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Just a half-baked idea inspired by Apoc and other threads. The basic concept is that you divide your army up into "fire teams" during list creation. During a game round, players alternate activating all the units in a given fire team. The main objectives here being:

* Reduce the time between player turns.
* Reduce alpha strikes.
* Tweak some of the weirdness with bubble characters.

I feel like this approach minimizes the slowdown caused by some AA systems by reducing the time spent switching between player turns. It discourages MSU skew because you'll end up activating less of your army at a time and will be spreading your character buffs around less efficiently. The 650 point cap prevents a player from activating multiple superheavies at once and also means that the second player can activate a similar number of points in response; even if you start the game by activating a castellan knight, your opponent can activate more than a castellan's worth of points in response. This system doesn't work with models that cost more than 650 points... and I'm kind of okay with that. Apoc is probably a better fit for such models.

THE PROPOSAL

* During list creation, all units in your list must be assigned to a fire team.

* A fire team is a collection of units whose combined points do not exceed 650(?).

* At the start of the game round, players roll off to determine who has initiative. They then declare which model in each fireteam will act as the leader for that fireteam. Leaders can be models embarked in transports or not currently on the table. Any model can be a leader.

* Starting with the player that won initiative, player take turns activating fire teams. Fireteams with Character leaders that are either on the table or embarked in a transport that is on the table must be activated before fireteams without such leaders. (Note: Need to work on the wording, but that last part only impacts the order in which a player chooses to activate their teams. You can't get a double activation by having more character leaders than your opponent.)

* All units in a fireteam move, cast powers, shoot, charge, and fight per the normal 40k rules, but morale happens in its own phase at the end of the round (starting with the player who won initiative).

* Units not at least partially within 18" of their fireteam's leader may not cast psychic powers, shoot, or charge (but may still move, overwatch, and fight).

Other Adjustments:
* A unit may not fall back unless it was within 1" of an enemy unit at the start of the game round. So you can't immediately fall back right after being charged.
* Units that can deny the witch may deny (however many times they normally do) per round rather than per turn (as turns don't really exist in this format.)
* Many character abilities would become leader abilities that only kick in when that character is a fireteam leader. Generally, these abilities would function even while the leader is embarked on a transport. So a lieutenant might grant his entire fireteam the ability to reroll wound rolls of 1 even while embarked on a razorback, but you wouldn't be able to stack his buffs with, say, a captain's unless you had some special rule that let you benefit from multiple leader bonuses at once.

* These rules would open up a lot of design space for stratagems, warlord traits, etc. that play with these changes. You might have stratagem to let you take a slightly larger fireteam. Marines might be able to use a variation on the combat squad concept to split into new fire teams or merge weakened fire teams together. Some warlord traits might grant CP when you wipe out an entire fire team. Lots of possibilities. Lots of things would need to be changed to account for these changes too, obviously.

Immediate issues:

1. Models in transports aren't considered to be a distance from other models. "It's the start of my round, so my special character unit leader disembarks". :-/
2. The proposed change to Deny the Witch greatly amplifies the effectiveness of Deny units for no reason. What's a "turn" when you're doing group-based alternating activation? It goes like so:

* Start of turn phase: At the start of the turn, no one has activated.
* Activation Phase: Players now alternate activating whatever-you-want-to-call-it's
* Clean Up Phase

Disclaimer: Proposing new turn structures is the easy part. Going through and rewriting 20 codexes and all of those models is the hard part. You'll get respect when you demonstrate the hard part, not the easy part.

 solkan wrote:
Immediate issues:

1. Models in transports aren't considered to be a distance from other models. "It's the start of my round, so my special character unit leader disembarks". :-/

Good catch. Easy enough to resolve by letting fire teams measure from any transport their leader is embarked upon. As I have it written, I suppose you could technically have your leader be in a dropod that hasn't landed yet, but there's not really an incentive to do so.

2. The proposed change to Deny the Witch greatly amplifies the effectiveness of Deny units for no reason.

Does it? How so? I must be overlooking something. As I read my proposal, a psyker that currently denies 1 power per turn (and thus 1 power per game round because you only ever deny on your opponent's turn) would still be denying a single power per game round.

What's a "turn" when you're doing group-based alternating activation? It goes like so:

* Start of turn phase: At the start of the turn, no one has activated.
* Activation Phase: Players now alternate activating whatever-you-want-to-call-it's
* Clean Up Phase

Sure. I suppose litanies and such would go in the start of turn phase and morale would be a subphase of Clean Up.

Disclaimer: Proposing new turn structures is the easy part. Going through and rewriting 20 codexes and all of those models is the hard part. You'll get respect when you demonstrate the hard part, not the easy part.

I'm not sure seeking respect is my main motivator here, but sure. The details are generally where the real work is at. But it makes more sense to hash out the high-concept stuff before spending a thousand hours rewriting faction-specific rules, no?