So with all the new units out, and being limited to 800 in tournament play, one has to seriously weight every option.

My question is, in your experience, is having less activations but beefier units better or worse than lots of activations with "naked" units.

I m think of testing this theory in my next couple of games by 1st take as many basic units as possible for maximum activations, and then the exact opposite in the next game.

I would like to hear about your actual experiences, not your opinions of what will happen.

Personally, I love running vadar, that said, it reduces my activations by 1 or 2 depending on my list. As such, I find that its not a huge pain if you are below on activations if you can focus on the objectives and you can see decent return on those beefier units. However in my local group, we don't run as many tournaments, so our lists tend to be strong but more on the enjoyable side of making lists vs min-max for wins. Playing imperials though, do find that losing out to activations does sometimes hurt due to suppression really stacking with smaller units, who can stack them on your beefier guys.

I think for tournaments the number of activations does tend to make a difference. The more you have the better it is. For a more casual setting i dont feel they make as much of an impact, but yes they still help.

I think it depends. Extreme spam and extremely beefy units are both often too vulnerable to being overwhelmed or too fragile to stand up to fire.

I like bringing 8-10 activations. Less than 8 and I’m a little uncomfortable. More than 10 and I’m probably bringing stuff that won’t survive or at least has no answer to other big guns.

In my experience it really depends on what the opponent has and what deployment you're playing with. Battle Lines and disarray favor higher activation counts while long march tends to favor higher quality troops.

I normally shoot for 8-10 activations as that seems to be a good number in general for an 800 point game. I've tried using fewer, but I don't like putting more than 100 points into a unit. I've hit 12 before and I felt like I had squads not really contributing anything.

Likewise, I've found 8-10 seems effective.

ABR
A- Always
B- Be
R- Rolling

There’s definitely a balance; too few and you are giving up board control at the tail end of each turn, too many and you have a bunch of weak, ineffective units.

Personally, I always end up right around 10 when building my lists. I don’t shoot for that number specifically, but it seems to be my comfort zone.