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 Ventus wrote:
The best takeaway from this thread is that DakkaDakka remains a terrible venue for talking about Age of Sigmar.

For those only interested in superficial discussion yeah, the toxic overtones are not worth sifting through since the nuance will not be what they are looking for.

I seem to recall a recent double turn thread on the TGA, the most positive place for AOS evah... having some people not named Auticus discussing their disdain for double turn as well.

You guys do realise that people are critical/negative on TGA right? It's not some kind of strange place where anyone being negative gets taken out back and reconditioned by the secret police.

 auticus wrote:
I seem to recall a recent double turn thread on the TGA, the most positive place for AOS evah... having some people not named Auticus discussing their disdain for double turn as well.

It is not at all like it was when they banned you, totally reasonable now.


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 Overread wrote:
You guys do realise that people are critical/negative on TGA right? It's not some kind of strange place where anyone being negative gets taken out back and reconditioned by the secret police.

And dakka isn't a horrible toxic place where all free thought is shouted down by tourney-worshipping donkey-caves, but it is still fun to joke about it

 Overread wrote:
You guys do realise that people are critical/negative on TGA right? It's not some kind of strange place where anyone being negative gets taken out back and reconditioned by the secret police.

It was rainbow land for a long time lol. If its not that right now then cool. I don't go there very often and its been a while. It USED to be a place where posting criticism of the game was on the list of rules that could get you banned.

You can even post about whfb on TGA now, and most people are cool with it. What a crazy time to be alive!

To quote darth vader...

"Impressive. Most impressive."

VBS wrote:
You can even post about whfb on TGA now, and most people are cool with it. What a crazy time to be alive!

With Old World coming back from GW chances are in the future it will likely get its own Old World subsection as well if that game takes off well.

 Ventus wrote:
The best takeaway from this thread is that DakkaDakka remains a terrible venue for talking about Age of Sigmar.

Sure it's a bad venue, if you want a rah rah circlejerk rather than actual discussion.


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 Overread wrote:
You guys do realise that people are critical/negative on TGA right? It's not some kind of strange place where anyone being negative gets taken out back and reconditioned by the secret police.

There was a time when there was a no negativity policy in place where they wanted only positive pro-GW comments. I know this because Ben Curry, the owner of TGA, personally messaged me once to ask me to tone down the negative comments because it sounded like I "hated the game and hate GW" because I was very critical of their design choices. Auticus was banned for it. They've relaxed a bit.

They relaxed because the honeymoon phase ended and you can't have a standing and competitive game were everything is positive.

I mean they let Icegoat be there for a couple of weeks before banning him and hes a by-the-book negative troll.

It felt like something that was tossed in to make the game feel 'different', something they could use to market AoS as having something unique to other, far better balanced wargames. If the game had much tighter balance then maybe I could see, at a very hard push, why maybe there's an element of having to plan around it... but that isn't AoS, when things like Slaanesh and the like exist, where as many times as the weaker army can snatch victory through a double turn, you can get tabled by the army that had already wiped out most of your stuff. It's completely redundant at best and at worst you're bored, having to sit there and wait for someone to play another turn whilst you twiddle your thumbs.

If it makes it into third edition I'll be very surprised, especially with the way GW's recent rulesets have been slipping in alternating activations in various forms . As has been said, the only real defenders I've ever seen tend to be the people who'll defend literally anything about AoS/GW and will no doubt do an about turn to declare it's removal as the best decision ever once it gets announced.

But yeah TGA's actually not a 'total' hugbox anymore. It's still brimming with far more GW White Knights than anywhere else on the internet (which is saying something) and any critical talking point will see you doggy piled by a share of them, but at least you probably won't get banned for it.

I suspect the whole reason for the double turn was to give that "snatch victory from defeat" vibe, just they forgot that it also means you can turn a victory into a complete route with it too.

Yeah. Knowing that one of their design point was easy entry and a game that anyone could master and do well in without having to get good with rules as that was a complaint about whfb (having to get good with the rules and navigate the rules gotchas), the double turn to me screams "it doesn't matter how bad you're getting piled on, if you get the double turn you can win".

Which is also why I think its defended so much.

And honestly - I'm fine with the double turn -- if it was a scenario rule that wasn't in every scenario 100% 24/7. It could be something cool to have in once in a while.

Or if there was the beginner style rules (the four page rules) and then an "advanced" AOS. A lot of games I grew up with in the 80s and played after had a basic version of the game and an advanced version of the game.

It is fun as a unique thing that happens in scenarios designed to accommodate it.

Wayniac wrote:
I suspect the whole reason for the double turn was to give that "snatch victory from defeat" vibe, just they forgot that it also means you can turn a victory into a complete route with it too.

Could also be done as a way to mitigate turn 1 damage.
If you lose out on first turn you have the chance of a double to get back on your feet.
Plenty of armies now have alpha strike capabilities which can cause a fair bit of damage.

Jackal90 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I suspect the whole reason for the double turn was to give that "snatch victory from defeat" vibe, just they forgot that it also means you can turn a victory into a complete route with it too.

Could also be done as a way to mitigate turn 1 damage.
If you lose out on first turn you have the chance of a double to get back on your feet.
Plenty of armies now have alpha strike capabilities which can cause a fair bit of damage.

The problem with every argument that suggests the doubleturn lets you get advantage on a losing situation, is that nothing in the mechanic actually relies on the current game state.

You could be against a super fast army that can make an alphastrike and hit you hard in the first turn. Just as you could be against a very slow army that's not even in range after one turn.
It's the same for "turning a loss into a win" arguments in that it can also turn a win into an outright win or an even battle into a win.


Because the doubleturn is random and that random element is based purely upon a dice roll; there's no part of the actual game state contributing to the chance of it happening. It is in itself a source of gross imbalance rather than an agent of increasing game balance. The only element that might adjust balance is the choice of the player who rolls the dice in deciding if they take it or not and the vast majority of players will take the path that gives them the best potential chance for a win.




If the doubleturn pinged if, say, the point difference in fielded units was greater than 50% of the games point value. Eg if a 2K game if the difference in points on the table between you and your opponent was equal too or greater than 1K points - then the player with the least points gets a doubleturn. Then perhaps at least it would be taking steps toward trying to at least work with the current game state. Though honestly I'd argue that such a system would be a pain to put into practice game-wise if you had to add up the points at the end of every single round.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I was just speculating as to why it might exist in the game.

I still remain on the bench with it though.

Only time I’ve seen a dramatic impact is with meta lists in low point games.
In 1k games a double turn can be lethal for a magic or shooting heavy army.

Seen skryre lists nearly wipe half an army on a double turn in a 1k game recently.
While they did roll well, it’s still a lot of damage.

Yep. I'd also wager that we'll see more ranged units start to appear in more armies. Right now a lot of armies are really small on model range; so as GW likely expands them we'll see more and more ranged weapons appear. That might well start to show more cracks.

Of course GW could start to say "Ok so close combat alternates lets make ranged alternate" or even shift to alternate activation where a "double activation" per turn wouldn't be too bad (you'd just activate two units one after the other rather than a whole army)

It’s badly needed.
Before some armies literally couldn’t do a thing.
I’ve been in games before against khorne armies that had to just ignore my mage sat on a balewind lol.

Glad they changed that too.

Like i said, once they remove double turn as a thing and replace it with pretty much anything else, I'd definitely be more interested in the game.

If they injected alternate activation of some type (look at Middle Earth) I'd be all in.

I wish they could have just taken the LOTR game's rules and make that AOS. It's one of the best rules they've done.

As much as I dislike the double turn, unit-by-unit activation would require a thorough re-write of the ruleset and factions.

I know you say that a lot but I don't think it needs an extensive re-write of everything. I've done it, it worked great with it as-is.

I could agree it could use some tweaking but I don't think it would need an extensive rewrite of everything.

In fact the two changes I was using with alt activation and with summoning leading to a sudden death victory condition if you over did it made the game pretty much awesome from my perspective. There was a lot that I liked beyond those two issues for me.

Assuming you alternate by unit and also by phase (as in, all phases work like the combat phase)...

Movement changes a lot. For example:

A shooting unit could move forward to get into range, only to have the target unit move back out of range, short-range shooters are less valuable, changing the balance.

Small, cheap units that can be activated to force the opponent to use up their activations before important units are moved become more valuable, changing the balance.

If a unit runs enemy units can now move to 'hide' behind that unit safe in the knowledge they cannot be charged by it, making one's own units potential fortifications for the enemy.

A large, fast moving unit could go first and run forward in a massive line, locking the enemy into position while allowing other friendly units to move about the board as they wish. Flying units can do similar, by jumping into the middle of the enemy line before support elements have been able to move up behind the unit they are meant to support. This dramatically affects not only balance but the entire dynamic of the movement phase.

My Nurgle army needs to advance as one solid line, without room for enemies to get between units, which also makes narrative sense. Unit-by-unit means I could move one unit up, then an opponent could jump into the gap before I can create that solid line. The entire makeup and strategy of my army build would need to be re-worked, since unit-by-unit destroys its concept.

That is a notable amount of balance changes and/or exploits which need to be addressed without even getting past the movement phase.


Personally I prefer alternating by phase instead of by unit, which still creates some issues (including some of the above) but avoids most of them and still preserves a similar gameplay experience.

I dont really know if theres that much of a balance issue, compared to where the game is now. Different units become the best and worst, but I'm not convinced the overall balance is significantly worse.

 auticus wrote:
Like i said, once they remove double turn as a thing and replace it with pretty much anything else, I'd definitely be more interested in the game.

If they injected alternate activation of some type (look at Middle Earth) I'd be all in.

I’d be fine with it removed but I’d quite happily drop it if alternate activation came in.
Really not a fan of it as it can slow games down dramatically.

Wayniac wrote:
I wish they could have just taken the LOTR game's rules and make that AOS. It's one of the best rules they've done.

You're not wrong.

Has anyone written a comprehensive modification for AoS that makes it alternating activation?

If you do it so every phase is like the fight phase that's going to be the easiest. Though I think in theory I prefer to do everything for each unit all in one go. It does take a little more modification for certain abilities though.

I guess because the games’ balance is already a burning train wreck, the balance shifts caused by alt activation dont really impact my opinion. Having done it for three years against power players i can also say the balance of the game was roughly the same. There was no gross imbalancing issues that came up thst wasnt anything you dont already deal with in aos 24/7.

The only ones that i can see sensitive to this are people that have built armies that take advantage of double turn or who really like elite small armies because those would have a disadvantage in board control over larger armies. And i know people hate buying new things to get back to optimal. Thats reasonable.

Also ive been doing alt activation in many games for many years and have not noticed any significant uptick in time.

That same complaint was levied when i put in alt activation to aos (the time) and we pretty solidly refuted that over an entire summer of playing where some would use alt activation and some would use standard turns and both types of games took nearly the same amount of time pretty much always.


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And yes i have a complete alt activation set of rules ive published on here before.

My Nurgle army is hardly meta, alt activation still destroys it. Without the ability to properly position all my units at once in the movement phase the entire concept falls apart.

I am guessing that you have not had anyone try to really exploit the alt activation rules. Take for example, a Slaanesh army. A unit of 10 seekers, deployed in a long line strung across the board. Movement phase, they activate first and run their 20+ inches, forming a 37" wall of movement obstruction that locks down the opponent unless they can fly. Bring two such units, or a 20-man, and the entirety of a 6 ft table can be blocked easily. The Slaanesh player is handed massive board control, if it is a scenario where the objectives are centrally located they now have double-turn level advantage.

Which goes back to my original point; if the replacement system is not actually better then GW does not gain by changing it.