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Just a random thought to throw out there.

What if each player gets to have a turn with one detachment at a time instead of their whole army?

This would lead to some scenarios we don't normally see, like units holding back their movement until another detachment has shot and destroyed a transport or cleared a hole in the chaff.

all-in-1 detachments would activate their whole force and so get all their damage output done in one go, which is an advantage.

multiple detachments would activate slower, separating their army into a few turns so can see how things play out before some of their units go - they could have firepower in 1 detachment and melee in another, and see how their firepower does before committing their melee.

Soup lists with cheap detachments would have to suffer going second with half their army vs a single detachment list.

2 soup lists would yield a more technically difficult game to engage in, choosing detachments to go first will be crucial to strategy.


No doubt this can be broken - I've not spent long thinking about it!

Thoughts?

A big flaw I'm seeing is that the current missions are built with IGOUGO in mind. There are advantages and disadvantages built in - Most objective-based missions are scored at the end of the battle round, for example, not the end of the player turn. The player with the first turn gets the advantage of shooting first, the player who goes second can take concealed positions and has an easier time grabbing objectives.

It also breaks the Fight phase pretty badly.

I think this would be a cool idea in theory, but would require massive restructuring of how 40k works, like most activation-based suggestions.

I like the idea of activating one detachment at a time. It's an interesting compromise between full AA and the IGoUGo we have now. It theoretically helps tone down alpha strike a little. It makes it so that you shouldn't have to wait all that long for your next turn.

However, I don't think it really discourages soup, and I don't think it's a change that could work without some other pretty major changes.

First of all, your proposal doesn't really target "soup" lists so much as it targets anyone fielding more than one detachment. Most armies need multiple detachments to get enough CP or a key mix of units to compete. Other armies can field cost-effective brigades. As a result, armies like IG or orks would be able to alpha strike more or less as well as they do now (perhaps with a few less CP), but the Grey Knight/Sisters/Assassins army would always be stuck activating 3rd and 4th and sometimes 2nd.

Second, wonky things could happen as a result of players putting a disproportionate number of points into their detachments. If I take a tiny detachment of basically screens or a loyal 32 that I don't need to move around much or what have you, I can activate that first to force you to activate one of your own detachments. If you don't have your own "throw away" detachment, then I could keep my whole army hidden for the first activation, then pop out with my shooty detachment that contains 75% of my points and strike once you've come out of hiding and given me a better idea of where you are.

I think most issues would be solved with a couple of related changes though:
1. Divorce detachments from CP generation. Lots of ways to do this. Simplest is to just give every X CP for every Y points of game size. (For instance, 1CP per 100 points). That's a whole other topic that gets discussed in other threads all the time though, so I"ll try not to derail us.

2. Force players to divide their army up into X detachments. Not sure how best to do this. Requiring people put exactly 500 points or less into each of 3 detachments at 1500 points seems like it could get awkward fast. The goal here is to give both players the same number of activations to balance out the activation economy and to even out the amount of potency within each detachment that gets activated. If all my long-ranged alpha strikers are in a 1200 point detachment in my 1500 point army, then I'm functionally still alpha striking. If 1000 points of those 1200 points are divided up between two detachment activations, and another 200 points of alpha strike potential is locked up in the last detachment, then we've cut down on my ability to kill you before you activate by quite a bit.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Waaaghpower wrote:
A big flaw I'm seeing is that the current missions are built with IGOUGO in mind. There are advantages and disadvantages built in - Most objective-based missions are scored at the end of the battle round, for example, not the end of the player turn. The player with the first turn gets the advantage of shooting first, the player who goes second can take concealed positions and has an easier time grabbing objectives.

It also breaks the Fight phase pretty badly.

I think this would be a cool idea in theory, but would require massive restructuring of how 40k works, like most activation-based suggestions.

Those feel like solvable problems. If the advantage of going first is considered to have diminished, then the advantages of going second can be diminished in kind. Maybe Concealed Positions becomes available to both players or goes away altogether. Maybe we create or adjust missions that score at the start of each player turn rather than the end of the game round. The Fight phase could probably be addressed the same way most AA threads suggest they be addressed: units swing as they're activated. So in this case, you'd get to fight with any units in the detachment you're activating and, possibly, with any units locked in combat with units your opponent is activating.

But you're not wrong. The proposed change would be a huge adjustment to the game as a whole. You'd need to adjust a lot of stuff to compensate. I think the idea has potential though.

I’m in the middle of writing a set of rules and a couple of codices based on the exact concept for quite some time now (I have started months before Apocalypse came out). Forced detachment count is indeed one way of solving activation economy, but there is another, much more interesting one - activation queue, with command abilities (either hardwired to characters or stratagem driven) focused on manipulating such queue (Blackstone Fortress uses such mechanics). This creates completely new strategic layer, adding meaningfull decisions to the game and with detachment activations instead of unit activations it is perfectly manageable.

Random thought: how important is it to keep units in a detachment physically clumped near each other? Is it too unclear/confusing which marine are in detachment A vs detachment B? Like, if I have a detachment with two predators and a detachment with 1 predator, is that going to be a headache for my opponent?

Wyldhunt wrote:
Random thought: how important is it to keep units in a detachment physically clumped near each other? Is it too unclear/confusing which marine are in detachment A vs detachment B? Like, if I have a detachment with two predators and a detachment with 1 predator, is that going to be a headache for my opponent?

It isn’t that much more demanding than tracking 7th ed formation benefits or current shared keyword benefits. And even if, all it takes is a small marker beside each unit. Where it is demanding is weighting importance of activation order relative to what’s happening in different table areas, thus forced clumping of detachments actively decreases game depth. It works fine in Apocalypse because of intended games size and focus, but with typical 40K it simply takes away too much.

Pure AA makes more sense. The idea of trying to force IGOUGO to work just needs to stop.