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I've been a naysayer on alternating activations for a long time because it's a catchphrase people on this forum use for vaguely clickbait-esque "here's this one simple change that'd fix everything that's wrong with 40k!" for a long time, but I set out to revisit the idea pursuant to a thought experiment about porting Age of Sigmar back to the 40k core rules and had some further thoughts.

First off: It's an advantage to attack first, but it's an advantage to move second, since that lets you move with greater knowledge of where your opponent is going to be. X-Wing gives higher pilot skill (=more expensive/better) pilots the ability to move later and shoot sooner, Kill-Team uses alternating activations in shooting and fighting but forces one player to move everything first and has a priority roll so it doesn't screw over whoever loses the first priority roll as badly, and Bolt Action requires you to give a unit a complete full-turn activation in which you'd get to move and shoot. I suspect minimal-invasion alternating activation systems for 40k (move phase = players alternate moving, psychic phase = players alternate casts, etc.) would lead to movement phases with a lot of units staying put to stall out your opponent and force them to move first, which would lend even greater disparity to armies that can take cheaper units (ex. all my 40pt Guardsmen squads activate first in the Movement phase to force you to move all your stuff, then my Baneblade and my Russes activate first in the shooting phase to get more firepower off before you can).

Second: I'm having a really hard time justifying (at least to myself) keeping shooting and melee in separate phases. One of the thing that keeps 40k games really long is the assumption that units can exist that need to do something five times a turn (move, cast, shoot, charge, fight), and adding alternating activations into that would just make things worse to my mind. If instead the game had three phases (movement/psychic/attacks), charges happened in the movement phase, and generalist shooting/melee units got a price drop and/or something approximating Warmachine's Dual Attacks keyword (where they can make melee attacks and shoot when activated to fight and they can shoot out of combat) the game might be faster even with alternating activations.

Thoughts, remarks, experiences with other alternating-activation games?

I would go the bolt action route for 40k over the others. The alternating phases creates problems both like you pointed out and bigger issues to boot tied to the way ranges and such are handled in 40k. It would require vast reworkings of 40ks rules to have alternating phases work.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
First off: It's an advantage to attack first, but it's an advantage to move second, since that lets you move with greater knowledge of where your opponent is going to be. X-Wing gives higher pilot skill (=more expensive/better) pilots the ability to move later and shoot sooner, Kill-Team uses alternating activations in shooting and fighting but forces one player to move everything first and has a priority roll so it doesn't screw over whoever loses the first priority roll as badly, and Bolt Action requires you to give a unit a complete full-turn activation in which you'd get to move and shoot.

I played one alternating activation homebrew system - before Kill Team rolled around - that used Leadership as your "priority" stat. You activated models in order of Leadership (lowest to highest) in the Movement phase, and in order of Leadership (highest to lowest) in the Shooting/Fight phase, alternating if there was a draw. The system was later updated so that phases were split into Fast Attack, Troops & Elites, and Heavy Support, with the order reversed in the Movement phase.

So the Movement phase started with every Heavy Support unit being picked to move, lowest Leadership first. Then every Troops or Elites unit being picked to move, lowest Leadership first. Then every Fast Attack/Flyer unit being picked to move, lowest Leadership first. Then the Shooting phase started with every Fast Attack unit being picked to shoot, highest Leadership first. Then every Troops or Elites unit being picked to move, highest Leadership first. Then every Heavy Support unit being picked to move, highest Leadership first. It was kind of similar to the Hammer of Wrath/Ready, Fire! sections in Kill Team, come to think of it.

It was an interesting system, but it ended up needing a whole binder document of houserules for how things like Synapse or Mob Rule worked, plus adding rules like "charging makes you Fast Attack in the Fight phase" and Stratagems for affecting Leadership. Its main weaknesses were bookkeeping and inflexibility – you had less control over which of your units could activate and when than in Kill Team, and against an all-biker White Scars list you were pretty much back to IGOUGO.

I like the idea that a battlefield role would affect the units activations, it gives it more use than just in army selection.

I can also get on board with having charges move in the movement phase, and having a single "attack" phase.

I would also be quite happy without a psychic phase, and simply have psykers do things as they suit - "when a unit within 18" of this unit is selected to move, if this unit successfully passes a psychic test, that unit may add 6" to their movement", or "when a unit within 12" is selected as the target of an attack..." and so on.

Then you are left with move, attack and morale at the end.

I also suggest that units which are within 1" of one another can only choose the other one as the target of any attacks. A unit which has been charged this turn may choose to fight in CC or shoot at -1 to hit. this makes overwatch more powerful, but prevents you from also doing CC attacks - this turn, you shot them on approach, and they slammed into you.

What about the Bolt Action token in a bag system but to "prevent" back to back activation whenever a player pulls a random token and activates their unit the opponent then has the choice to either pull their own token or allow a random pull?

What surprised us with our tokenhammer system was how rapidly and easily 8th fit into it. 8th (the very core rules) are pretty simple to adapt to any kind of alternating activation system.

The one issue (and a reason it'll never appear in a full scale GW game) is time. It bumps the time a good chunk. A 2000 point game needs to be about 1,500. You get more "game" out of that 1,500 than you would in a normal game though. Because of that I don't see anything like it ever showing up in 40K. Smaller games = less models...and that's now GW's gig.

I havent experienced an increase in time with my own games. But i am looking forward to apocalypse. The simplified statlines, unit based interactions, all that can speed things up significantly. If apoc itself isnt great it at least provides the statlines to build a faster smoother running aa.