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I have been collecting Astra Militarum for a few months now and just this past weekend finally played my first ever game of 40k on the tabletop. I had not looked too deeply into the game rules prior to this since I was much more interesting in building and painting models.

The game was.. ok I'd say. The (what I see now is very common) gripe I had was that, not going first, probably 75% of my army was destroyed by enemy fire before I got to do anything at all. I also see now that alternating activation is something that has been extensively discussed.

What I haven't seen much discussion of (maybe I missed something though, idk) is: Could you keep all of the rules more or less the same as they are now, with the exception of making the shooting phase alternating activation? So each player commands their whole army, and moves their whole army, but then when the shooting starts, you alternate units, similarly to how the fight phase works now.

So the idea is that commanding your army and moving your army is still done all at once, for simplicity's sake, but when the models are actually dealing damage, you take turns to avoid a major sweep of one side before they are able to do anything in response.

Again, major noob here who has played one game so apologies if I'm missing something obvious.

The kind of hybrid you're after kind of happens in close combat in Age of Sigmar already; however it can be somewhat messy because one player is still getting to move around their whole army for a turn and moving in itself can be a very major part of the game itself (or at least should be in most cases).

Now as you're new to the game it could be that your deployment was poor and you basically left yourself open to taking heavy casualties early in the game, whilst deploying a little differently might have given you more protection without hindering your early game performance*

You aren't wrong, GW's style of high damage output (high lethality) coupled to whole army turns does leave it wide open to issues that you've experienced (its nothing new, people have argued over it for decades now).

However there are tactics and methods you can use to help mitigate it.


Deploying differently;
Ensuring that the board actually has line of sight blocking terrain features
Using reinforcement/droppod/etc.. abilities so that some of your army is held in reserve and pulls in when needed
Learning to take hits and roll with them in the game - easy to say harder to master.


In the end if you want to try a full AA system you could see if your club plays or is open to playing One Page Rules, which has rules systems for all the GW armies in a fully Alternate Activation system. https://www.onepagerules.com

If not then I'd still encourage you to play more 40K games and each time review what happened; what went wrong; what went right and to learn from those experiences.


*Something I suffer with is hiding up too early too much and surviving the game, but ending up losing control of the board because my units take longer to come out of cover, into the open to do things - by which point my opponent has secured the middle and dominated the game and whittles down my army

While I fully understand where your proposal is coming from, it would not work without a major overhaul of some systems.

If one player gets to move everything before you alternate between shooting, the non-moving player might be at a disadvantageous position where the units are not in range or facing the wrong target.

If both players get to move prior to exchanging shots, melee units might have to expose themselves if they want to get into charge range.

Another system you could try out would be linked in my signature.

a_typical_hero wrote:
While I fully understand where your proposal is coming from, it would not work without a major overhaul of some systems.

If one player gets to move everything before you alternate between shooting, the non-moving player might be at a disadvantageous position where the units are not in range or facing the wrong target.

If both players get to move prior to exchanging shots, melee units might have to expose themselves if they want to get into charge range.

Another system you could try out would be linked in my signature.

Yeah, I think both players should get to move their armies into position before shooting.

I don't necessarily follow what you mean in your line about melee units. Shouldn't a melee unit generally need to expose themselves to some degree to get into close combat with an enemy that has superior ranged attacks?

Definitely give Age of Sigmar a try and see if you like it better. It works closer to what you're suggesting. I personally don't care for it myself despite generally vastly preferring alternating activation games like MCP, Judgement, Malifaux, etc, but its an easy example of what you're suggesting that you can play a demo of and see if you still prefer how it works.

Tree_Beard wrote:

Yeah, I think both players should get to move their armies into position before shooting.

In my head, I have this vague notion of a version of 40k balanced around 1,000 point armies with alternating movement, shooting, and fighting where units that don't move can instead "ready" themselves Kill Team style. (Meaning they get to shoot before non-readied units in the shooting phase.)

I don't necessarily follow what you mean in your line about melee units. Shouldn't a melee unit generally need to expose themselves to some degree to get into close combat with an enemy that has superior ranged attacks?

Sorta. The issue is that melee units are usually already harder to "deliver" than shooting units. Something like a devastator squad can be contributing to your offense starting on turn 1 from the relative safety of the backfield. Something like an assault intercessor squad has to cross the table and get danger-close to the enemy in order to contribute to your offense. In 40k's current rules, you can use transports, clever positioning, or lucky charge rolls coming out of reserves to deliver those units relatively safely. But if both players are shooting every turn, those assault intercessors will have likely be left standing out in the open waiting for their chance to make a charge roll.

Basically:
Movement phase: intercessors walk out of cover moving towards the thing they want to charge. They are no longer safely behind cover.
Shooting phase: Enemy army lights up the intercessors before they can charge.
Charge phase: Intercessors either died in the shooting phase or else took a bunch of casualties and functionally won't hit as hard in the fight phase.

And a lot of melee units are kind of glass cannons. Consider units like dark eldar wyches with their toughness 3 and 6+ saves. Currently, they're designed around the assumption that they'll be safely inside a transport until the turn they hop out and charge something, at which point their special in-melee-only save activates to keep them safe with a 4+ invuln. Now imagine those wyches *always* get shot at before they're allowed to get into melee. This is why Overwatch can be so rough for some units at the moment. Some units just aren't designed to take a hit before they make their attacks.

follow the middle earth system, which could be brought into 40k pretty easily

Movement Phase:
1. player with the initiative moves everything, including charges
2. player without initiative moves everything, again including charges.

Shooting Phase:
1. player with the initiative shoots
2. player without the initiative shoots

Fight Phase:
pretty much as now, alternate, it works