We have a 3 per side 2400 point game planned and we were discussing what to do about the orders phase.

Having 6 independent commands and thus 6 unique turns seems a little over complicated, especially as the order of the turns will change depending on what cards are played. On the other hand, only having 1 commander issuing orders creates a lack of control.

Our general plan at the moment is to have one character give a command and then replicate the pips to the other commanders as a generic command (ambush, push or assault).

For example, if the Imperials play New Ways to Motivate Them- Vader uses the card as it is, whereas the other players with Veers and The Emperor will give 'push' commands as NWtMT is a 2 pip card.

If, next turn, they play Maximum Firepower, Veers will command himself and do his thing while Vader and The Emperor give out ambush commands as it is a one pip card.

We're thinking that this gives a level of control and also limits the effect of 'special' commands on the whole table which will make it a bit more focused on standard tactics with pockets of heroic intervention.

Has anyone else tried anything like this? Or is it easier to us the 'team game' rules even with extra players?

We also need to work out what we're doing with the order pools- keeping them separate sounds like the best plan.

Have you checked out the team battle rules in the RRG? It's for 1200 point games though, but it has some neat ideas. Each player plays a card on its own, and issues orders on his own, yet initiative is determined for entire team by the lowest pip card.

It depends if your main plan is to fight all together as one or if every one will want complete control over his own units.
If it's the first then I think that your plan for the command cards is fine and for the unassigned tokens I'd say to form a single order pool with all remaining units from the 3 of you.
If it's the second option, maybe each can have his own command hand and each play one command card per turn. To determine priority you could add the pips from the 3 cards and the team with less pips has it. I'd still play with a single order pool with all remaining orders, but in this case will have sense too to have them separated as you said.

13 minutes ago, Lemmiwinks86 said:

It depends if your main plan is to fight all together as one or if every one will want complete control over his own units.
If it's the first then I think that your plan for the command cards is fine and for the unassigned tokens I'd say to form a single order pool with all remaining units from the 3 of you.
If it's the second option, maybe each can have his own command hand and each play one command card per turn. To determine priority you could add the pips from the 3 cards and the team with less pips has it. I'd still play with a single order pool with all remaining orders, but in this case will have sense too to have them separated as you said.

We definitely want the first. While our overall experience with Legion isn't particularly extensive, we've all played a lot of wargames from like Warhammer and Flames of War. As a group we don't like large games that devolve into slow playing one-on-one games.

I'm thinking a single command stack could slow the game down a bit too much- if you pull a corps token, three people have to make a decision over a number of competing squads. If we pick a player and they draw from their own they should have at least a vague plan in their head of what they want to do. To a point, I suppose it depends on which units we take. After all, we're bound to have at least a brace of AT-STs and I think we have the potential of 3 airspeeders between us. The lower the number of units, the more acceptable a single command stack is.

38 minutes ago, Shanturin said:

Have you checked out the team battle rules in the RRG? It's for 1200 point games though, but it has some neat ideas. Each player plays a card on its own, and issues orders on his own, yet initiative is determined for entire team by the lowest pip card.

That's our starting point- we're just exploring other options. No idea is a bad idea and all that. Except hydrogen zeppelins: the US had it right with helium airships.

In a 2 v 2 game I played in (1600 points per side) we each had a command card hand, and each played a card. Initiative was determined by the lowest total number of pips between the teams. Once you figured out which team went first the players each issued orders as normal for the card they they played and then figured out who would activate first. Teams alternate activations just like a normal game between two players. This created a cool added layer of strategy within your team because you had to coordinate initiative bids (deciding when you should all play a 1 pip card for instance) and we kept things secret by just showing each other cards and either nodding our heads or pointing at other cards. You also have fewer initiative ties because there is a wider spread of total pip numbers.

We kept command stacks separate and orders could only go towards your own guys. Command card effects were likewise limited to your own guys both for balance reasons and because it makes more sense for say "Return of the Jedi" to only inspire the people around Luke.

and the team who won initative did then 2 activations at a time or still one at a time and then the other team got to activate?

34 minutes ago, Taiowaa said:

and the team who won initative did then 2 activations at a time or still one at a time and then the other team got to activate?

It alternates as per the rulebook. It's especially important when there are 6 of us I'd think.

1 hour ago, Taiowaa said:

and the team who won initative did then 2 activations at a time or still one at a time and then the other team got to activate?

Still one at a time. Two activations back to back every turn would be game warping

So we ended up with a single command hand with orders echoing out like in my original post.

It all worked well apart from the new generic commands which we restricted to one person's force after realising 10 core units throwing aim tokens around was going to get silly.

One thing we did that we hadn't planned for is that each side took 3 activations at a time. This didn't actually lead to rampant insanity as we initially feared and meant we got to turn 4 and a satisfying conclusion in about 4 and a half hours including setting up. For a 2400 point game I don't think it was bad going.

We did find that the characters without their commands were suddenly a bit lackluster so maybe next time we'll try simultaneous commands as the rules suggest, but 3 activations per side definitely speeds things along .