Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
Having played infinity, the whole "elite armies would be bad because they would get less activations" idea makes no sense to me.
My army has better stats/equipment than the other armies and hits better than them. Me getting less activations when i play Pano (space marines) than when i play Ariadna (Imperial guard) doesnt make the game unbalanced.

Uhhh, did we play the same Infinity? N3 was marred by activation-based meta. When they gave YJ new rules they specifically addressed this by giving multiple orders to their Heavy Infantry to compensate for the activation loss incurred by taking Heavy Infantry. Every list at a tournament level had 16+ orders because anything less was hamstringing yourself. My PanO army got shredded because it took my Hospitaller link team 40% of my orders (because I didn't play to meta and brought Limited Insertion style lists every time, because that's what I wanted to play) to kill a Grunt in cover and those same 4 orders to kill a Hospitaller was only 20% of the Ariadna player's pool. Every time I lost a game, every player in my group would recommend me new lists which were 16+ orders. If I mentioned my losses on forums, people would suggest 16+ order lists.
----
Grimdark Future lets Titan Lords (their Imperial Knight equivalents) delay their activations if the entire army is Titan Lords. This gets around their lack of activations by letting you make a skill-based decision on when to activate. You can let your opponent activate half their force hoping for them to get a unit out of position for your titans to spring on, or you use an early activation to bait out certain behaviors from your opponent. It's a very interesting take on elite armies and a good way of balancing them out vs armies with more activations.

It's pretty easy to do 40k with AA.


-------------------------------------------------------------
You pick a unit and that unit can do all their phases. (move psychic shoot charge fight).

No unit may be activated more than once per game turn unless some special rule says otherwise.

When you activate a unit you may also activate a CHARACTER unit within 3" of the activated unit (this is how you bring a character buff with the unit like Crypteks or whatever.) You may not activate a CHARACTER in this way if it was activated earlier in the turn. This counts as activating that CHARACTER unit.

When you activate a unit you may also activate a unit that can protect the activated unit ala drones/lychguard/etc... his is how you bring keep those units doing their jobs. Coupled with characters you could activate a unit of necron warriors, a cryptek, and lychgaurd. Or Firewarriors, a Fireblade, and drones. A hive Tyrant, Tyrant guard, and some warriors.) You may not activate a unit in this way if it was activated earlier in the turn. This counts as activating that unit.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Reserves: When you activate a unit in reserves you deploy it. You do not have to activate units in reserves and may end the turn by having only units in reserves.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Transports: When you activate a Transport you activate all/any units embarked inside it. You may disembark any of the units inside before you move the Transport (or after deploying it from reserve in the case of drop pods and such). All activated units then go through all their phases together.

A unit that ends their move within 3" of a legal Transport may EMBARK on the transport. Their activation then immediately ends.

If the Transport allows embarked units to shoot out of it they get to shoot at the same time as the Transport during the Transports activation.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Fighting/Melee

A unit that is in melee when it is activated has a choice to fall back or fight. If they can shoot while within 1" they can do that. Just start at the top of the activation and work your way through the phases as normal. Move if you want with all the consequences there of. Powers, Shooting, Charge, Fight.

If the concerns about disparities in the relative number of activations are legit, the easiest thing to do is just have it structured around a number of activation rounds (i.e. 3) and each round each player must activate 1/3 of their units.

I think this issue is far less of a problem in practice though, particularly for the turn structure I suggested earlier. That structure was basically an alternating phases and alternating activation hybrid:

Movement: Alternate phases (players move all of their units, then the other player)

Shooting: Alternating activation (single units at a time, can build in simultaneous fire elements)

Assault: Alternate phases for declaring + resolving charges. Fighting happens with alternating activations (basically the rules as written already).

Armies with fewer activations during shooting have a potential benefit in that more of the armies total fire power is concentrated in a fewer number of units. If I have 6 units and you have 10, I'm dealing out my full armies shooting after the first 6 activation rounds, meaning your remaining 4 units would've potentially suffered loses/wounds/reduction in fire power without a chance to respond yet. But that can have it's upside too.

tldr; Full AA systems (where an activated unit performs its full move-shoot-assault action) I don't think work well at all alongside the rest of 40K rules, and would require a lot more fussying to get right. A hybrid approach like I describe above can work pretty well (I've done it for the record), and is a nice change to the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
When you activate a unit you may also activate a CHARACTER unit within 3" of the activated unit (this is how you bring a character buff with the unit like Crypteks or whatever.) You may not activate a CHARACTER in this way if it was activated earlier in the turn. This counts as activating that CHARACTER unit.

When you activate a unit you may also activate a unit that can protect the activated unit ala drones/lychguard/etc... his is how you bring keep those units doing their jobs.

My issue with this, is that creates an additional incentive to build lists centered around characters with aura's and buffs, because you can leverage that to activate multiple units at once ahead of your opponent. Strong incentive for both players to do this. But this a personal playstyle thing. I prefer the game to be less centered on characters and stacking abilities.

I think the easier fix (which also addresses transports) is to just have a series of three activation rounds, and you can activate up to 1/3 of your total unit's per round. If you have less than 3 units left, these can all be activated in one round (and you can pass) (lords of war exempt).

 argonak wrote:
Alternating activations works fine in Kill Team. It worked fine in Epic 40k. It works fine in every game of other types that I've tried that uses it.

Would it take a major redesign for some balance issues? Sure. Would it be worthwhile to create a more engaging, more strategic, and more modern game?

Yes, I think it would. The main thing I dislike about Kill Team, as a matter of fact, is the IGOUGO movement phase that can completely determine how a game is going to turn out with a single role.

AA also helps mitigate the effect of the going first advantage, because now its down to a single unit (or set of units however you do it) going first, rather than my entire army getting to blast and charge your entire army (potentially reducing you by 10 to 20%) before you can even react.

But mostly it just reduces my boredom.

If the movement phase was model by model AA like shooting and fighting, coordinated squadlike movements of your troops would be much more difficult to pull off. I suppose ideally it could be broken down into chunks, but the current implementation has its merits as well IMO. And you should always keep that "Decisive move" tactic on the button when your enemy moves, its your only tool of countering the worst of what can happen during the opponent's movement phase if they go first.

I hate Kill Team's system.
The player that moves first essentially has no control, whereas the player that goes second can make sure that you enter the next phases exactly how they want.
If they don't want to get shot at, they'll just move out the way.
If they want to take the firefight, they can just stay still and shoot first.

Aeronautica works on a similar system, although at least players alternate moving as well. This way, rather than Player 2 just perfectly countering Player 1, it's every plane countering the plane that went before it.
I still hate it though.

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

This generally makes it incredibly difficult to utilize buffing or other forms of combo abilities in alternating activation systems. It's not... impossible... but anything with wind up is likely to wiff.

 LunarSol wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

This generally makes it incredibly difficult to utilize buffing or other forms of combo abilities in alternating activation systems. It's not... impossible... but anything with wind up is likely to wiff.

it could be a good way to make use of the command phase honestly, nerf the amount of buffing wombo combo and move all these buffs to the command phase.

 LunarSol wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

This generally makes it incredibly difficult to utilize buffing or other forms of combo abilities in alternating activation systems. It's not... impossible... but anything with wind up is likely to wiff.

well, any implementation of alternating activation is going to noticeably change 40k anyway. I think moving away from the current gameplay of just buff-stacking to victory would be a good thing.
But it's not impossible to do, you simply allow characters to multi-activate.
You could do this remaining with thr current system if characters bring independent units that can't be shot, or returning to the older system of embedding characters within units.

I have been playing 40k with AA for at least 10 years. The old "I go you go" system has nothing to offer but an unfulfilling gaming experience for both parties involved.

 Strg Alt wrote:
I have been playing 40k with AA for at least 10 years. The old "I go you go" system has nothing to offer but an unfulfilling gaming experience for both parties involved.

Care to share your experience after such a decade?

 Vector Strike wrote:

 Strg Alt wrote:
I have been playing 40k with AA for at least 10 years. The old "I go you go" system has nothing to offer but an unfulfilling gaming experience for both parties involved.

Care to share your experience after such a decade?

You have to be more specific.

If you would like to know how such a battle with AA turns out, look up my BatRep in Pics threads in the Battle Reports section of this forum.

I'd be interested in exactly what rules you used for it.

I'd love for an alternating system like BA. I enjoy that game rather a bit and often like the feel of the momentum. Same for Infinity.

@kirio:

Rules which were used are also written down in the respective threads.

Could you point me to which thread? There's a million of these threads on Dakka, some of which have over 20 pages.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Could you point me to which thread? There's a million of these threads on Dakka, some of which have over 20 pages.

BatRep in Pics on page 1 & 2 in Battle Report section.
Thread Titles: Plague Zombie Siege, Take & Hold and Lost Cargo.

 Strg Alt wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Could you point me to which thread? There's a million of these threads on Dakka, some of which have over 20 pages.

BatRep in Pics on page 1 & 2 in Battle Report section.
Thread Titles: Plague Zombie Siege, Take & Hold and Lost Cargo.

Gonna check them!

I find it hard to understand why so many people think implementing AA in 40k would be difficult. It's not. IGOUGO is about the worst of all worlds for compelling gameplay, especially with the level of lethality seen in the current game.

Just nabbing the Bolt Action activation system for randomised sequences of "mini-turns" within one round, with some finetuning for character support and on-going assaults, makes the game so much better. Been there done that, can recommend.

Of course there are many ways to do AA with quirks of their own: detachment activation (Apoc), phase priority and heroic moves (LotR), operational friction on detachment level (Epic Armageddon), commander centric systems (De Bellis Multitudinis etc.), initiatives (X-Wing), pre-planned sequences via card decks (Confrontation), reactionary IGOUGO (Infinity), timed orders (Epic Space Marine) ...

Of these, the Bolt Action method has been trivial to plonk into 40k and hasn't caused much problems thus far:

1) No player turns, only the game round.
2) At the beginning, all players count the number of their units. Assign coloured dice or chits into a bag in corresponding numbers.
3) Determine the player that has initiative that round, who then gets some extra tokens of their colour into the bag.
4) Draw tokens from the bag until the colour changes. The indicated player chooses that many of their units and makes a full 40k turn sequence with them from Move to Fight phases.
5) Repeat 4 as long as there are tokens in the bag, though every unit can only act once per round unless otherwise stated in the rules.
6) Handle Morale phase collectively, all buff powers and such end now unless otherwise stated.

The new Command phase would probably be done collectively in the beginning as well. It's up to taste how the players like to handle the melees when multiple units get involved, do characters get extra activations for units around them and so on.

Whereas this system sits into the current 40k frame without much of a hitch, if I were to put some effort into it, I'd probably rig something along the lines of Epic Armageddon into the system to increase the differences in faction identities and operational friction in the game that doesn't really have any in it. In E:A, all detachments need to pass a check to do their given orders instead of milling around less effectively and it is up to their commanding player to decide if they want to keep trading the initiative with their opponent or push for more concentrated actions with the risk of not getting what they want as the command checks get progressively harder until you let the other player do their stuff too.

 Sherrypie wrote:
Of course there are many ways to do AA with quirks of their own: detachment activation (Apoc), phase priority and heroic moves (LotR), operational friction on detachment level (Epic Armageddon), commander centric systems (De Bellis Multitudinis etc.), initiatives (X-Wing), pre-planned sequences via card decks (Confrontation), reactionary IGOUGO (Infinity), timed orders (Epic Space Marine) ...

But Sherry, I've never played AA so I'm going to assume it's just taking turns activating one unit at a time back and forth. Here's three paragraphs about why that'll ruin 40K...

 Sherrypie wrote:
I find it hard to understand why so many people think implementing AA in 40k would be difficult...

It's fairly straightforward, actually. Implementing AA in 40k without breaking things would require either a) tacking a new layer of bloat on top of an already bloated game and figuring out how to account for broken interactions (groups playing homebrew AA stacked straight over 40k have the safety net of being able to patch things on the fly and don't have to worry about minis/armies their group doesn't play), or b) taking the whole game apart and putting it back together. Both approaches are "difficult" in the sense that they're far more thorough and intensive than GW ever is (every time GW's done some kind of grand overhaul to everything at the same time they've relied on simple translation formulas to produce new stats rather than actually doing the legwork, which tends to break things (see: general damage/durability balance and ineffectualness of blasts in the 8e Indexes, bizarre and nonsensical points costs in the 9e rescale, anything to do with any of the WHFB minis in Sigmar)). People who think AA in 40k would be too hard to implement are the same people who think that rolling back stupid design decisions is harder than just buffing everything else in the game to compensate, because they watch what GW does and assume that GW's work ethic is normal for game design.

I think a system change to 40k that could work would be Alternating Phase Selection.

Basically in the command phase, you take a dice for Movement, Shooting, Psychic, Charging, Fighting.

You set the order you want to go in on those 5 dice (basically command phase is always 1).

If i picked Movement 2, Shooting 3, Charging 4, fighting 5, psychic 6; then I would do them in that order.

Both players would do the number 2 option before either did the number 3 option, but you would still have player turn order.


This makes the game far more tactically flexible, and even makes armies that skip a phase have a slight advantage of hasting the phases they do participate in.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I hate Kill Team's system.
The player that moves first essentially has no control, whereas the player that goes second can make sure that you enter the next phases exactly how they want.
If they don't want to get shot at, they'll just move out the way.
If they want to take the firefight, they can just stay still and shoot first.

Aeronautica works on a similar system, although at least players alternate moving as well. This way, rather than Player 2 just perfectly countering Player 1, it's every plane countering the plane that went before it.
I still hate it though.

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

The movement phase is the only part of kill team that is still igougo. I totally agree it should be redone to be AA like the rest of the game.

I've actually houseruled Killteam's movement phase to be IGYG. Tbh it didn't improve it. In fact, it just made small elite armies absolutely garbage because they would always end up having to go first, with all the problems I've already outlined.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I've actually houseruled Killteam's movement phase to be IGYG. Tbh it didn't improve it. In fact, it just made small elite armies absolutely garbage because they would always end up having to go first, with all the problems I've already outlined.

I've been working on a semi-fix for the issue built to port 40k armies into the Necromunda system (pure alternating activations with no phases at all); you give the player with the spammy army the ability to do more activations at once (so the Marines don't get to always attack first) and you give the more elite army pass tokens (so the spammy army can't always force them to move first).

Oh the number of ways to do it are legion, each with its own little dynamics for smaller and larger armies.
You just need to take your pick.
Some would require more overall than others of course.

Although as I said, I find alternating action by phases to be absolutely horrific and hate playing those sorts of games.

In general though, I think each unit doing an entire move/shoot/charge phase every activation is perhaps a bit much (I generally assume psychic to be more a sub-phase).
Moving to an action system like Necromunda or Grimdark Future would be better.
It would also generally slow the pace of the game down a little (not in terms of how long it takes to complete a turn, but how much is achieved in a turn) and make things like transports more useful for covering distances. Which I think is a good thing.

 Mezmorki wrote:
If the concerns about disparities in the relative number of activations are legit, the easiest thing to do is just have it structured around a number of activation rounds (i.e. 3) and each round each player must activate 1/3 of their units.

I think this issue is far less of a problem in practice though, particularly for the turn structure I suggested earlier. That structure was basically an alternating phases and alternating activation hybrid:

Movement: Alternate phases (players move all of their units, then the other player)

Shooting: Alternating activation (single units at a time, can build in simultaneous fire elements)

Assault: Alternate phases for declaring + resolving charges. Fighting happens with alternating activations (basically the rules as written already).

Armies with fewer activations during shooting have a potential benefit in that more of the armies total fire power is concentrated in a fewer number of units. If I have 6 units and you have 10, I'm dealing out my full armies shooting after the first 6 activation rounds, meaning your remaining 4 units would've potentially suffered loses/wounds/reduction in fire power without a chance to respond yet. But that can have it's upside too.

tldr; Full AA systems (where an activated unit performs its full move-shoot-assault action) I don't think work well at all alongside the rest of 40K rules, and would require a lot more fussying to get right. A hybrid approach like I describe above can work pretty well (I've done it for the record), and is a nice change to the game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
When you activate a unit you may also activate a CHARACTER unit within 3" of the activated unit (this is how you bring a character buff with the unit like Crypteks or whatever.) You may not activate a CHARACTER in this way if it was activated earlier in the turn. This counts as activating that CHARACTER unit.

When you activate a unit you may also activate a unit that can protect the activated unit ala drones/lychguard/etc... his is how you bring keep those units doing their jobs.

My issue with this, is that creates an additional incentive to build lists centered around characters with aura's and buffs, because you can leverage that to activate multiple units at once ahead of your opponent. Strong incentive for both players to do this. But this a personal playstyle thing. I prefer the game to be less centered on characters and stacking abilities.

I think the easier fix (which also addresses transports) is to just have a series of three activation rounds, and you can activate up to 1/3 of your total unit's per round. If you have less than 3 units left, these can all be activated in one round (and you can pass) (lords of war exempt).

Your concerns are unfounded in both regards.

1) disparate numbers of activations isn't a problem. AA balances a lot of things inherently. Single activations made up of many points chunk out your army faster which makes you less able to adapt to a changing battlefield and allow the opponent to out maneuver you. Smaller activations have "mobility" in that they can set up and react and manipulate the changing state of the battlefield. More then anything else they give you flexibility. People who do all MSU get outguned in every confrontation and their advantage dwindles turn by turn until it turns to disadvantage. Peope who go all "deathstars" get ruined by a smart opponent who can deny them optimal targets and then widdle them down and take them out after they have burned through everything. Which is also the answer to number 2) If you list build for characters and auras and protecectors like that you burn through your activations. It's just as bad as bringing nothing but knights. And every lost model you suffer dwindles the power of your "super unit".

For the record, I have played a multitude of AA 40k. It just works. It doesn't require a lot of fussing. The theory crafting concerns that get trotted out every time have no foundation in the reality of playing it.

catbarf wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:
Of course there are many ways to do AA with quirks of their own: detachment activation (Apoc), phase priority and heroic moves (LotR), operational friction on detachment level (Epic Armageddon), commander centric systems (De Bellis Multitudinis etc.), initiatives (X-Wing), pre-planned sequences via card decks (Confrontation), reactionary IGOUGO (Infinity), timed orders (Epic Space Marine) ...

But Sherry, I've never played AA so I'm going to assume it's just taking turns activating one unit at a time back and forth. Here's three paragraphs about why that'll ruin 40K...

Naturally, this is of course the inevitable response

AnomanderRake wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:
I find it hard to understand why so many people think implementing AA in 40k would be difficult...

It's fairly straightforward, actually. Implementing AA in 40k without breaking things would require either a) tacking a new layer of bloat on top of an already bloated game and figuring out how to account for broken interactions (groups playing homebrew AA stacked straight over 40k have the safety net of being able to patch things on the fly and don't have to worry about minis/armies their group doesn't play), or b) taking the whole game apart and putting it back together. Both approaches are "difficult" in the sense that they're far more thorough and intensive than GW ever is (every time GW's done some kind of grand overhaul to everything at the same time they've relied on simple translation formulas to produce new stats rather than actually doing the legwork, which tends to break things (see: general damage/durability balance and ineffectualness of blasts in the 8e Indexes, bizarre and nonsensical points costs in the 9e rescale, anything to do with any of the WHFB minis in Sigmar)). People who think AA in 40k would be too hard to implement are the same people who think that rolling back stupid design decisions is harder than just buffing everything else in the game to compensate, because they watch what GW does and assume that GW's work ethic is normal for game design.

It's funny to me how this mostly seems to be a problem with GW's 40k studio, the company produces a whole slew of other games where such corrective moves and bolder steps in innovation are much more common. Part of the baggage of being the flagship game where change is frowned upon, I guess.

@Sherrypie:

The only people who wouldn't benefit from AA are those who try their best to wipe 50% of the opposing force during turn 1.

There IS a lot of inertia when it comes to changing things or trying out innovative mechanics in 40k. There are ways to mitigate that (honestly I think GW would benefit from some open playtesting, as the current setup has some combination of incompetent playtesters and GW not listening to them) but it is definitely a significant factor they must manage.

 LunarSol wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:

IMO your opponent should not get a response in-between the movement and attacking of a unit. It's just begging for them to completely negate the move you've set up.

This generally makes it incredibly difficult to utilize buffing or other forms of combo abilities in alternating activation systems. It's not... impossible... but anything with wind up is likely to wiff.

Units should be good on their own with buffers just being a bonus.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 catbarf wrote:

 Sherrypie wrote:
Of course there are many ways to do AA with quirks of their own: detachment activation (Apoc), phase priority and heroic moves (LotR), operational friction on detachment level (Epic Armageddon), commander centric systems (De Bellis Multitudinis etc.), initiatives (X-Wing), pre-planned sequences via card decks (Confrontation), reactionary IGOUGO (Infinity), timed orders (Epic Space Marine) ...

But Sherry, I've never played AA so I'm going to assume it's just taking turns activating one unit at a time back and forth. Here's three paragraphs about why that'll ruin 40K...

Hahaha, excellent. The amount of people that think 40k can't be ruined to begin with is hilarious.