Apologies for the scandalous title (or is it merely good advertising?) but I wanted to start a poll on what people would pay for a "naked" activation.

What is a naked activation? By this I mean a free activation in your list with no formation or units attached to it. Basically stalling for one activation to get the opponent to commit their forces somewhere.

So, what is the MAXIMUM price you would pay to be able to add one activation? What would you be willing to pay in order to even out the activation count against a pesky Biel-Tan list without adding any other combat power to your own list?

I'm also curious to see whether people's choice of army affects their response, so feel free to post a reply with your army and your reasoning behind your choice. And if this question has been asked before, someone point me to the original post please! Couldn't find anything with the search function.

Dinner, a movie, and a foot massage.

Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.

But seriously, buying an extra activation is worth nothing if the opponent gets to buy one too.

Obviously, activation imbalance is a topic that comes up again and again. Sometime it’s a problem, sometimes it isn’t. At this point it probably ought to be addressed by changing the points or composition of the offending formations.

I agree with Semajnollissor. If you both have it then it takes away from the effectiveness. I know when I play SM against IG there are times when I would love to let my opponent take an extra activation before I do. But in that situation I would just choose not to retain the initiative.

Surely choosing not to retain the initiative is the free version of the above?! OK you cant skip the whole activiation, you still have to do something with a unit but you dont have to carry it on to activate a second unit.

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Walk softly. And carry a big gun.

A naked activation is worth about 50 points. That's a reasonable premium paid for a formation over the sum of the price of its units.

It’s an interesting game theory topic - it’s the same as asking what the minimum point cost is for a formation that does nothing.

The value really isn’t constant - it’s a function of the number of a activations you have in you army (among other things).

Maybe it would be something like 50 pts + 10 x N, where N is the difference between the number of activations in your own army, minus the number of activations in your opponent’s army. You could allow N to be negative, or set N = 0 as a minimum.

So maths is not my strong point (nearly 40 years on this planet and in all honest I am still not sure what it!) but in your equation above would that not mean that if you were playing an opponent with a far greater number of activation's than you the cost for the "naked activation" would be higher?? Which doesn't seem right. Surely if they have way more units than you, the cost should be less?

50 + 10 x 2 = 70
50 + 10 x 5 + 100

or change it to 50 + 100/ N? again where N is the difference between you and your opponents activations?

50 + 100/2 = 100
50+ 100/5 = 70

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Walk softly. And carry a big gun.

It’s more complicated that just the number of activations too. The survivability of the activations is important too – the degree to which opponents can break or destroy vulnerable activations.

I’ve done reasonably well at tournaments last year using a 4 activation Titan Legion list (2 Warlords and 2 Reavers) and though it has an extremely low activation count they’re hard to break or destroy and good at doing so to the enemy, so the activation disadvantage can reduce as the game goes on.

No, N is the ‘difference’ (in American English that means the resulting value after one number is subtracted from another) between the number of activations in each army.

In your example, where a player with 2 activations is playing against a player with 5 activations, N = 2 - 5 = -3

That gives the following value of an naked activation for the player with fewer activations:
50 + 10N = 50 -30 = 20

I don’t actually think that the correct equation, I was just throwing it out there as an example.

I get what the "difference" is. My examples were not meant to be for the same game, they were to show the points cost variance in 2 seperate games. So in one game the difference was 2 activation's, and in the other the difference was 5 activation's.

So in the first game you have an SM Army with 8 activation's and an IG army with 10.

Example 2 a Titan legion list with 5 activation's against say Eldar with 10.

But I see now your way round, its a similar way to come at the same issue from a different side.

GlynG makes a great point though. When you add in suitability it becomes even more complicated.

You also have to weigh up do you a) have a "naked" activation or b) for the same points have another unit, or upgrade an existing one. I play predominantly as SM(not on the tournament scene I will grant you) and if the cost for the naked activation was 50 points, I would rather add a chaplain to my assault marines then choose not to retain the initiative.

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Walk softly. And carry a big gun.

The point is not the naked activation, which is effectively stalling, but rather what you can do with the remaining activations after the opponent has run out - ie this is a popcorn strategy.

If you consider Dan’s THawk list, it was very close to this with 6 TBolts, 7 or 8 THawks and only four or five small formations.