I made a custom once that had a commander effect that let you activate the same amount as your opponent each phase.


I'm not a fan of anything costing under 3, however if it is Unique and has some other penalty, maybe 2

Sweet, I can use it to run my opponent's high-powered shooter into the midst of all my pieces, where it will be helpless for the rest of the round....

There are certainly ways to handle Tempo Control. Black Ops is a good way. Something like Lying in Wait or Patience or whatever can also be viable. But the first thing we need to do when considering any of these is to find and prevent any potential for abuse.

Yeah, that's actually a super interesting ability. The owner of the piece gets to do whatever they want with the piece, you just decide when it's activated. It's incredibly powerful, although targeting rules sort of keep it in check. Being forced to fire with Dash early against unactivated targets would suck, so would having a melee character activated without anything good (or without anything at all!) to attack, and without being able to get away from an enemy with Opportunist.

Probably too strong. But very cool.

That's Basically what i mean. They already have 3 activation control options. I dont think they need the counter too.
I am primarily Refering to THe one i suggested, but i would argue the same for most of this type.

Too complicated to keep track of all of who has to be activated. Perhaps if it lasted only one phase.

Sound the Alarm! (or Panic in the Ranks): In your opponent's next phase, your opponent must activate any non-unique followers within 6 squares of this character before activating any other characters.

Here's another idea. Activation control like Sith Sorcery but only for low-cost pieces.

Intimidation 1 [Force 1, usable only on this character's turn: Roll a save for each enemy within 6 squares. The enemy is considered activated if the save is higher than its cost.]


Perhaps make it line of sight or even boardwide if spending more Force points. Boardwide should be 4 or 5 Force so it doesn't happen more than once or at most twice per game.

Intimidation 3 [Force 3, usable only on this character's turn: Roll a save for each enemy within line of sight. The enemy is considered activated if the save is higher than its cost.]

Intimidation 5 [Force 5, usable only on this character's turn: Roll a save for each enemy. The enemy is considered activated if the save is higher than its cost.]

Naturally, this sort of thing should only be on a really high cost beat. 50+ cost for Intimidation 1. 80+ for Intimidation 5.

*bumpity bump someone ban the bot"

That would be insane, first act, sit sorcery 6, I choose deffel, furious assault... Then do it all over again

The idea there is that for one round (at the cost of a bunch of force) each side gets to only activate their best X pieces. (Where X depends on when the force power is triggered.) It favors squads that front load their power into a small number of pieces.

However, my math was off. At the end of a player's phase they have activated one more piece than their opponent. In order to equalize the number of activations in the round the opponent should get one more activation than you get:

Advanced Sith Sorcery: Force 6, usable only on this character's turn: designate one ally; enemies designate two characters in their squads. All other characters are considered activated this round.

This also gives the last activation of the round to the player who uses this Force power. I still like it, but it should perhaps be limited to once per skirmish regardless of Force points.

@atmsalad: Dessel using Blaster Barrage twice isn't as scary in practice as it is in person. His low attack means lots of misses. But the fact that he might be able to kind of illustrates the point. What you describe with Dessel is basically what happens when the opponent outactivates you and then wins init (with either Master Tactician or MTB). The most popular examples of this are Single Lancer squads and Imperial Black & Blue squads. They get to go last where they either do something devastating or get in position to do something at the beginning of the next round. Then they go first and either do something devastating or run away so you can't touch them. With a Lancer, it's all of the above. Run in last - strafe for damage. Twice. Then win init and run away and hide. The whole point here is that for one round a low-activation squad can turn the tables on that sort of high-activation squad. The low-activation squad gets to go last and also negates a large chunk of the enemy squad for one round.

Several challenges to overcome with this approach:

* Not all play formats have gambit or are based on victory points, so the wording would be awkward to specify which play formats this impacts. Some Epic formats have 25 point gambit. How would it work with that format?
* It's an auto-loss if you have too many activations. That shouldn't happen.
* Makes it even harder for factions without activation control. They can run 20+ activations, still be outactivated by Dodonna, but then they would be the one paying the gambit penalty instead of Dodonna.
* 15 is arbitrary. How to determine the appropriate number?

Very interesting idea, but has a lot of work before it would be viable. How would you word it?