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 Overread wrote:

 Insularum wrote:
It's a no from me. While I'm generally happy to give anything a go if it sounds like it would improve the game, I'm not sure you can make an AA game that can cope with alternating between wildly different scale units from nurglings to titans, over any game size from combat patrol to apocalypse. The amount of admin required to play a game would be crazy.

I don't see why it requires so much more admin? About the only difference is you just need an activation token per unit (not per model for squads).

The issues of nurglings to Titans is basically the same no matter the rules system - a titan is always going to be a massive difference in power over a nurgling no matter what.

Activation tokens alone is already more admin, but that wouldn't be enough. If damage is applied in AA in real time like it is currently (pick up models as soon as they lose wounds):
1. Melee units are useless, as you get an entire shooting phase to intercept them (on top of a potential reactive move away from them). Factions that rely on melee are dead
2. MSU armies are useless, as activating a 1 gun tac squad at a time is way less efficient then activating a maxed out squad of devastator centurions (or a unit of nurglings vs a titan or whatever)
3. Every player just focuses on either intercepting melee units, or shooting enemy units that haven't shot yet to deny an activation

To balance out these issues and more, you would need to get rid of real time damage. This would require additional damage tokens that units rack up throughout the turn to be cashed in during a new damage phase at the end of the turn. In short, AA is not a silver bullet, it would introduce as many issues as it alleviates.

Melee units have already had issues for years - remember way back when Tau were new they could utterly demolish any close combat heavy army if the Tau player got a good turn.

It's still an issue now, though mitigated a bit by the fact that GW has included a lot more options for deployment other than hiding close combat units in transports.

MSU has gains and losses - multiple smaller units means more activations and thus more choices to make. It also means that you've more targets for your opponent. If they've got that one massive unit with all their guns in it then if there's no split fire or limited splitfire rules then that huge amount of damage might go to waste firing it into one or two smaller units. Whilst the army with more smaller units can now return fire on that single blob from more of their individual units.



It's not a silver bullet; but it is a bullet for one of the major issues of large army high lethality I-go-you-go games which is removing or at least reducing the potential for one player to wipe out a significant portion of their opponent's army in a single turn with limited to no retaliation options during that moment. In fact it lets you keep high lethality if the system favours MSU construction of forces in general because both players get retaliation options one after the other rather than one getting to do so with impunity for a turn .



As noted damage assigned at the end of a whole phase could easily overcome that issue with the current turn sequence. Or lowering the lethality of the game in general.

Of course any system being balanced by GW could likely fail. Or do well but then have all its gains undone by the 3 year rules edition cycle.

Honestly, the lethality issue has always been a little overstated. I haven't seen wiping out deployment zones since the swap to 8th and GW pushing players to adopt real terrain. There are definitely moments where some busted combo makes it seem bad against and 10th definitely had early issues with Eldar and Knights, but for the most part I do not see the crippling lethality that was so common a decade ago and really haven't for a while. I think if you're getting blasted off the table you really need to look into your terrain setups and make sure you've got enough ruins to block LOS.

That's the opposite of my experience since 8th. I vastly prefer the 8th edition onwards system to the 3rd to 7th approach, but had to realize that there's hardly a game where something survives past 3rd turn since then. 2nd turn is usually a big slaughter and afterwards you have few if any squads remaining in 40K. Especially in 8th and 9th were you could blow 10 stratagems in the first two turns. In 10th is not as pronounced anymore.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
That's the opposite of my experience since 8th. I vastly prefer the 8th edition onwards system to the 3rd to 7th approach, but had to realize that there's hardly a game where something survives past 3rd turn since then. 2nd turn is usually a big slaughter and afterwards you have few if any squads remaining in 40K. Especially in 8th and 9th were you could blow 10 stratagems in the first two turns. In 10th is not as pronounced anymore.

Yeah, 8th in particular had no idea how to run a resource economy and was riddled with exploits. I mostly was referring for the tendency for armies to die in their deployment zone on the bottom of turn 1, which is something I've not seen nearly as often post 8th edition. To be clear though, 10th is the first time I've rated 40k as a game I actively want to play as opposed to an excuse to stage cool models on a cool board and roll dice. I just find that a lot of the game's traditional lethality problems have been greatly overstated since meaningful LOS blocking became the norm.

 Insularum wrote:

Activation tokens alone is already more admin, but that wouldn't be enough. If damage is applied in AA in real time like it is currently (pick up models as soon as they lose wounds):
1. Melee units are useless, as you get an entire shooting phase to intercept them (on top of a potential reactive move away from them). Factions that rely on melee are dead

Just move the charge phase at the end of the movement phase, no problem.

2. MSU armies are useless, as activating a 1 gun tac squad at a time is way less efficient then activating a maxed out squad of devastator centurions (or a unit of nurglings vs a titan or whatever)

MSU are very useful, since you have many more activations than your opponents. You also have stronger units on the board by the way, not just shaff, so you paint a one-sided picture that is not sincere.

3. Every player just focuses on either intercepting melee units, or shooting enemy units that haven't shot yet to deny an activation

As they already do. But as said in point 1, move charge at the end of movement phase, and melee units are not useless at all.

To balance out these issues and more, you would need to get rid of real time damage. This would require additional damage tokens that units rack up throughout the turn to be cashed in during a new damage phase at the end of the turn. In short, AA is not a silver bullet, it would introduce as many issues as it alleviates.

Any issue would be worth solving, instead of the current system of waiting 30 min for your first turn (most boring game system i have ever seen) while your opponent weakens your army because of luck of the draw.

Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

Gitdakka wrote:Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

Spoiler:

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

Activation by formation feels like IGOUGO, with extra steps.

Siegfriedfr wrote:

Spoiler:

 Insularum wrote:

Activation tokens alone is already more admin, but that wouldn't be enough. If damage is applied in AA in real time like it is currently (pick up models as soon as they lose wounds):
1. Melee units are useless, as you get an entire shooting phase to intercept them (on top of a potential reactive move away from them). Factions that rely on melee are dead

Just move the charge phase at the end of the movement phase, no problem.

2. MSU armies are useless, as activating a 1 gun tac squad at a time is way less efficient then activating a maxed out squad of devastator centurions (or a unit of nurglings vs a titan or whatever)

MSU are very useful, since you have many more activations than your opponents. You also have stronger units on the board by the way, not just shaff, so you paint a one-sided picture that is not sincere.

Spoiler:

3. Every player just focuses on either intercepting melee units, or shooting enemy units that haven't shot yet to deny an activation

As they already do. But as said in point 1, move charge at the end of movement phase, and melee units are not useless at all.

To balance out these issues and more, you would need to get rid of real time damage. This would require additional damage tokens that units rack up throughout the turn to be cashed in during a new damage phase at the end of the turn. In short, AA is not a silver bullet, it would introduce as many issues as it alleviates.

Any issue would be worth solving, instead of the current system of waiting 30 min for your first turn (most boring game system i have ever seen) while your opponent weakens your army because of luck of the draw.

On the subject of one sided and not sincere, your poll options are Yeah! Yeah! and no, for a sarcastic reason. I think AA games can be great, I don't think 40k can be made to fit in AA without losing more than you gain - that is my sincere thoughts on this.

I think AA works for small forces with nearly fixed numbers of units, like Adeptus Titanicus and Kill Team.

 Insularum wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

Spoiler:

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

Activation by formation feels like IGOUGO, with extra steps.

Why does it feel like that, rather than feeling like AA with fewer steps? At least superficially it looks like a way to mitigate the common critique of AA where one side exploits the system by having far more activations.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Insularum wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

Spoiler:

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

Activation by formation feels like IGOUGO, with extra steps.

Why does it feel like that, rather than feeling like AA with fewer steps? At least superficially it looks like a way to mitigate the common critique of AA where one side exploits the system by having far more activations.

Swarm Tyranid VS Custodes would still have the same issue; you'd just have one side with more formations than the other. Unless you adjust the game to have mirror-deployment numbers and quantities then you're always going to have an imbalance of activations. Heck you have it now its just a moot point because you only have 1 activation per army so you don't see the unit disparity. A Swarm army always has more choices; more units; more mass to move around and do stuff with and an elite army always has fewer units that will demolish most swarm army individual units one-on-one.

I think its important to note that alternate activation doesn't mean that units are just 1v1 all the time. Yes a swarm army unit won't stand up to an elite 1 on 1; but even in AA you will still gang up your many swarm units onto one target; you will still see 1 elite unit split fire so they can pin/damage/take out more than one weaker swarm unit.

Sprinkle in some command point abilities and so forth and perhaps some additional points if there's a big activation disparity (eg for every 2 activations your opponent takes in a row you get 1 additional point to use a strategic ability) and you've got things to do even when your opponent might out-activate you.

 Insularum wrote:
On the subject of one sided and not sincere, your poll options are Yeah! Yeah! and no, for a sarcastic reason. I think AA games can be great, I don't think 40k can be made to fit in AA without losing more than you gain - that is my sincere thoughts on this.

Not sure what's your point. I have a preference and it shows right in the first post.

Anyway, there are 2 yes and 2 no answers to this poll, seems very balanced for a poll on such a touchy subject.

 Overread wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Insularum wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

Spoiler:

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

Activation by formation feels like IGOUGO, with extra steps.

Why does it feel like that, rather than feeling like AA with fewer steps? At least superficially it looks like a way to mitigate the common critique of AA where one side exploits the system by having far more activations.

Swarm Tyranid VS Custodes would still have the same issue; you'd just have one side with more formations than the other. Unless you adjust the game to have mirror-deployment numbers and quantities then you're always going to have an imbalance of activations. Heck you have it now its just a moot point because you only have 1 activation per army so you don't see the unit disparity. A Swarm army always has more choices; more units; more mass to move around and do stuff with and an elite army always has fewer units that will demolish most swarm army individual units one-on-one.

I think its important to note that alternate activation doesn't mean that units are just 1v1 all the time. Yes a swarm army unit won't stand up to an elite 1 on 1; but even in AA you will still gang up your many swarm units onto one target; you will still see 1 elite unit split fire so they can pin/damage/take out more than one weaker swarm unit.

Sprinkle in some command point abilities and so forth and perhaps some additional points if there's a big activation disparity (eg for every 2 activations your opponent takes in a row you get 1 additional point to use a strategic ability) and you've got things to do even when your opponent might out-activate you.

Do you mean formations or squads? The example given was activations in 500 point blocks so each players activation is roughly the same overall combat value. True, the Tyranids might have more squads taking actions per activation, but you're still avoiding that big end-of-round clump of activations that comes from the same scenario but activating only unit-by-unit.

Armies should definitely be different, and I'd never advocate for mirror unit numbers. But AA naturally seems to favor gaming unit numbers in ways that ought to be mitigated. The same-combat-value "chunk" activations don't seem unreasonable at first glance.

I was more talking about formations which would be multiple squads but not necessarily linked to point values. Breaking armies down into 500point blocks for, say, a 2K game could be done but I suspect it would require a LOT of fundamental adjustments to be undertaken to make it work.

It might also result in really simplified unit types and roles because now your specialists have to be sprinkled into mass activations.


I dunno, my gut feeling says no because 500 point blocks are still big blocks capable of quite considerable firepower and damage all on their own. It might mitigate out though; but that might only be if it came hand in hand with major reworks and things like lethality also coming down.


GW might even like that though as they could do 500 or near 500 boxed "combat patrols"



I have seen "Formation" building like that before - Planetfall kind of went that way under Spartan Games, but a bit part of that was both making the game simple to build armies with, but also keeping their sku really down so you had preformed blocks of select models you'd form your army around. It made army building a lot simpler and I think 40K players would HATE that (we already dislike the loss of points in the current edition*)




*say what you like, this edition is running on power-level in all but name and the numbers we have to add up.

Armageddon in 8th edition essentially worked that way. I think you could do something where you have 3 squads in your list that have to be a minimum of 500 points each. Certainly something that could be played around with if someone wanted to try it out.

 Overread wrote:

Spoiler:

I was more talking about formations which would be multiple squads but not necessarily linked to point values. Breaking armies down into 500point blocks for, say, a 2K game could be done but I suspect it would require a LOT of fundamental adjustments to be undertaken to make it work.

It might also result in really simplified unit types and roles because now your specialists have to be sprinkled into mass activations.


I dunno, my gut feeling says no because 500 point blocks are still big blocks capable of quite considerable firepower and damage all on their own. It might mitigate out though; but that might only be if it came hand in hand with major reworks and things like lethality also coming down.


GW might even like that though as they could do 500 or near 500 boxed "combat patrols"



I have seen "Formation" building like that before - Planetfall kind of went that way under Spartan Games, but a bit part of that was both making the game simple to build armies with, but also keeping their sku really down so you had preformed blocks of select models you'd form your army around. It made army building a lot simpler and I think 40K players would HATE that (we already dislike the loss of points in the current edition*)




*say what you like, this edition is running on power-level in all but name and the numbers we have to add up.

Why would it take a lot of "fundamental changes"?

Like, genuinely I don't think you need new unit restrictions or anything. Just take a 40k system and change it to AA, but then limit activations to "up to 500 points". I don't see what immediately "breaks" with that.

But also, doesn't have to be 500 points either. Pick a number. 350. Whatever.

Tyel wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Personally, I’d rather lose a game and be able to look back, say “That’s what I did wrong,” and improve for next time than win a game where my skill wasn’t particularly relevant.

I wouldn't want skill to be completely eliminated. If you are making decisions, there must inevitably be "good decisions" and "bad decisions". And skill is arguably making the good ones.

But there are two sides to a game. Giving one player scope often entails preventing the second player from just instantly stopping them.

I mean again - "wouldn't it be good to make initiative matter?"
"Why?"
"So my superfast Eldar can hit your sluggish Orks before they know what's happening."
"But what's in it for me as an Ork player?"
"I guess you've got slightly higher toughness, so maybe I'll roll poorly and you won't die, then you can try and hit me back."
"...doesn't seem great?"

And in a game where the Eldar player picks apart the Ork player's army (which blunders around with worse movement, lower initiative etc) what did the Ork player do wrong? Beyond playing Orks that is.

Now maybe there are people who wouldn't mind. But competitively it feels like one side would have a major advantage. And so, inevitably, GW would then have to come up with a lot of mechanisms for trying to make Orks work despite being initiative 2. Feels like we've gone down this road before.

It's a somewhat artificial distinction though.

The same argument can be made for S vs T - why should a low T army want it, when you could just make to wound automatic? It's of no advantage to a low T army that you have this rule, because it does nothing but penalise them and advantage high S armies. Orks have crap BS, but somehow no one considers removing the roll to hit so they don't feel bad about it.

Because that's the point of rules that make armies good at some things and bad at others. The only reason Initiative is discussed this way is because GW took it away, lending it some pseudo justification that there's an intrinsic reason that it be removed. But it's no more or less sensible than saying that scifi guns should automatically wound what they hit - they're deadly weapons.

Low initiative armies feel bad if initiative exists.
Low Toughness armies feel bad if toughness exists.
Low save armies feel bad if saves exist.

Being bad at something is not a reason to remove a rule from the game, unless you want a game where every dice succeeds on a 2+ and no one is bad at anything.

Initiative really lacks meaningful counterplay. Fights first can cause similar issues if available in mass on models that are either durable or have competent shooting and really needs to be rare. I don't think making it a core rule does any favors.

 LunarSol wrote:
Initiative really lacks meaningful counterplay. Fights first can cause similar issues if available in mass on models that are either durable or have competent shooting and really needs to be rare. I don't think making it a core rule does any favors.

Having low toughness has no counter play either.

 Hellebore wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Initiative really lacks meaningful counterplay. Fights first can cause similar issues if available in mass on models that are either durable or have competent shooting and really needs to be rare. I don't think making it a core rule does any favors.

Having low toughness has no counter play either.

Toughness has almost no bearing on the active player.

Not sure I follow.

The point is that if you always go first, you always have a chance to just win without your opponent being able to do anything about it. And equally, you'd probably want your chances of success to rise if you do the sensible thing of putting say Shuriken Catapults into infantry, and Fire Dragons+Bright Lances into tanks.

So then you always go first, and have a good chance to just win due to sensible decision making - much balance, great game. The opponent can really look at their decision making and workout what they did wrong (not play Eldar I guess).

I don't want to pick on Eldar too much - but I feel this is a real Eldar mentality (and to a degree the other elite armies). "I'm playing the perfect game, so I should win most of the time". Fine - but what of your opponent - with lower movement, lower initiative. What's their gameplan? Just hope their opponent messes up or fluffs the dice rolls?

Fundamentally though - no. Ork BS shouldn't be bad "so Ork Shooting Is Bad". GW has then often be reduced to trying to "remove the hit roll" to fix it. Just as they had to bail out Ork initiative. But without this you are stuck with a terrible way to design a game. Because if Ork Shooting is objectively bad, its really telling Ork Players they should never run Ork Shooting Units. (Like say Shoota Boyz for approaching 30 years). Its like the idea Tau should have the worst assault unit in the game for the lols. But no one would ever run it (except for the lols - or as a trap for newbies) so what's the point? See Storm Guardians for pretty much the whole of 40k up until maybe 10th.

If as GW you don't think Orks should be shooting, then the answer is not to make Orks with guns. Its not to have them and then make them deliberately bad. Every unit in the game should be "good" at what its meant to be used for. So you might want to take it in a vaguely sensible list.

You can go down the Bloodbowl route and have a clear tier system. Some factions are explicitly not as good as the best ones - and if you play them then that's on you. But that works on the basis that you can buy a team with a single box. Not so much in 40k where you've spent hundreds to get the joke NPC tier faction that will be beaten up by everyone else. Its not as easy as say playing Wood Elves and Halflings.

This is perhaps trending off topic. To a degree unit AA might inevitably detract from this. You move your Eldar unit up to do some damage - well then the big clunking fist of an Ork unit gets to respond. But I feel such a system isn't going to allow for the grand manoeuvres or subtle encirclements to enable shooting people in the flank or rear that people seem to imagine and want. Such would depend on your opponent wandering into your trap.

A bit simplified, but:

Orks play against higher initative is having more numbers and above average toughness to weather through to eke out the win..

The Eldar play against high strength (against low toughness) used to be the higher initiative to try and reduce the eventual damage coming in to eke out the win.

The game is simply more dysfunctional without initiative and removing it (like removing Movement during 3e) was a mistake.

I don't mind iniaitive, and I think it's a good stat and worked well for close combat. Orks going last in close combat was made up for by each Ork being really good in melee for their points, so you were able to weather the pummelling and give it back.

In theory, I really like the idea of Initiative vs BS for shooting. But I feel it's going to really hammer Orks (and Necrons) even more. And I feel shooting is different to melee - for one, Orks aren't good at shooting, and they don't get to reply to enemy shooting immediately. So a fast enemy with good shooting can kite them, and now they're gonna hit them more often too because of the Ork's low initiative stat. I feel that's very hard to point for properly, and I think it's true that people who would like these systems aren't thinking much about how it might feel for the Ork player in these situations.

I dunno, you could probably hammer it out but I feel it'd be a lot trickier than it is for melee.

Gitdakka wrote:Activation by formations of units is something I could see working for 40k. Say blocks of 500pts in each formation roughly.

That way units and transports could act together for example. And msu would not spam activations.

I've kicked this idea around before. The high concept is really appealing, but the details get messy fast. Like, if you're activating 500 points at a time from anywhere on the table, it can immediately become harder to keep track of which units are still available. Tokens to mark activated units help, sure, but it's still a consideration. And then you have to constantly be juggling unit costs in your mind. If you're playing MSU, you might be juggling the costs of around 10 units in your head and trying to keep them straight while you plan out which units to activate next. Or your remaining unactivated units might have unfortunate points totals that force you to do a few "inefficient" activations because you can't activate your transport and its passengers and your walker in the same activation because they're just a little over 500 points collectively but any two of those units is less than 400 points.

These are all solvable problems, but they are problems that would have to be solved.

I feel like more restrictive army building rules that help keep the number of activations within a reasonable range might be the way to go here. Alternatively, some sort of initiative system might work, but instead of making it an army-wide thing, keep it restricted to a few broad categories. So for instance, both eldar and ork bikes might be initiative 3, both eldar and ork "heavy" units (tanks, wraiths, meganobz) might be initiative 1, and everything else would be in the middle at initiative 2. You could play with those values as part of special rules , but you'd want to do so sparingly to avoid having all eldar attack before all orks, etc.

I also feel like there's maybe some interesting potential with having multiple common/battleline units activate together. So guardsmen might not be as impressive as heavy weapons teams or tanks, but maybe activating a company commander lets you activate up to X additional Guardsmen units within Y" of him. That gives your relatively unimpressive units a way to apply more force per activation while still remaining flexible in how you use them and individually less impressive than their elite counterparts.

LunarSol wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Initiative really lacks meaningful counterplay. Fights first can cause similar issues if available in mass on models that are either durable or have competent shooting and really needs to be rare. I don't think making it a core rule does any favors.

Having low toughness has no counter play either.

Toughness has almost no bearing on the active player.

Consistently going second as orks wouldn't be much fun, but I think there are ways to play around with the turn order to keep it more interesting for both parties. If you do the old Kill Team thing of letting some units "ready" their shooting, then orks could potentially be activating before some units but after others provided they're willing to give up some movement/charging to do so. Charging could let units swing before non charging units in the fight phase meaning that orks might find themselves shooting *after* their opponents as they move closer, but punching *before* them once you get to the charge phase. Some strats or unit abilities could let you count as being ready/having charged for purposes of keeping the tempo a little uncertain. This is all assuming per phase AA rather than per unit though.

If you bring the damn Initiative stat back AND want to put it on shooting as well, you better give Orks the very best shooting initiative because they don't even waste time on aiming.

The other option is to do damage allocation at the end of the combat resolution for both sides in a close combat situation. So that damage is allocated at the same moment so it doesn't matter which side fights first.

Then you can introduce a few special abilities for limited units that gain "assigns damage before opponent resolves attacks" and "engages attacks after opponent assigns damage"


This means that you have units that you know will always fight first or second (unless against units with the same ability and then they cancel each other out) and thus you can balance their stats around that aspect of their playstyle.

So Eldar might have more of the former and orks more of the latter ;but not all units would be like that.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Initiative really lacks meaningful counterplay. Fights first can cause similar issues if available in mass on models that are either durable or have competent shooting and really needs to be rare. I don't think making it a core rule does any favors.

Having low toughness has no counter play either.

Toughness has almost no bearing on the active player.

You mean the active player's toughness has no bearing - the target's toughness certainly does. Whether it does or not is not really relevant though - you said meaningful counterplay. You can't avoid having low toughness you just have to deal with being vulnerable to your enemy's attacks. There is no way to avoid the effects of low toughness, no counterplay to mitigate it.

Melee that uses initiative has a range of counterplay options that GW used in some games and not others. WFB 6th had chargers striking first to reflect the charge advantage, so even slow orcs got to strike first if they set up their charges right. in 40k they got bonus attacks for charging so even if some died the remainder hit more. Some rules allow for Initative bonuses.

But the fact you want simultaneous melee but also don't want initiative is weird - if it was truly turn based then whoever was active would make attacks the target would stand there and take it. having both sides attack together is already giving the inactive player a bonus they shouldn't really have and now they shouldn't even have a mediating factor of initiative either? Where is the tactics of setting up your melees if you're just giving your opponent free melee attacks back?


Then there's the simple fact that the low initiative armies either had cheap units, or tough ones or both, so that they made up for first strikes by surviving or having a lot more bodies to attack back.

The problem isn't with IGoUGo, it's with the pacing of the game. Too few turns, too much movement and damage per turn, and too many special abilities that can be pulled out of a hat with no warning. Also too much time spent resolving dice-gimmicks.

If that wasn't the case you wouldn't need AA to react to stuff, you'd just react to it when your own turn comes and that would be sufficient.

 TedNugent wrote:


a grey hunter was considered a huge step up simply because it had a CCW unlike a tactical marine. Even for +1 PPM it was considered a big upgrade since it meant +1 attack (since ork boyz had base 2 attacks compared to tactical marines, and nobz has base 3 attacks compared to vets at 2).

5th edition Grey Hunters were cheaper than Tactical Marines. A 5-man GH squad started at 75 points. A 5-man tactical squad was 90 in the vanilla codex. The Tacticals included a squad Sergeant with LD 9, had combat tactics (allowed them to voluntarily fail morale), and the combat squads rule allowing them to split a 10-man squad into two 5-man squads. They were 16 points per model. At 15 points per model, the Grey Hunters not only got the Bolt Pistol/CCW combo for the extra attack they also had the Counterattack USR which gave them the bonus attack for charging when they got charged. So they had 3 attacks per model in close combat whether they were the instigators or not. Grey Hunters didn't have a pack leader and so were just LD 8 but they could take two special weapons instead of a special and a heavy weapon like the tacticals. They were practically an upgrade across the board and were cheaper to boot. Orks would think twice about charging a grey hunter pack that could put out 30 CC attacks before a single boy got to swing.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
The problem isn't with IGoUGo, it's with the pacing of the game. Too few turns, too much movement and damage per turn, and too many special abilities that can be pulled out of a hat with no warning. Also too much time spent resolving dice-gimmicks.

If that wasn't the case you wouldn't need AA to react to stuff, you'd just react to it when your own turn comes and that would be sufficient.

Frankly i disagree, the problem with igougo is not about the ruleset contained within it, it's about player agency and having fun.

In the current 40k system (or any other main GW games) :

1) the person going second is effectively locked out of playing the game for the first 20-30 minutes. Fine and dandy for competitive players, no fun for normal people.
2) the person going second has an inherent disadvantage since damage is distributed immediately (as opposed to "at the end of the turn").

Let's be frank, the fact that GW maintains that system is because of tradition and the fear of the vocal minority uproar, certainly not because of its quality.