an issue.

There absolutely was. It may have been less of a balance issue but it was still a problem for keeping both players engaged and having interesting decision trees. The only thing "better" about IGOUGO in old editions is that back then we hadn't seen as much progress in game design yet and it wasn't as clear that IGOUGO was an obsolete relic with far superior alternatives available.

GW's structure of I go you go has been an issue for years. The reason its more of an issue now than before is that armies are a lot bigger which means you've more units to concentrate fire and also because GW has steadily made the game more and more lethal and more and more fast paced. The result of which units can get into close combat super-fast which means little manoeuvring around; meanwhile shooting units got more and more powerful to obliterate close combat ones.

The result is a game of alpha-strikes where whoever gets the best one during the game tends to come out on top. It also can mean the most damage is done during the early first few turns instead of the middle to end of the game



At its most insane extreme is AoS which has the double turn trick where you can end up with two whole turns of play for one player before the other gets a go.






That said turn based video games are doing very well right now and are a subset of games all to themselve;s they are certainly not all just copying "one old game". That said they are often WAY less lethal but also often offer WAY more turns. Instead of 6-7 they might have 100 or 200 or more turns to play out.
That said they can still have issues of their own - doomstack armies being a notorious one for many turnbased games which can mean that the entire multihours of game can come down to just one conflict of who brings the bigger fleet/army.
But lets not get sidetracked into a comparison too much.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
There was no issue with IGOUGO in earlier editions.

IGOUGO has been a point of criticism since the 90s. Andy Chambers wanted 4th Ed to have a reaction system (that eventually wound up in his Starship Troopers ruleset), and the 2000s were when wargaming really started to move beyond completely non-interactive pure IGOUGO. Nowadays if you find a tabletop game with IGOUGO, it usually has some flavor of reaction system to give the otherwise inactive player something to do. Even GW has done this in modern games.

40K's turn structure is a relic of 80s wargame design that has been carried forward by momentum alone. It's not appropriate to this scale of game, and is a source of a lot of issues that have plagued the game over the years. There are better alternatives.

 catbarf wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
I changed the names of your lists because you're giving a different scenario. You might use list C instead of list D, but list A is still better than list B. But you cannot guarantee that most factions would end up in the situation of choosing between C and D instead of A and B.

Ideally, I'm not giving a different scenario. If the game is designed well, list A (the one that always underperforms) should not exist outside of a new player making big mistakes with their army composition, and list B (the one that typically overperforms) should not exist either.

The dichotomy you describe- all-rounder that sucks versus a specialist that usually performs better- is a game design issue, but not something inherent to varied mission design.

I think my scenario didn't describe what I wanted it to. I imagine between 20 factions, there are going to be around 10 that will choose between 50/50/50/50/50/50 or 45/45/45/45/70/70 for their most efficient list and a lot of people I imagine will pick the one with the 45s because on average you'll win more games and tournaments with it.

Not sure how familiar you are with Infinity, but tournament play there has a considerable variety of missions, ranging from kill-em-all to progressive scoring to board control at the end, and I have never had a game where I thought the game was a foregone conclusion just based on lists and mission. In my experience the scenario you describe of players choosing to optimize for certain missions and accept auto-loss in others is not how it plays out.

Almost no idea, I think there are more strict list-building rules right? From my memory playing missions like the Relic was really unfair when some factions got to start next to the relic, pick it up and get out of there. A lot of factions don't have the tools to deal with that, which is the 70% I'm talking about. Herzog's idea of how it'd transfer to 40k fills me with dread and I can't wrap my head around how you cannot get the feeling that you have no chance if you go into a mission where your specialist dudes lose their specialistness and your opponent's specialists get more specialisty. Is winning by annihilation a relatively easy alternative that keeps it fair or what? Are the list building restrictions so strict that everyone has some specialists that lose something and some that gain something? I am not good at mission design and I have not played enough different games to say. I'm just theorising and speaking from my 40k experience.

From what I heard when GW made rules for a planet-strike or siege defence Crusade mission they made it horribly imbalanced. I am not saying that it's impossible to create a mission set that feels varied and balanced. You can't tell me the 4th edition missions were balanced (apparently GW's best missions yet), I've read them when I tried to update them for 9th. If you're playing meat-grinder with a more vehicle-based list then you get no benefit as the attacker and you have to destroy the entire enemy army or lose. So that's both roulette and coin-flip in one. You cannot tell me that because of one mission the most efficient list in every faction in the game are going to have enough Troops to where being defender or attacker is balanced and some armies don't do a lot worse than others in the mission.

Slipspace wrote:
According to you, just adding 100 more useless strats to an army immediately increases the depth of the game.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
All tactical choices add depth, a game with a lot of tactical choices is deep.

This is not true at all. Let's say I give tactical marines the following special rules...

Read the rest of the post before you start spouting gak. "Tic-tac-toe has very few tactical choices, therefore it is shallow. If you have 10 different colours of X and O but ultimately it only matters whether you place an X or an O you have Tic-tac-toe with the illusion of depth."

Or the post I made above that. "If I can choose to shoot your the guns or the feet of your Knight with my weapon that hits and wounds on 4+ to either get +1 to hit or +1 to wound then that choice will have no impact on the statistical average damage I do and is therefore irrelevant." Stratagems need to meet some minimum level of balance before adding additional ones adds depth. Whether you have 100 CP re-roll Strats or 200 CP re-roll Strats is irrelevant because you can't use more than 100 CP so the last 100 identical CP re-rolls are 100% pointless. Whether you have 1 1CP Strats that say "You lose all your CP" or 2 1CP Strats that they "You lose all your CP" is irrelevant. But you can break any system with a lack of balance. If I can have any number of Basilisks in my list for 0 pts I won't have to think about how I play because your army will be gone in two turns anyway. So now Movement, Toughness, Strength and Sv characteristics are irrelevant, let's just remove them and set up a diorama instead. We'll make a roll-off each turn to see who wins the turn and the person who won the most roll-offs wins.

Even with design as silly as the old Cacophony + VotLW combo you still had to choose which turn your Obliterators came down, whether you kept an additional unit in reserve in case the first one died and you had a back-up or if you sent the back-up straight down to perform a more powerful beta strike. Whether you deepstruck in a more or less risky position depending on whether your opponent could take out your Obliterators and whether you had other units that could make efficient use of CP or whether your game plan revolved around one key unit. Without that combo your decision tree is a lot less complex. Now, this is worst case scenario, but you're all ignoring the best-case scenario where every CP spent is a hard choice because you have a lot of more or less valuable effects, some of which are contingent on some dice rolls and saving CP for them is risky because it might not pay off, but you'll be slightly more CP-efficient if it does. A system where using some Strats people think you made a reasonable mistake instead of just goofing around using Stratagems you and everyone else knows is way overcosted.

Choosing the turn your Obliterators killed a unit is not depth LMAO

 vict0988 wrote:
Stratagems need to meet some minimum level of balance before adding additional ones adds depth.

Then by that standard virtually none of 40k's stratagems meet the minimum level of balance and the stratagem mechanic does not add depth.

 catbarf wrote:

IGOUGO has been a point of criticism since the 90s. Andy Chambers wanted 4th Ed to have a reaction system (that eventually wound up in his Starship Troopers ruleset), and the 2000s were when wargaming really started to move beyond completely non-interactive pure IGOUGO. Nowadays if you find a tabletop game with IGOUGO, it usually has some flavor of reaction system to give the otherwise inactive player something to do. Even GW has done this in modern games.

well, Any Chambers system still was IGoUGo
and no, IGoUGo is not an issue by itself and nearly all games that have a reaction mechanic or break down from alternate turns or phases to alternate activations still use IGoUGo as they don't interrupt a players "go" but let the opponent react to it
Starship Troopers has a very clear mechanic here without any interrupts, but alternating player turns and reactions that only ever happen after an action is resolved (as an example, Overwatch in SST would happen after the attacking unit made their melee attacks, if the there are still model models left)

by now 40k has no clear system any more, 3rd was IGoUGo with alternating player turns with a clear phase structure, and over time rules that sound cool on paper were added to make the game more interactive but at the same time slowed it down without adding much to it

people (and GW) call 40k IGoUGo and say that this is the main problem, yet it already stopped being pure IGoUGo long time ago and the problem players have with the game is that it uses alternating player turns combined with the possibility to wipe the opponent's army out in one turn and they cannot do anything about it (and this is the problem since the beginning)

change the game to alternating phases or alternating activations, combine this with the possibility to wipe out the opponent's army in one phase/activation (one "go") and we have the same problem again (that the player has to sit there and just remove models without doing anything)

the reason why most shooting heavy games use some form of alternating activation is to remove the possibility to win in one go without having an "unrealistic" damage output or range
while some games made the "win in one go" a key part of their game but also make sure that you need some afford to set that one "go" up and not have a "whoever has the first turn wins" setting

PS: but in the end it does not matter what the game is, GW is not interested to have a good or balanced game as bad games make much more publicity as the internet is built around negativity (how many topics to we have that say a game is good and you can play whatever you like compared to "game is bad and need to change" and "what options are bad/good and what needs to be taken to have a chance"

 kodos wrote:

and no, IGoUGo is not an issue by itself and nearly all games that have a reaction mechanic or break down from alternate turns or phases to alternate activations still use IGoUGo as they don't interrupt a players "go" but let the opponent react to it

That's not what IGOUGO means in a wargame context. IGOUGO refers specifically to acting with your entire force followed by your opponent acting with their entire force, not that single units doing an action can't be interrupted.

change the game to alternating phases or alternating activations, combine this with the possibility to wipe out the opponent's army in one phase/activation (one "go")

Why would you combine alternating activation with the possibility of wiping out your opponent's entire army with a single unit? That's an absolutely absurd thing to do.

PS: but in the end it does not matter what the game is, GW is not interested to have a good or balanced game as bad games make much more publicity as the internet is built around negativity (how many topics to we have that say a game is good and you can play whatever you like compared to "game is bad and need to change" and "what options are bad/good and what needs to be taken to have a chance"

And this is just plain ridiculous. GW doesn't make a bad game because of some weird idea that bad games get more publicity, they make a bad game because they're incompetent at game design and management won't fire their friends.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:

 emanuelb wrote:
They add a lot of depth to the game, because they add meaningful decisions.

They really don't. Most of the time you have a handful of obvious buffs on obvious units that you will use the same way every game and a whole bunch of filler content you'll only very occasionally use when you remember that a particular stratagem exists to cover that once every ten games edge case (but will use every time it happens because it's an obvious buff).

Do I use my cps to buy relics/traits or leave them for strats?

That's list optimization, not genuine depth. Most of the time you will evaluate which relics//WLTs are worth the CP and those will be your permanent choices. It's no more depth than recognizing that plasma is the best and flamers suck so you always take plasma.

Another aspect that makes stratagems great is the fact that they engage both players during both turns. Strats reduce the "now it's your turn so you do your stuff while I watch my dues being blown up", which is great.

So does removing IGOUGO. We don't need an entire layer of rules bloat to make up for the fact that GW is using a terrible turn structure that virtually every modern game has abandoned.

I'm curious, why do you play 40k if you think is such a terrible game?

Anyway, i disagree with you on strats. Yes, like half of them are situational at best, and a couple are very powerful, but even then you still have a couple of meaningful options that, together with the CP resource system, makes the game way more interesting. It adds an additional layer to the game. And yes, in a specific situation, a certain stratagem will be the optimal choice. But the same applies in life in general, too. In chess you have a ton of opening moves, but in any given situation, there's probably 1 optimal choice. That doesn't mean this is obvious and the rest of the options are trash and we should remove them.

As for igougo, true, but this was a staple for 40k since the begining, so it is very unlikely to change. Same with caster killing in Warmachine - some people hate it, but is very unlikely to go. Also, in computer games TBS is still a thing and imo Civilization and Heroes of might and magic are some of the best strategy games ever made, far superior to most RTS.
And even in tabletop, Kings of War has IGOUGO, and it's a popular mass battle game developed in 2012.

 vict0988 wrote:
Almost no idea, I think there are more strict list-building rules right? From my memory playing missions like the Relic was really unfair when some factions got to start next to the relic, pick it up and get out of there. A lot of factions don't have the tools to deal with that, which is the 70% I'm talking about. Herzog's idea of how it'd transfer to 40k fills me with dread and I can't wrap my head around how you cannot get the feeling that you have no chance if you go into a mission where your specialist dudes lose their specialistness and your opponent's specialists get more specialisty. Is winning by annihilation a relatively easy alternative that keeps it fair or what? Are the list building restrictions so strict that everyone has some specialists that lose something and some that gain something? I am not good at mission design and I have not played enough different games to say. I'm just theorising and speaking from my 40k experience.

From what I heard when GW made rules for a planet-strike or siege defence Crusade mission they made it horribly imbalanced. I am not saying that it's impossible to create a mission set that feels varied and balanced. You can't tell me the 4th edition missions were balanced (apparently GW's best missions yet), I've read them when I tried to update them for 9th. If you're playing meat-grinder with a more vehicle-based list then you get no benefit as the attacker and you have to destroy the entire enemy army or lose. So that's both roulette and coin-flip in one. You cannot tell me that because of one mission the most efficient list in every faction in the game are going to have enough Troops to where being defender or attacker is balanced and some armies don't do a lot worse than others in the mission.

Its been a few years, so the game may have changed radically, but I think the issue partly is that Infinity is much smaller. It's more like Necromunda than modern 40k. You don't really design lists to be TAC but to the missions. I think in tournaments its standard to know the pool of missions in advance, have 2 lists and then pick which one would be more appropriate for that particular case. This is obviously "physically" easier when a list is say 15~ guys (and there may be some crossover between them). No one wants to cart around 4k points.

As a result if you showed up with no appropriate specialists that's kind of on you.

40k is designed completely differently, and so "missions" tend to be more random - with inevitable consequences for balance. I tend to agree with you, an awful lot of scenarios GW have put out over the years are obviously imbalanced to the attacker or defender. Or do not work unless you have a vast collection from which to build a suitable list. (And that doesn't work if you have to write a list then roll up a mission.)

More generally, you can have a toolbox list in 40k - see Siegler's Ad Mech at the LVO nearly a year ago for instance. But you can also have lists which are point and click.

When I was writing my update of 4th ed missions I actually included having three lists to accommodate the randomness of missions. You'd need to bring 3k pts to a tournament, but a 50% increase doesn't seem so bad.

Create 3 Battle-forged armies with a points limit of 2000 each, labelled list A, B and C, all three must share the same Honour Guard units. The Honour Guard must be 1500+ points. The number and variety of Detachments does not need to be the same in all three lists and Honour Guard units do not have to be in the same type of Detachment in all three lists. For example, if you have 3 units of Flayed Ones (Necrons Elites) as part of your Honour Guard units you could have all 3 in a Vanguard Detachment list A and 2 in a Patrol and the last one in an Auxiliary Support Detachment in list B, but any Novokh dynasty Flayed Ones in your Honour Guard must be Novokh in list A, B and C. Upgrades, equipment and number of models in all Honour Guard units must be the same in all three lists. The units in list A, B and C which are not Honour Guard are labelled Ancillary A, B and C respectively.

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
That's not what IGOUGO means in a wargame context. IGOUGO refers specifically to acting with your entire force followed by your opponent acting with their entire force, not that single units doing an action can't be interrupted..

Warhammer context, not Wargaming

in the Wargaming world IGoUGo" means you finish your "go" before your opponent makes his "go" (no one would describe Chess as Alternating Activations but always as IGoUGo)

if this one "go" is a single activation, a phase, or a turn depends on the game in the wider context and its structure
because in Warhammer you have alternating player turns, one "go" is one turn so people playing Warhammer use this to describe the turn structure

but then it is still not true anymore, because the active player does not make a full turn without the opponent doing anything, the opponent acts during your "go" hence it is not IGoUGo any more but a mix of alternating phases with alternating activations, interrupts and RPG elements
and this is one reason that causes the game to slow down, having long waiting times and rules bloat because it is a random mix of rules without a clear structure (and the other reason is that you play with Model-2-Model Skirmish scale rules but army level amount of models)

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
And this is just plain ridiculous. GW doesn't make a bad game because of some weird idea that bad games get more publicity, they make a bad game because they're incompetent at game design and management won't fire their friends.

given that the 40k design team changes on a regular bases and people play the game out of the box although it is just crap, it does not matter if it happen by accident for 20 years now or is intentional, the outcome is the same

Gue'vesa Emissary wrote:
Why would you combine alternating activation with the possibility of wiping out your opponent's entire army with a single unit? That's an absolutely absurd thing to do.

why would you combine this with alternating player turns and give the player the option to win before the other player even had his turn
it is a design choice by GW because they think this is fun and what people want

no reason this would change just because you change the turn structure

 Overread wrote:


At its most insane extreme is AoS which has the double turn trick where you can end up with two whole turns of play for one player before the other gets a go.

Oh yeah, that. That mechanic is why I don't bother with AoS. Well, among other things.
GW really doesn't know how to properly use IGOUGO. It might have had issues in earlier editions, but 4th ed was not as egregious as it is now.
I wouldn't call 40k fast paced though. For me it takes like 5 hours to resolve a 2k point game. In earlier editions it would just take something like an hour and a half.
That's not fast paced, that's bloody slow. In my experience, the whole trap card stratagem thing and special abilities you have to resolve slow the game down.

It's as if the designers forgot that 40k isn't a computer game and tried to shove in computer-game like abilities that would have been resolved by an AI. It feels really clunky to me.

I don't think changing the structure to AA will change anything really. Bad designers making a clunky game will not suddenly become good designers after changing the turn structure. They'll just find a new way to feth it up, and then have the audacity to make you pay money for their incompetence, the product of which would then be rendered obsolete in less than a month through a "patch."

It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Most strats fall into four categories:

1. Things that should just be part of the core rules.
2. Things that should just be unit special rules.
3. Things that should just be wargear.
4. "Gotcha" things for combos that shouldn't be part of the game.
5. Wastes of ink.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

And units can only do a certain amount of things per turn.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

And units can only do a certain amount of things per turn.

i mean, yes?

OPR has it where you can

Move + Shoot
Move + Move
Move + Move (if you end up in base contact, fight)

and special abilities/psychic can be done at any point before attacking

a very standard action based system
each unit get a certain amount of actions during its activation and resolves them before another unit is activated

nothing special or new, and nothing that is dedicated to alternating activation, as other games used the same system for alternating player turns


yet you can still have alternating activations in a different way, as 40k is doing it with close combat phase

 kodos wrote:
a very standard action based system
each unit get a certain amount of actions during its activation and resolves them before another unit is activated

nothing special or new, and nothing that is dedicated to alternating activation, as other games used the same system for alternating player turns


yet you can still have alternating activations in a different way, as 40k is doing it with close combat phase

And melee was the absolute worst place to insert any AA. Why is one unit waiting around to hit? I'd rather have Initiative back because at least that makes more sense than "I need to wait to fight". Unless a unit charged, units should hit each other at the same time.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 kodos wrote:
a very standard action based system
each unit get a certain amount of actions during its activation and resolves them before another unit is activated

nothing special or new, and nothing that is dedicated to alternating activation, as other games used the same system for alternating player turns


yet you can still have alternating activations in a different way, as 40k is doing it with close combat phase

And melee was the absolute worst place to insert any AA. Why is one unit waiting around to hit? I'd rather have Initiative back because at least that makes more sense than "I need to wait to fight". Unless a unit charged, units should hit each other at the same time.

yeah, just like we shoot each other at the same time really -.- .....

Treating melee as 0" range shooting is a rather simple solution for AA style games, but it works

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

Played my first OPR game last night and it was pretty gratifying, I have to say.

Also my favorite bit so far is their totally legal alternate name for a Starcannon, which is "Star Cannon" with a space, lol.

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Any of the above. Virtually any system is better than IGOUGO.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

Played my first OPR game last night and it was pretty gratifying, I have to say.

Also my favorite bit so far is their totally legal alternate name for a Starcannon, which is "Star Cannon" with a space, lol.

Man, you're lucky. Nobody in my area will even give it a thought.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Tyel wrote:
It is interesting because these terms can all mean different things.
I.E. when people say "Alternate Activations are better" - what is meant? Is it you move a unit, I move a unit, then you shoot a unit, I shoot a unit etc?

Or do you effectively play out a full 40k turn but for one unit - then your opponent does the same, then on to the next etc? Both systems produce quite different games.

Should there be a full reaction system like Infinity - which I guess is more IGOUGO but doesn't play out like that as a result?

Do it like OPR where you activate a unit for its whole turn. Simple , fast and easy

Played my first OPR game last night and it was pretty gratifying, I have to say.

Also my favorite bit so far is their totally legal alternate name for a Starcannon, which is "Star Cannon" with a space, lol.

Man, you're lucky. Nobody in my area will even give it a thought.

yeah, the GW kool-aid is hard to deviate from sadly. I've got a few people playing and its slowly growing locally