To give an example of this from another game (I’m not copy/pasting ITS stuff because I’m not trying to argue terms, just trying to illustrate the point): Every Encounter is set up in the same way: 1. Select Game Size 2. Place & Define Terrain 3. Pick Allegiance & Commanders 4. Determine Operation 5. Hire Your Company 6. Scouting 7. Deployment 8. Play! The game begins as described by Playing The Game (see pg. 20). On the first Turn of the game, the Attacker has Initiative. So according to the main game rules you’ve got about a few minutes worth of important decisions (and reactions to what the other player is choosing) and setup which occurs before the start of the game. The amount of time you take getting figures and terrain and markers out of boxes is time spent not playing, too. ;) A lot of it is also stuff that a tournament can make arrangements to do ahead of time, but most of it needs to be scheduled for. It’s the sort of thing where if you see the words “At the start of the game” in an ability, you have to stop and read the rulebook to find out when it happens. (For the game I copy/pasted from, what would be “at the start of the game” effects are “during scouting”, but it still breaks that down into three steps depending on other details...)
So true! The ARO rules have always been written that way, even though Coordinated Orders have been a part of the game since the beginning, too
Is that so, and did they always use a Command Token, then? It always felt like a game design hack to me - a way of balancing things up once the base rules had been written and tested. (Not that I dislike the mechanism particularly; it just always felt added-on somehow).
No, back then you needed to spend one order per model in the Coordinated Order (which as you might guess made them uncommon). Command Tokens are an N3 thing.
they coordinated order was also much stronger. All participants would shoot at full RoF. Back in the old times, this was the real solution to TAGs.
I fear that's nostalgia, nobody got full Burst unless they were already on B1. 'In a Coordinated Order to Shoot, the Burst (B) of each miniature participating is halved, always rounding up: the minimum B value being 1.'
then it's not nostalgia, it's that German medic who keeps hiding things from me...I think he's called Alzheimer
