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I touched on this in another thread and thought it wise to move it here so that it didn't derail their points.

AA is often contested by the idea of large units like superheavies dominating by virtue of their ability to hurl out so much damage in a single activation - rendering MSU armies vs Knights essentially igougo but with a couple of token units from MSU going between the knights.

I would suggest a reintroduction of initiative, in a more basic form (not 1-10 but perhaps 1-5).

As a baseline, Initiatives would be:
5: Beasts, Fliers
4: Infantry
3; Jetbikes, bikes
2: Vehicles & Monsters
1: Superheavies & Gargantuan creatures

The gist of this is that each turn, you put a token/large dice/whatever signifying that it is initiative phase 5, and then alternate activating initiative 5 units until neither army has any left that they wish to use, and then drop to initiative stage 4, and repeat all the way down to initiative stage 1.
By keeping this generic and not on case by case it won't mean excessive bookkeeping (EG if some infantry in an army are faster than others, it will be hell. If some armies are, as a whole, faster and have a rule stating that all their infantry units count their initiative as one higher, then it will stay simple.)

Specialist units like Assassins could have rules stating that they can activate in any initiative phase.

"Hold" can become an action to allow units to prepare for later initiative stages - it will simply reduce their initiative by 1, and allow them to activate next initiative - so slow things don't have an advantage by hiding. Units can Hold all the way down to Initiative 1.



A large part of this is the aim to make troops feel more useful again. you can either have the usual everything powerful with token troops, or you can have more troops who might be less effective per point, but will do all their stuff before the enemy vehicles even move.

We can also introduce a stratagem to activate a unit early - 1CP per initiative step out, so a superheavy can activate in initiative 5 for 4CP.



My other thought was to do it in slot order rather than unit type;

5: Flyers & Fast attack
4: Troops & HQ's
3: Elites
4: Heavy Support
5: Lords of War


At any rate, the aim is to make AA work if one side brings superheavies and the other doesn't. I think that this can work - though I don't doubt that it will need more work before it does!


Go on Dakkanaughts - Pick it to shribbons!

One of the major reasons to go AA is to give players the agency to decide who to activate and when so that they can make tactical choices on the table.

Using initiative takes the agency out of the players hands, makes their activations predictable, and removes tactical decision making.

Why would you want that?


AA works when one side brings superheavies because they spent all their points on 3 units and you have over a dozen. You out maneuver and outpace them.

 Lance845 wrote:
One of the major reasons to go AA is to give players the agency to decide who to activate and when so that they can make tactical choices on the table.

Using initiative takes the agency out of the players hands, makes their activations predictable, and removes tactical decision making.

Why would you want that?


AA works when one side brings superheavies because they spent all their points on 3 units and you have over a dozen. You out maneuver and outpace them.

My suggestion retains that agency, but in varying amounts. Taking infantry to outmanoeuvre tanks, taking tanks to out-gun infantry.

Have you tried 40k as AA? If so, where did you get the rules for it (I'd like to try it some time!)?

Apocalypse at 100-150 pl is a decent way to do it with official rules.

Search the forum for beyond the gates of 40k. There are various versions of a rule set based on beyond the gates of antares that just work.

I played other versions suggested by others and built by me before that.

Taking away any of that agency is bad imo. In both suggestions infantry psykers go second which prevents them from buffing/debuffing. In the first version hive tyrants go near to last. If you want players to make plYs like throwing targets to bait people or setting up plays for the turn then you need to give them the freedom to do it.

GW used to do something like this for deployment. You’d take turns deploying all your heavies first, the through the force org until you put fast attack last. That represented slow units being more predictable and fast units being more able to adjust.

However if you did it with turns as in your OP, then at some point they aren’t necessarily faster. Eg a slow unit at the end of turn two is still going before a fast unit’s turn 3. The fast units have acted one more turn than the slow ones, but they’re never actually “faster”

Some people have fixed this by separating the moving and attacking. Eg you’d alternate moving all the slow units, then alternate moving all the fast units, but the fast units get to attack right after that and the slow units wait until the end to attack. That way fast units always have the initiative. There are all kinds of problems with this too, like slow units being able to run away from elite/high int units and never get caught.

So you pretty much go back to basic AA like Lance says, and that way your weak but nimble units can choose whether to strike first or wait in cover and use their movement to pounce after someone makes a wrong move.

That’s not for me, I don’t really really want to play either of them.

I have a question about AA and this seems a decent place to ask.

What about alternating phases? So it would go like:
1. My move.
2. Opponent move.
3. My psychic phase.
4. Opponent psychic phase.
5. My shooting phase.

And so on. It seems to me like that's a decent way of representing a battle without the weirdness of people taking turns for everything which is what bugs me in AA and 8ths cc fights.

You play orks or BA or deamons or any other melee army. I am Tau. You move first. You move to try to get into charge positionn. I move away from you so you can't charge/move tanks and other unfavorable targets in the way. You, not being great and shooting, shoot at me to little effect. I being great at shooting and being able to see your entire plan shoot every unit that is even remotely a threat to me.

Alternating phases is even worse then IGOUGO.

 Lance845 wrote:
You play orks or BA or deamons or any other melee army. I am Tau. You move first. You move to try to get into charge positionn. I move away from you so you can't charge/move tanks and other unfavorable targets in the way. You, not being great and shooting, shoot at me to little effect. I being great at shooting and being able to see your entire plan shoot every unit that is even remotely a threat to me.

Alternating phases is even worse then IGOUGO.

Eh, I rather disagree, but then Battletech was my first tabletop game, but they use alternative activations within phases. A lot depends on how you set up the rules between everything. One of the worst I've seen is all the phases were completely out of order.

 Charistoph wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
You play orks or BA or deamons or any other melee army. I am Tau. You move first. You move to try to get into charge positionn. I move away from you so you can't charge/move tanks and other unfavorable targets in the way. You, not being great and shooting, shoot at me to little effect. I being great at shooting and being able to see your entire plan shoot every unit that is even remotely a threat to me.

Alternating phases is even worse then IGOUGO.

Eh, I rather disagree, but then Battletech was my first tabletop game, but they use alternative activations within phases. A lot depends on how you set up the rules between everything. One of the worst I've seen is all the phases were completely out of order.

In other games with other units and different mixes of mechanics and abilities alternating phases could work and work well. In 40k that is not and never will be the case. There is way too big of an advantage when moving is different from charging and the enemy can see what you are trying to do before you ever get to do any of it.

I think that large units (in size or model count) might need redevelopment in an alternating activation system.

You might need to create a couple of subprofiles for those units so that not everything activates in a single activation.

You can also use detachment rules like apocalypse to activate a group of units and super heavies are individual detachments.


You can do both, you can create an arbitrary value for a detachment (ie each detachment is xpts).


As it's the weapon systems that are the issue, making them separate activations gives you the opportunity to shoot back between shots.

A Bane blade might have 2 activations - mega Cannon and demolisher, and everything else.

A warhound would have 2 (one per gun).

@Some_Bloke:
I feel like you'd run into too many exceptions to make this work cleanly. A shining spear should activate more quickly than a tactical marine. A falcon should probably be able to activate more quickly than wraith guard or terminators. So you'd be creating a lot of fluff dissonance.

Plus, as Lance points out, you remove some of the advantages of using AA in the first place.

X-Wing did initiative:
* Movement, from lowest initiative to highest initiative
* Shooting, from highest initiative to lowest initiative
because if you do it as
* Everyone fast moves and and attacks
* Everyone slow moves and attacks
there are a significant number of times where that's a disadvantage:
- The slow unit is hiding behind a corner. It gets to wait and attack the fast unit, safe in its position.
- A fast unit vs. a slower unit, when the slow unit has better range. All the fast unit accomplishes is running into range to get shot.
and similar situations.
- Fast units getting charged by slow units after the fast unit has moved during the obnoxious 'you're just out of my charge range, but I need to get closer to you' step of the encounter.

Of course, X-Wing doesn't have charges or being locked into combat; and 40k lacks any real 'charge reaction' system. So if you were going to implement something like the X-Wing initiative system in 40k, you'd really need to implement charge reactions, so that the faster units are still able to react to getting charged by one of the slow units.

Or you'd have to resort to something horrible like giving units the option to either move at the first opportunity or wait one step.
--
If 40k was a game like Warmachine/Hordes where shooting ranges were dramatically reduced, and most units weren't able to shoot further than they could run, then simple initiative order would be an improvement.
--
But, to be honest, I think this is one of those cases where a game like 40k is stuck being the way it is because of all of the other choices that it has made concerning army designs.

I mean, all you've got to do to make 40k make sense is throw out the assault phase, completely redo how close combat works, and redo all of the army designs.

 Lance845 wrote:

 Charistoph wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
You play orks or BA or deamons or any other melee army. I am Tau. You move first. You move to try to get into charge positionn. I move away from you so you can't charge/move tanks and other unfavorable targets in the way. You, not being great and shooting, shoot at me to little effect. I being great at shooting and being able to see your entire plan shoot every unit that is even remotely a threat to me.

Alternating phases is even worse then IGOUGO.

Eh, I rather disagree, but then Battletech was my first tabletop game, but they use alternative activations within phases. A lot depends on how you set up the rules between everything. One of the worst I've seen is all the phases were completely out of order.

In other games with other units and different mixes of mechanics and abilities alternating phases could work and work well. In 40k that is not and never will be the case. There is way too big of an advantage when moving is different from charging and the enemy can see what you are trying to do before you ever get to do any of it.

You'd think that, but as I said, a lot depends on how you organize the rules. It could work in 40K, but GW is far too stuck on their IGOUGO system that I doubt they will ever break out of it for the larger systems.

Interestingly enough, Battletech does do a turn-based Initiative, and it affects the phase similar to how X-Wing works, but the players pick instead of it being determined by the pilot. The other side of the coin is that damage never officially takes hold till the end of the Phase. You have two Loota units facing off against each other and they blaze away, they'll both shoot as every gun they had available at the start of the Phase, even though one of them may have been "shot to death" first. There is no need for Overwatch, since everyone gets a chance to shoot when they're clear. It works rather well.

Out of curiosity, I remember seeing the Strategic Rating on old 3rd & 4th Edition codices, but I only started learning the rules in 5th, could that have a bearing on initiatives and alternating activations if it returned?

There was no logical reason for getting rid of initiative.

All initiative did was represent how prepared a squad was for Close Combat. Space Marines, training for centuries being more prepared, in an innate sense than conscripted Guardsmen. It makes NO sense at all, that a Guardsman can summon up the cubes to run, headlong into a Space Marine and still somehow strike said Marine first.

Now, we have Elite Troopers like Grey Knights, being charged, and attacked first by T'au. How does that make sense?

Gary_1986 wrote:
There was no logical reason for getting rid of initiative.

I don't know about that. Initiative gave a huge advantage or disadvantage to arrmies with especially high or low initiatives. Orks, for instance, are a melee-heavy army, but initiative was a built-in disadvantage for them; it basically gave most armies a chance to thin their numbers in the fight phase before they could swing. If you brought oldschool initiative into 8th edition, for instance, a squad of ork boyz trying to charge a marine gunline would have to deal with all the normal 8th edition downsides to being a melee army and would then risk getting wiped out by the initiative 4 intercessors before the orks get a chance to swing. And then you've got characters like nobz that would frequently get chopped up by the characters they charged if said non-ork characters are sufficiently killy and have a high initiative.

Old initiative wasn't perfect is all I'm saying.

All initiative did was represent how prepared a squad was for Close Combat. Space Marines, training for centuries being more prepared, in an innate sense than conscripted Guardsmen. It makes NO sense at all, that a Guardsman can summon up the cubes to run, headlong into a Space Marine and still somehow strike said Marine first.

Now, we have Elite Troopers like Grey Knights, being charged, and attacked first by T'au. How does that make sense?

Honestly, either side getting all of its swings in before the other seems kind of non-sensical in general. If you're close enough to poke them with your stabby sticks, they're close enough to stab you too. If anything, swinging first would more about reach than skill. Something like a rough rider with a lance or a carnifex with its long arms would theoretically be able to connect with their weapons before a marine with a combat knife or a striking scorpion with a chainsword.

If the initiative stat was meant to represent speed/agility/"combat readiness," then I feel like it might have been better used as an opposed stat to Weapon Skill (similar to how Toughness is opposed to Strength). So my space elf ninjas would be hard to land a hit on because of their high initiative and orks would be easier to land a hit on because they're clumsy.

 some bloke wrote:

Have you tried 40k as AA? If so, where did you get the rules for it (I'd like to try it some time!)?

I exclusively play 40k with AA rules. I got into wargaming with Warhammer Fantasy 7th edition with just the skaven vs high elves starter set with a buddy from highschool and we played 2 games with the IGOUGO format decided it was gak and ran our 3rd game with AA progressing through phases and I've never played any other way. Honestly you don't need to change much to make AA work.

The way I play 40k I'd say about 90% or more of the rules remain intact. The biggest difference is that instead of rolling off to decide first turn then go into player A turn 1 then player B turn 1 then moving on to the next turn, instead at the begining of each phase players roll off to see who gets priority activation that player can then choose if they want to act first or force their opponent to activate first then you take turns activating units and taking actions appropriate for that phase. You still go through movement > psychic > shooting > assault > morale > end step as you would in the normal turn structure in the IGOUGO format and take any actions as they would normally be permitted ei: if a ability says "at the beginning of your X phase you may/must do Y" that ability still triggers at the beginning of the appropriate phase before either you or your opponent have taken any action that phase.

There are a few additional tweaks my buddies and I have made to improve the flow and deal with some of the disadvantages imposed by doing AA this way. For example we found that one interaction this style has is that melee focused units pretty much always just got obliterated because both armies would move toward each other with the melee focused units obviously in the front meaning that when the shooting phase rolled around because they had not had a chance to get into CC as we didn't get to the charge step which is in the assault phse yet those melee units were just sitting there and more often than not they were not only in range of the opponent's entire army by they might be the only ones in range to their back line so they just got shot by EVERYTHING every time.

So we made a rule that you may declare a charge in the movement phase and if you did your charge range would be 2D6 + your unit's movement speed and if your unit had an ability that lets them charge and and advance in the same turn it would be 3D6+M. Then just as in the assault phase a the unit(s) being charged could choose to fire overwatch or fall back how ever because this charge was made during the movement phase if they choose to fire overwatch they get to do so a full BS instead of only 6+ as they had not and would not have a chance to fire on "their shooting" phase and if they chose to fall back and had not already moved earlier in that movement phase they could add their movement speed to the 1D6 they rolled to fall back however if they chose to do so it counts as advancing (meaning a -1 in the shooting phase). The choice must be made BEFORE the charging unit rolls any dice and if they choose to fall back the unit which is falling back must move again before the charging unit rolls their charge distance. After the defending unit falls back the charging unit must roll their charge distance even if the target is now out side of their charge range and they must move the distance rolled or into base contact which ever is less. In addition of they fail their charge they become "exhausted" until the end of the phase which basically means that if they are inturn charged they cannot choose to fall back and while firing over watch they only on a 6+ instead of full BS additionally a unit would not be able to make a charge attempt in the assault phase that turn.

This change basically provided melee focused units the opportunity to get into CC before getting blasted off the table but is also kind of a risk vs reward aspect as it also allows for some fun shenanigans where you can feight and draw charging units into a trap to be blasted in the shooting phase and/or counter charged by supporting units. The over watch as normal BS at least partially negates the negative effect of assaulting units charging before the shooting phase which is further negated by the fact that any unit with assult weapons doesn't get the chance to fire their weapons if they charge in the movement phase. It also make some interesting strategic choices in the movement phase as it's always better to try moving anything anything you want to charge with after what ever they are going to charge them at so they don't get caught with their pants down.

There are a few other changes we'd made like adding a general strategem that allows you to activate multiple units at the same time on any of your activations that can be used once per phase and cost either 1 CP for to activate 2 units or 3 CP to activate 3 units however you cannot activate multiples of the same category of units except troops. Additionally any time you activate your warlord you may also active 1 troop or elite unit within 6" at the same time.