Attempting to add Alternating Actions to 40k

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**Barrywise**

Howdy Y'all,

Been a hot minute since I've visited the site, but I've been wheeling the idea of alternate activations in 40k for awhile in my brain and just wanted to put pen to paper. Especially with the turn of the edition, might be a fun way to try out the edition one last time before it goes away. Also, please feel free to absolutely shred these ideas, I'll list some pros and cons with each idea, but obviously I'm not omniscient.

Objective: Keep the rules as true to current 40k, while also integrating an alternating actions system that hopefully limits alpha strikes.

Option A (my friend's suggestion)

Spoiler:

Option B (my idea)

Spoiler:

Inspired by one of the other tabletop games my friends play (Drop Fleet Commander), players have a card for each unit in their army, with the Power Level or Points Value of the unit written in one of the top corners. Players stack their cards in the order that they'd want to activate their units. Once both players are ready, they reveal the top card of their deck, with the lower Point Value player going first. The activated unit associated with the card is allowed to move, shoot, charge and fight. Going through a full activation. Here's the catch. The player who just went reveals their next card and adds that value to their previous card. The player with the lowest sum of points activates their next unit. Example:

> Player 1 has three 80pt cards on the top of their deck
> Player 2 has one 200pt card on the top of their deck
> Revealing cards, player 1 gets to move the two associated 80pt units.
> Once revealing the 3rd 80pt card, the 1st player's sum is now 240, so the 2nd player with a 200pt unit gets to go next.

My idea behind this is to alternate player actions based on the supposed power/impact of the units being activated, while hopefully matching the power that players are activating as they progress through the round. What I like about this system is that it allows players to track which units they've activated as the units inactivated are still in your deck waiting to be drawn. However, one of my major issues with this idea is that a melee unit that charges and wipes the enemy they charged is just left out in the open. Additionally, if the unit that was charged survives and hasn't been activated yet, they can just fall back out of combat, leaving the melee unit open to getting shot. One of the other ideas from DFC is the idea of your commander/HQ being able to switch up some of the cards in your deck. Maybe on activating the HQ? More cards affected the more expensive the tax paid for taking the HQ? idk. If you really wanted to, you could combine the deck idea with Option A, but that feels a bit too much to me.

Pros:
- Easy to keep track of activated units
- Players hopefully match power/impact of activated units

Cons:
- Melee units can get wrecked if they're activated too early
- With a large army, the deck will probably be a bit annoying to manage

Option C

Spoiler:

Again, feel free to absolutely shred these. Just wanted to get the ideas out into the world.

**Tawnis**

I really like Apoc's take on it. It not only fixes the issue of taking a long time of not doing anything while adding more tactical insight, but also helps prevent Alpha strike which is a big issue a lot of the time. It's also cool that you only see the number of wounds inflicted and saves are later, so sometimes a key unit might luck out and live, or soak even more firepower than necessary to ensure it's demise. I do think that the addition of the Scrum phase to it would be unnecessary though.

**Wyldhunt**

I think you've done a pretty good job of identifying the pros and cons of each option.

A. I voted for B, but on further reflection, I think I probably prefer A. But the potential to have one army with tons of interactions and another army with relatively few seems like it could lead to some very gamey and annoying situations.

B. I like it, but I worry that the inability to reliably activate multiple units in quick succession could really screw over some maneuvers. For instance, if I send a squad of banshees and fire dragons to blow up a rhino and charge the guys inside, I'm kind of screwed if my banshees end up activating first or if the banshees have to wait too long after the fire dragons activate. I feel like this could work well in smaller games.

Also, both A and B would need to spell out how they deal with things like transports. If my banshees and dragons are hanging out in a wave serpent together, do I have to activate all three separately? Can I hop out of the transport and functionally activate three units at once? What if I embark a unit on a transport? Etc.

C. I like apoc, but it really does work better as its own thing. As you point out, tracking the the types of wounds on a unit would be a ton of bookkeeping in its own right. I also tend to think of the whole "stuff gets to shoot back before it dies" as a double-edged sword. My drukhari kind of rely on popping out from behind terrain and killing things before they can retaliate. Stuff not dying right away means that I can't use maneuvering to make up for their poor defensive stats.

**Tawnis**

Wyldhunt wrote:
I think you've done a pretty good job of identifying the pros and cons of each option.

C. I like apoc, but it really does work better as its own thing. As you point out, tracking the the types of wounds on a unit would be a ton of bookkeeping in its own right. I also tend to think of the whole "stuff gets to shoot back before it dies" as a double-edged sword. My drukhari kind of rely on popping out from behind terrain and killing things before they can retaliate. Stuff not dying right away means that I can't use maneuvering to make up for their poor defensive stats.

Some units could have a keyword ability like Ambush or something where their damage is inflicted right away. Could be a good way to balance this while still keeping the overall mechanic.

**cody.d.**

Could also be an initiative system for activation. Like in combat for 7th and HH but in every phase. Would make fast armies feel fast as they get to move, shoot and attack first. But you can justify making them flimsy as they get to control the pace of things.

An eldar is faster than a marine who is faster than an ork. With exceptions, wraith constructs being slower, bikers being faster, terminators being dirt slow but tough as hell.

**alextroy**

I would go with Option A, with an alteration. As one army can easily have many more activations than another, you have to offset that by requiring an army with more activations available in a phase to activate more units at a time. This would require some work to avoid the use of chaff units to allow a player to totally front or backload these multiple activations, but it would lead to a much better result that the mess you would see from a Questoris Knight Army going up against a hard MSU army.

**AnomanderRake**

The problems with alternating activations in 40k are myriad; the size of armies varies massively, armies' ability to add cheap units to gain activation control varies massively, and the length of an individual activation is very long. The closest I've ever seen to a game that plays like 40k would with alternating activations is Dystopian Wars, where you can have a large number of units and where each unit's activation can have move/shoot/assault steps, but the game gets increasingly unwieldy as it gets bigger because of how long activating all those units actually takes.

If I were rebuilding 40k to do alternating activations today the main thing to do would be to shrink the activation; e.g. imagine an activation is "move step->combat step" rather than move/shoot/assault, psychic powers are passive buffs rather than an extra active step to remember to do, that kind of thing.

**Wyldhunt**

AnomanderRake wrote:
The problems with alternating activations in 40k are myriad; the size of armies varies massively, armies' ability to add cheap units to gain activation control varies massively, and the length of an individual activation is very long.

I keep finding myself wanting to try out using the previous edition of Kill Team's turn structure in a ~750 point 40k game. The points would be low enough that the disparity in the number of units should be minimal, and part of me really likes the idea of giving priority to units that charged/readied. This is just spitballing, but I could see something like:

* Turn Order is Command Phase > Movement Phase > Action Phase > Fight Phase > Morale Phase (if we keep morale).
* Command phase is what you'd expect. Players alternate throwing orders/buffs.
* Movement phase lets you either move or ready your unit.
* Action phase is where you can shoot, advance, or charge. Take turn activating readied units first, then non-readied units. This means that readying a unit functionally gives it a chance to "overwatch" an approaching enemy, and melee armies can potentially get their most fragile units into the safety of melee by activating them first. Would maybe consider having each type of action (shooting, advancing, charging) be its own activation, so marines that want to shoot and charge would take two actions overall whereas a squad of hormagaunts would just go straight for the charge. Assault weapons would let you advance or charge immediately after shooting (as a single activation). Pistols would let you shoot them immediately after charging.
* Fight phase is what you'd expect. Take turn activating units to smack each other. Units that charged take turns first. Would consider making players opt to "fall back" during this phase, giving up their melee attacks in exchange for being allowed to move out of engagement range at the end of the following movement phase.
* Morale phase would be whatever, but would happen here if it exists and needs its own phase.
* Psychic powers would either be command phase abilities, always-on buffs, or literally be treated like guns in the case of witchfires.

So faster back-and-forth, more opportunities to pop in and out of cover, incentives for holding still or getting the charge off, and options for falling back without it being "free" to do so. But as I said, I'm just spitballing. I"m sure this exact idea has been pitched a hundred times at this point.