Those who have dipped only their toes into the world of tabletop wagaming will be familiar with the alternating turn approach to initiatives in wargaming. This is the method used by the undeniable flagships of the tabletop wargaming world, Warhammer, and Warhammer 40,000.
The premise of this type of initiative is simple - one player takes a turn, and they do everything with their army during that turn. They move, shoot, charge, fight, cast spells, drop bombs, and whatever else they need to do, with everything that they have. The system is neat and easy to follow, with little bookkeeping1 involved. But, it has its downsides - and the main one of those is that whoever is playing as player 2 starts their first turn with a whole chunk of their army already dead. Thus, they have a natural disadvantage.
Some of you will also have played games which are not as mainstream (outside of the TTWG world) but which address this issue using Alternating Activation, or “AA” for short.
AA is popularly heralded as the natural solution to the first-turn lethality of turn-based wargaming. Player 1 picks one unit and does everything with them, and then player 2 does the same, and they alternate until both have activated each of their units once - and then the turn ends, and they start again.
AA has the major advantage of drastically reducing the likelihood of a player losing all of their cool units before they get to use them, which is a real boon for the system. It also allows tactical rethinking partway through the turn, and other interesting tactics like coaxing (where you activate your weak units first to draw out the enemy’s strong units) and Hammering (where you have few powerful units and rely on dealing huge damage quickly to cripple the opposing army), and anything in between.
The major disadvantages of AA come in army imbalance. In a game where both players have about the same number of units, the AA system is really effective at keeping things balanced, but when one player has a lot more units than the other, things start going back to that alternating turn system. Players alternate until one player has run out, and then the other player activates all of their units, all at once. This can lead to one player using all of their weak “chaff” units to stall their heavy-hitters, whilst their opponent is forced to activate and commit their more powerful units. In melee-centred gameplay where charging into close-combat can be advantageous over being charged, this can be a somewhat frustrating tactic to face.
So, is it possible to avoid all the problems?
Where most people would design a tabletop wargame and pick one of these two methods, I have opted to try and make an unholy amalgamation of the two, which counters the “activating chaff” method, but doesn’t have the pitfall of the alternating turns where one side is left battered before they even begin. It’s still a work-in-progress, but I call it Chaotic turns.
How do Chaotic Turns work?
Considering that the word “Chaotic” is in the name, Chaotic Turns are actually going to be quite well ordered and organised. The system is similar to alternating activation, except that it only alternates when the off-player chooses, or if it has to. Here’s the concept:
Game Setup:
The game will use AP (Action Points) to determine the value of a unit. A unit with a higher AP value costs more AP to activate than a unit with a low AP value. This will be used in lieu of “points” to determine battle size - you might have a game size of 40AP. Both players will then make a warband2 comprised of units which are worth a total of 40AP (obviously this can be pre-determined, and will likely have some recommended sizes for drop-in games!).
Once the warbands are on the field3, the turns can begin.
Turn Setup
The turn setup will involve both sides having a pool of AP to spend, equal to half of the battle size - so in this case, 20AP each. They will also have a separate pool of Leadership AP, which will be tokens of a different colour, and will recharge differently.
Start the turn
The first player will be whoever has the most units4. They will pick a unit, and spend AP to activate them. A unit must perform at least one action. Actions include moving, charging, attacking, and other more mission-specific ones. Each action that a unit can perform will be listed on their reference sheet, along with a cost. More powerful units will have greater costs for their activations. Most units will not be able to do every action on their sheet every turn - a 3AP unit might have move (1AP), shoot (3AP), meaning they can either move or shoot, but not both.
Leadership AP can be spent on a unit when it has used all of its AP. In the aforementioned one, the unit might move for 1AP and then spend 2AP plus 1 Leadership AP to shoot. Essentially, the leadership of your army will help units to do more than they could alone.
Leadership AP are determined by the highest Leadership value of any unit in your warband - this unit is the leader, the high warlord, the battlemaster of the warband. If they die, you pick the next highest, and lose Leadership AP to match the new maximum Leadership.
So the first player picks a unit and spends AP and (if they want to) Leadership AP to activate them. The AP they spend is moved to their opponent’s pool, and the Leadership AP spent is set aside for later recovery. Additionally, their opponent regains 1 Leadership AP, if they have spent any.
Short-activating
I have realised that there is a real risk of all the AP moving to one player if they choose to short-activate and only spend a little AP on high AP units. This should be balanced, as the opponent will spend more AP than them, and thus do more damage, so short-activating to try and get an advantage in the late-game will be offset by dealing less damage (and taking more damage, as you’ll not be using Suppression) in the early game. I could say that you move AP equal to the unit cost when you activate, but I worry that will remove tactical options from the arsenal of those playing. I can fix it later if needed!
Then it’s time for the opponent to choose - do they steal the initiative and take a turn, or do they let their opponent go again? The advantage of forcing them to go again is more AP in your pool, more leadership AP, and the opponent potentially running out of Leadership AP altogether.
Changing Hands
The turn changes hands when one of three conditions are met:
The inactive player chooses to steal the initiative.
The Active Player runs out of AP in their pool
The Active Player runs out of units to activate (units can only activate once per turn).
When the turn changes hands, the opposing player starts activating units, and spending AP, and the now inactive player starts to regain AP and Leadership AP.
When something dies
When a unit in your army dies, you remove AP from your pool5 equal to their AP value, and discard it from the game. Thus the AP in a game will dwindle as the units are killed. If the unit which died is your Leader, then you must pick a unit to be your new leader (typically the one with the highest Leadership value) and discard Leadership AP from your pool until you have no more than the Leadership value of your leader.
Nothing left to Activate
Theoretically, unless the game proves extremely lethal, a player should not be able to activate their whole army in one go (they would run out of AP first), meaning there must be some sort of back & forth occurring through the turn.
Each unit can only activate once each turn (they should be marked in some way to account for it), so when one player has nothing left to activate, the other player will play until they run out of AP. In theory, this means that whoever is losing (IE has the least AP worth of units left) will end the turn with more AP than their opponent.
End of the Turn
When all of the units on both sides have activated, or when one side has finished and the other side has run out of AP to activate with, the turn ends. The AP pools remain as they are, and a new turn begins. Whoever has the most AP6 at the start of the turn activates first.
What will all this do?
That’s a tricky one - I honestly don’t know for sure! There are a lot of moving variables here - activating a unit but not spending all the AP (short-activating), units dying, unit-number imbalance, Leadership values, and so forth. This is before we start introducing the factions, how they play (some will be elite and more autonomous, others will rely on leadership to perform to their full potential).
What problems can I see?
I also have to consider that the AP value is supposed to denote the price of a unit, but currently only contributes to offensive capacity. If I increase the AP cost of say, a tank, to reflect its high armour, then it will have more AP to spend. I suppose I can simply increase the cost of its actions to remain balanced - it should move and shoot once, so even if it’s AP20, it can have move (6) and shoot cannon(14). This then has the knock-on effect of the Tank being less useful for Leadership AP, but this can in turn be offset by making it on the cusp of further actions, E.G. Move(6) Shoot Cannon(11), meaning with 20 AP it can move and shoot, but for 2 Leadership AP it can sit still and shoot twice (22AP), or it can shoot and move twice for 3 Leadership AP (23AP).
So that’s already solved then, isn’t it? More or less.
Factions (revisited)
Following a piece of lore I rewrote, forgot, buried, dug-up, reread, and declared “rather good that”, I am revisiting the factions of the game.
When I introduced the game before, I was discussing largely human factions throughout the theme. In this new piece of lore and writing I unearthed, it turns out that I was going down a different route all those years ago, when I was building momentum on the project - I was going down the route of Anthropomorphic Animals.
So next time, I’ll start delving into the factions - which are still an amalgamation of all the ‘punks - and the lore behind why they aren’t human any more!
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I’m moving to “Warband” instead of “Army” because the latter implied many more units than I intend to build this game around!
The method will likely be alternating placements of units on the field, as is standard in most wargames.
This decision is currently arbitrary, so it could be replaced by being determined by a random dice roll, who has the most impressive moustache, or a race to the north pole and back.
Playtesting will reveal if this needs to come from your pool, the opponent’s pool, or divided between both, or the highest pool - it might need tweaking to get it right, is what I’m saying!
Or possible the most Leadership AP, which would be a clever way of denoting both military skill and who has been activating the least recently.
So many options, you also have chit activations, where your war band might be split into different groups, and each group activates when you pull that chit, with each side alternating chit pulls. Civil War by Victory Games used the alternating command points such as you are going, with a couple of twists. Command available were determined by dice rolls and certain scrolls exploded the number of command points. Bad rolls could result in minimal command pints. Command were used to activate the leader, smaller value better leader, and there units. As this was a strategic game one of the twists was units/stacks/armies could move/fight multiple times as long as command points were available. This simulated how some armies ran circles around others