Double Turn begone! AoS should get rid of the double-turn

[pnkdth]

A player should only get one double turn per game. After that, it is the player who used up his double who has to be cautious. Add some actual weight to the decision. Yes, yes, I know it occasionally it is best to give up the double and that just adds even more consideration to what I'm suggesting. Obviously, forcing your opponent to take the double doesn't count as the 'once per game' double.

While you could add more mechanics to the game, I think duct taping new rules to a flawed system is going to lead to rules bloat. What I want to achieve with the above suggestion is adding a strategic element, in addition to the tactical decision it is now, and it would lead to more mind games and considerations throughout the game. More important, no more games where you are totally screwed due to a string of poor priority rolls. Once you seize your moment, you gotta make it count and, remember, you still gotta roll for it... What if you don't get it next turn? Should I take it now? Try for a late game double? Does this align with my opponent's plan?

 

 

[Ganigumo]

4 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

The double turn hides imbalance by adding a random factor. If it went away, win rates of overtuned books would spike and monday morning books would sink even further.

In a good world, GW would write balancwd books, but that's not where we are.

This isn't exactly the case because the strong armies mostly fit neatly into battle regiment, while many of the weaker ones struggle to do so, so strong armies have more control over the double.

 

Obviously its not the only factor, or even the biggest factor (even if all gitz lists could 1 drop by default it would still be bad) but it can be the difference between mid and high tier, or high tier and top tier.

[EntMan]

18 hours ago, Noserenda said:

*Resets the "Days since double turn argument" counter to zero*

Well, it gives us something to talk about in the absence of any either official or reliable rumours!

[Mandollies]

Jarvis has said the phrase “Kill your darlings”; a part of game design that if you had to put in multiple rules to justify a rule (like extra command points for going second, removing objectives by the person going 2nd in Round 3) then you should remove it.

[KrispyXIV]

13 minutes ago, Mandollies said:

Jarvis has said the phrase “Kill your darlings”; a part of game design that if you had to put in multiple rules to justify a rule (like extra command points for going second, removing objectives by the person going 2nd in Round 3) then you should remove it.

You realize that without the double turn, you'd still need to compensate players for going second, since they have to endure a first turn alpha, right?

The same with providing adjustments base on turn order to make sure that scoring doesn't unreasonably favor the player taking the first/last action?

Those things don't go away because you make player order static - their value changes, but the challenges remain.

The double turn makes those things dynamic, but its not the reason going first/second may be of different values from one another...

[Kadeton]

In a fixed initiative game, the player who is winning continues winning. You see this in 40K all the time - as soon as one player has gained an advantage (generally during the first shooting phase), they then leverage that advantage to consolidate their lead in subsequent turns. Once you fall behind, it's almost impossible to turn the game around.

When a double turn occurs in AoS, generally one of two things happen:

1. The player who is winning wins faster. They would have won anyway without the double turn, but now they crush their opponent immediately;
2. The player who is losing now has an opportunity to turn the tables and win when they otherwise would have lost.

I like both of these outcomes, personally. The first provides a clean, decisive end to the game rather than the "Are we bored enough to call this a foregone conclusion?" ending you often get in 40K. The second provides uncertainty and hope, which helps you stay engaged with the game even when it's going against you.

I would still very much prefer a system with alternating activations. But the double turn is, IMO, a surprisingly clever piece of design to mitigate the inherent flaws of an IGYG turn structure.

[JackStreicher]

14 hours ago, Freejack02 said:

Without the double turn, controlling the first turn becomes too powerful. Shooting/ranged becomes even stronger because you know the enemy can't pull the 1-2 (or 2-3) to come back from taking early losses, so they are always playing from behind. 

Aha. So the dt is fine because shooting can go twice in a row?

 

the only reason the double turn exists is to set AoS apart from 40K.

Edited January 22, 2022 by JackStreicher

[Nacnudllah]

12 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

In a fixed initiative game, the player who is winning continues winning. You see this in 40K all the time - as soon as one player has gained an advantage (generally during the first shooting phase), they then leverage that advantage to consolidate their lead in subsequent turns. Once you fall behind, it's almost impossible to turn the game around.

When a double turn occurs in AoS, generally one of two things happen:

1. The player who is winning wins faster. They would have won anyway without the double turn, but now they crush their opponent immediately;
2. The player who is losing now has an opportunity to turn the tables and win when they otherwise would have lost.

I like both of these outcomes, personally. The first provides a clean, decisive end to the game rather than the "Are we bored enough to call this a foregone conclusion?" ending you often get in 40K. The second provides uncertainty and hope, which helps you stay engaged with the game even when it's going against you.

I would still very much prefer a system with alternating activations. But the double turn is, IMO, a surprisingly clever piece of design to mitigate the inherent flaws of an IGYG turn structure.

Very much this!  Both possible outcomes of the double turn are net positives.  Too many wargames are decided in turn 1 (or worse, list-building) but linger on for another hour or 2 after that.  The double turn forces the game to either get interesting or end.

[KrispyXIV]

Yeah, I normally don't like to say it because it sounds harsh, but most of the time if you're winning and you get doubled you don't suddenly lose the game. 

If you're losing and you get doubled, you were losing anyway.

The main thing is that if you're losing and you GET the double, you suddenly have an opportunity not to lose that you wouldn't have in a static initiative game.  

There's some cases in the middle, but even then the double hurts but on its own it's not the determination most people suggest it is unless you set yourself out of position...

Edited January 22, 2022 by KrispyXIV

[Kasper]

Psst, if you really hate the double turn that much, just dont play with it. I have, and it was absolutely horrible and it made me realize how important the double turn is for the game. 

[yukishiro1]

54 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

In a fixed initiative game, the player who is winning continues winning. You see this in 40K all the time - as soon as one player has gained an advantage (generally during the first shooting phase), they then leverage that advantage to consolidate their lead in subsequent turns. Once you fall behind, it's almost impossible to turn the game around.

 

In a badly designed game, sure. Which certainly describes a lot of iterations of GW games over the years, admittedly. But there's no reason this necessarily has to be the case. There are better ways to build some comeback potential into game design than randomly giving one player two turns in a row. 

Which brings me back to it being crude game design designed to mask even cruder game design. Which is better than no masking, but still not great. 

Edited January 22, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Skreech Verminking]

I kinda find it funny.

I haven’t heard of a single player saying how the double turn helps the armies that are already doing badly to be at least able to win.

I guess, the last faq point update, was very disheartening😂

sad, sad skaven

Edited January 22, 2022 by Skreech Verminking

[kahadin]

31 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

In a badly designed game, sure. Which certainly describes a lot of iterations of GW games over the years, admittedly. But there's no reason this necessarily has to be the case. There are better ways to build some comeback potential into game design than randomly giving one player two turns in a row. 

Which brings me back to it being crude game design designed to mask even cruder game design. Which is better than no masking, but still not great. 

Please name some well-designed games rather than just allude to them existing.

[yukishiro1]

Well-designed in what particular way? In terms of offering a player who gets behind the opportunity to come back into the game?

To use a classic example, Go has more comeback potential than Chess, because of the way the game mechanics work. Chess is a classic snowballing game, where every mistake impacts the final result because every mistake is permanent and cannot be remedied; once you lose a pawn, it's gone forever, and if you lost it without a good reason, you're simply down for the rest of the game. In a very high-level sense this is true in Go as well, but in practice the near-infinite possibilities and the segmented nature of the board mean that an early mistake doesn't usually create a snowball the way it does in chess. You still pay for the mistake, but you can often write a line under it in a way you cannot in Chess. 

To apply this directly to AOS, one way you could incorporate a comeback mechanism could be to reward players more for recovering an objective held by an enemy than for capturing an unclaimed one or holding one they have continued to claim. Another way you could incorporate this is with more recursion mechanics like the one Soulblight has that allows them to restore destroyed units from grave sites (although in this case the SBGL mechanism could be designed better for that purpose, i.e. your chances could increase per your units destroyed, not per your opponent's units destroyed). 

You can also attack the issue by simply making it less possible to get that initial snowball. One way AOS does this is by having alternating activations in combat, compared to 40k's "the active player resolves all theirs first (minus interuppts)." But it could go a lot further. There are all sorts of ways you could tune down first-turn advantage in AOS that don't depend on a double turn. What if you only had 18" visibility on T1 (or you just can't shoot further than 18" period, to account for Sentinels), and models suffered a -1 (or even -2!) to their runs and charge rolls? Suddenly going in for a T1 alpha becomes a lot riskier, and ends up more likely to put yourself into a vulnerable position than to establish immediate dominance. 

Basically there's a million ways you can do this. A double turn is a particularly crude way to attack the problem, in that it as often as not ends up helping the snowballer rather than the one being snowballed. 

Edited January 22, 2022 by yukishiro1

[kahadin]

I wanted to know real world miniatures wargames that show an example of what you're talking about. 

I know you gave me some abstract strategy games, but I would prefer a miniatures wargame that meets your criteria of good game design.

[Skipsalajan]

It makes the game fun, most of the players like it

[yukishiro1]

1 hour ago, kahadin said:

I wanted to know real world miniatures wargames that show an example of what you're talking about. 

I know you gave me some abstract strategy games, but I would prefer a miniatures wargame that meets your criteria of good game design.

I gave you classic examples because they are easy to understand. Everyone knows basically how Chess and Go works (or can figure it out in 2 minutes on the internet) and can appreciate the difference re: how one snowballs compared to the other. It's a lot harder to go read up and understand the finer points of some other miniature game. 

Again, good game design in what way? Things are good and bad in different ways. Chess snowballs badly, but that doesn't make it a bad game overall, it just means it's bad on that particular design metric. Since we're discussing snowballing / comeback mechanics, so I'm going to assume you're talking about that particular aspect. GW itself has a ruleset that does a much better job at this: Apocalypse. The way activations and damage are handled in that ruleset quite dramatically lowers the efficacy of alpha strikes and therefore mitigates the snowball effect in the first place. 

Now that doesn't mean that it would be great to just import that wholesale to AOS. But the point is that even GW itself is capable of coming up with game mechanics that keep snowballing in check without something as crude as a double turn mechanic. 

The other problem with the double turn is the chicken-and-egg problem. The game wouldn't have the overwhelmingly strong alpha strikes it currently has without the double turn, because not even GW would design a game that way (see how they've tried their best to mitigate first turn advantage in 40k with all sorts of approaches designed to lower the efficacy of the T1 alpha and/or compensate with better scoring rules for going second, with mixed results). The reason AOS is so front-loaded is partly because of the double turn, and the need to provide a strong incentive to go first to balance the strong incentive to go second in order to get the double. 

 

Edited January 22, 2022 by yukishiro1

[kahadin]

@yukishiro1 You say AoS is badly designed, but have not given example of a well-designed mini wargame by your standards. I think its because there aren't any.

If you can't name a miniatures war game that follows your idea of well designed then I can't take your claim seriously. 

[Clan's Cynic]

To be frank, I think Double Turn is one of those things where almost none would be upset at it's removal - even people who defend it - compared to the positive response it would receive. 

I genuinely don't think I've ever seen someone use Double Turn as a selling point for AoS. I can think of plenty of other wargames where XYZ feature is touted as such, and a fair bit for AoS, but never Double Turn. 

[yukishiro1]

FWIW, I didn't say AOS was a badly-designed game, I said this particular aspect of AOS was badly designed. Because, you know, that's the topic we're discussing. I'm not sure it really makes much sense to talk about games being well- or badly- designed in the abstract. Almost all games have some good aspects and some bad aspects, and AOS certainly falls into that category. But if you insist on making some sort of totalizing judgment, SW: Legion is a well designed miniature game overall; I didn't quote it here because the main area it actually suffers in is in snowballing. LOTR is a well-designed game overall. Apocalypse is a well-designed game to the extent you can call it a game. 

I answered your question in a topical way. You said that wasn't good enough, and asked me for a wargame. I answered that question too in a topical way with an example of a GW ruleset that addresses the snowballing problem more elegantly than with a double turn. You responded that that wasn't good enough either. Let's keep the thread about the double turn, not about Yukishiro1; if you don't want to take me seriously and don't want to engage with my opinions that's just fine, but please do it in a way that doesn't derail the thread. 

Edited January 23, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Schauer]

Double-Turns are a great mechanic to the game. I get some might say its a luck based way of getting back into the game but lets not lose sight we are in the business of playing a luck based game that revolves around rolling d6s in the first place so at the end of the day its another cog in the wheel so to speak. 

 

Figure of speech aside, we also have to realize the people who like the mechanic typically arent going to post that they like it on its own. The only way the conversation is getting started is when someone doesn't like the mechanic and wants to talk about it. Just because it's being made vocal doesnt mean its the stronger reaction. 

 

Also giving a player some benefit for going to second does not mean that Double-Turn is bad, it is giving the player going second some help. In most 2-player games going first is already a massive benefit of its own right. 

 

We also have to remember that GW wants these games to wrap up in 2.5 hours. There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing a game that was going to reach its conclusion to get to its destination faster as a result. That plays right into what they want from a game design standpoint. The other side of the coin allows an army an avenue to come back into the game, which keeps the player getting stomped invested and doesnt turn the type of game where a player can concede reasonably due to a bad turn 1. 

 

Also consider how some of these armies work too. LRL for example. I personally do not want to play mass sents and 3 foxes with them being able to play without the fear of double turn. Theres a lot of mechanic that would need to be passed over rules wise for double turn to be removed. I personally cant imagine them going through that much effort to get rid of a rule for what may or may not be a vocal minority.

[mojojojo101]

3 hours ago, Clan's Cynic said:

To be frank, I think Double Turn is one of those things where almost none would be upset at it's removal - even people who defend it - compared to the positive response it would receive. 

I genuinely don't think I've ever seen someone use Double Turn as a selling point for AoS. I can think of plenty of other wargames where XYZ feature is touted as such, and a fair bit for AoS, but never Double Turn. 

I mean I'd be pretty disappointed to see it go, but I do think it's a pretty great mechanic, even if that isn't always that obvious.

For me, it makes the tactical decisions you make during the game more interesting and more difficult because you have to always have it in the back of your mind.

Ultimately I think that's valuable but much harder to quantify than occasionally getting spanked by a double turn.

Edited January 23, 2022 by mojojojo101

[Dingding123]

Doing everything at once in one turn is such a huge deal that the act of taking a single turn is enormously strong.   It's almost as if...decreasing the potency of a single turn would help balance double turns.  Almost as if nerfing CAs or the sheer number of CPs players got on their turns would be the smartest thing to do without shaking up the game too much.

Or Mega-Gargants and the like can just have All-Out Attack/Defense every single turn.  One of the two.

 

[Lord Krungharr]

The double-turn is only a result of rolling for priority each battle round.  Definitely a more fair way to play the game than whoever goes first round 1 always goes first.  (However I don't think a tie should give the first go to the previous round's first turn player.)  

One thing that might help mitigate a double turn is allowing each player to declare a Battle Tactic at the start of the Battle Round, thus one could complete it potentially in the opponent's turn (like Slaying a Warlord or Bringing It Down if YOU are being charged or retained in combat in their turn).  Would give each player more chance to score those points.  

Don't understand why there's any loyalty to the you-go-i-go game design in general.  I see many folks write that it just wouldn't be Warhammer.  SOOOOO not true!  Warhammer is the models and the lore; Fantasy played totally differently and yet here we are enjoying many many many of the same models, characters, and faction relationships just a different setting with different rules.  Besides, 40k Apocalypse (another GW game) has simultaneous turns where each side does their thing in each phase and all damage to each side is allocated at the end of the turn.  It's a great system!  

[Kadeton]

14 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Which brings me back to it being crude game design designed to mask even cruder game design. Which is better than no masking, but still not great. 

I don't think anything I've said contradicts this.

GW's design paradigm, especially in their flagship games, is clunky, outdated, and emphasises gambling rather than tactical expertise. Yeah, it would be lovely if they changed their approach in any number of ways. In the absence of that, the double turn is much better than no double turn, and by GW's standards it shows a relatively high degree of creativity and willingness to experiment.