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Hi Everybody! let me explain:

today I was thinking: I am sure I have read somewhere that warhammer is comparable to chess, but in chess players move one "piece" at a time and then they switch to their opponent. why not doing the same in warhammer?

After determining who will commence the game (Let's call him Player A)
During the movement phase, Player A moves one unit and then Player B does the same and the same happens for any other player.
Same repeat with the psychic phase, shooting phase, charge and morale.

I believe that playing the game in this way would make it more balanced and give every player the opportuniy to actually use some of their units instead of seeing them being wiped out ay first turn.
also would give players the chance at controlling objective in a more balanced way instead of having one army usually storming the board on turn one and tag most of the objective
I understand that in this way, the player with fewer unit potentially would have a lot less "moves" than the player with more units but I think that overall this dynamic would give more space for further strategical play for all the players.

What you guys think?

If warhammer was like chess, players would use identical armies. That is the biggest source of imbalance in warhammer, asymmetrical starting game pieces.

The problem of first player bias also exists in chess but since chess tends to be played out over 40 turns that bias is not so great compared with a warhammer game which is generally done over half a dozen or so.

Warhammer was not really meant to be a hard nosed competitive game but rather a bit of snakes and ladders dice rolling while showing off your fabulous paint jobs so I am not sure it is worth agonising over.

If you are a competitive player then why are you not playing a proper game that was designed to be such?

Celestino2 wrote:Hi Everybody! let me explain:

today I was thinking: I am sure I have read somewhere that warhammer is comparable to chess, but in chess players move one "piece" at a time and then they switch to their opponent. why not doing the same in warhammer?

After determining who will commence the game (Let's call him Player A)
During the movement phase, Player A moves one unit and then Player B does the same and the same happens for any other player.
Same repeat with the psychic phase, shooting phase, charge and morale.

I believe that playing the game in this way would make it more balanced and give every player the opportuniy to actually use some of their units instead of seeing them being wiped out ay first turn.
also would give players the chance at controlling objective in a more balanced way instead of having one army usually storming the board on turn one and tag most of the objective
I understand that in this way, the player with fewer unit potentially would have a lot less "moves" than the player with more units but I think that overall this dynamic would give more space for further strategical play for all the players.

What you guys think?

What you are talking about is generally called alternating phases or alternating activations within phases and in 40k it doesn't work. Player A is a Khorne melee army and Player B is Tau. Player A moves into position to charge a unit. Player B moves that unit to maximum charge range (so that they can still fire over watch) or moves an unfavorable target in between (like a devil fish). In order for alternating activations in 40k to work the players need to be able to actually act with a activation and that means going through all phases at once so they can move and cause meaningful impact before the opponent gets to respond.

SolarCross wrote:If warhammer was like chess, players would use identical armies. That is the biggest source of imbalance in warhammer, asymmetrical starting game pieces.

This isn't true and never has been. Different amounts of pieces is fine. More weak activations can outmaneuver bigger more expensive units but are not capable of anywhere near the same amount of impact. It balances itself and a army composed solely of either extreme is handy capping itself. The best lists have good mixes of both.

The problem of first player bias also exists in chess but since chess tends to be played out over 40 turns that bias is not so great compared with a warhammer game which is generally done over half a dozen or so.

The issue with first turn advantage in 40k is that you move every chess piece at the same time. Not how many turns it takes.

Warhammer was not really meant to be a hard nosed competitive game but rather a bit of snakes and ladders dice rolling while showing off your fabulous paint jobs so I am not sure it is worth agonising over.

If you are a competitive player then why are you not playing a proper game that was designed to be such?

40k is a game and games need some measure of balance to be fun for all involved. It doesn't need to be crazy competitive to want some amount of balance.

Warhammer is not a game like chess.

The biggest differences is chess has no hidden infirmation and no random variables outside who plays white. That is the apeal of chess. Warhammer has very many random variables. Although in theory very little hidden information.

As Lance points out, this is a concept we're pretty familiar with here in the Proposed rules section. You can't swing a grot around without hitting a thread discussing it!

I've come around to the idea of doing something like this:

* Players go back and forth activating one unit at a time.
* When a unit activates, it does its full turn.
* When a non-character unit activates, you can choose to activate a character unit with less than 10 wounds along with it. This makes it easier to keep characters in aura range.
* Units may not fall back on a turn in which they were charged. This keeps your opponent from immediately falling back and preventing melee units from hiding in melee.

Other variations might work better depending on the game size. At lower points, for instance, you might be able to get away with modeling unit activation a bit closer to the Kill Team system (where one player does all their movement/charging, followed by the other, and then there are rules for which units can be chosen to shoot and fight first). But that level of detail is a bit much for something like a 1500 or 2000 point army.

Some of the advantages of doing a unit's entire turn at once include:
* Shooty units don't get a chance to run away from stabby units before they can charge.
* You don't have to rapidly jump between a bunch of different data sheets in quick succession. You're pretty much just looking at one unit's stats as you go through its entire turn.
* Similar to that last point, it seems like it would be a lot faster to rapidly resolve your movement, psychic powers, shooting, etc. for a unit all in one go rather than "handing off" whose turn it is once per unit per phase.

If you and I each have 10 units (20 total) and we go back and forth to resolve entire unit turns, then we end up with 20 activations in a game round. If we have to go back and forth for each unit each phase, your movement and shooting phases alone might result in 40 activations. Fighting potentially another 20 on top of that, and some number more for morale, psychic, and the charge phase (depending on how charge rolls go and what the armies look like).

Thank you everyone for getting back to my thread.

Pretty interesting answers if I have to be honest.
I personally, am not a competitive player, nor I have much interest into playing it competitive. One of the main things that I love about the game is it's lore and it's range of miniatures. I truly believe that, specially 40k, has got a flavour for everyone miniature-wise. what makes me a little bit disappointed is the fact that GW seems to be biasad towards some factions *cough* space marines *cough* and as a game comlex as this one, I do believe that luck should not be a very dominant factor, hence why my exploring the possibilities of having players activating their units one each per turn.

If anything, I do like the "reaction phase" that Infinity has and I believe it would be nice if GW would incorporate something similar ( I am aware that overwatch it's similar to that )

I like the ideas that Wyldhunt is throwing around!