Re: [FT] Simultaneous Fire

--- agoodall@canada.com wrote:
> On Thu, 10 May 2001, David Griffin wrote:
> 
> > With simultaneous
> > fire, every ship gets a chance to fire too.
> 
> Which is why some of us don't like simultaneous
> fire. There isn't a whole lot to FT. Choosing the
> order of fire among your ships and choosing targets
> amongst the enemy is sometimes the only real
> strategic element you have in a battle....

This is, I think, overstating the case. Maneuver
and ship design, as well as fleet composition are
still strategic/tactical factors. And choosing targets
is more tactical than strategic.

Further, consider what it looks like. Let's say you
have 10 ships on each side. One ship ends up waiting
for everyone else to fire first. On the one hand 
that means that apparently he waited till everyone
had fired before he fired, so he knows just who 
got destroyed and who NOT to waste his fire on. 
On the second hand, he might be destroyed WELL
before being able to fire. This doesn't sound very
plausible to me. And in this method, there is the
tactical consideration of guessing how much fire
to allocate to various targets since you DON'T know
whether they will be destroyed by the others 
shooting at them.

It seems to me the tactical consideration you name
is the more artificial one -- the one least likely
to have a connection with a real situation. Guessing
how much fire to allocate seems more likely to 
happen in real life (if there is such a thing).

If you didn't like simultaneous fire, but wanted to
model some kind of play mechanism, you might roll
a dice or two to get a number for each ship and 
the ship would fire in that phase reflecting random
chance. The side with initiative could subtract 2
from their roll or something. Even that would seem
more likely to me than the current system.

Yes, the dice initiative system with it's alternating
ship fire system is the one in the rules, and we're
pretty much all stuck with it. It's not a bad play
mechanic. It works, it's just not my personal choice.

In the last two outings, there was at least one
player who adamantly refused to play anything but
the normal initiative/fire alternating system, so
that's what we did. They claimed it totally 
transformed the game into a completely new game.
This too was an overstatement for effect. It does
change the feel of the game a bit, but not enough
to transform it into a whole new game (in my
opinion anyway). FT is a great system, but no
system is ever exactly like you think it should be.


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