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 adamsouza wrote:
Cweg is right.

If your opponent has LOS to your whole army turn 1 your problem is either poor deployment or not enough LOS blocking terrain.

8th edition NEEDS LOS blocking terrain to function well. True LOS and weak bonuses from partial cover make LOS blocking terrain much more vital to a balnced game than an any previous edition.

in 8th, I've had a lot of trouble keeping even half of my models out of LOS. You can always hide some, but even with 1/2 of your army exposed, most competitive lists lists can kill near 1000 points of orks before you get to move them.

This isn't a new idea. Tried searching for previous discussions, but that proved a little tedious.

Some of the other posters are right, alternate activations are hard to scale with larger games and this system heavily favors horde armies. Some friends and I tried it in in a series of games during 6th / 7th edition. Not sure it would ever work for 40k even with major retooling of the rules.

Here are my impressions.

1) Movement became the most important factor in most games and didn't feel right. Most of what you do is in response to the last unit your opponent moved, either trying to get in cover or out of double tap range. Assault and charges became harder since there was now a way to kite your opponent, which made 6th's charge mechanic even worse.

2) Shooting became all about the order in which your units fired and this was a negative. You always wanted to fire first with the unit that had the best chance of going away and spent a lot of time weighing that option with other strategically important ones. Target priority would change throughout the phase, which lead to a lot of half-destroyed units on the table. While the 8th edition morale mechanic would help with this, actually killing a unit became much harder.

3) Charges and assaults were a joke. Under this system, it's not hard to prevent charges, you just keep your distance during movement. Let's remember scatter dice were still part of the game, any time you scattered you could forget about charging anything because you would never catch up. In most games, there was no melee at all. When it did happen, it felt like it was an accident.

4) One of the downsides of the psychic phase was reactionary casting, where each side would buff a single unit to be superpowered and impossible to wound. There was a huge incentive to do this and it lead to a lot of mini-deathstars. I think the way this would play out in 8th edition is smite spam to the exclusion of everything else, because mortal wounds would be a lot more valuable than relying on shooting. But there was no richness to the psychic phase at all, some strategies were more dominant than others and players would focus on them exclusively.

5) Finally, every game was really drawn out. It wasn't that we were learning a new system, it's that the number of choices you have to make goes way up when opponents can react to your moves. Constantly rethinking your strategy in response to your opponent's reaction made me feel tense, and part of the reason was this feeling the units in my army were not designed for this. There needed to be very different mechanics for it to work at the unit / weapon level but I couldn't really get my head around what the changes needed to be.

There were things I liked about it, but nothing to outweigh the negatives. Maybe it would work for smaller games.

 sphynx wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
The right answer is to just play with enough terrain to mitigate the ability to get a full strength alpha strike when going first.

Exactly what I was going to suggest. Never had an issue playing after populating the board with the appropriate amount of trees or buildings. There's no excuse not to have an urban or forested section on your board. Both if you've got room. I see so many people just playing long table edges totally exposed. It baffles me. I've found the best games always start with Vanguard Strike deployment and plenty of scenery. Saying that, seeing DKoK deployed along a long front is very fluffy...

That a) doesn't help much vehicles who have to be inside terrain(so often since they have to move UP and then DOWN to get there are basically sitting ducks), have to have whole unit(have fun with orks), avoiding LOS is super hard due to tiny piece of sword visible from 1 guy=entire unit free target and of course many of the worst shooters are also so fast they can simply move to better position and shoot down. Or simply ignore LOS to begin with...

Orks don't benefit from +1 save and hiding out of LOS requires basically huge walls. Which makes roadblocks from which you have to appear which means opponent shoots units that appear and generally orks then don't advance at all!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 techsoldaten wrote:
This isn't a new idea. Tried searching for previous discussions, but that proved a little tedious.

Some of the other posters are right, alternate activations are hard to scale with larger games and this system heavily favors horde armies. Some friends and I tried it in in a series of games during 6th / 7th edition. Not sure it would ever work for 40k even with major retooling of the rules.

Eternal curse of alternative actions is the huge advantage cheap stuff has. I have seen very few games where it wasn't best to load up with cheap stuff.

So far, we've been really enjoying Tokenhammer as a solution to the first turn issue (and general IGOUGO boredom).

You need to scale down games, because it does increase the time, but units also live a lot longer and more happens in a turn than normal 40K. So far so good. Going on about four months since I played "normal" 40K. Of course I don't do tournaments or random pick-up games, so it's a luxury I can afford I s'pose.

To speed up alternate activation of a unit each, as to me this is where it would slow down, how about before the battle, you and your opponent present to each other their activation list order for moving and shooting, and this cannot be changed at all, all game for either side (maybe a command point to activate out of the sync).

That's where the speed would slow down with it, those annoying players who spend 3 or 4 minutes pondering what unit to move, and then where to move it for each bloody unit.

If you intend to break up the 40k turn Epic style, I would strongly recommend more of a balanced alternation by phase:

Turn 1:

A move,
B move & B shoot,
A shoot & A fight,
B fight

Turn 2:

B move,
A move & A shoot,
B shoot & B fight,
A fight

This still interleaves the turn, but it has some interesting effects when you get to move & shoot -or- shoot & fight.


That said, the big fix is to add more LOS-blocking terrain and play with fewer points on the tabletop.

Has anyone considered alternating detachments? Perhaps force the largest detachments to go first, or something more interesting like the following order:

Outrider
Vanguard
Patrol
Battalion
Brigade
Spearhead

It's a compromise between i-go-you-go and alternating, and keeps some fluff with army composition.

So, if an army needs alpha strikes, then those units have to be squeezed into outriders, but that means they potentially lose command points.

Knowing your spearhead will always activate last will mean you have to keep it safe, but it also means the stuff that's most killy is likely to be left until last. It would probably need a complete rebalance of armies, but it's an interesting idea for another edition?

SweetLou wrote:
My friends and I tried two techniques to lessen the first turn win ness we have been experiencing.

First we tried the LOTR technique as that game is very well written. We did Each player moves, then each player shoots, then each player resolves their combats.

This went well, and made for a much more back and forth game, we also added a friendly fire mechanic when shooting into combat that was fun. (roll for each hit, on a 1-3 its a friend, 4-6 a foe). Made my orks have alot of fun mowing down enemy and friends alike. FetLife IMVU Canva

Option two led to us doing activation style. You moved one unit, then your opponent until both sides have moved everyone ones or moved the units they wanted too. Then did the same thing with shooting, back and forth and then resolved combats. This is how we intend to play in th future. Its great fun.

fundamentally how functioned was you issued an "arrange" to every unit, by means of counters - look down (when a counter was face up you knew it had moved)
at that point a development stage, stuff requested to "Charge" moved first, at that point "advance", "first fire" couldn't move.

 Elbows wrote:
So far, we've been really enjoying Tokenhammer as a solution to the first turn issue (and general IGOUGO boredom).

You need to scale down games, because it does increase the time, but units also live a lot longer and more happens in a turn than normal 40K. So far so good. Going on about four months since I played "normal" 40K. Of course I don't do tournaments or random pick-up games, so it's a luxury I can afford I s'pose.

And you just said reason why GW will never go for this.

Have you tried using terrain? I found that using a lot of LoS blocking terrain mitigates that first turn alpha strike.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Have you tried using terrain? I found that using a lot of LoS blocking terrain mitigates that first turn alpha strike.

Yes. Yes, I have, it helps immensely.

I'm 1 step away from making a tutorial on LOS Blocking terrain: how to build and use it.