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There's a thread over in proposed rules about removing seize the initiative, and I thought this one up as a response, but I thought it would be better served here.

What about if you deploy alternately, and then the first player to finish deploying gets to start activating instead of placing units.

This then had me thinking whether a game could use this structure instead of a fixed turn system.

You have, say, 3 tokens, numbered 1-3. These are your activation tokens. Different armies might have different amounts, but for now we'll work with 3.

When you activate your first unit, you place token 1 by them. second unit is token 2, and so on until all the tokens are on the board. You may not activate a unit with a token.

When you activate your next unit, you remove token 1 and place it on the unit you just activated, and then number 2, and so on - so each unit you activate must wait 3 activations before they can act again.

This would mean that you would have to overcost elites somewhat due to their ability to fight quicker than a horde.



An alternative would be to issue an amount of tokens to each unit when it activates - depending on the unit. You would start with, say, 10 tokens. Activate a basic unit, place 1 token on it. Activate a superheavy, place 5 tokens on it. Continue until all your tokens are on the board. Then, the next thing that the player activates needs 3 tokens - take these from any of your units on the board.

This would mean that you unlock units by activating others, and can unlock multiple units by activating a single large unit. Or you can take 1 token from each of 3 units with 2 tokens, meaning they are easier to unlock later.

If a unit is killed then their tokens are returned to the player, and must be placed in the next turn.

The amount of tokens will have to reduce as models are removed so that the game doesn't grind to a halt. I would probably go for the players opting to reset if they cannot move anything, taking all the tokens back and recalculating how many tokens they need.

Another alternative would be to unlock the opponents army using yours, and be allowed to skip a go if you cannot activate anything.

EG 10 single-point models vs 2 5 point models. If a 5-point model activates, the opponent takes 5 tokens from their force and gives it to the player, who puts them on their model. The other player can now activate a model, taking 1 of these off the bigger model, which cannot activate if it has any tokens.

To try and apply this to a known entity, let's take 40k.

Working off PL as a more convenient unit, you add up both armies and each player gets 75% (rounding down) of their armies PL in tokens to place on their units. This means 25% of each players army will be free to activate (yes, some will have an odd token or two on them). When a unit is destroyed, you remove 75% of their PL (rounding down) of tokens from the game. These must be from the unit if possible, and any excess on the unit are used to go to the enemy unit which just activated, and any further excess are allocated by yourself to your other units.

EG a PL12 unit with all his tokens is destroyed by a PL2 unit. 8 tokens are removed form the game, 2 are put on the PL2 unit which just activated, and the remaining 2 are allocated to the players other units.

There would need to be a way to reset so that you don't end up with tokens on everything. Perhaps allow unit with less than full tokens to move but not attack or shoot, whereupon the opponent will lose some tokens to fill them back up.

all of these options would make a more fluid game than a turn structure. You would play until an objective is complete, rather than a "be here at the end of the game", and I think would work pretty well.


Thoughts?

A few thoughts:

1) The idea of starting the game whilst one player is still deploying means that players would be heavily encouraged to bring fewer units to the table so that they get fewer drops and so can start moving and shooting/using powers before their opponent can begin playing. The result is that any army which relies on more units in general to operate would suffer compared to any elite style army.
I think it would also make the game state a bit confusing for the first round because you've got one person playing and the other still unpacking their models from the box. A disjointed start to the game that just feels messy even if you could resolve the balance issue.

2) Lots of counters. It's an inherent problem with some alternating activation systems in keeping track, but your system sounds very counter heavy. This can feel a bit messy to players, esp if you get into close combat and now you've got counters for different units all bunched up close together.

3) Again we see an issue with imbalance in so much as because there's no formal turn end a player with fewer models can activate them more times than one with more.
If one army had 3 units with at least one being a superheavy tank and another army was 8 units then the army with 3 is going to activate that superheavy tank twice for their opponents one round of activating their whole army.

This means that elite armies are getting more activations on their more expensive and powerful models. In short getting to have two turns worth of activations for their opponents one.



You're aiming for a more fluid game, but a lot of other parts would have to change to facilitate it. It might even require a very strict army building system that uses points and unit count limits so that each army has the same number of activations - thus ensuring that each army has the same "turn length" for their forces. Otherwise its going to be a nightmare trying to balance very expensive models which might be put into smaller armies and thus need to be weaker to account for fewer activations; but also need to be more powerful to justify their higher cost. It's basically pitting a points and activation systems at odds with each other in balance terms.



Another issue is that with no formal turn structure the game might feel more fluid, but at the same time it might lack the natural pausing and downtime moments between turns. Many games can sometimes "drag on" and a turn limit can be a good way to give a formal ending, esp for objective based games. Other times the end of a turn can be a good spot to pause for food/toilet breaks or just to gather ones thoughts.

The idea of allocating activation tokens to different units is an interesting idea, Warmachine does this with their warbeasts, but also has units that operate each turn without the resource allocation as well. Allocation could be a means to balancing variation in army size, but then you're sort of messing with three resources at once - points, resource allocation and unit count.

I can see what you're saying about the natural breaks in a game. I wonder if this would work better is a fast-paced game with no more than 15 models per side, with missions like capture the flag, where both sides want to get to the middle and get out again as quickly as possible.

As for activating a superheavy twice, I think that the multiple-token system would counter this, as a multitude of units would activate between one superheavy activation and the next.

Perhaps tokens with different numbers could be used to reduce the token count.

The thing is you're now making army building quite complicated because a player has to consider activations, activation tokens and unit points. That's three things to juggle around when trying to build their army. Do they take the superheavy take which has a high number of points, thus fewer activations, but also costs more in activation tokens.

Or what about a big unit of troops - same points and activations, but might get more chances to activate because it costs less tokens

etc....



I do think this system might work better in much smaller games with very few models on the table, perhaps even down to 5 or so models per side. At least then the game is more likely to have less deviation in the number of models per player (one might have 5 the other might have 4 kind of thing). It also makes tracking individual units a lot simpler.

I was thinking something similar except that you move stuff onto the board for deployment, and an Epic Armageddon-style blast marker system is used to figure out what units can do. They get a blast marker for an action, a blast marker for being attacked, and so on.