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I am sure this has been suggested before (I searched but couldn't find anything the search option recognised) and there are likely problems with it, but:

Would it be a good idea to change shooting declaration for all units to the start of the phase? You could use a marker to dictate what unit has declared it's shot(s) and against which unit(s). I see this as only slightly more added book-keeping alongside buff/debuff abilities/psychic powers and wound tracking etc...

(Obviously stratagems would need reworking).

When splitting shots for a unit, you're already partly leaning towards this rule and, like splitting shots, this turns the shooting phase from "point & click + Insert-list-here" into more of a considered choice.

The primacy of maths cannot be understated, but this would at least go some way to changing the spreadsheet, by the numbers, approach to the game. To reiterate, that should still be important and I'm not denigrating it (I approach aspects of the game like that myself) but it might help mitigate how easy it is to see which army will win by list alone. This moves the purely abstracted decision making more into the grounded realm of having likely chances, but not certainties. The chances currently offered lie between the extremes of statistically negligible, either for or against your favoured outcome (not least due to the stacking of synergies that exist within the system itself).

The fact that there is always an infinitely small chance that your optimal list and unit combinations might fail, does nothing to discount the fact that this degree of chance is pathetically small next to other choices and that's what I want to bring into the fore: choices. I'm not talking about a perfectly balanced game (no such thing exists) but if we don't attempt to bring some form of balance into our equations, we are (ironically) justifying a less than optimal product and experience. In other words: I think it becomes shallow and unrewarding.

I want to sweat a little when I'm making my decisions, not yawn and look at my probability app, then mentally check out. Instead of clicking through each unit one at a time to get the maximum output, this brings back context and situation to the decision-making process.

If I have 2 hellblaster squads facing down 2 Khorne 'zerker squads I would now have to weigh up the odds and consider whether I have enough shots from one or both to kill 1 squad and then maybe damage the other, or do I need to split for a high risk/reward? Some might say this is how the game currently is (excuse the strawman) but I do not think this is true.

If you factor in the rest of the armies on either side, such a choice becomes much more complex. Where do I shoot my heavier weapons? Will those hellblasters be enough or do my aggressors need to chime in? And so on.

A more extreme version of this would be to also remove split-firing, though I'm not sure about that myself, that might shift things too far in favour of close-combat hordes.

As an aside, I don't think this would work for the psychic phase or for the combat phase, mainly because in combat you are usually forced to chose between only a handful of targets and, once engaged (actively or passively) your choices are more locked in, and with psychic there are only a handful of armies that make a strong use of it to put out damage.

What do people think? Am I just talking utter gak here?

If we were talking about a video game, this could be fun. However, I feel you're underestimating the amount of bookkeeping this would add. Consider a tau gunline where every non-drone unit in your army is likely to be shooting at something each turn. Say that army has 20 units. You're talking about taking the time to declare 20+ (splitfire) targets for 20 different units and presumably using 40+ markers to track those declarations.

I'd be careful about removing splitfire. It was one of the very well-received changes from 7th to 8th. A marine squad with 4 bolters and a meltagun really hates being forced to shoot at a tank alongisde the melta when there's a squishy infantry target right next to it.

Wyldhunt wrote:
If we were talking about a video game, this could be fun. However, I feel you're underestimating the amount of bookkeeping this would add. Consider a tau gunline where every non-drone unit in your army is likely to be shooting at something each turn. Say that army has 20 units. You're talking about taking the time to declare 20+ (splitfire) targets for 20 different units and presumably using 40+ markers to track those declarations.

I do see what you mean, though currently you still have to keep track of who has and hasn't shot, as well as keep track of how many special applications are applied (using your example of Tau to mention marker-lights here).

Wyldhunt wrote:

I'd be careful about removing splitfire. It was one of the very well-received changes from 7th to 8th. A marine squad with 4 bolters and a meltagun really hates being forced to shoot at a tank alongisde the melta when there's a squishy infantry target right next to it.

I agree to some extent, that was why I wasn't sure about that idea. Though it would mitigate the bookkeeping problem a little bit, although maybe not enough to justify it.

 Wunzlez wrote:
I want to sweat a little when I'm making my decisions, not yawn and look at my probability app, then mentally check out. Instead of clicking through each unit one at a time to get the maximum output, this brings back context and situation to the decision-making process.

You don't have to look much at your probability app with the current system, your system on the other hand requires an immense amount of probability math each turn because if you split your fire too much then you could waste an entire shooting phase dealing little bits of damage everywhere but getting nothing substantial done. Let's say your goal is to do 11 damage to a vehicle, currently I'll just assume I'm slightly lucky with my first available attack on that target and roll fewer dice than the math suggest I require, so if I need 15 shots I might do 10 or 12, then if the unit isn't dead I'll put in just enough that I should kill it on average with each other unit until I get to my last unit and then I'll put in twice of what the math suggests is required to finish it off. Very rarely do I get hosed and nothing is done because I applied my shooting in the wrong places. With your system I'd have to think long and hard about how much shooting to put into units, do I want a 20% chance of killing the vehicle this turn with little chance of overkill or 60% chance with massive likelihood of overkill. Then after determining what chance of killing the unit I want then I have to calculate how much of my shooting it will actually require to kill the target. I like the idea, but I wouldn't use it without a chess clock and an extra hour available for the game.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Wunzlez wrote:
I want to sweat a little when I'm making my decisions, not yawn and look at my probability app, then mentally check out. Instead of clicking through each unit one at a time to get the maximum output, this brings back context and situation to the decision-making process.

You don't have to look much at your probability app with the current system, your system on the other hand requires an immense amount of probability math each turn because if you split your fire too much then you could waste an entire shooting phase dealing little bits of damage everywhere but getting nothing substantial done. Let's say your goal is to do 11 damage to a vehicle, currently I'll just assume I'm slightly lucky with my first available attack on that target and roll fewer dice than the math suggest I require, so if I need 15 shots I might do 10 or 12, then if the unit isn't dead I'll put in just enough that I should kill it on average with each other unit until I get to my last unit and then I'll put in twice of what the math suggests is required to finish it off. Very rarely do I get hosed and nothing is done because I applied my shooting in the wrong places. With your system I'd have to think long and hard about how much shooting to put into units, do I want a 20% chance of killing the vehicle this turn with little chance of overkill or 60% chance with massive likelihood of overkill. Then after determining what chance of killing the unit I want then I have to calculate how much of my shooting it will actually require to kill the target. I like the idea, but I wouldn't use it without a chess clock and an extra hour available for the game.

That's a fair argument. My comment about the probability app was made flippantly, normally I wouldn't bother with it when actually playing a game, I just didn't want to give the idea that I was against min/maxing or efficiency through mathematics. I tend to land firmly in the middle between casual and competitive, not because I like being a fence-sitter, but because I can clearly see the validity of both sides of that particular isle.

I'll admit, however, that my aim is not to speed the game up and I'm aware that this would not be a good idea for people whose circumstances do not allow for entire evenings of gaming (I'm fortunate enough to live locally to a club where we put aside an entire day each week in order to game).

It's kind of what my friends and I do already.

I have dozens of squads of Inquisitorial Stormtroopers which I picked off eBay in various paint forms:
Blue Troopers
Snow Troopers
Desert Troopers
Guards
Ceremonial
Jungle
Forest
Wet Terrain
Cityscape
Grey Undercoat
Tan Undercoat
Black Undercoat
Silver
etc...

Some of the others have their classic Ultramarines' Squad and shoulder markings (complete with the Red Bolters!):
Squad Red 1
Squad Red 2
Squad Blue 1
Squad Blue 2
Squad Green 1
Squad Green 2
etc...

This makes order marking and shooting easy:

S> = Shooting At
FRF = FRFSRF
TA = Take Aim
You get the idea...

BluTr S> SR1 FRF
DstTr S> SR1 TA
Guards S> SG1 TA
City S> SG2 FRF

We just scrawl this down at the start of each phase then just roll through the shooting - it surprisingly speeds the turn up, especially when I'm often using 10-15 squads...

I think it's far more than a little bit more book keeping. The amount of extra things to keep track of alone makes me think it's not a good idea honestly.

pm713 wrote:
I think it's far more than a little bit more book keeping. The amount of extra things to keep track of alone makes me think it's not a good idea honestly.

Thanks for your input.

I really like the idea of declaring all shooting before hand - and in older editions of 40k my group has played some games this way.

Here's the thing... the OP is right on that so many games structured as IGOUGO with the ability to sequence firing in whatever order you want turns the entire shooting phase into a big optimization exercise. You fire, unit by unit, at the biggest threats on the board until you eliminate it, and then move onto the next unit. It's very one dimensional from a tactics standpoint. Usually the right shooting order is pretty obvious, you just need to spent a minute thinking through it first.

With declared shooting, a second dimension gets added to the decision process. This is basically asking you to make a risk/reward judgement. What's the risk that my shot from a unit doesn't neutralize a certain threat? Should I fire extra at it to make sure that it does? That might mean I end up "wasting" shots on an already dead unit. But such is the trade-off. It absolutely makes the decisions deeper and makes for a richer game.

Now, implementing it under the 8th/9th edition rules is a problem, since every individual model can shoot at whatever they want. Something like this is only going to make sense for earlier editions of the game where splitting fire was not the norm. In these cases, it really isn't that onerous of a change. If you have 10 units in your army, you just have them numbered on your army roster, and then have 10 tokens you can set next to your targets. Then roll away in whatever manner you want.

Anyway, I like the idea of this rule, and I've used in the past and it's been successful.

You'd make transports much, much more powerful since you can't target the people in the transport at the start of the phase. You'd also annoy the people who really like splitting fire if you went back to one unit-one target.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
You'd make transports much, much more powerful since you can't target the people in the transport at the start of the phase. You'd also annoy the people who really like splitting fire if you went back to one unit-one target.

I'm working on a rule set based on 5th that might add in declaring targets. There could easily be exceptions made for some of these cases, like units that target a transport may switch their fire to target a disembarking unit in the event the vehicle is destroyed. They'd already have their shots lined up so it makes sense.

As for split fire - I'm considering adding a rule that allows units to make a leadership test, and of successful, split fire between two target units. Or perhaps just a Global rule that when a unit had multiple types of weapons, it may split fire once by shooting all of the weapons of one declared type at a Certain target with all remaining weapons at another target.