re: Card Draws and Fleet Admirals

thomas,

i very much like your ideas for this.  card draws are much more favored
in our
group than big handfuls of dice.  we have a similar card system for
firing
order, but are struggling to figure out a simple idea to factor in
crew/captain
quality.

the only idea we have at the moment is to separate the cards (both sides
combined) into piles according to crew quality.  firing order is
determined by
drawing from the highest quality pile first until it is exhausted, then
the
next highest, etc.  the fleet admiral may intervene a limited number of
times
per game depending upon admiral quality by announcing a "Priority
Order".  when
selecting a card from the highest pile, the admiral may select any ship
(regardless of quality) to activate if one of his ships are drawn.  

this seems to meet the design goal of better quality ships react faster,
but
the admiral also may influence the course of events when he feels the
situation
is critical.  since this idea is fairly new to us, we have not
playtested it
too much (2 times).

so, this is very similar to your idea, but our problem is how to keep
the cards
straight when the admiral picks a low-quality ship.  simply swapping the
card
codes for the ships makes the switch easy, but penalizes the swapped
out,
high-quality ship.  if anyone has any ideas of what might work better,
please
post away!

i would like to hear your ideas on solving the crew quality part of this
equation.  maybe you already have a better solution.

david