Re: Initiative - was RE: Piquet

> 
> The one large issue with Piquet system is the complete randomness of
it.  Since both players roll an opposed d20 and the winner gets the
difference in activations, it can generate numbers from 0 to 19.  If a
player is lucky and rolls several high numbers in a row, the opponent
essentially can't move or perform actions for several turns.  I've seen
games that were over within 6 turns because one side could not roll high
to save their (game)life.  A couple of lines of infantry were able to
march across half the board and then fire and reload three times into
the opponent before receiving return fire.  The intiative die rolls
balanced out at that point, but it was moot since they had already taken
significant casualties.

   Yep, this is "possible".  Of course, you have to win all that
initiative 
 *and* get all the right cards (and none of the wrong ones), *and* use
them all
 for the right part of your army, and you might win this way.  On the
other 
 hand, if you don't get all three of those conditions, you'll usually
find a 
 large part of your army isolated and easily destroyed and the battle
lost.
   I know that PK isn't to everyone's tastes, but it still seems to me
to be
 the best system I've seen for allowing the wild results we actually see
on
 the battlefield.  With PK, you could actually produce an Austerlitz, a
Jena,
 or Marengo.  Most systems are woefully incapable of producing those
kinds of
 "snowball" victories that did really happen.
   All that said, there are quite a number of alternate initiative
systems in
 PK now.  The most popular alternatives lately seem to be the domino
versions
 that use domino draws to determine initiative with the winner getting a
higher
 number (possible *much* higher) and the loser getting the lower number.
 If 
 the initiative system is all that bugs you about PK, there's probably 2
dozen
 variant ways of doing it.  One of which is likely to suit you better.

  grant