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Intent: With 8th using Age of Sigmar rules for the Fight Sub-Phase, 40k has become a game of "I-go-you-go" with an alternating activation game-within-a-game, and so I've been in at least several other discussions about how to just make 40k Alternate altogether. So I figured I would join in and go for an Alternating Activation system that had relatively minimal bookkeeping, had a relatively streamlined set of actions you could do, and would most importantly keep the game fast-paced and fun, rewarding clever tactical play over everything else! The rules as written are fairly edition-agnostic, though the removal of Initiative makes it easier to use this system for 8th. As usual, comments and criticisms are appreciated.

What I'm looking for: Folks to help playtest, give counter-suggestions, look for potential problems in the system, etc. Also, ways to help "Flesh Out" the "army-specific" special rules. I've had a fair bit of time to "hammer out" (ha!) the rules due to sickness but I'm sure there are assorted editorial gaffes in the system too. Originally the rules were that "Retaining the Initiative" let you only activate a "second" unit (as opposed to having a larger activation with gradually increasing CP costs), and it didn't allow for Interrupting an Interrupt. These were adjusted to add even more "risk management"/generalship to the game, as you must decide when to feint, when to do an all-out attack, how to keep units supporting each other, etc.

Google Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sK-Wzy1fF1nn__Le2h5q7qnpGKb7HuPbKWafVJCpHao/edit?usp=drivesdk

Tyranids going back to loosing control of their units because they don't have synapse is bad.

The units subjected to ib often have a poor ld. Having to both suffer all the il effects of a poor ld AND loose direct player control is crippling. Its too much. Get rid of it.

 Lance845 wrote:
Tyranids going back to loosing control of their units because they don't have synapse is bad.

The units subjected to ib often have a poor ld. Having to both suffer all the il effects of a poor ld AND loose direct player control is crippling. Its too much. Get rid of it.

Fair enough. It was a spitball, and can be reverted. The idea was to check IB at the start of an Activation rather than the start of a turn (giving a chance to "intervene" or snipe, as needed)
How are the core components?

I don't quite have enough information on how you intend to use command points to make any real call on it. Right now it seems like its different just for the sake of being different. Why are they not a finite resource? Why are you choosing how many you have at the beginning of the turn? What is this adding to the game that the current system is lacking? Maybe i need to see it in action? First impresion is the change just seems pointless however.


Defence hurts lower accuracy models drastically. Hormagaunts who already need their numbers to try to get their hits/wounds through are screwed mightily by a unit of terminators who decide to go defensive. It hurts shooty orks even more. This gets worse and worse if you intend to include any modifiers to hit (like heavy weapons after you move or assault with advance/run). The option to activate multiple units in a row especially with refreshing command points, is damaging to, and counter to, the purpose of alternating activations and keeping the flow of the game going back and forth between the players.

Units in reserves both having no cap and costing command points is bad. The cap has been good in 8th. It keeps games reasonable. Just like the recent faq change to fliers. Requiring the use of command points just to get a unit to function as intended is bad. Yeah, i saw you saidnsome units with rules for reserves could get to do it for fred. But i think its cleaner when units without the rules just cant.

Superheavy is kind of a nonsense descriptor. It covers such a broad range of things. A stormsurge is not the same as a manta. A hierodule doesnt really match a knight (though it is closer than it has ever been). I see what your trying to do, but rebuilding a wall that says "anything on this side of the line functions differently" is bad for a game that has just made huge leaps and bounds towards normalizing everything to functioning the same.

A lot of this seems to be trying to reinvent the wheel of bolt actions reactions and pin markers. Disruptions are a far more damaging version of them and the intdrupts you have seem to be focused on acomplishing the same things but with a different set of triggering costs And conditions.


Overall, as a first pass, i would say it has some decent ideas. But this needs to go back to step one. Write out a short list of "musts". Example: the game must promote a active vame turn for both players in which player turn and activations are quick and decisive and the target ayer can do more than roll saves.

Then, if any mechanic does not build towards and or reinforce that short 5 or 6 Musts it gets scrapped or adjusted until it fits elegantly into the overall design.

 Lance845 wrote:
I don't quite have enough information on how you intend to use command points to make any real call on it. Right now it seems like its different just for the sake of being different. Why are they not a finite resource? Why are you choosing how many you have at the beginning of the turn? What is this adding to the game that the current system is lacking? Maybe i need to see it in action? First impresion is the change just seems pointless however.

In Bolt Action, you have a die cup for activations. As the game scales upwards, so does the chance for getting disproportionate amounts of actaivations in one go, making the game more akin to a IGOUGO in a more "messy" manner. This is ok for Bolt Action by itself, but it really gets messy in Gates when you add officers and chain activations, double-activations, etc. This system uses CP to replace the "die bag" mechanic with a system that is less randomized. You want to do a "one-two" with 2 units? That's 1 CP. Want to pull off a 3-unit manever? 3 CP. 4 units, that's 6 CP, etc. That's before you add costs for "half action" activations/interrupts, counter-interrupts (aka "cover my attack"), etc. Ceding the Initiative to your foe resets this of course, so it will be more economical to run several 2-unit activations. Of course, Reserves require CP too; bringing in 2 units while you have the Initiative will take 3 CP (2 for the units, one for the 2nd activation), and your opponent does gain the option to Interrupt so Reserves aren't necessarily a case of "Surprise Tau Commander", "Surprise Warp Spider" or what have you. And then this is all before you consider the potential for Stratagems (Incidentally, one issue with CP being a "fixed pool" rather than a "replenish per turn" system, is it can promote "front-loading" certain stratagems of an alphastrike nature.). Mathematically, this system still favors a more aggressive game rather than turtling, but not to the point where getting the "drop" on your foe can destabilize the game so quickly!

 Lance845 wrote:
Defence hurts lower accuracy models drastically. Hormagaunts who already need their numbers to try to get their hits/wounds through are screwed mightily by a unit of terminators who decide to go defensive. It hurts shooty orks even more. This gets worse and worse if you intend to include any modifiers to hit (like heavy weapons after you move or assault with advance/run). The option to activate multiple units in a row especially with refreshing command points, is damaging to, and counter to, the purpose of alternating activations and keeping the flow of the game going back and forth between the players.

Defense only works versus Ranged attacks, but even so, the "cut the number in successful hits in half" is an equal-opportunity malus. A flat -1 to hit would penalise Orks more than Marines, after all. Think of it as the "Dig in" action from WMH, and you're not too far off. In theory, certain combos will allow some units to grant Defense to other units for a turn (ex: Mortars with smokeshells), or to negate them altogether, but that's more for expansion.

PS: I ultimately decided it would be best to remove the shoot penalty for firing Assault while Advancing. Yup, this means Shootas could move 10 and shoot, or move 5, shoot, then Defend.

 Lance845 wrote:

Overall, as a first pass, i would say it has some decent ideas. Butthis needs to go back to step one. Write out a short list of "musts". Example: the game must promote a active vame turn for both players in which player turn and activations are quick and decisive and the target ayer can do more than roll saves.

Then, if any mechanic does not build towards and or reinforce that short 5 or 6 Musts it gets scrapped or adjusted until it fits elegantly into the overall design.

My main points were:
-KISS: Only 3 types of action. Interrupts are said actions.
-Keep the game flowing: Both players have actions. Interrupts are vs attack rather than vs move to prevent Overwatch impasses ala 2e 40k. Both players always have the potential to make moves, rather than one person making saving throws while the other person does everything else.
-Derandomized play order: Rather than activations being literally "luck of the draw", the activation system is tied into a resource mechanic, where incremental costs to retain the Initiative will be less efficient than spreading out your activations more evenly.

too much to keep track of and it would slow the game down a great deal. a 2k point game already takes a while, this would double the time. maybe do it for house rules, nothing wrong with that, but i dont think your average group would wanna take the extra time. theres maybe another way to add the same type of thing youre looking for with different rule modifications, that takes less time?

warpedpig wrote:
too much to keep track of and it would slow the game down a great deal. a 2k point game already takes a while, this would double the time. maybe do it for house rules, nothing wrong with that, but i dont think your average group would wanna take the extra time. theres maybe another way to add the same type of thing youre looking for with different rule modifications, that takes less time?

I'm not so sure there's too much "net" time being added in this ruleset. Is there anything in particular that you see doubling the time? Bookkeeping I imagine is more relevant than extra time, but it shouldn't be much of a stretch to keep colored tokens or dice on hand for marking what units have moved.
-In standard 40k, you must move all units, then cast with all units, then shoot with all units, then charge with all units, then fight! By contrast, this system lets you do everything you need to do with a unit at once, and that's that. You can do "one action" activations, but even this means you're using a unit "twice" at most, and you're limited on how many units you can do this with per turn.
-You don't have random Charge distances, or random Advance distances. You can simply Advance twice and your unit doesn't have to do anything else for the turn. Likewise, Overwatch isn't a round of "free shooting", but Interrupting to Advance/Engage/Defend does eat up an action point, as well as potentially some CP. Plus this system lets you Interrupt an Interrupt, so you can model "bounding overwatch" tactics where squad A advances to commit to some Shotgun action, while you could save CP so Squad B can provide covering fire via Interrupting an Interrupt.

If anything, I would imagine any increase in time (other than first learning the system) would be due to there being more options for how you want to play out your turn. However, this isn't Starfleet Battles and CP usage is something to plan out as a turn develops, rather than something that should require spreadsheets in a spreadsheet!

At a glance it's just really clunky for the scale of game 40K is, unless you're intending a much smaller army fielded (more 2nd ed. size).

Have you play-tested this yourself yet? That's the real key to adjusting or changing a game. Just start playing it and a lot of the solutions will arrive by happenstance.

I've done some kill-team testing, but a full game will still need to wait. Like I said, I wrote most of this while I was sick and a bit looney. The actual action-tracking is surprisingly fast-paced, and the tradeoff between activating multiple units versus keeping CP ti interrupt means there's far more emphasis on units mutually supporting each other ("Cover my Advance!")

I did make several edits to clean things up. I renamed the "Engage" action to "Combat", to avoid any confusion between "Engaged" (being in melee with the enemy). I imagine the main thing I want to playtest/tweak is "how many CP/turn" for point-levels.

Update: I'm liking how this system is working out, and the basic rules should be ready for VASSAL soon. Defining interrupts as a Stack has been an incredibly elegant system. Since interrupts are "single action" while activations are double-action, this means using too many interrupts/counterinterrupts will eat into your CP fast. Because every Interrupt reduces the total number of potential activations or CP (or both) available to a player, they actually don't slow the game down so much, and the net result is there is very little "downtime" for players to contribute to the game. Deciding on an order to activate or interrupt with your units is an *incredibly* tactical system; in the playtest I ran (using Wood Elf and dwarf proxies), I found there was far more emphasis on "leapfrogging" as well as keeping a few units inactivated to reduce the CP cost.

The main things I'm working on now are "fleshing out" the system. I'm looking for an alternative to Command Points just being a fixed amount per turn based on point level. The most immediate thought would be for them to work akin to a Focus/Fury mechanic, ala Warmahordes, but other ideas are appreciated too

Update: I have moved everything to Google Docs. I have updated the rules for resolving the Interrupt Stack, and switching targets if an Interrupt leaves a unit unable to attack its original target.