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Hello everyone

The you-go-I-go turn structure of 40k is often identified as a problem for the game, and activating units proposed as a possible solution. I havent seen any of those proposals in written form, so I took some time to write up a complete system myself that should be able to plug right into the existing rules.

Here is the google doc link

I go into more details about my reasons for doing what I did at the end of the document.

I welcome all feedback. Especially where you see this system causing major imbalances, and where there is need for clarification or just downright incompatibility with any rules I missed.

This might be a handy reference:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/776122.page

Are you referring to one post in particular or the entire thread?

The entire thread as instances of where alternating activations have been implemented, successfully or otherwise, and different ways of doing it.

You are proposing alternating phases basically. Its a terrible idea.

A melee army move into position to charge. The shooty unit they are trying to charge activates and moves away. Shooting phase they shoot any melee units that COULD be a threat. The scrap remains of the melee units try to charge, get overwatched, and likely fail because the enemy stepped farther away.

A unit has to be able to do all its things when it activates or this will always be a problem.

 Lance845 wrote:
You are proposing alternating phases basically. Its a terrible idea.

A melee army move into position to charge. The shooty unit they are trying to charge activates and moves away. Shooting phase they shoot any melee units that COULD be a threat. The scrap remains of the melee units try to charge, get overwatched, and likely fail because the enemy stepped farther away.

A unit has to be able to do all its things when it activates or this will always be a problem.

Thoughts on making charging a thing that happens in the movement phase immediately after a unit moves and then allowing units to shoot things that they charge. That second part means that you'd be able to benefit from your shooting on a turn that you charge, though you would give up the flexibility of shooting at a target you didn't charge.

I just don't see the issue with activating a unit, having it move, psychic, shoot, charge and fight all in one go. Then the opponent picks a unit and does the same thing.

Why have a unit do only a part of it's things at a time? Just let it act.

 Lance845 wrote:
I just don't see the issue with activating a unit, having it move, psychic, shoot, charge and fight all in one go. Then the opponent picks a unit and does the same thing.

Why have a unit do only a part of it's things at a time? Just let it act.

That doesn't seem terrible, but wouldn't you lose some of the benefits of alternating activations by limiting your opponent's ability to respond to that unit? Or maybe that's a feature rather than a bug. Wouldn't it be more difficult to have units support each other under this system? I'm picturing something like a melee unit running ahead of their melee character and and killing the enemy unit out of range of said character. Or conversely, a melee character moving forward to prevent an enemy from charging his shooty pals but suddenly being left exposed because you didn't have a chance to move his melee pals up next to him first.

Also, how would you handle having more expensive units that can deal the majority of your offense in a few activations? Like, 3 dark reapers squads can put out ~1200 points of offense with 3 activations.

Wyldhunt wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
I just don't see the issue with activating a unit, having it move, psychic, shoot, charge and fight all in one go. Then the opponent picks a unit and does the same thing.

Why have a unit do only a part of it's things at a time? Just let it act.

That doesn't seem terrible, but wouldn't you lose some of the benefits of alternating activations by limiting your opponent's ability to respond to that unit?

No. In order for the opponent to meaningfully respond the unit has to be able to meaningfully act in the first place so your opponent has something to respond to. You can't strip the first player of their agency on the field. The unit moves into position to act and then acts. Having been acted upon, the second player responds.

Think chess. Player 2 doesn't get to interrupt player 1 because hes about to take one of your pieces. He just takes it and then you get to answer.

Or maybe that's a feature rather than a bug. Wouldn't it be more difficult to have units support each other under this system?
I'm picturing something like a melee unit running ahead of their melee character and and killing the enemy unit out of range of said character.

Generally speaking this is addressed by expanding the heroic intervention rule to cover activations. If you activate a unit and a character that has not been activated yet this turn is within 3" of that unit you may activate that character as well. If a unit capable of protecting a unit is within 3" of that unit when it activates you may activate that protector unit as well so long as it has not been activated earlier in the turn. No more than 1 character and 1 protector may be activated in this way per activation.

You could activate... Necron Warriors, a Cryptek, and Lychguard in one go. Eating up 3 of your activations at once to keep the auras and protections going but loosing out on your activations to adapt to the opponent latter. Or Tau Firewarriors, a Cadre Fireblade, and a Unit of drones.

Or conversely, a melee character moving forward to prevent an enemy from charging his shooty pals but suddenly being left exposed because you didn't have a chance to move his melee pals up next to him first.

The ability to activate a single unit and put it in a position to act as a distraction or desirable target is a interesting choice and part of tactical game play. If you want to sacrifice a pawn for the chance to save a bishop then do it and see if the opponent takes the bait.

Also, how would you handle having more expensive units that can deal the majority of your offense in a few activations? Like, 3 dark reapers squads can put out ~1200 points of offense with 3 activations.

More expensive units mean less activations and less chance to respond to what the opponent is doing. They tend to get out maneuvered. More cheap disposable units for many activations tends to create a situation where each activation has little impact and your opponent is capable of stripping away at the number of activations you actually have each turn much faster. Both are valid interesting choices you can make in your list building that have benefits and consequences. The best lists will sit somewhere in the middle and have a mix of both and use those elements strategically and tactically to maximize their effect.

If all you have is say..... Imperial Knights. Well then my first activations will throw dross units into your line of fire who were never capable of hurting your knights to begin with. After your knights have all activated and committed themselves I will run rampant with the rest of my units to do as much damage as possible and set myself up for my plans for the next turn free of your intervention. If you over specialize you pay for that over specialization with easy counters. Thats part of tactical and strategic game play. It's a feature not a bug as you say.

In Pulp Alley there's an initiative, and the player that has it decides which unit is activated next. They can lose it by being defeated in combat, or by some event, and I'd have to look it up in my spiffy 2.0 rulebook, but I think it was the player with the smaller force got it first or something.

Lance, you're making some good points there. Thanks!

Making each unit go through its turn in its entirety might work better, perhaps only leaving the morale phase at the end. The only question then is how to implement the fight phase and still have units potentially fight twice a round. I will change my draft to reflect the whole turn per activation thing

The simple solution is to combine the charge into the movement phase. soften them up the turn before.

As far as I can see, the only issue with phase-by-phase is that armies will move away from assault armies before they get to charge. If you can declare charge & then move+2D6 towards the enemy, this issue goes away.

Overwatch would simply be that a unit which was charged can shoot in the shooting phase, but only at the unit which charged them and hit on 6's. Same principle with Assault weapons, but the other way around - you can shoot at a unit you charged with assault weapons.

Are there any other sequencing issues if the charge is done with the move? Or is it just not getting to soften them up that's the issue?

 Threeshades wrote:
Lance, you're making some good points there. Thanks!

Making each unit go through its turn in its entirety might work better, perhaps only leaving the morale phase at the end. The only question then is how to implement the fight phase and still have units potentially fight twice a round. I will change my draft to reflect the whole turn per activation thing

If a unit has an ability that lets it fight twice then when that unit activates it fights twice. Easy.

You don't need a separate fight phase. Each unit acts when it activates.

SOME FEW special rules need adjustments.

Like if a unit has an ability that lets it fight first THEN once per a turn that unit gets to interrupt an opponents activation to fight. That counts as it's activation for the turn. The same thing goes for stratagems that allow the same. You spend the CP and the unit gets a kind of "bonus" activation to fight interrupting the opponent.


So lets run through a couple scenarios.

1)Ork boys charge the Tau firewarriors. The orks fight.

2)The Tau player activates the fire warriors. He has a choice, fall back or fight.

In this scenario lets look at a few variable.
-If the Firewarriors had already activated early then cool, the Tau players firewarriors are now stuck there until next turn when the firewarriors become available to activate again.
-If the firewarriors had not been activated yet then the Tau player can choose to leave them there keeping the fire warriors safe from enemy shooting and activate them much later in the turn or activate them early so that the unit of boys becomes available to shoot. What do they do? What is the best choice? The fact that many variables can impact that question and it's answer means it's good game play.


AA mostly just works. It only gets complicated when people try to complicate it. Just pick a unit and do it's things. Then let your opponent pick a unit and do it's things. The simplest way to keep the rules functioning lets you just transfer the codexes as is and play.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 some bloke wrote:
The simple solution is to combine the charge into the movement phase. soften them up the turn before.

As far as I can see, the only issue with phase-by-phase is that armies will move away from assault armies before they get to charge. If you can declare charge & then move+2D6 towards the enemy, this issue goes away.

Overwatch would simply be that a unit which was charged can shoot in the shooting phase, but only at the unit which charged them and hit on 6's. Same principle with Assault weapons, but the other way around - you can shoot at a unit you charged with assault weapons.

Are there any other sequencing issues if the charge is done with the move? Or is it just not getting to soften them up that's the issue?

Units in 40k are not costed based on the idea that they are choosing to shoot or melee. They are costed based on their ability to do everything. If you switch Melee to be part of movement and a choice between being able to shoot OR being able to melee then you need to go back through every single unit in the game and decide when, if, and by how much, their cost needs to be adjusted. Sounds like a fething nightmare to me.

How do you feel about the activations in Epic Armageddon?

I have been waiting to see the rule set. Excited that they might be good rules to run regular 40k with. Did they release it yet?

 Lance845 wrote:

 Threeshades wrote:
Lance, you're making some good points there. Thanks!

Making each unit go through its turn in its entirety might work better, perhaps only leaving the morale phase at the end. The only question then is how to implement the fight phase and still have units potentially fight twice a round. I will change my draft to reflect the whole turn per activation thing

If a unit has an ability that lets it fight twice then when that unit activates it fights twice. Easy.

The thing im referring to here is not Khorne Berzerkers, it's EVERY unit. In normal turn structure you get to fight in your own turn and the opponent's turn (provided the opponent has not fallen back since). I want to preserve this to not cut the power level of melee units in half.

As for Berzerkers (and any units with the same ability to fight twice, if they are any) allowing them to always make both of their fights on their phase before the opponent can fight back, boosts them i think significantly. You can argue that they would have destroyed most opponents with their two fights if they charge anyway, but

You don't need a separate fight phase. Each unit acts when it activates.

Yes that is more or less what im trying to build right now without removing the potential second fight phase for all units.

SOME FEW special rules need adjustments.

Like if a unit has an ability that lets it fight first THEN once per a turn that unit gets to interrupt an opponents activation to fight. That counts as it's activation for the turn. The same thing goes for stratagems that allow the same. You spend the CP and the unit gets a kind of "bonus" activation to fight interrupting the opponent.

That's pretty much verbatim what i have just written so far for my new draft, not exactly because i have the second fight phase in there, but in spirit the same thing otherwise.

So lets run through a couple scenarios.

1)Ork boys charge the Tau firewarriors. The orks fight.

2)The Tau player activates the fire warriors. He has a choice, fall back or fight.

In this scenario lets look at a few variable.
-If the Firewarriors had already activated early then cool, the Tau players firewarriors are now stuck there until next turn when the firewarriors become available to activate again.
-If the firewarriors had not been activated yet then the Tau player can choose to leave them there keeping the fire warriors safe from enemy shooting and activate them much later in the turn or activate them early so that the unit of boys becomes available to shoot. What do they do? What is the best choice? The fact that many variables can impact that question and it's answer means it's good game play.

Now lets compare that with regular turn structure

1) Ork boys charge firewarriors. Orks fight, tau fight.

2) The tau player now has the choice fall back or fight again and also allow the orks to fight again.

AA mostly just works. It only gets complicated when people try to complicate it. Just pick a unit and do it's things. Then let your opponent pick a unit and do it's things. The simplest way to keep the rules functioning lets you just transfer the codexes as is and play.

Im certainly not trying to complicate it but I am trying to preserve the balance around which units get costed.

EDIT:
In any case I finished the second draft you can read it in the original link. I moved the original draft down to page 10 if anyone is interested in what it was like

I dont think that is worth preserving.

The whole games dynamic changes with aa. You dont need 2 rounds of combat for each players turn in a single game round.

Besides the added complication that comes with how wierd those mechanics are to begin with, melee already has some good advantages like controlling how the other players activations go.

In a new game round if niether of us have gone yet and you choose to fall back i can then activate the unit you were fighting and charge again. You would need to wait till after i activated my melee unit to be sure the fall back mattered. So long as i dont do that i kind of got you by the balls. Unless you want to try to force me to do that charge. Or you use a couple activations before hand to give the falling back unit some support. All kinds of things can happen.

Its very dynamic. And almost as, if not more important, its simple.

I suppose that's fair. Then, if the charged unit activates later in the battle round it was charged in, it can also expose the charging unit to the entire army by chosing to fall back instead of fighting back.

 Threeshades wrote:
I suppose that's fair. Then, if the charged unit activates later in the battle round it was charged in, it can also expose the charging unit to the entire army by chosing to fall back instead of fighting back.

Entire army = units that have not been activated yet, but yes.

I also want to point out another tweak/clarification to make because of the change to AA.

Transports.

You have a choice of activating either the transport or the units inside.

If you activate the transport you activate all the units embarked upon it with it. (I.e. they would not be able to disembark this turn) Which also means if it has firing ports (so few transports do anymore) and the units inside would be able to shoot with the vehicle.

If you activate the units inside you can activate EVERY unit inside at once allowing the whole transport to disembark at once and act.

SIDE NOTE: I am not really opposed to the idea of letting the transport move and then disembark. But you figure out what you want to do. I have seen decent enough arguments for both sides of the equation and I do not currently have strong feelings either way.


Reserves

When you activate a unit in reserves you can either choose to HOLD keeping them in reserves or DEPLOY doing what they do. Transports in Reserves kind of mix with the Transport rules.

So a Drop Pod would get activated. DEPLOY, get placed on the field, immediately disembark it's unit/s(as per it's rules) and then they would be activated and get to act with the transport.

Yes: this allows for one time activations of several units all at once. Thats the point of these kinds of delivery systems and it would make them horrible if they had to sit around waiting 1 unit after the other to deploy and act.

 Lance845 wrote:
If you activate the units inside you can activate EVERY unit inside at once allowing the whole transport to disembark at once and act.

I suspect that this would allow for some fairly hefty abuse of transports. Working with what I know (Orks), but I assume others could do it better:

Have a transport with 4 SAG big meks in it on turn 1. Activate units inside, disembark to where you wanted the SAG's, and then open up with 4 SAG's on your first activation.

Similarly, if you have MSU in large transports (Nobs/Meganobs in battlewagons) you can end up activating a lot of units in each activation. A battlewagon full of nobs (2 units of 10) could let you activate a lot more model than you should.


As for models paying to shoot & charge, I think I covered that - going phase by phase, you can shoot the unit you charged, and they can shoot you, but hitting on 6's for the defender (replacing overwatch). You don't lose anything, except other units shooting the unit you charged, which your models haven't paid for.

Activating a transport with all the units inside it isnt that different from just activating a single prohibitvely expensive unit, like knights. As Lance pointed out doing so reduces the number of activations you have and means that your opponent has more opportunities to outmaneuver you.

In D&D, this is known as the action economy.

I have updated and implemented the one fight phase per unit solution as well as some other suggested tweaks.

 some bloke wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
If you activate the units inside you can activate EVERY unit inside at once allowing the whole transport to disembark at once and act.

I suspect that this would allow for some fairly hefty abuse of transports. Working with what I know (Orks), but I assume others could do it better:

Have a transport with 4 SAG big meks in it on turn 1. Activate units inside, disembark to where you wanted the SAG's, and then open up with 4 SAG's on your first activation.

Similarly, if you have MSU in large transports (Nobs/Meganobs in battlewagons) you can end up activating a lot of units in each activation. A battlewagon full of nobs (2 units of 10) could let you activate a lot more model than you should.


As for models paying to shoot & charge, I think I covered that - going phase by phase, you can shoot the unit you charged, and they can shoot you, but hitting on 6's for the defender (replacing overwatch). You don't lose anything, except other units shooting the unit you charged, which your models haven't paid for.

If we are working off the rules as they are now.

1) the transport has to spend 1 turn putting them in position and then on turn 2 disembarking them all.

2) its a one time thing. Unless you want to spend a series of activations on turn 3 piling everyone back inside so that on turn 4 they can all get out at once again.

3) you pay for the transport to move the uniys you put inside and do just this. Its a , realistically, one time benefit.

So, any more feedback on the current version?

Play test it. Get your friends. Pit unfavorable mixes to see how it pans out (tau vs orks for example). See if you enjoy it.

Oh, buffs or powers that last until next x phase last until that units next activation. Seems obvious enough.

 Lance845 wrote:
Oh, buffs or powers that last until next x phase last until that units next activation. Seems obvious enough.

Good catch