Wow, the topic went wild in a night...

@TauntaunScout : you talked about time limit, clock is a solution that should be relevant, and by itself, punish players who are a bit slow with 11 activations (or even 10). I would like to see a time factor in the game, like once you are running out of time, you can't activate anymore. You keep scoring if you have to, but no more activation.

For everything else, it is a bit too long to catch up. I like the idea to either remelt the activation or token functionality of the game.

And yeah, if strike team remains they need detachment.

On 6/25/2019 at 3:19 AM, colki said:

The problem is that, as I explained above, the meta shifts to few high-powered activations with corps taken as a "tax", because now that double AT-ST army is actually *better* at stalling than the other guys fluffy 501st list, as well as more killy.

If you've never seen the "corps spam" moans then good for you!

This never actually plays out. It's always the fear of a pass token system but it doesn't happen because passing means not contributing to the game and while its a better option than "activating something that doesn't do anything" there's still a ton of power in simply having more targets and things that are active during their turns.

I have wondered if a compromise is to have an overall activation limit (9, maybe?) and instead of removing orders from the pool when units are destroyed, gain the option to pass if an unusable order is drawn. I'd need to play with it a bit to see if it actually functions as an effective pass system (I think it can as long as you can give orders to things you want to delay the activation of) but it seems like it might work.

9 hours ago, Derrault said:

The only point at which delaying an activation might plausibly create a benefit is in the round just prior to engagement, in the hopes of luring an enemy into stepping forward without attacking, ceding the first strike.

That’s foreseeable, and is therefore avoidable.

There's actually lots of places where having the final activation is an advantage. The most prominent one is actually end of the game, where a player can something back in a safe place until there's nothing to threaten them before they take the scenario uncontested. This is honestly the most common way I see activation advantage win games.

The obvious strength in combat is turn 1, but its important to remember that the benefit prior to engagement happens at several small points throughout the game. You're often just trying to out activate a single model in the opponents army (Luke, Boba, etc) and if you can consistently out activate your opponent, you can effectively neuter that piece the whole game. Vader's actually a great example of a model who gets somewhat crippled by this. His low threat range is coupled with a number of abilities that really benefit from early activations, which allows the opponent to give him little to work with.

Just because you can see something coming, doesn't mean you have the ability to avoid it. Ultimately activations matter as long as some units are more impactful than others. Most of what you described as a counter works when you have fairly even output across all your activations, which is kind of why you see armies with 10 or so DLTs in the first place. It gives them the power to react as you describe, but isn't really solving the problem.

Also things like having Luke Skywalker activate last, on one turn and first on the next , you can have 3 back to back attacks with son of Skywalker, this can cut swathes through an opponent.

@LunarSol
"This never actually plays out. It's always the fear of a pass token system but it doesn't happen because passing means not contributing to the game and while its a better option than "activating something that doesn't do anything" there's still a ton of power in simply having more targets and things that are active during their turns.

I have wondered if a compromise is to have an overall activation limit (9, maybe?) and instead of removing orders from the pool when units are destroyed, gain the option to pass if an unusable order is drawn. I'd need to play with it a bit to see if it actually functions as an effective pass system (I think it can as long as you can give orders to things you want to delay the activation of) but it seems like it might work."

So if you took many small units, and one gets destroyed, now you have a permanent pass? 😕
That would seem to favor the player who takes tiny units (strike teams) and deliberately gets them killed (assuming passing is ever useful to do, of course).

Limiting total activations is not fun, nor sensible. Why would the extra units not be acting?

@LunarSol
"There's actually lots of places where having the final activation is an advantage. The most prominent one is actually end of the game, where a player can something back in a safe place until there's nothing to threaten them before they take the scenario uncontested. This is honestly the most common way I see activation advantage win games.

The obvious strength in combat is turn 1, but its important to remember that the benefit prior to engagement happens at several small points throughout the game. You're often just trying to out activate a single model in the opponents army (Luke, Boba, etc) and if you can consistently out activate your opponent, you can effectively neuter that piece the whole game. Vader's actually a great example of a model who gets somewhat crippled by this. His low threat range is coupled with a number of abilities that really benefit from early activations, which allows the opponent to give him little to work with.

Just because you can see something coming, doesn't mean you have the ability to avoid it. Ultimately activations matter as long as some units are more impactful than others. Most of what you described as a counter works when you have fairly even output across all your activations, which is kind of why you see armies with 10 or so DLTs in the first place. It gives them the power to react as you describe, but isn't really solving the problem."

If your opponent has an activation advantage, why would you hold off engaging, hard, for 6 consecutive rounds, such that they're able to apply the advantage at the end of the game? I mean, it's one thing to exploit a sudden reversal to achieve that goal, but allowing them to do that simply from list build and wait 6 entire rounds to achieve such a goal?

Delaying, knowing they have that capability...That's just a huge, nearly unconscionable, mis-play by the player with fewer units. It's not dissimilar from the blue player wins ties issue, if you have a tie it's incumbent on the red player to shake things up (and similarly, blue player wants to retain status quo and act accordingly).

I think Vader is best used early on for area/objective denial, playing keep away, allowing your own units to collect those objectives. For later turns, getting behind LOS blocking terrain with standby is not the worst idea (allowing Vader to take advantage of Relentless off activation). In general it’s preferable to lose a high hit point unit just by forcing the enemy to engage it (or react to it), allowing the weaker units to do the hard work of collecting VPs, than have it not even get involved.

18 hours ago, RaevenKS said:

once you are running out of time, you can't activate anymore

As much as I like the idea of this, wouldn’t it lead to the person with fewer activations stalling to ensure the person with more doesn’t get them all in? In a casual setting, you wouldn’t really see it, but competitively it would be a clear way to take advantage of a rule. Right now, there isn’t much stretching of the rules from what I could see on the live stream.

12 hours ago, LunarSol said:

have an overall activation limit (9, maybe?

I really like this idea since you could still keep the army composition requirements, but have players limit that composition to 9 activations. I really think 9 activations is the sweet spot with this game that allows you to take units that you want to have fun with while letting you pad things out with a strike team or two. I don’t think strike teams were ever intended as a “3 of” since they aren’t strong enough to really justify it. Maybe the sabs, but only because they become riskier as you play fewer.

If people had to limit to 9, I’d think they’d drop the third strike team before anything else and just maybe an AT-RT becomes a better take than the two strike teams for some players.

On 6/25/2019 at 10:39 PM, colki said:

Hey Cap,

I could, of course, be wrong - but it's with an experiment. I'm going to propose here what I *think* your idea is, mechanically, then why don't we both give it a try?

Have a supply of tokens that are "pass" (in my case, I use cheap coin holders on my cardboard tokens, so easy enough to slip in a scrap of paper without them being "marked" for randomisation purposes). At the start of each turn, give enough "pass" tokens to whichever player is lower on activations to equal the number.

We should try an setup test games against high activation lists (like Boba/Veers/DLTs/snipers) using elite lists (like double tank, or quad Death Troopers).

My suspicion is that ability to both wipe enemy units with early activations *and* stall out till last activation with passes will seem unfair quite fast. Since a "pass" cannot be killed before it's turn you are almost guaranteed last activation as the smaller army.

Yup, pass tokens to make up the difference in activation is basically what I had in mind. However I imagined them not being something you draw, but something you spend instead of drawing. Drawing them is an interesting variant.

Yeah I'd propose taking a proven high activation list, like Wonder Twins & triple snipers, and playing a few games against some well known bad low activation lists, double ATST, maybe double tank, or even just a low activation list where the squads are maxed for upgrades like heavy + trooper + stims + gear. What we'd want is a starting deficit of activation that is at least three, but probably not more than four.

I would suggest keeping token diversity equivalent in the builds so that is not a factor.

I don't have TTS setup or I would do it that way, but maybe I can get it up over vacation. If not, maybe some TTSers would be willing to try the experiment...

3 hours ago, smickletz said:

As much as I like the idea of this, wouldn’t it lead to the person with fewer activations stalling to ensure the person with more doesn’t get them all in? In a casual setting, you wouldn’t really see it, but competitively it would be a clear way to take advantage of a rule. Right now, there isn’t much stretching of the rules from what I could see on the live stream

No, you got me wrong on this. Typical game is 2hours + 15 min (settings).

You give each player a 1hour 7 min and 30 seconds, and you do like chess, passing the time to your opponent in each action that is not yours.

I like the idea of a pass mechanic. I'll see if I can convince my opponent to give it a try in our next game.

What do folks think about incorporating some kind of automatic/free return fire mechanism as well as/in lieu of a pass mechanic? Just spit balling here...

Option 1: Max Range Standby

Your Standby action's range uses the longest ranged weapon in your unit.

Option 2: Free Standby

If you have a face-down order token and have not attacked this round, you get 1 free Standby action.

Option 3: Free Max Range Standby

If you have a face-down order token and have not attacked this round, you get 1 free Standby action. Your Standby range uses your unit's longest ranged weapon.

Option 4: Free Return Fire

If you have a face-down order token, have not attacked this round, and you are attacked from range, you get a free attack action versus your attacker. You may only do this once per round.

Option 5: Free Return Fire (Half Damage)

If you have a face-down order token, have not attacked this round, and are attacked from range, you get a free attack action with 1/2 if your attack pool, rounded down. You may only do this once per round.

I haven't thought through any of these. I guess one thought is that it gives the defender too much of an advantage, since you can double-move somewhere and know that you'll get an attack (possibly for free) in that round. So maybe some of these options makes attacking a position too hard?

I'd start at option 1. I think Standby is supposed to be one of the factors to help mitigate activation advantage, but its not quite strong enough.

I think you'd have to change standby so that it doesn't trigger until a unit ends its activation in standby range. The problem with max standby range inherently is that it punishes the aggressor, which generally leads to turtle strategies that prevent dynamic play.

Personally, in testing that route I'd just make it so that after a unit activates, any unit can use their standby token regardless of distance (still can't shoot beyond your weapon range after all). Probably change it so the target has to be the unit that activated. SENTINEL could make it so you can declare the token after a model completes an action instead of extending the range.

I'd make standby into a proper Overwatch in that it actually interrupts an opponent's action...

The problem with that is that it's already a game where the side that moves first loses but it does increase the usefulness of units like emplacement troopers and Fleet troopers that can accumulate free standby tokens.

To make standby useful, they need to remove the rule that removes standby if the unit gains a suppression token. Its so easy to remove standby that its rarely worth using - you need a lot of los blocking terrain and that's not always the case.

44 minutes ago, Ghost Dancer said:

To make standby useful, they need to remove the rule that removes standby if the unit gains a suppression token. Its so easy to remove standby that its rarely worth using - you need a lot of los blocking terrain and that's not always the case.

Maybe that’s the problem then? There really ought to be more LOS blocking terrain. It’s weird if most terrain is little more than a glorified barricade.

9 hours ago, Derrault said:

Maybe that’s the problem then? There really ought to be more LOS blocking terrain. It’s weird if most terrain is little more than a glorified barricade.

You are making assumptions - there are more types of terrain other than los and barricades. There needs to be a good balance of terrain types, some setups will have less los than others. Having too much los can swing things the other way.

At my local club, its very rare to see anyone use standby because its so weak, and usually ends up being a wasted action, either because it was removed or because no enemies came into range.

Whilst it can be useful in some situations, most of the time its best to use another action.

@Ghost Dancer
"You are making assumptions - there are more types of terrain other than los and barricades. There needs to be a good balance of terrain types, some setups will have less los than others. Having too much los can swing things the other way.

At my local club, its very rare to see anyone use standby because its so weak, and usually ends up being a wasted action, either because it was removed or because no enemies came into range.

Whilst it can be useful in some situations, most of the time its best to use another action."

Most of the terrain I've seen on the board are either buildings/objects large enough to block LOS and require climb/clamber or low-providing clear LOS and cover.

And it's not like that's a tiny percentage of the terrain that can block LOS, and thereby support standby actions, it's all the buildings/walls/high hedges/big stones and so forth. In my opinion, boards don't see enough area terrain either (lakes/forests/ruins).

One thing I'd like to see in the tournaments is a few minutes to (re)arrange the terrain to suit the participants. Far too often on the streams there are very long fire-lanes and kill zones right in the middle of the board that mean there's no covered approach from one half of the board to the other; a setup I personally would never condone.

I agree, Standby is for when you don't want to expose your unit to fire using the one action (i.e. You need two actions to leap frog to the next cover spot), or you're trying to play keep away from another unit, or deter the enemy unit from approaching that round.