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I was talking to a friend who is booked to play an Apocalypse game with somemthing like 6000 points+ per side. He's considering pulling out because the opposition have said they are taking a full knight army, a shadowsword and loads of guard. Seeing as his side (Death Guard and Daemons) will have way more drops he thinks "what's the point, they will get 1st turn and just wipe anything that threatens their T8 models. We might as well call the result now!"

Ignoring the fact you're meant to play things like this for the fun rather than the result (!) it did get me thinking about a way to run these sort of games by only allowing each side to use some of their army per turn, but playing perhaps twice as many turns.

It could work like this...

Each side gets a number of "activation points" every turn. Let's say... 50, or 80, or 100. Probably around 1/3 to 1/2 your total power level.

At the start of your turn before the movement phase, you spend some or all of those points by putting a counter next to every unit you want to activate. The cost to place a counter to activate a unit is its Power Level on its Datasheet.

So if you had 80 points you could activate:
a Knight, for 27 power points, leaving 53 remaining
a Shadowsword, for 27 power points, leaving 26 remaining
a Company Commander, for 3 power points, leaving 23
3 infantry squads for 9 total power, leaving 17
a leman russ, for 11 total power, leaving 6

you could decide then to save the 6 until the next turn, where you get a top up of 80 points, so would start with 86.

You then play the turn normally but only the activated units with counters next to them can move, psyk, shoot, or charge.

Units without counters can be selected to fight if they are already in combat. So you don't need to pay to reactivate them if they're already scapping.

The inactive player acts as normal.


This is probably super unoriginal. I expect someone will be along to say "well duh thats just how warmachine works" or similar.

Anyway i thought it would probably ensure each side gets a turn more quickly, and not everything is destroyed T1... and you might have some interesting tactical decisions where you could focus one turn's attack on the left flank, then the next turn up the right... or all the heavies on T1 followed by a rush to objectives with fast units on T2... or whatever.

Do you think it would work?

Too much math. A simpler system is needed.

Both Star Wars Legion (alternating activations, you play a card that determines initiative (value 1 to 4) and number of units to assign activations to (1 to 4, inverse of the initiative card you play), other unit activations are randomly determined).

And Bolt Action (put a token in a bag, one for each unit on the board - draw tokens and activate until everyone’s gone) will help to reduce the effect of 40K’s alpha strike IgoUGO system.

Just two examples.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another idea - useing precalculated points, simply activate a portion of each army in blocks. Say, break the army into 500 or 1000 point blocks. That block activates for one player, the other player responds.

However, this could be gamed - destroy a block of points and you force the player to “skip” a turn or have a fraction of an activation because that block got devastated.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that your suggestion doesn't seem likely to fix the stated problem. As I understand it, your friend is less concerned that that everything in the enemy army gets to shoot and more concerned that the other side is full of extremely durable super heavies that will be able to wipe out the portion of his army that meaningfully threatens them.

So the (implied) real issue is that part of his army consists of things that can't really interact with all the mega tanks and big stompy robots running around. Having his havocs or tanks or whatever wiped out by half the enemy army before he can take them out rather than the full enemy army seems like it's more likely to prolong the suffering rather than relieve it.

If the goal is to make it so that roughly the percentage of the enemy army that can hurt your friend is comparable to the percentage of your friend's army that can hurt the enemy, you aren't really stopping them from killing the percentage of your friend's army that matters with an alpha strike, although you do make it more difficult.

The real problem as I see it is that your friend's infantry models just don't really belong in the same game as a detachment of super heavies. Which is an issue with super heavies in general.

In my (limited) experience with apoc, anything that can't efficiently kill an imperial knight isn't worth the time it takes to roll dice for. You basically shouldn't have things like tactical marines or plague marines or dire avengers in a game of apoc. You should really only have predators, fire dragons, transports, knights, etc.

Apocolypse can be fun, but it really isn't just a big game of 40k; it's a different animal entirely. One that is all about super heavies and the non-superheavy units that can efficiently kill them. Infantry not equipped with tank busting weapons will generally take too long to get anywhere and be too bad at hurting anything worthwhile to be worth taking, moving around, or rolling dice for.

That said, a system for activating a small part of your army each turn could be an interesting way to speed up apocolypse games with the less alpha striky parts of your army basically becoming "reinforcements" that only start moving and shooting once your big guns have been taken out. I think what you've proposed would work pretty well for that. However, a game of apocolypse where everything on the table actually "belongs" in a game of apocolype (see above) is likely a much smaller and quicker-to-resolve army than one where you have a hundred boltguns futiley trying to plink a wound or two off of a titan.

 Silentz wrote:
Ignoring the fact you're meant to play things like this for the fun rather than the result (!) it did get me thinking about a way to run these sort of games by only allowing each side to use some of their army per turn, but playing perhaps twice as many turns.

Fun, yes. But for most players, spending 40 minutes setting up your army, only to spend the next hour removing them again before you get to do anything meaningful with most of them; probably does not classify as 'fun'. Knowing you're going to lose, and badly, and quickly, also may not be most players idea of fun either.

It may be simpler to just activate by detachment, each player alternating one detachment at a time (assuming you've written up lists) and playing through the entire sequence of a turn for just that detachment, till both players have activated all of their detachments (but do all Morale phases at the end of the round instead of during each activation). Might get a little messy with certain special rules, but in a friendly game it could probably work out if all the players are reasonable enough.

I think the simpler solution in games of that size is just to limit the size of armies, and force players to take multiple armies (and turns) instead; it achieves the same basic end result, and avoids a lot of other issues in huge games, without the same kind of added book-keeping, so long as you're clear which models are in which army.

You'd probably want to require Battle-forged armies to prevent them just shoving all their first turn units into a single army, and/or randomise the order that players activate their armies.

So for example, let's say player 1 has two armies A and B, and player 2 has armies C and D. The order might work out as D, A, C, B, so alternating players, but the ordering of armies isn't predictable, to discourage stacking of units in any one part of your split force, i.e- encouraging more balanced forces.