Card Draws and Fleet Admirals

Card Draw Initiative:
Assign every card in a fleet a card (if you have 1-4 players, you can
suit split too). If your fleets exceed 13 ships a side, then thing get
interesting. But lets assume you have mid sized fleets here. Shuffle
the cards together. If you have small # of ships, throw in spacers for
suspense and ease of shuffling. Every turn, start at the top of the
deck and draw. Each time a ship's card comes up, it fires.

Fleet Admirals:
Fleet admirals can exert their influence on the course of a battle in
many ways (morale, coordination etc) but one of these is in terms of
initiative. When a card from their side comes up, they can swap that
ship with any other unfired ship of their side. So they can either
wait to fire (hmmm...unlikely) or fire the big guys early (more
likely). Then when the card normally for the 'queue-jumping' ship
comes up, the ship that should have fired originally fires at that
point.

The question asked was: How many times can a fleet admiral do it.
Well, one scheme that I'm toying with says we have 5 levels of fleet
admirals. Each level of fleet admiral can make one shift in the card
order. So a level 5 (a Farragut...) can make 5 such swaps.

What happens when fleet admirals clash: Well, to ease play, we
subtract the level of the lower from that of the higher and the lower
one makes no changes and the higher one makes the difference in
changes. If a level 1 fleet admiral meets a level 3, then the level 3
gets to make 3-1 = 2 changes of cards per turn. You could let both
sides do the swapping and let the choices they make decide things...
but we thought that might be more painful.

I've got my own (slightly complex but will work for small fleets)
rules on crew quality I'm working on and will put them up on the web
when I have time.

Thomas Barclay
Software UberMensch
xwave solutions
(613) 831-2018 x 3008