Stormonu wrote:
With my recent games with Bolt Action, I think alternating activations is a fantastic change to 40K. Alternating makes the game far more interactive and builds a greater sense of tension (especially with random activations). It also tends to minimize the effect of Alpha strikes.

I've also been doing a lot of mathematical calculations since I've been working on rebalancing 40K, and the advantage that being the first player to get a turn of actual combat it has a dramatic effect on who wins (about a 50% advantage to win with like units).

However, changing to alternating unit activations isn't quite so straight forward in 40K. It takes a lot of rule rewriting to make it work - especially when it comes to Assaults - and really messy when more than two units engage in close combat.

 MrVulcanator wrote:
One option for balancing hordes and elite armies would be to have you be able to activate an amount of your point total. It would have to be flexible for varied armies (maybe every codex would say) but it could work.

Wraith2121 wrote:
To keep phase mechanics, couldn't they just have alternate activation in each phase. I move you move until finished then, psychic phase your power my power, etc.. This would keep both players engaged and allow the current books to mostly work.

 Lance845 wrote:

Wraith2121 wrote:
To keep phase mechanics, couldn't they just have alternate activation in each phase. I move you move until finished then, psychic phase your power my power, etc.. This would keep both players engaged and allow the current books to mostly work.

While lanrak will disagree, the issue then creates a larger advantage/disadvantage gap between first player second player. If player 2 is tau with generally long range weapons and player 1 is nids with mid to short then player 1 moves and attempts to use los blocking terrain, or to get into range to shoot. Player 2 (tau) then backsteps just outside of the nid players range or side steps to regain los.

Phase 2 tau shoot, nids dont.




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This becomes even worse when you factor in melee centered units/armies (blood angles) vs longer ranged shooty armies (tau again).

 Lance845 wrote:

It's real simple.

The game is far more engaging and tactical when you either a) take turns or b) use a random draw some dice out of a bag (like bolt action) mechanic to activate units. Which units you activate when and how you utilize them can heavily influence how the next person uses their activation. It becomes more like a chess game with each move the player makes influencing the direction of the game.

Bring more powerful units in smaller numbers? They have more staying power on the battlefield and can have greater effect on a single activation. Bring MSU you get more activations and more chances to take favorable positions and react intelligently to enemy postions. But your units will crumple faster and a single activation is likely to cause less damage before the enemy can react.

You don't need anything else. Any additional rule added to attempt to alleviate problems that don't really exist will just superficially create all new problems.

Waaaghpower wrote:

It's real simple.
I could not disagree more. There are several reasons, but one big one is that you're assuming that people won't try and game the system. If the game makes players go back and forth with each activation until one player runs out, then the other player finishes their turn, then this will just encourage buying a few super-cheap units to fill up activation slots. Adepta Sororitas can bring 15-pt 3++ shields that stand out on their own and do nothing. Inquisition can bring 12-point squads of three acolytes. If it's randomized, that makes the 'Spam weak units' tactic weaker, but raises other issues of balance, since you could potentially get all the wrong units activated to defend yourself while your opponent mauls one chunk of the board unimpeded, or alternately get the exact unit you need at a given moment to completely counter his moves.

There is no balanced way to make unit-by-unit activation work in 40k without completely changing every single aspect of the game from the ground up. I defy anyone to make a model system that works in a reasonable, unbroken manner that doesn't change the core existence of the game.

I'm going to go off on a tangent here, about a game that I really wish hadn't been discontinued: Heroscape.

Heroscape had a really good way of handling this. You could activate 3 units per turn, so you got 4 tokens - A 1, 2, 3, and X. The 'X' did nothing, but could be used to bluff your opponent so he's unsure what you're going to do next. You placed the tokens, then activated in order of placement. You could activate any unit as many times as you wanted - Even all 3 times. If a unit was killed before you activated it, then you didn't get to use it - This could create interesting back-and-forth situations, where you try and throw everything you have at a model to kill him before he activates, so you can steal the opponent's turns. It was probably the best thing about that game, and it worked really, really well.
The reason this system wouldn't work in 40k is how list and army building works - In Heroscape, the rules were fairly simple. Units had a set cost, period - No wargear, no increasing size, no special characters. You could buy multiples of some squads, but when you activated those squads, you only got to use a set number of them. (However many the minimum squad size was, usually 2 or 3, very rarely 4.) Games ran between 200-500 points, and most units cost between 50 and 150, with the really expensive, huge ones costing maybe 200. You couldn't build massive deathstars, or deathstars of any kind, really - One activation couldn't move your whole army, so the rules don't have to worry about players building unstoppable squads and then steamrolling entire armies. If you wanted character/unit synergy, they'd either need a rule on their card giving them some way to work together, (Usually it was 'You can use a nearby squad of this type instead of using this character' or something,) or rules that just work well together (A defensive buff and a unit that can evade attacks, for example), but the former option usually limited choices to specific roles, and the latter required you to activate multiple separate squads or have the characters get left behind by squads after a few turns.
You could go MSU, but it meant taking lots of the same squad, so that you could activate it safely - Activating a squad with only one member left was never a good idea, so you wanted multiples so you were always moving the 2 or 3 alloted models. You could take cheap units, but if they were too cheap and numerous, you would end up with lots of really lackluster turns, so usually you just wanted a couple cheap models or squads to fill in gaps. (This also created an interesting dynamic where more expensive units gave progressively less benefit for the points, because the more dense they were, the more valuable any upgrade became, since it made the unit more and more dense.) If a 100 point unit was twice as strong as a 50pt one, then a 200pt unit was only 50% stronger than a 100pt one, and a 300pt unit was only 20% stronger than the 200pt one. This made power creep a non-issue, because big expensive models were still killable by weak ones - There were no unstoppable Lords of War that would trounce armies twice their size unless specific counters were taken.

I miss Heroscape...

Waaaghpower wrote:

I could not disagree more. There are several reasons, but one big one is that you're assuming that people won't try and game the system. If the game makes players go back and forth with each activation until one player runs out, then the other player finishes their turn, then this will just encourage buying a few super-cheap units to fill up activation slots. Adepta Sororitas can bring 15-pt 3++ shields that stand out on their own and do nothing. Inquisition can bring 12-point squads of three acolytes..

 John Prins wrote:

There's a really easy fix for this. Each side has an equal number of activations, depending on who has the most. The 'empty' activations allow the player with fewer units to 'pass' on his opportunity.

So if you've got 8 units and your opponent has 12, you both have 12 activations, but 4 of yours are passes.

Note I don't think that super-cheap units like you describe should have a place in the game, but given the disparity of troop quality in the game cheap units are inevitable.

 Lance845 wrote:

Those super cheap units that do almost nothing will get killed off quickly. Or, you could be using them to bait the other player to move forward. Does he fall for it or not? Those are tactical decisions. It's like moving a pawn in chess. That is not a problem. That is part of having strategy and tactics.

If your opponent is forced to dedicate his army into 10 and 15-point models that are hiding behind walls, completely out of Line of Sight or with 2+ cover and 3++ invulns, then he's wasting his firepower. Currently there is no reward for bringing those units, so it works out fine, but in your theoretical version of the game, they would provide a huge advantage just by existing, forcing the opponent to play whack-a-mole with them. It's not like pawns in chess, because if you move a pawn in chess, then you're doing that instead of moving another piece - In unit-activation-40k, you would be moving all of your pawns on top of the rest of your army, and your opponent can't move once he's out of pawns.

There is no balanced way to make unit-by-unit activation work in 40k without completely changing every single aspect of the game from the ground up. I defy anyone to make a model system that works in a reasonable, unbroken manner that doesn't change the core existence of the game.

Seen it. Done it. Done a lot actually. Curious, what exactly do you consider the core existence of the game?

There's lots of things to it. The stat system is one, since the same stats have been used universally since at least 3rd edition. (I can't confirm 2nd edition, since I never played it.) This is the only thing that still *mostly* works in an activation-based system. Leadership is a massive issue, but that gets its own section.

Having Independant Characters who can join squads and who drastically change certain parts of the army, or just exist and be a nice bonus, is a big deal - This causes problems, both because of the thing I mentioned above in my Heroscape rundown where you can build massive squads that only use a single activation, and because you can actively change the number of potential activations every time you move a squad.

Leadership and morale aren't the most crucial system, since the number of Fearless and otherwise morale-ignoring units has been increasing as the editions go past, but it's still a huge chunk of the game that is completely unworkable in an activation-based system, since it's built on assuming that you'll only test morale at certain predetermined points - At the start of the player turn, end of the shooting phase, after losing an assault, or after getting hit with rare special circumstance rules. (Fear tests, psychic powers, etc.) In an activation system, though, when do you take a Morale check for shooting casualties? When do you count as taking 25%? Can you take multiple tests because you lose 25% more than once?

Assault completely breaks down as well. How would charging into a unit that's already in combat work? In a 1v1, I could see it sort of working in a weird, awkward way, because you would still fight twice per turn - Once when Player 1 activates, and once when Player 2 activates. But if it's a 2v1, does that mean that the units involved will fight in combat three times? How would it function? Also, it would mean that the issue of 'Trying not to kill an enemy unit in close combat so you don't get shot at' is even larger than it currently is, because players would be intentionally avoiding activation so that they wouldn't have to fight. (Or, alternatively, a shooty army might intentionally activate an Assault in order to get their squad killed, which is an immensely stupid thing to have as a sound tactical decision.)

Shooting would become even stronger than it already is, because mid-range units would be able to activate late on turn one, fire once the enemy is in range, and then activate early on turn two to run away before most of the assaulty army can catch up - Effectively giving every single army psuedo-Jet Packs. You could also prioritize threat units, since you can watch what your opponent is doing and then target only the dangerous squads. (I'll admit, that does add an extra layer of strategy to the game, but that comes at the cost of making assault even worse than it already is, so it is by no means a fair trade.)


These aren't exactly 'Core', but here's some other things that would need to change:
Psychic powers would need to revert back to how they worked in 5th or 6th edition. (AKA the editions when they were incredibly broken and overpowered.) Warp Charges don't work if there isn't a Psychic Phase.

Many rules that have some kind of effect on a given unit would be a nightmare to keep track of, since things that normally only have to be noted on a phase-by-phase basis now have to be monitored constantly. For example, rather than remembering to roll It Will Not Die at the end of the turn, you need to remember it constantly.

A huge host of special rules would cease to function - Anything that is meant to last for a full turn becomes ambiguous and terrible - Either you reset it next time that unit is activated, meaning that a squad could jink or pop smoke or whatever and then sit on that buff for a really, really long time before moving, or else activate quickly and get rid of debuffs that were meant to be crippling, (Or, say, you could cast Enfeeble on an enemy squad at the top of a turn, and then wait until the bottom of your next turn to reactivate that psyker, letting the Malediction last twice as long as it should,) or else the abilities reset once everyone has activated, meaning that abilities which are used at the end of the turn become entirely useless. (Why bother casting Enfeeble when there are only two activations before everything resets?)


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 Elbows wrote:
If you're going to go with alternating activations, you should steer clear of "trying too hard". Don't introduce a bunch of fancy mechanics - toss a die in a bag for each unit you have at the beginning of the turn. Players draw a die blindly - Player A? Cool, draw again...Player A? Cool he gets two in a row - continue until Player B's die shows up.

An army with more small units should activate more - that's the advantage of having tons of Orks/Tyranids/Guard etc. However weaker smaller units disappear faster (and the goal becomes more to eliminate enemy units because the opposing player will lose dice next turn because of this).

Keep it simple.

That... Sort of works, at least for balancing out players so they can't spam weak units for extra activations, but then it makes it very likely that a string of bad luck could absolutely ruin a player. Getting a string of a few activations in a row to set up a one-two punch against a strong enemy could very easily win the game, (Say, getting two or three anti-tank units to fire at an Imperial Knight while he's in a vulnerable spot, before he gets into combat or moves into cover,) but getting a bad streak could just as easily lose you the game - Say, that Imperial Knight player being exposed for two or three turns without a chance to retaliate.

It's not going to happen every game, but it'll still be pretty common, and losing due to no fault of your own is one of the most frustrating things that can happen in 40k.

Lanrak wrote:
I agree that 40k would be improved if a more interactive game turn was used.
However, based on the play tests we and others have carried out over the last decade or so.Alternating phase game turns seem to work better with the current rules.
(As a lot of rules are phase specific, not action specific.)

Alternating unit activation can work with 40k rules.But it requires quite lot more effort .
(Also alternating phases can model simultaneous interaction.Where as alternating unit activation still need some form of reaction or scheduling rules. )