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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lOAD1AHhubPh5g3egLCBx3etWxYRrhc1lATaIaTRn5Y/edit?usp=sharing

This link includes two different modifications to the 9th edition warhammer 40k ruleset that allow the game to be played in an "Accelerated Alternating Activations" style. The intention of the Minimal Modification ruleset is to introduce the fewest possible changes to the current balance of the game. The largest change when using the Minimal Modification ruleset is the fact that there goes from being two potential Fight phases per battle round to one. In my experience playing with that ruleset, this change is actually more minor than one might initially think given the reduction from 2 to 1 - generally speaking, the overall level of lethality present in the current game state means that in most cases where a unit that can actually deal appreciable melee damage Fights, it generally destroys its target. Generally speaking the instances where a unit would have a second opportunity to fight in the current game state have been relatively low-stakes fights between things like vehicles and models that can't really hurt that vehicle, two shooting-focused infantry squads, or support characters that don't particularly matter much.

The Major Modification ruleset introduces or reworks multiple concepts to the game as well as "Bundling" the psychic, shooting, and fight phases together into the Action phase in order to reduce the slowdown that occurs from introducing AA to the game.

The addition of the Guard action allows for a player to hold a unit's action until their opponent has moved, or until they charge or fall back. The Hide action exists to help solve that age-old problem with TLOS systems and heroically posed miniatures, allowing units to hunker down behind partially obscuring cover and count as being out of line of sight.

The morale system has also been reworked to both be more relevant and to reduce rather than increase lethality. Rather than rolling a single D6 and adding casualties, this system returns to the previous flat 2d6 system of previous editions, and introduces a new Broken state that prevents units from moving closer to the closest enemy unit, forces them to declare Fall Back if they are within engagement range, and prevents them from taking any action except Hide.

Finally, I added a variant of Charge called Ram that allows units like tanks and bikers to give up their shooting and normal fighting to deal automatic hits based on the bulk of the model (Strength = the Toughness of the Ramming model). This is just something I think is nice to have and is easier to add when combining the phases together so you can bake in a drawback. Enjoy squishing a few guardsmen with your Rhino tanks again!

I am also considering adding additional reaction type moves with the aim of further reducing lethality, such as allowing a unit targeted by a shooting attack to willingly become Broken to give them a free move towards cover that might get them out of line of sight or give them a better save, or allowing a Vehicle or Monster keyword unit to mitigate some hit points of damage by rolling on a damage effect table.

Noticed that I might have F'ed up the google drive sharing link - should be anyone who clicks it can view now, sorry!

I hate the concept of alternating by phase, as you've used in this.

Firstly, it takes forever. Every time you hand off control between players it takes time for them to consider the new state of the board and plan their action. When you're altnernating by phase, the only thing you can plan is a single action ahead. And this planning step occurs 3-5 times per unit every round.
Secondly, it creates really terrible situations.
For example, a melee unit moves up to set up a charge, then the enemy unit just moves out the way. No charge for you.
Or another one, you position a unit to shoot. The enemy sees where you've moved and just moves out of LoS/range. You now have no target.

A far better mechanic is allowing models to go through all the phases themselves before handing off to your opponent. This way each unit need only activate once.
As a simple rule you can just run through the phases exactly like they are now.
For a more complex solution, you can change it up. For example allowing units to go through the phases in any order they please. So you could shoot and then fall back behind cover for example.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I hate the concept of alternating by phase, as you've used in this.

Firstly, it takes forever. Every time you hand off control between players it takes time for them to consider the new state of the board and plan their action. When you're altnernating by phase, the only thing you can plan is a single action ahead. And this planning step occurs 3-5 times per unit every round.
Secondly, it creates really terrible situations.
For example, a melee unit moves up to set up a charge, then the enemy unit just moves out the way. No charge for you.
Or another one, you position a unit to shoot. The enemy sees where you've moved and just moves out of LoS/range. You now have no target.

A far better mechanic is allowing models to go through all the phases themselves before handing off to your opponent. This way each unit need only activate once.
As a simple rule you can just run through the phases exactly like they are now.
For a more complex solution, you can change it up. For example allowing units to go through the phases in any order they please. So you could shoot and then fall back behind cover for example.

What you've stated here as a bug is what I would call a feature.

40k is a game with massive ranges, true LOS, 360 degree arcs, a small board, and fixed objectives sitting on the board that you need to stay on to hold them. Being able to choose to reduce casualties by giving up offense/board position is an element that leads to a less deadly, more interactive game.

I have tried unit-by-unit full action alternating activation 40k, and this is generally intended to be an iteration on that. Neither me nor my opponents were a fan of how much it turns the game into 'rocket tag' - a unit moves, shoots, charges, fights, and makes its points back, then the opponent activates, and destroys that unit. Coordinating any kind of synergy between units is basically impossible.

It swings from "too easy to coordinate your entire army together to create a massive wombo-combo" to "basically impossible to have even two units act in consort."

Even just basic things like trying to keep a character within 3" protection radius becomes impossible.

The character solution is easily solved.
You add a rule that, when activating, a character can also activate another unit within 6".

 kirotheavenger wrote:
The character solution is easily solved.
You add a rule that, when activating, a character can also activate another unit within 6".

This.

I'm afraid these rules aren't quite right for me, the_scotsman. While some of the concepts here (especially the reactions) do add some depth to the game, I feel like the extra slowdown that would result from handing off activations (as well as some of the extra steps created) would ultimately bog the game down too much for my liking. I've definitely seen worse attempts though. There's a lot to like here.

A few common challenges presented by AA rules that I don't see addressed in your rules:
* How do you handle units embarked on open-topped transports? If I have several units of tankbustas in a truk or drukhari in a raider, do I get to shoot with all of those units when the transport activates? Do I have to track action tokens for the units inside separately?

* What keeps my opponent from just moving away from short-ranged firepower? Especially if he has more units to activate than I do? If I move a bunch of burna boyz or fusion pistol harlequins into position to shoot a unit that has yet to move, won't my opponent just jog the 8" or 6" away to nullify my firepower?

* Similar to the above, but in regards to charging. Harlequins are frequently outnumbered and have an average charge roll of 7". Seems pretty easy for you to get your units safely away from them unless I'm specifically only trying to charge units you've already activated. (Which means that I"m letting you control which of your units I'm attacking.)

* Letting units fall back in the same turn that they're charged is pretty brutal against melee units/armies. I suggest not allowing units that were charged earlier in the phase to fall back. This gives a purpose to cheap secondary waves of melee units that can help keep targets locked down and ensures that a melee unit that manages to get a charge off will get at least one t urn of attacks in.

*The character thing. My favorite solution to this in other AA systems is to just let a single second unit activate alongside the character and maybe share his charge rolls.

A few other notes...
* Neither Charge nor Open Fire lets you shoot with your heavy weapons and then fight in melee. Is it intentional that something like a dreadnaught with a multi-melta and dreadnaught ccw is unable to benefit from both its gun and its melee weapon in the same turn?

*Ram. I get the nostalgia for it, but this will either be an always-use or never-use for units that have access to it. Either the unit already has a melee weapon that will be more effective (never use) or else it doesn't and will thus always use Ram (assuming it want to shoot instead). Basically, you're giving a melee buff to a bunch of units and giving a redundant rule to a bunch of others. So you'll just have to weigh how many points that's worth on a unit-by-unit basis. Though that creates a lot of extra work for you.

*Morale. The broken unit rules feel weird to me. I'm scared of the unit 8" away on my left, so I have to run away form them. But this potentially allows me to move within a couple inches of the enemy unit on my right that was initially 8.5" away because I want to get closer to an objective or be in position to charge them next turn or whatever. Also, what happens if I deepstrike into a corner, get scared of the nearest enemy unit 9.5" away, and physically can't move any models further away because I'm trapped in the corner of the board?

* Hide seems abusable to me. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to end up in a "magic box" situation with a cheap, untargetable squad of guardsmen or gretchin scoring an objective near some ruins every turn?

----------------------------------------
AA appraoches that I want to try (but haven't gotten around to trying yet)
1.) Basically Kill Team style activations. Only use these rules in Combat Patrol and Incursion games to keep the army sizes (and thus the number of activations) limited.
2.) Go back and forth having units perform their entire turn except the morale phase. Then take turns doing morale tests. It's not as glamorous as a more thorough rework, but it does seem like it would work relatively smoothly. It's enough of a change to remove some of the alpha strike problems facing the game. It keeps turns short enough to avoid putting the other guy to sleep when it isn't their turn. It keeps the number of activations low compared to a system like Kill Team (where each unit gets activated during each phase of the game.)

Kill Team activations shares the same flaws as this system, regarding avoiding short ranged weapons and charges and such.
The only real difference in Killteam is that it's one players *entire army* that gets to hard-counter their opponent like that, rather than both players getting a few units.
I played Killteam, and trying to play short ranged or melee was *extremely* frustrating as you basically couldn't do anything if you didn't lose priority one round (to approach) then win it the next (to charge).

I favour approach 2.
I also think it would be nice under such a system to allow units to undergo the phases in any order they please. If you start your turn in a position to shoot, you can open fire then move out.
This way also be a bit of a buff to shooting armies in the current missions, allowing them to shoot a unit off of an objective and then take the position in the same turn.

Wyldhunt wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
The character solution is easily solved.
You add a rule that, when activating, a character can also activate another unit within 6".

This.

I'm afraid these rules aren't quite right for me, the_scotsman. While some of the concepts here (especially the reactions) do add some depth to the game, I feel like the extra slowdown that would result from handing off activations (as well as some of the extra steps created) would ultimately bog the game down too much for my liking. I've definitely seen worse attempts though. There's a lot to like here.

A few common challenges presented by AA rules that I don't see addressed in your rules:
* How do you handle units embarked on open-topped transports? If I have several units of tankbustas in a truk or drukhari in a raider, do I get to shoot with all of those units when the transport activates? Do I have to track action tokens for the units inside separately?

* What keeps my opponent from just moving away from short-ranged firepower? Especially if he has more units to activate than I do? If I move a bunch of burna boyz or fusion pistol harlequins into position to shoot a unit that has yet to move, won't my opponent just jog the 8" or 6" away to nullify my firepower?

* Similar to the above, but in regards to charging. Harlequins are frequently outnumbered and have an average charge roll of 7". Seems pretty easy for you to get your units safely away from them unless I'm specifically only trying to charge units you've already activated. (Which means that I"m letting you control which of your units I'm attacking.)

* Letting units fall back in the same turn that they're charged is pretty brutal against melee units/armies. I suggest not allowing units that were charged earlier in the phase to fall back. This gives a purpose to cheap secondary waves of melee units that can help keep targets locked down and ensures that a melee unit that manages to get a charge off will get at least one t urn of attacks in.

*The character thing. My favorite solution to this in other AA systems is to just let a single second unit activate alongside the character and maybe share his charge rolls.

A few other notes...
* Neither Charge nor Open Fire lets you shoot with your heavy weapons and then fight in melee. Is it intentional that something like a dreadnaught with a multi-melta and dreadnaught ccw is unable to benefit from both its gun and its melee weapon in the same turn?

*Ram. I get the nostalgia for it, but this will either be an always-use or never-use for units that have access to it. Either the unit already has a melee weapon that will be more effective (never use) or else it doesn't and will thus always use Ram (assuming it want to shoot instead). Basically, you're giving a melee buff to a bunch of units and giving a redundant rule to a bunch of others. So you'll just have to weigh how many points that's worth on a unit-by-unit basis. Though that creates a lot of extra work for you.

*Morale. The broken unit rules feel weird to me. I'm scared of the unit 8" away on my left, so I have to run away form them. But this potentially allows me to move within a couple inches of the enemy unit on my right that was initially 8.5" away because I want to get closer to an objective or be in position to charge them next turn or whatever. Also, what happens if I deepstrike into a corner, get scared of the nearest enemy unit 9.5" away, and physically can't move any models further away because I'm trapped in the corner of the board?

* Hide seems abusable to me. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to end up in a "magic box" situation with a cheap, untargetable squad of guardsmen or gretchin scoring an objective near some ruins every turn?

----------------------------------------
AA appraoches that I want to try (but haven't gotten around to trying yet)
1.) Basically Kill Team style activations. Only use these rules in Combat Patrol and Incursion games to keep the army sizes (and thus the number of activations) limited.
2.) Go back and forth having units perform their entire turn except the morale phase. Then take turns doing morale tests. It's not as glamorous as a more thorough rework, but it does seem like it would work relatively smoothly. It's enough of a change to remove some of the alpha strike problems facing the game. It keeps turns short enough to avoid putting the other guy to sleep when it isn't their turn. It keeps the number of activations low compared to a system like Kill Team (where each unit gets activated during each phase of the game.)

The split between the Movement Phase and the Action Phase tends to resolve a lot of these issues. in particular your concern about being able to fall back in the same turn you're charged - you can't, because Fall Back occurs in the movement phase and Charge in the action phase. If you're charged in the action phase the only action available to you is Pile In.

"* Neither Charge nor Open Fire lets you shoot with your heavy weapons and then fight in melee. Is it intentional that something like a dreadnaught with a multi-melta and dreadnaught ccw is unable to benefit from both its gun and its melee weapon in the same turn? "

Hmm. The intention behind the restriction was to not just allow Charge to be an extra bonus thing you can do on top of all the other stuff you normally do during a turn. Maybe I'll just add a caveat that INFANTRY models may not fire Heavy weapons during a charge action.

"* Hide seems abusable to me. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to end up in a "magic box" situation with a cheap, untargetable squad of guardsmen or gretchin scoring an objective near some ruins every turn? "

A unit of gretchin or a small character can generally get itself out of normal line of sight in a Ruin anyway - if it isn't already behind an Obscuring terrain piece. The use of Hide is just to allow a unit trying to do a similar thing that would just be limited by the pose of the model even if, realistically, that wych posed jumping off a rock should be able to hide just as well as that gretchin or whatever.

If you are cornered while Broken and cannot move farther away than the closest enemy unit, you just don't move. It's the same as if you were to Pile In but could not move closer to the closest enemy unit now.

In the current game state the types of units that benefit from Ram are not particularly OP - undergunned transports like Rhinos, shooting focused bikers like Windriders, etc. I'm fine with including an option in a wargame that is only occasionally the optimal thing to do and is mostly a "desperation maneuver" that you might consider if, say, your leman russ had 1 wound left and would be hitting on 6s with its guns.

In terms of the concerns about your opponent being able to react to your movement by ceding board control to reduce the amount of damage you can do, or if you might be able to charge a unit before that unit is able to shoot....isn't that the point of introducing alternating activations? Is the goal not to introduce additional counterplay, reduce the overall deadliness of the game, and allow more options to the opposing army than just sitting and taking it on the chin while the entire opposing army acts?

Alternating activations where a whole unit (or, say, a character and one unit) acts in its entirety and then your opponent activates one unit which acts in its entirety is that it's just as non-tactical and just as stacked towards big deathstar units as normal IGOUGO 40k. A mobile army like the Harlequins you use in your example becomes just "one unit sprints out 24", blows the hell out of something, then your opponent acts and obviously just targets that unit that just moved and blows the hell out of it, then you shoot another one of your units all the way across the board doing all its stuff, etc etc"

It changes the game from "the optimal strategy is a big ball of death surrounded by auras that kills the whole opposing army" to just "the optimal strategy is self contained suicide missile units who can act independently and get across the board and murder stuff quickly.

At the end of the day, the perception of any alternate rule system being "miles better" than the core GW experience is going to be at least in part the fact that you're probably the kind of player who prioritizes an interesting game over winning, and there won't be a dedicated cadre of powergamers trying to find ways to break your custom system like there is for core 40k. I'm just letting you know the types of units that will inevitably be king in that kind of a system: armies that don't rely on auras and have tons of independently acting units like Harlequins, Custodes, Knights, Drukhari, etc.

I like both of these approaches a lot and think they are right on track for a simple AA system that doesn't throw core mechanics of the game out of whack or require re-writing codex or other major overhauls of the existing rules.

Nice job!

In the major modification, I like the changes to morale - much better than just losing models because you already lost models. I also like the idea of broken units being unable to benefit from auras and stratagems.

In ProHammer, I've been experimenting with more details in how to handle fall back moves. Basically, we define what direction the unit must move towards (i.e. your nearest table edge if you started deployed or the nearest edge if you had special deployment) by the shortest viable path possible. Then we further stipulate that the viable path means that you can't end your move closer than you the unit was to it's nearest enemy unit prior to the fallback move (within a certain overall distance, e.g. 18").

Basically, it means you move towards the relevant table edge and need to be moving away from enemies as well.

We added a pinning rule, which can be triggered by a bunch of things, and if you can't move your full fall back distance (i.e. you'd end up closer to enemy models again or are blocked by impassible terrain, etc.) the unit moves as far as it can and then automatically becomes pinned.

EDIT: I'm considering doing a version of your system that works for ProHammer / classic 40k as well.

 Mezmorki wrote:
I like both of these approaches a lot and think they are right on track for a simple AA system that doesn't throw core mechanics of the game out of whack or require re-writing codex or other major overhauls of the existing rules.

Nice job!

In the major modification, I like the changes to morale - much better than just losing models because you already lost models. I also like the idea of broken units being unable to benefit from auras and stratagems.

In ProHammer, I've been experimenting with more details in how to handle fall back moves. Basically, we define what direction the unit must move towards (i.e. your nearest table edge if you started deployed or the nearest edge if you had special deployment) by the shortest viable path possible. Then we further stipulate that the viable path means that you can't end your move closer than you the unit was to it's nearest enemy unit prior to the fallback move (within a certain overall distance, e.g. 18").

Basically, it means you move towards the relevant table edge and need to be moving away from enemies as well.

We added a pinning rule, which can be triggered by a bunch of things, and if you can't move your full fall back distance (i.e. you'd end up closer to enemy models again or are blocked by impassible terrain, etc.) the unit moves as far as it can and then automatically becomes pinned.

EDIT: I'm considering doing a version of your system that works for ProHammer / classic 40k as well.

The balance you want to strike with any good 'forced/semi-forced movement' system is to make it impactful while not making it a nightmare to resolve or just make units perform weird, suicidal maneuvers.

The other challenge with morale and 40k specifically is unlike settings like WW2, where obviously most of the combatants are terrified humans trying to not get shot, in 40k a lot of units when they 'fail morale' are still going to be acting fairly logically, if being driven by a sense of self-preservation to avoid death. So rather than trying to engineer a set of fully automated behaviors my intention is to try and make the options available to the player more incline them to having a Broken unit act 'realistically'.

Basically, Hide is the only action available to me? I'm likely to move my unit towards the nearest piece of cover to break partial line of sight with as much of the enemy army as possible, and I'm likely to take the Hide action.

I didn't put in a stipulation that you must move towards your table edge because so many units in 40k infiltrate, deep strike, outflank, or just move extremely quickly and you could need to run from something that's between you and your table edge. Or you could be Broken and have a nice piece of empty terrain right next to your unit, which naturally makes the most sense as the place they would run to in order to hide from fire, but it could be towards your opponent's edge rather than your own.