Seems an unfair way of a formation becoming unbroken to me.

While my gut reaction is that allowing broken formations to merge is bad, I think it might be necessary. If uncontrolled swarms end up at 4+ init (as one of the options in the poll), it will rally on a 6 away from the enemy and never rally if the enemy is close. You might as well remove them if they break, and when they lose synapse, they also lose expendable - so they'll break a lot easier. Oh right, +2 to rally checks or no -2 for being broken. Never mind.

Maybe the synapse swarm has to take an initiative test to merge with uncontrolled swarms? -1 for blast markers or enemies nearby, or both. That way there's no guaranteed rally when picking up broken formations (but it does make it harder to pick up unbroken ones).

KISS

I would agree with KISS - and allow active formations to pick up lost and broken bugs That said, the 'merged' formation would have a lot of BMs that would be hard to shift, which in itself would be a significant downside to the practice.

True enough. I'm not completely against picking up broken formations if it's part of the activation of the unbroken formation, as it doesn't have the problems E&C has been pointing out.

Actually, it does. Uncontrolled formation activates, self-breaks, withdraws. Controlled formation moves over to pick it up on its action.

Nonetheless, I still think merging at the end of an action is the best option. It's simple but has good implications for incentivizing reasonable behavior.

Merging a broken formation, which is getting the advantage of an effective "auto-rally", could only be done by a controlled formation as part of its action. The absorbing swarm would have to go out of its way to meet up, or the broken swarm would have to be pre-positioned where it can be picked up in some location that is tactically useful. That seems like a reasonable tradeoff.

To pull off the break-march trick, the Nid player would have to voluntarily lose units AND put the swarm into position, either a dangerous forward position or falling back. The absorbing swarm would still have the choice noted above. If it's an aggressive forward position, the broken swarm would be in proximity with the enemy, with all the attendant risks and disadvantages that entails. Activating the absorbing swarm ASAP would be a priority. If it's a fall-back, it would presumably be to meet up with some sort of objective-guard formation. That makes sense and even though it has less urgency, it would still require the absorbing swarm to activate to finalize the merge.

I can still see that potentially being a gamey tactic, but I think it has enough drawbacks that we can at least test it out before dismissing it.

If both swarms are unbroken it's easier but there's still a practical limit on the radius of merging. The uncontrolled swarm could position itself for a merge during its own action. However, it's going to be hard to make a big move with the Initiative penalty for being uncontrolled. The uncontrolled formation could really only count on a single move from either a faux-Engage or a Hold action.

I don't see who merging with a broken swarm is seen as auto-rally?
You loose one activation but gets a "super-spawn" for one formation with Synapses.

Or did you mean that the formation with Synapses is broken, moves to an unbroken synapse-less formation and merges?

If yes then i see this as wrong. The formations with Synapses has to be un-broken in order to pick up a synapse-less formation.
The Hive Mind has to exert it's control to the broken synapse-less swarm. This it can't through broken Synapse creatures as there is already some problems with control which has to be adressed first.

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The question unasked at this point, is IF a merge is done during an action, what action can it be? The problem perceived, I think, is that "I kill off the Synapse of Formation A, causing it to break. It flees to Formation B, Formation B activates, and engages, with Formation A attached.". Or, if it's done at the end of the action, beefing up a formation that just assaulted.

Given the merge seems to be a form of reorganization, couldn't a merge be restricted to only during a Marshall Action? Merge is going to require a 'special rule' anyway, so include any further restriction (at end of the action, forfeit one/both rally dice, forfeit the move/shoot section, can't spawn, whatever's needed if any). If the acting formation has to do a Marshall action, it's choosing to limit it's offensive capability to bring the other formation into the fold. So any "Well, it gets to go Grr! Argh! AND get bigger?" problems are avoided.

Morgan Vening

I think that merging has to be a passed activation so no 'hold' based merging
There is scope in the rulebook for adding 'special actions'. Its getting into realms where we probably shouldn't go but could a 'merge' action be considered that incorporates all the limitations that are needed (also potentially applicable to a special 'Spawning' action).
Alternatively tag the merge onto a limited number of existing actions, potentially that would be Advance (no shooting), Double (no shooting) or Marshall (No Spawning, shooting or regroup)

I don't think that's a valid design goal (that is, how people react the first time they play the list). One of my regular opponents think that Ork Oddboys are ridiculous as they give a TK3+(D3) attack to an infantry unit, does that mean they should be nerfed?

I was thinking more that the formation adding the units (the merger) would be required to act, rather than the formation ceasing to exist (the mergee). As the merger would still have Synapses for the most part, it's still at the 1+ base.

It'd put a tactical limitation on the ability to merge, and stop End Phase merging from essentially being "super spawn". Even if you write it so that you can't abuse TieBreaker rules*, it still means the merger formation gets to do whatever it wants, and then get a bunch of reinforcements. Makes it much of a no-brainer, and that's not a good thing, IMO.

* The end run on the TieBreaker rule (if using End Phase) needs to be either stopped, or directly acknowledged as legitimate. And it needs to be done before Rallies or not be allowed for broken formations, else you get the super abuse rule E&C pointed out. 4+ to rally (5+ if within 30cm of the enemy), and failure allows a double move, to best position for abuse. Failure to rally should NEVER be something you want, or your opponent doesn't. It's my issue with Portals, and Fearless, and Fearless Portals. But that's another story.

Morgan Vening

To be clear my point on merging as part of an activation is
1) Only unbroken synapse formations could initiate a merge action
2) The merge action would consist of only a movement component, so no shooting, engaging, regrouping or spawning
3) The unbroken synapse formation could initiate a merge with any synapseless formation (broken or unbroken)

I think the issues of changing swarm size during the turn and synapseless formations breaking for faster movement and effective auto-rally are mitigated by the merge activation itself being limited in offensive potential. You lose a swarm for tiebreak calculations, potentially gain a significant number of BMs on the surviving swarm and lose an offensive action in return for strengthening a single formation. If you're heading towards a tiebreak you can either strengthen some swarms by losing others or you can attack, merging as an activation wouldn't allow you to attack while positioning formations in such a way to merge in the endphase to get the best of both worlds.

I'm not sure if merging is worth wasting an entire activation.

While I was away I wasn't idle. The Nids and Squats got played during my free time and a number of ideas, concerning the nids, popped into my head and I played them out. This thread covers one of them.

First though we all have to get away from turning something that should be simple into something that becomes complex. This happens because everyone is trying to cover all of the possible bases at the same time. Not that this isn't something we should be doing, but it can lead a simple concept into becoming a very complex one. It is time to take a step back and re-think the entire basic concept (It is what I did leaning over my card table while actually sweating in the middle of January and fending off real bugs!)

The basic question is 'What happens when synapse controll is lost/destroyed?'
(A) The bugs go to ground and are added to the spawn pool.
(B) The bugs suffer an initiative penalty for lost sysnapse control.
(C) The bugs can be swept up by other swarms and brought back under control again.
(D) The bugs revert to instictive behavior and act on their own.

(A) Leaves us the problem of bugs being able to 'appear' where most needed at a moments notice, due to spawning. Writing rules to get around this creates more complexity then is needed in the game. If they go to ground and are just lost for good then the Nid Army becomes extremely vulnerable to pin-point attacks against just their synapse creatures. Again this creates it own new problems, more rules to address it, hence more complexity.

(B) Does have the beauty of being very simple to impliment and only leaves one trying to decide what that penalty should be. The downside of this idea, though, is it leaves the Nid player to much flexibility with the swarm when in fact he should heve much less flexibility. So going after the synapse creatures becomes almost pointless as the loss of control is minor compared to the effort invested to create the problem for the bugs.

(C) Like 'A' this idea starts out looking real simple, but ends up creating a whole host of problems that have to be addressed, as this thread shows clearly so no need to explain. Also it shares the downside of 'B' above as it makes the investment in going after the Synapse creatures not really worth the effort expended.

(D) When I reviewed the old Titanicus Nid Book long ago, when I first took the mantel of the Nid AC, I had dismissed the 'Instictive Behaviour' rule outright as being too complex to impliment. Basically the rule allowed each creature type to act in a different way once synapse control was lost. (To duplicate it we would have to do the same thing, and that would be too complex to impliment). While away I came back to it and decided I was both right and wrong about the rule. In its original form it is too complex, but what if all the bugs had the same instictive behaviour? Then it would be dead simple to impliment, wouldn't it?

RATIONAL
The Synapse Links of the Hive Mind, once established for a Swarm, are not easily changed (Well not in the time scale of a battle at least). If the Synapse link is lost the Hive Mind will be unable to establish a new link during the time scale of a battle so the bugs fall into their instictive behaviour. In this case that would be to continue to devour and destroy. For all intents and purposes they continue to fight, but in a very restricted manner, and not really under the control of the Hive Mind.

RULE
If a Swarm loses all of its Synapse Creatures then it falls out of direct control of the player. The swarm may still rally in the end phase, but cannot spawn. The player still moves the swarm but under the following restrictions.
(1) No dice roll is needed to activate the swarm, it activates automatically.
(2) The swarm MUST attempt to assault CC the nearest enemy formation. If more then one enemy formation is equal in distance roll randomly to decide which enemy formation is attacked.
(3) If the swarm cannot get into an assault CC then it WILL move to carry out an assault FF on the nearest enemy formation. If more then one enemy formation is equal in distance roll randomly to decide which enemy formation is attacked.
(4) If the swarm cannot get into assault FF then the swarm makes a double move toward the nearest enemy formation. If more then one enemy formation is equal in distance roll randomly to decide which enemy formation is move toward.

EFFECT
Two things happen right away. One; The Nid player still has an active swarm on the table, but he cannot really fully control what it does. The player can plan the actions of the army around what the swarm will do, sometimes making things worse, so limited control remains army wide. Two; The opponent can now take advantage of the situation by feeding the swarm harmless target formations to chase while ranged units rip it too shreds.

NOTES
In this situation the Nid player hasn't lost a whole formation because the synapse creatures were killed, while at the same time their opponent can pretty much predicte what the swarm is going to do and plan their actions around it. Not really a good/bad situation for either side, in most cases the time and place of the occurance will determine if it was good or bad. In one battle, using this idea, I whacked the synapse creatures of a swarm right in the middle of my army (Note to opponents of Nids was not really a good idea on my part) and then it proceeded to make hash out of my center. In another battle I slammed the synapse of a swarm out on a deep flank and it then spent the rest of the battle chasing down a formation of Rough Riders! (Note to opponents of Nids this would be a good idea)

With the other special rules ideas I have in mind a synapseless swarm could even still get spawning points to put units back in the formation! (This one is linked to swarms sharing spawning points, in a limited fashion. This comes in two possible forms; (1) The Dominatrix is not allowed to control any swarm, but may add its spawning points to any swarm within 45cm; (2) A swarm may share up to half its spawining points with another swarm within 15cms.

Cheers All,
Jaldon

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