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Not even sure how feasible this would be, but would changing when casualties are removed help to offset the advantage of being the first player?

Several options here:

1). Both players get to complete a phase (moving, shooting, psychic, charge/melee) before casualties are removed (I don’t much like this, it REALLY favors shooty armies).

2). Both players take their entire turn. Casualties are noted after an attack is completed, but the model in’t removed until the end of the turn. Could be an override - mortally wounded models removed instantly - nut I wouldn’t suggest it.

I’m skeptical myself as it does some overall wierdness - melee units still getting to attack even though they’ve been “picked off” by overwatch and such.

However, I’m open to suggestions and other ideas that may somehow make this work.

Its an interesting idea though it kinda nullifies ancients kinda. and it sort of screws over CC units that would of otherwise wiped the enemy clean

Aye, but it would also save a melee unit from getting slaughtered at range before they could fight.

Additional random thought: Casualties are removed at the end of the turn, but you can spend a command point (or several, based either on the number of attackers or defenders - whatever balances things out) for a unit to remove the casualties immediately?

Absolutely not this is an aweful idea all around. Examples

For suggestion one, if I know a unit is orettyuch dead I'm gonna suicide run it and not care about anything that happens to it at that point.

For the second suggestion this gives massive advantage to melee attacks and also makes screening units stupid powerful case and point. If you conga line a unit of say calastin robots and i manage to kill in the shooting phase, then In my charge
Phase I have to make a shorter charge since the models will still be there.

Also let's say I'm running gaunts to screen something. You shoot and kill all but one, that means the other 20 some odd gaunts get to block and charging units but your attacks are all gonna go into one model vs just carging right past it.

This is an aweful idea.

Actually, none of your scenarios sound bad to me.

In the first case, that unit I paid points for still gets to do something before the models get removed.

In the second, I can't say I understand the situation. At any rate, there would probably need to be a statement that an attacker has the right to bypass "dead" models and attack survivors, and that you can't assign wounds to already "dead" (but not removed) models.

In the third, the guants either get their turn to screen or you blast them at range and wait until next turn to charge. Either way, the owner of the guants gets use of the points he spent for the guants to do some actual screening.

As I said initially, I'm not all on board with this idea - I think I'd rather do alternating activation via Bolt Action. There are definitely some wonky results you can end up with and the question is can these sort of results be avoided or mitigated in a way that doesn't bother players, but helps to alleviate the problem of Alpha Strikes and such.

However, consider:

40K plays out in turns, with units almost acting like napoleonic forces where they stand still and take fire before moving up to melee with one another.

We use turns because both players attempting to resolve their troops actions at the same time would be utterly confusing.

However, if our models were actually moving and fighting, they would be doing so simultaneously - shooting on the move, diving for cover, rushing into gunfire and all that. Real units wouldn't be standing still to be shot and waiting their turn to return fire or rush at the enemy headlong. We can't really replicate it that well with the current turn sequence of 40K. We resolve the game in an orderly, unrealistic fashion - models move up, and we resolve ranged fire before melee combat because that order makes sense.

But the big question is, does immediately resulting casualties before the opponent resolves their action make a better game or is it causing a serious problem with the advantage the first player (or active player) is receiving in reducing the size of his enemies ability to strike back?

In short, are we essentially shafting the second player a few hundred points at the start of the game? Should we just start the second turn with the first player having 2000 points and the second player having, say, 1800 - and just put everybody in the range of each other's guns or in melee?

I

This might honestly be the worst idea I've seen suggested in terms of both not making sense for fluff AND crunch.

While I like the principle of the idea (that actions are supposed to be occurring simultaneously) I think this particular option introduces far too many new problems. The fact is GW really should have taken the opportunity to make 8th a more radical overhaul with properly interleaved turns, i.e- players activate and fully resolve units individually, or even take actions (move, shoot, fight) alternately.

The whole "I go, you go" with full armies mechanic has always been the biggest weakest in 40k IMO, and it doesn't really work at any scale, as even with smaller games an early unit loss is a big handicap for the rest of the game. I just don't see there being any way to properly fix it after the fact.

Do you mean end of the Battle Round rather than turn?

In any case, that seems like a lot of bookkeeping overall given the sheer number of models that some armies can kill in a turn (and that others can field).

Bookeeping can be solved by the old/new "go down" rules (found in any skirmish GW game before 2000?).

Main problem I think will be a too heavy difference between the "granularity" of the turn, size of the armies and granularity of casualties.

For example, if we use a single model to represent any unit instead many miniatures, this system may work very well. With the current "model use" (rather than ruleset), the Interaction with movement, space occupied on board, consolidation and all the small movement in general is quite difficult to solve (and, TBH, I will remove any micro-management on movement if I could... if you want to play with/by an intelligence positioning on board you already have your GW game: it's BloodBowl. Do that with 100 gants instead of 11 models it's not tactically more difficult, it's only more tedious and prone to attention mistakes).

So it's a good idea, but I think will work with smaller games, or using an "Epic" scale for the models (or, otherwise, using mandatory movement tray).

I feel like this rule would work better in the CQC phase than the shooting phase.

But this would just make CQC more dangerous to the attacker and would incentivise shooting even more so even though I think it makes more logical sense it would further skew the balance towards shooting in a game that is already heavily skewed in that direction.

It would make the survivablitiy of troops more important and glass cannon units would probably be brought in line a bit more to their costs (looking at you shining spears). Being able to delete a unit on the charge wouldn't make you invulnerable to their fight back but I still think it would create too many CqC vs shooting imbalances to be helpful.