Quote:
I'd love to hear more details about how this is implemented. Are there a certain number of activations that will happen before the chance to end turn comes into play? With horrible luck could you end with absolutely no moves in your turn whatsoever? How many times during testing have you been left with units swinging in the breeze? What's the chance per round? Does it change? Questions, questions, questions!
You put a dice into a bag for each player's activations.
So if I have 10 formations, and my opponent has 9 formations, I put in 10 red dice and my opponent puts in 9 white dice.
You also put in one black dice.
To play a turn, you start drawing dice.
If we draw a red dice, I get an activation, if we draw a white dice, my opponent gets and activation.
If we draw the black dice, the turn immediately ends.
With astonishingly bad luck your opponent could get five activations and then pull the black dice, but we haven't had anything like that happen in practice. Sometimes we've pulled the black dice in the first 2/3 activations, but that can actually be a benefit under certain circumstances, but most of the time the black dice comes out after quite a lot of activations have been undertaken, which is what you'd statistically expect.
At the end of the turn, you count up how many formations are remaining, and you put the appropriate number of dice back in the bag. So, if you lost two formations, next turn you'll have two less dice in the bag.
Due to the way the probabilities shift as dice get removed, if one player gets a run of 3/4 activations in a row at the start of the turn, the other player is more likely to get a run of activations toward the end of the turn, which can be quite useful as already-activated formations don't have the ability to shed damage before causalities are removed in the end phase.
Unlike in Epic:A where you generally want to target un-activated formations as much as possible, there are clear benefits to attacking both un-activated and activated formations - un-activated formations might take damage and be forced to regroup when their turn comes, but already activated formations won't get the chance to shed damage before casualty removal so putting extra damage onto them is really beneficial.
You also can't hold back your most powerful units until the end of the turn like in Epic:A, as you'll rarely get 100% of your dice out of the bag, but on the other hand activating them too early in the turn can leave them vulnerable to lots of counter-attack fire. So it becomes quite interesting as to when to take the risk to put your most powerful formations in harm's way.