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A lot of games using any kind of alternating (unit) activations scheme suffers from the particular problem where lists with more activations have an advantage, and this advantage can get worse as the game goes along.

How have you, or games you enjoy, overcome this limitation?

Currently I allow an outnumbered to purchase Delay Counters, if their army list is smaller in activations, and limited by their Command stat. This allows a player to effectively pass their turn, and maybe do more than that if they have the right abilities.

I've also given armies with more elite and costlier units ways to do some out of turn actions, like movement to get them into cover and reduce the effect of concentrated fire.

One method can be to streamline the army building phase.

Spartan Games (before their demise) started experimenting with what they called the Helix system. This was a means by which they could both build armies and retail the game.

Essentially each army was made up of a number of "helix" choices, where a helix would consist of a fixed number of varied units based around a specific focus. So you might have a heavy weapon group or a support group etc.... These helix were then sold in dedicated boxed sets so that for a single army you might have a half dozen helix boxes that might have far more than a dozen varied model types within.

The idea was each army would have a central "core" of units and then you could bolt on helix options to that, the way they did it was like a hexagon shape for the central core and then each other helix connected onto a flat side of the hexagon. With each face of the hexagon being a different type of helix.




This way you have army building and variety, but you've also got enforced unit numbers and counts within the helix system. This means in any alternating activation system you have some scope to min-max things; but you can't break it so easily because the more numerous options would always be under control as to what they were; you could even fix it so that no matter what was taken, players would always have the same number of units on the table.



So that is one way; curtail the army building phase so that players can't one-up each other. GW sort of had this similar approach with the old force organisation chart in that you had to take x number of options and could only take so many others before you hit the limit. Again you still had lots of army building freedom and variety, but the system curtailed what you could take.

To my mind this is easier than trying to balance in delays and such into the game system which allows one player to take 5 units and another 15.

In the game I'm designing, models have action points (AP), and can spend them in reactions as well as actions - the reaction takes place after the attack has been deemed allowable, but before it is resolved.
so if you are targeted by a shot, you can go to ground, or run to cover, and receive the relevant bonuses from them, but if you run out of LOS or out of range, the attack is still resolved.

Another option I toyed with is allowing models multiple activations, provided they have AP to use and they use at least 1AP, rather than one model doing everything they want to. so elite models have more AP, horde models have less, but each side has roughly the same amount, so could have similar amounts of activations, though the elite player could spend more with each swing to make more decisive activations.

Allowing each elite model to "hold" once, for free, per turn as effectively a skip-turn could work. perhaps work in a balancing mechanic that another model must be activated in between, so you can't hold and then next activation use the same model (unless it's the only one left).

This way the elite army will get weaker as it is killed (quite rightly) as it can pass less turns.

The most usual solution to this issue if it is ever attempted is to make horde armies activate in large groups of units so an elite army and a horde army has the same amount of activation.

The proper solution, in my opinion, something I did as a solution to my own game systems and finally seen it commercially in Warhammer Underworlds, is to have a set amount of activations each turn the hordes player simply cannot activate all their elements, this gives the elite army the use of all their elements all the time while horde armies retain the resilience of redundancy without the ability to hammer full force the smaller elite army each turn.

The interesting element Warhammer Underworlds added is the decks, this allows a force with smaller unit count than activation to have some tactical flexibility (draw a power card discard and draw an objectives card), I am experimenting the last 4 years with boardgame design so this was never something I originally experimented with, but I am sure it can be adapted to tabletop wargames.

Another system I toyed with adds some more complexity to the system.

Add fatigue to the system, all units can be activated again, but continuous activation gives them combat and moral penalties that fade out in next turns, obviously elite units will need to have bigger fatigue threshold, for example second activation adds fatigue counter but no actual penalties while a hordes unite gets significant penalties with the first fatigue counter, fatigue counters get removed one at a time either at the start of the turn or at the end of the turn.

The problem with limited activations is that it favours an army that "ideally" fits into the limited activation window. I think it works better with something like Underworld or Malifaux or Inifinity - ergo very small scale games where you might only have 4 or 5 units a side. In those situations one unit can camp out for a turn without any activations without a huge issue.

In a wargame where you've perhaps 10 or more units on a side it can become more of an issue. The army with more models often requires them all to function together to work, so if they don't have enough activations to activate everything in one go they could easily end up leaving a chunk of the army behind each turn. That might be ok for a shooting army, but for any close combat focused army or any high terrain table; it would end up just funnelling the army along. This makes the elite armies job even easier as it means the larger army can only funnel so many units forward at once, which means the potential to do damage is curtailed and the elite army has a much easier time of focusing fire.

My observation is that in most, if not all, systems I have played or studied, been Horde is an advantage all by itself elite armies never live up to their name.

I do not know the unit count on Malifaux, but in Infinity you do see 10-18 different units on the battlefield and the difference in units count is an equaliser in experience, my own study shows that while Infinity is a fantastically balanced game, the difference in combat groups between players create a balance factor between players experience, a novice player with two groups (so lets say 18 models) versus a veteran player with one group (lets say 10) will be on equal footing.

While Infinity manages to pull a hordes vs elite gameplay it needs an elite player behind the elite army to properly manage it.

Of course since all the factions can field elite or hordes and it is not restricted to some factions it does not have a severe impact on the overall game balance.

That been said Infinity order pool mechanics are an oddity to the wargaming genre and to my knowledge no other system makes use of a pooled units activation and distribution mechanism, for most games we see a per unit activation.

I do believe that for most wargame design and per unit activation, limited activation is the proper way it gives a solid framework to design everything around since you do not need to worry about unit count or excessive synergy if the designer knows the maximum number of units that can ever be activated is for example 4 then they can design all the synergy around this, in contrast to having to deal with all the abuse players will give to the system in order to take tactical or strategic advantage over armies with less unit count.

 Vertrucio wrote:
A lot of games using any kind of alternating (unit) activations scheme suffers from the particular problem where lists with more activations have an advantage, and this advantage can get worse as the game goes along.

How have you, or games you enjoy, overcome this limitation?

I have done a lot of studying on various alternating activation games. They all have various methods but I don't exactly see the issue you are talking about. I believe this is only an issue with games that allow cheerleading (ie: Infinity game model).

With Infinity, activation points are determined by model count. Make a list of a lot of cheap models, get lots of AP but overall weaker models. So usually employ 1-2 stronger models. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) they tried to combat this by limiting 10 models in a unit. So you can have a list of 15 models that generate 15AP, and 10AP can be used for any models, while the other 5AP can only be used for that second fireteam.

AA tends to work better when they use an Action/Reaction system but don't allow cheerleading. Each unit can only activate once. Sure you have a lot of cheaper units that activate, but because of reactions, they die easily and those AP aren't fed to other stronger units like Infinity.

There are other methods that can work to balance. Higher cost units have more attack and/or health, lower costs cards have lower health, attack, defense. I try to think of it in terms like WoWTCG or MtG cards. I will use four cards as examples;

Player-A has 2 2-cost cards with 2atk/2health, 2 3-cost card that is 3atk/3health.

Player-B has 10 1-cost cards with 1atk/1health.

Player-B does have more units and technically more activations, even though they both used 10 points to pick their forces. If you look at total power though, Player-A has a total of 10atk/10health and Player-B has 10atk/10health however that doesn't translate to being equal. Momentum-wise Player-B is worse off because they are trading more cards, faster, compared to Player-A who can maintain control at certain choke points easier than Player-B could.

Other than balancing the cost of units and power scale. You can also provide random outside elements, outside of army lists which can affect conditions for better or for worse. Objectives are one way, but in 'battle' Objectives change so add in some command tokens which can be used to alter objectives to maybe pull a condition more favorable to the smaller unit. You can also add Obstacles/Environment deck where each turn/round conditions can negatively impact or give bonuses. You can also create Tactics deck that players utilize to boost their troops, "like when outnumbered, gain an extra action" or "when outnumbered, units get extra defense X". You still allow someone to buy lots of cheap troops, but those cheap troops should not equate to being equal to more expensive units.

TLDR: In other words 1AP should not equal 1AP. 1AP should be dependant on the troop being activated in both offense, defense and capabilities.

Infinity is an I Go You Go system so it is not relevant to the alternative activation discussion as structure, I do not think Alternative Activation with multiple activation on the same unit will work well if the activations are uninterrupted, though it is similar in concept with Alternative activation systems that use variable actions in a unit.

Infinity's order pool mechanic is an interesting beast, essentially your most important resource is your order pool and not your strong units and this is what separates new players from veterans and indeed there is a 10 order cap per group, but this is from the start.

All the above been said, I do not think the Infinity order pool and ARO system would work in an Alternative Activation setting.

Personally enjoy the bolt action one. not exactly alternative activation but its randomness prevents some of the aspect of activation spam.

not 100% though. statistically you have more of a chance to pull your dice if you have more activation and such. but then you always have the opportunity to react and as such can always pull your dice out to do a thing and so keeps both players engaged.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
Infinity is an I Go You Go system so it is not relevant to the alternative activation discussion as structure, I do not think Alternative Activation with multiple activation on the same unit will work well if the activations are uninterrupted, though it is similar in concept with Alternative activation systems that use variable actions in a unit.

Infinity's order pool mechanic is an interesting beast, essentially your most important resource is your order pool and not your strong units and this is what separates new players from veterans and indeed there is a 10 order cap per group, but this is from the start.

All the above been said, I do not think the Infinity order pool and ARO system would work in an Alternative Activation setting.

That is correct, Infinity is an IGOUGO with action/reaction system. Sorry been a long day so I drifted a bit.

Oddly Infinity actually works really well for Alternate Activation. We had a tactical game using similar AP pool and actions with Alternate Activation which probably be described as Infinity Core rules. It was to move away from IGOUGO and remove the effectiveness of cheerleading, but also putting more emphasis on maneuvering. The goal was more for a board game though, but instead of themeing it for XCom the company went a different direction so it was shelved. My skirmish games gets compared to Infinity but that is mostly because it is the more known action/reaction system than anything else.

I think the reason I brought up Inifnity, at least I think the point I was trying to make is that an ARO system is a way to remove a benefit from one side having 'more activations'.

Confrontation 3 did it well. All models were tied to activation cards, and up to 3 identical models could be tied to a single card. If you had fewer models AND fewer cards than your opponent then you generated a number of 'passes' equal to the difference in cards. This let smaller forces delay their activations mid turn so as not to let a larger force wait them out and get all the reactive fun. At least 90% of armies were built to streamline the use of cards by taking 2-3 of useful profiles where possible.

However...

You could purposely build a force that used a smaller number of high-power models who were all activated by individual cards rather than being grouped (Wolfen and Devourers were the masters of this but it could be done by almost any faction). If you got lucky then you had more cards than your opponent but fewer models, which denied them the ability to pass their go and meant your long charge distance Wolves got their pick of targets at the end of the turn after the enemy had all activated.

There was also reserving cards and the use of the Authority skill to play about with the card order.

Something I’ve thought about would be a stack of cards, one for each unit, that get shuffled together. Flip from the top, and that unit activates.

Horde style armies might have multiple activations before the elite player activates, but that should balance out over the course of the turn.

I think about the scope of 40k, where a Knight player could have as few as 4 units in a sizeable game, while a Guard player might have 20. In this case, while luck of the draw is certainly a factor, it introduces a tactical element of responding to the developing situation.

The Knight player will likely be able to activate some units later in the turn, after many of the Guard player’s units have committed themselves. He’s had to endure some punishment, for certain, but has also likely had the opportunity to move a knight or two into positions that would have been unsafe had certain Guard units not already activated.

While this is less alternating activation as it is random activation, I think it would make each flip exciting and create a quick flow to the game. You only need to specifically decide what one unit will do before potentially passing the turn to your opponent. Hopefully you’re considering the potential results of your turn, but it should also reward making the best of a situation. If a unit is destroyed, remove that card from the deck. If a unit is “summoned”, add it to the deck and shuffle the remaining cards.

 greatbigtree wrote:
Something I’ve thought about would be a stack of cards, one for each unit, that get shuffled together. Flip from the top, and that unit activates.

Confrontation 2 did it like this, with the addition that players who didn't like if particular card came out early could reserve that pick (1 card or 2 depending on who won the Discipline roll). You didn't get another card in lieu though, so would have to skip an activation to hold that card back.

Some local players dropped Confrontation entirely when v3 scrapped all that as they loved the chaos of the random cards, but I felt v3 was a far more solid game overall and players actually had to work out a sensible activation order (I didn't mention it above but you didn't just choose which card to play, you had to set your deck before any activations and couldn't change it).

Maybe there would be mileage in a hybrid card system? You have a set number of reserved cards based on your commander's skill, but these have to be ordered at the start of the turn, and then the remainder of your units go into a random pool?

My belief is that the use of delay does not solve the problem, on the other hand giving multiple activations on the elite units evens up the activation inequity problem.

That been said this system is again extremely open to exploitation by players.

I don’t understand how giving multiple activations to elite units balances single activations of horde units.

Like, in 40k, if 4 Knights could activate 5 times each to account for their opponent activating 20 units, that basically gives the knight player 5 turns to their opponent’s 1 turn?

@ Riquende: A hybrid idea could probably work. Each side determines their activation order, then shuffle an appropriate number of red and black cards, for example. If a red card flips, red activates the next unit in line. If black flips, they activate their next unit. It would add an interesting strategic element, but might be overly punishing if your “chain” falls behind your opponent’s activations.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
My belief is that the use of delay does not solve the problem, on the other hand giving multiple activations on the elite units evens up the activation inequity problem.

That been said this system is again extremely open to exploitation by players.

Terrible idea for the reasons said above.

Why the hell should you activate 10000 points of units for my 2000 on turn 1?

Its simple. Elite units survive longer and do more damage. Smaller msu units have less agency but get to act more often which often means reacting more often. To win you need a good mix of both.Don't use 8th madness take all the detachments in the world for infinite slots. use 30ks you get 1 basic detachment and 1 ally. It's really hard to spam a ton of msu units when you have a hard limit on the number of slots you get. Anyone who goes full MSU or full elite gets crushed by a good player with a mix of both.

 greatbigtree wrote:
@ Riquende: A hybrid idea could probably work. Each side determines their activation order, then shuffle an appropriate number of red and black cards, for example. If a red card flips, red activates the next unit in line. If black flips, they activate their next unit. It would add an interesting strategic element, but might be overly punishing if your “chain” falls behind your opponent’s activations.

That's one way that could work (both players have an attack plan that they're trying to launch before the enemy and it's up to luck who gets through theirs fastest) but it's not what I meant.

My idea was that, without either player doing anything, all the activation cards form a single deck which is shuffled and then drawn randomly as the turn goes on. However, either player can hold back a select number of cards and place them into a separate activation deck, pre-ordered before the turn begins. Then instead of flipping a card, a player can announce that they will instead play the top card of their activation deck (probably for a cost like a 'command point' or something). If they wanted to immediately play another card the cost would go up, then up etc.

You'd need a tie breaker for when both players wanted to interrupt the draw at the same time but that could just be a roll off. You'd also need to work out what happens when the random deck is gone and both players have activation cards left.

 Lance845 wrote:


Its simple. Elite units survive longer and do more damage. Smaller msu units have less agency but get to act more often which often means reacting more often. To win you need a good mix of both.Don't use 8th madness take all the detachments in the world for infinite slots. use 30ks you get 1 basic detachment and 1 ally. It's really hard to spam a ton of msu units when you have a hard limit on the number of slots you get. Anyone who goes full MSU or full elite gets crushed by a good player with a mix of both.

Practically false in most game systems involving dice, maybe possible in diceless deterministic systems, but these are not in favour.

I do not understand why people think in GW terms and use GW examples, anyway if you design elite units to activate more times you base your entire design around this as a bad example in the knights vs whatever horde to use the already set example different sections of the knight are a set of activations.

As I said I am in favour of set activations instead of multiple activations, but non activations does not fix the problem in alternative activation of forces with few units versus forces with multiple units.

Ultimately practical crux of the issue is this, a "horde" army essentially a multiple units formation has a vast advantage in tactical domination once their opponent runs out of units this is usually and indeed here called an elite VS hordes but it is not true indeed its a units issue an elite army with multiple small units against a horde army with 3 big blobs has the advantage.

the question is how to stop this from happening in alternative activation setting it is my belief that getting non activations to fill the gap is bad and unpredictable design. much preferable is to make all units activate the same amount of times, there are two ways to do this either design units to activate more or less times or set a set amount of activations per turn and design around that.

Since I prefer to have more control in design I prefer to have a set amount of activations.

BattleTech does it as follows:

Whoever loses the initiative roll makes the first move. For clarity, I'm going to call each pair of (loser moves, winner moves) a cycle.

At the start of each cycle, count how many unactivated models each player has. If one player has x times as many models as the other, they'll activate x models in this activation, so that the winner of the initiative always makes the last move.

(BattleTech only has alternative activation for movement - once all moves are made, IIRC all shooting is considered simultaneous.)

So, if player A has 7 models and player B has 4, and player B wins initiative, the activation goes:

7:4 is less than 2:1 so both sides move one model.
Player A moves 1 model, player B moves 1.


Player A has 6 remaining, player B has 3.
Player A moves 2 models, player B moves 1

Player A has 4 remaining, player B has 2.
Player A moves 2 models, player B moves 1

Player A has 2 remaining, player B has 1.
Player A moves 2 models, player B moves 1.

The solution is to stop looking at a one-dimensional "problem" as a defining problem and consider it part of strategy. There's clearly an advantage to having a higher activation count when it's to your advantage to delay and see what your opponent is going to do before committing, but there's also a significant disadvantage when it's to your advantage to activate as big a block of power as possible and exploit a fleeting opportunity. For example, if you're trying to kill an enemy unit (perhaps one that moved up aggressively to attack on the previous turn) before it can escape into cover you want to have a "death star" type unit available that can dump a ton of firepower into it in a single activation because you may only have a single activation before the unit moves out of LOS and the opportunity is gone. If you took a pure MSU list to maximize activation count you'll likely discover that you can't activate enough firepower to kill the target before it escapes. Or consider an effect like 40k stratagems that buffs a single unit. Would you rather apply it to a 500 point unit or a 100 point unit?

Do it right and you end up with a balance between the two factors. Some lists will go MSU, some will take only large units, and the majority will probably take a mix of types to deal with both situations.

I agree with Peregrine. This is not a real "problem: since it is a choice each player makes. They choose to have fewer, but better units. Having fewer activation's is a balancing point between Elite heavy forces and Less Elite but Numerous Horde forces.

However, some games give the side with fewer units a "pass" which then forces the other side to commit their hordes before the more elite units respond. This seems perfectly reasonable and thematic and does not generally "break" the game.

I do not see the strength of activation as an inherent problem, but friction that a commander must learn to navigate.

I've said this before, and it is NOT a problem. At all. No "balancing" needs to be done.

Assume a single Imperial Knight vs a horde of Gobbos. The Knight gets to make a STRONG activation before all but 1 Gobbo. At most.

If anything, the smaller, more elite force is advantaged by being able to consistently achieve initiative advantage over weaker forces, which amplifies as it attrits the horde.

I dislike the notion of a "pass" unless it costs a full AP. That is you would sacrifice movement or combat in order to delay.

I disagree that it cannot be a problem, it can and on many game systems it is, it can be a feature, a balance mechanism, or not a problem at all, but it must be actively designed to not be one.

By itself, unchecked it can be a problem.

What if each gobbo has a card, and it's shuffled into a deck with the knight's card? That's how Battlemasters worked, and it meant that you could have all the gobbos do something, or have them all react to something the knight did first, and every variation in between.

There's also something like how a knight might have three cards in a deck, and an ogre might have four, and the game develops depending on how actions are spread between those cards.

Regarding the knight thing, I am balancing the power of vehicles in my game by having the vehicle as just a piece of equipment, and so you have to crew it and activate the crew individually as if they weren't in the vehicle.

So for a Knight, you would have the driver and the gunners acting separately, so if the actions were shuffled into a deck, the knight might move and then shoot, or shoot and then move. It might watch helplessly as the gobbos move out of LOS, and then be able to shoot after.

separating massively powerful units into multiple parts could go a way for balancing them.

Obviously an ogre would still be one activation, but 3 ogres riding a giant hippo would be 4 - one for each ogre and one for the hippo - rather than activating as one hugely powerful unit. The stack of actions the gobbos would have shuffled into the deck would limit the effectiveness of the elite, and could separate the actions sufficiently to temper the all-powerful-doom-hippo into equality.

A Knight has a single pilot, so it's actions do not separate..

Sure, but mechanically and stripped of its connotation, a single game element or unit can be balanced against multiple if they have the same number of actions. So giving the 'knight,' the big single model multiple actions vs the 'gobbo' or horde of small models with one action each, could be pretty interesting.

It's a huge, huge problem. There's nothing that feels quite as gamey and exploitive as the games of red rover that alternating activations create. It's not at all interesting and hugely constrictive to list design. If nothing else, this situation completely killed Imperial Assault's vs mode when players learned to abuse it and Guild Ball had to completely revamp a character because just one extra activation was enough to completely warp the game.

I get the appeal, but in my experience alternating activation systems only work under heavy list constraints that keep activation sizes fairly constant. The value of an activation on its own is just too great to ever have cheap models that aren't completely game warping.

I overall like the way Infinity works as a compromise. It's IGUG without leaving the opponent complete without options. Relic Knights 2nd Edition is also interesting, though it has its own issues (namely that the system crumbles if you drop below 4 units). Pass systems are a decent patch to the problem and Legion masks it fairly well with the semi random choices on what you activate.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Sure, but mechanically and stripped of its connotation, a single game element or unit can be balanced against multiple if they have the same number of actions. So giving the 'knight,' the big single model multiple actions vs the 'gobbo' or horde of small models with one action each, could be pretty interesting.

Nah, just give the Knight his BIG actions, like he's supposed to. Battle Cannon is pretty good, and trades fairly against 20+ shoota attacks.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
It's a huge, huge problem. There's nothing that feels quite as gamey and exploitive as the games of red rover that alternating activations create.

Indeed.

The main issue with AA is that it is typically selected purely as a reaction to *not* be Igo-Ugo. To wit: AA is obviously different from 40k's Igo-Ugo, which the designer is tired of, so it must be "better". I don't believe it works at all for larger games, and is marginal when each player has more than a handful of things, but I think it's OK for very small skirmish of 2-4 models per player.

As far as I can tell, the "best" mechanic remains to be Igo-Ugo with reactions. OTOH, Infinity's "cheerleader" mechanic isn't good, either. Nor is its notion of models having perfect positional awareness and instantaneous reaction timing.

This seems like something that can be resolved without having models act variable times based off the idea that equal activations is some how more balanced, and would strike me as being considerably more difficult with that added. If you have a game where each model has an identical number of actions it can perform in a turn(or a set number that is factored into unit cost) you should be able to balance the action economy. If a unit costs X more it's because it's that much more effective in it's available actions.

Or more simply, it's a points problem, unless you build a system in which you can just farm activations and abuse that to use your more effective units more often. Balancing from a fixed activation count per unit is relatively simple, while variable activation count per unit or fixed activation count per army make that much more difficult unless you pin your balance on something else. Say you have units that are effectively equivlent in their actions, then variable and/or fixed activations makes a lot of sense, but if we're using words like elite then I assume they're supposed to be rather powerful when they act, so if they act more often and more effectively... how is that not biasing them towards them?

This isn't a simple topic, nail down your fixed points or a particular system and there's a lot discuss about balance but as a wide topic, nah, it's not inherently biased, it just means the onus on balancing effectiveness lays elsewhere.