Re: FTIII: A Plea to End "Me Too" Firing.

<snip>

> I have always liked the idea of 
> simultaneouus fire rather than the current system.  The current system

> leads to"me too" firing which is rather annoying when you think about 
> it.  IMHO all fire from offensive weapons must recorded and executed 
> like movement orders.  It will make the players "think" rather than 
> "react" and plan their tactics instead of just working along the lines
of 
> "Oh, he shot at me, now I can shoot back!"

<snip>

I have to agree with Mark here.  Providing your ships have weapons that
posess good fire arcs, much of the tactical element of the game is lost
as
steering becomes an issue of where their "fleet" will be rather than
where
X ship will be.

I've never liked the idea that just because you have more ships you fire
first, especially as I've always viewed a turn as a reasonably long
length
of time (say 5-20 mins), and each hit is the result of a salvo or two of
gun-fire.  With this in mind similtateous fire makes more sence.  Of
course not everyone has this idea of how long a turn is, but even if you
are using a shorter time-span, and iniative becomes important, then it
should be based on a dice roll, NOT fleet size.

Personally we use a system similar to that used in many PBEM games and
specify targets in orders. These can be of the form "Fire at ship X" or
"fire at nearest 'ship class' in Arc Y" - "with Fire group 1"

No measure exists to avoid overkill (as in Dean's game) as this
encourages
more thinking and often leads either, to conditions where a ship can 
either get slaughtered or can escape a huge barrage of fire, reletively
unscathed.  One element I dislike about the current system is peoples
ability to respond to a previous shot fired in the same turn, Oddly this
is more oppropriate if you have long turns (I just never really thought
about it before).

In the above example a "Fire group" is the selection of weapons tied to
a
fire control.  This is specified at the start of the game, though can be
changed at any time subsequently.  Thus if firecontrol 2 is destroyed,
Fire-group 2 may not fire, until reallocated to new firecons or it is
repaired.  This is again a follow over from PBEM games, that was
developed
to ease the writing of orders, and just stuck....

-Entropy