EA and Activations - a house rule

I am not a fan of the alternate activation rule in EA. Or, more accurately, I dislike how the focus on number of activations totally skews army selection.

The fact is that I do like that EA has alternate activations rather than a monolithic one-side-moves-all IGO-UGO model. It involves both players all through the game, which has to be a plus.

But the (rules mechanics-driven) focus on a force's number of activations is, in my view the tail wagging to dog to death. No doubt if I were an Eldar proponent I would see it very differently!

The elapse of time is always a difficult concept in wargames. Any computation of turns with a length of N minutes tends to be way off the mark, as is "5 minutes of intense activity and 25 of standing around" to explain a 30 minute turn. It probably helps if you see time as more of a continuum, with the end of one turn sometimes overlapping the beginning of the next one. What it is not is an umpire standing with a stopwatch proclaiming that a unit has to stop doing what it's doing because its time is up. All formations are active all of the time, whether it's their "turn" or not. It's just that simultaneous movement is a pain in the arse to actually manage on a tabletop! So we have alternate activation in EA to reflect the fact that no formation is an island, and that it may have to react to an opponent's move rather than stick to a previous plan.

I therefore find it particularly difficult to rationalise how a player with many activations - let's call them the Agile army - can have half of his army zooming around free of any restraint after one with few activations - the Stolid one - has finished with his.  In fact you've effectively reverted to IGO-UGO for part of the turn. So much for alternate activations!

I do get that the Agile army should have more opportunities to find flanks and exploit gaps that the Stolid army cannot easily counteract. But you already have the ability to Retain that allows more than one formation to combine to exploit an opportunity - to get crossfire bonus, to put in blocking forces and so on. I've no problem with any of that, and it is right that there is a risk in assuming that two different formations will combine seamlessly every time you try to Retain, and so failure is always an option. It's possible that, if you overextend in such an exploit, you might find that you've left yourself exposed to counterattack by the next enemy activation, and I'd argue that no move should be free of such risk. But that's largely what an army with excess activations achieves if it waits long enough: risk-free activations. (And given that such armies usually have high strategy ratings they can often pull back by winning the next Strategy Phase.)

It also means that a Stolid army is unreasonably penalised. Effectively, if you take a Steel Legion tank company, you should not even consider taking an armoured infantry platoon as an upgrade, because then you're quickly up to 900 points for that formation. So even though such a combined arms formation should be (and indeed is) powerful, that number of points really needs to be buying you three activations. Because that's the way the rules work. You'll get taken apart by your agile opponent because once you've moved, you're screwed by his ability to zoom around at the end of the turn.

It just seems wrong to me that an Agile army should get, say, 4 consecutive activations with little risk of activation failure and even less risk from enemy action.

I'm therefore thinking about the following as a House Rule:

The Action Phases alternate as normal until one side runs out of activations. The opposing force takes the next Action Test per the rules as written, but each Action Test thereafter suffers a cumulative -1 penalty on the Action Test per attempted activation. A roll of a natural 6 always passes such an Action Test.

So you get one activation without any penalty, and the second is effectively a Retain, but after that you're likely to start failing Action Tests pretty quickly with a -2, -3 and so on. These formations will still default to a Hold action of course, so they're not totally dead in the water, but what they can now achieve before the enemy starts to react is limited. Overall you've probably enough gas in the tank for one decent combined assault, but you can forget zooming around with impunity. Alternatively an agile army (with good Initiative) might be able to turn the tables by constantly Retaining (maybe with Farsight too) and completing their actions before a more stolid foe does, forcing them to take degraded Action Tests.  Thus, in many respects, the more Agile army will still retain control over the tempo of the action. They just don't get the risk-free run of activations at the end of a turn.

Clearly this has the potential to penalise the way Eldar and other high activation armies play, so it's not without its problems. However what it might do is encourage an Eldar force to accomplish its critical attacks (with Retaining and Farsight) during the body of a turn, and leaving less critical actions towards the turn's end. There is a danger that "mass" armies (Ork and IG) might game this, taking only five or six units in a 3000 point army knowing that a significant part of any activation disadvantage is largely neutralised by the cumulative -1 Action Test penalty, but I think such an approach would be fairly risky: fail a couple of Action Tests and any plan you had for a third of your army just ran into the sand.

Rather than creating further complexity to prevent such "abuse" - and arguably such armies really should have fewer and larger formations without being at a rules-driven disadvantage - you might well find that an Eldar player simply chooses to field slightly larger formations (perhaps "only" 10 in 3000 pts).