Re: Re: [FT] Simultaneous Fire

> Oops, you fire first, gee
> I guess you killed my last ship with your last ship
> before I had a chance to fire. I don't like luck
> to have THAT great an impact. One lucky roll on 
> the initiative dice can turn a winning strategy
> into a crushing defeat, not because the strategy
> is bad, but just because the opponent was luckier.

I'll be honest, I haven't seen that. I've seen a bad initiative die roll
turn a winning strategy into a tactical loss, but I haven't seen it
throw the whole game.

I'm curious, though, what you normally have for fleets. I've found that
small fleets centred around large ships are more at the mercy of the
initiative die. For pick up games, or meeting engagements, I normally
play with rules similar to what we came up with for the GenCon
tournaments: a set number of points, more cruisers than capital ships,
and more escorts than cruisers. 

Otherwise we play scenarios. The scenarios usually include the list of
ships, and sometimes the order of activation. I have set scenarios where
one side wins initiative for the whole game (to represent better
training) or have a modifier to the initiative roll.

If you play with a small number of ships per player, particularly big
ships, then that iniative roll does become much more important. In which
case, you could try alternating initiative every turn instead of rolling
for it (I suspect you'll answer with, "But they say that's changing the
game...").

> None of the recent games that I played non
> simultaneous had any ship smaller than a destroyer
> and only 1 or 2 of those.

You should give playing a scenario with a lot of small ships a try. I
have more fun doing that than playing with superdreadnoughts. A good,
old fashioned, single cruiser with bunch of destroyers and frigates
guarding a convoy scenario is a blast. Things pop more often, and the
initiative die is less of an "all or nothing". 

It's, for me, the optimum level for FT. Sure, people tend to concentrate
on the big ships, but I have more fun with the cruisers and smaller. The
game goes by faster, the initiative roll is less important, and things
"pop" far more often. You don't get a lot of fighters, though, unless
you're willing to build your own ships, play with a an escort carrier,
or allow a few fighters to tag along (I have allowed the escorts to have
fighter coverage, on the assumption that there's a fleet carrier "over
there" somewhere...).