I don’t love free wargear (because there will inevitably better or worse options when everything is a straight swap whereas with points cost you can balance finely), but I can see that it makes life easier.
Fixed unit sizes, however, are supremely shit. All in all totally ripped the variety out of list building, which was one of my favourite things about the game. Lists now will look mostly identical.
A lot of units can be double sized. Default battle brother (space marine) squad is 5, but you can pay to make it 10. Heroes can also be added to units.
I mostly was thinking of the wargear & abilities in the original post. Most heroes are very baseline generic, but with a combination of abilities and wargear can be molded to fit different archetypes. For example with battle brothers there is simply a “Master brother” bought wearing normal armor and with no special abilities, but then you can give him a jump pack or whatever, and psychic abilities, or command abilities and mold him into a captain or apothecary or tech marine or whatever.
Units have a decent variety of wargear that they have to pay for, and that wargear can sometimes completely change how the unit works.
One part of list variety is the fact that there are no force templates in OPR. So you don’t need a certain number of HQ or troops or whatever to fill out a force template. You just pay the points and buy the units. There is a competitive validation that says you can’t buy more than 3 identical units but my group just turns off validation in the army building app. It’s very freeing to just buy what you want. I’ve run lists of just terminators and dreadnoughts going up against a hoard of orks and it was way fun and interesting.
Sounds interesting. Worth a try at least!
I’m a big fan of alternating activations in games. I think it makes them more engaging for both players too.