Card Draw Initiative:
Assign every card in a fleet a card (if you have 1-4 players, you can
suit split too). If your fleets exceed 13 ships a side, then thing get
interesting. But lets assume you have mid sized fleets here. Shuffle the cards
together. If you have small # of ships, throw in spacers for suspense and ease
of shuffling. Every turn, start at the top of the deck and draw. Each time a
ship's card comes up, it fires.
Fleet Admirals: Fleet admirals can exert their influence on the course of a
battle in many ways (morale, coordination etc) but one of these is in terms of
initiative. When a card from their side comes up, they can swap that ship with
any other unfired ship of their side. So they can either wait to fire
(hmmm...unlikely) or fire the big guys early (more
likely). Then when the card normally for the 'queue-jumping' ship
comes up, the ship that should have fired originally fires at that point.
The question asked was: How many times can a fleet admiral do it. Well, one
scheme that I'm toying with says we have 5 levels of fleet admirals. Each
level of fleet admiral can make one shift in the card order. So a level 5 (a
Farragut...) can make 5 such swaps.
What happens when fleet admirals clash: Well, to ease play, we subtract the
level of the lower from that of the higher and the lower one makes no changes
and the higher one makes the difference in changes. If a level 1 fleet admiral
meets a level 3, then the level 3
gets to make 3-1 = 2 changes of cards per turn. You could let both
sides do the swapping and let the choices they make decide things... but we
thought that might be more painful.
I've got my own (slightly complex but will work for small fleets) rules on
crew quality I'm working on and will put them up on the web when I have time.
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.
> On 15-Dec-99 at 10:16, David Reeves (davidar@nortelnetworks.com) wrote:
> i would like to hear your ideas on solving the crew quality part of
Leave the order of fire to random chance and the admiral like it is now. If
you really want to get GZGish use the crew quality just like they do in all
the other games.
Untrained - 4 inch range bands (have to be a 3rd rate power or
merchant ships)
Green - 6 inch range bands (Have to hit a ship during "workups" with a
new crew, maybe during a new classes first combat.)
Average - 8 inche range bands
Veteran - 10 inch range bands
Elite - 12 inch range bands.
Barring this:
1st threshold must roll Q die, on a 1 system fails 2nd threshold must roll Q
die, fails on a 1 or 2. etc.
You could do the same thing for any roll that needs a to hit or a morale roll.
Realize any of these will cause _major_ changes to
game play.
Interesting ideas.
Additional comments:
Limited Use: I would suggest providing a limited number of Admiral's
Priviledge to the game. Perhaps give each Admiral a set number of tokens for
Admiral's Priviledge (sorting through the deck to find a particular ship and
fire
it).
Once the number of tokens is used up, the ships must be fired in the order
drawn. You can also provide for the quality of the Admirals by giving a better
Admiral more Admiral's Priviledge tokens.
Crew Quality: If you have multiple decks or a specialized deck (such as Uno),
you can add crew quality to the mix by adding multiple of the same card to the
deck for higher quality ships. Green crewed get 1 card, Regular crewed ships
get 2 cards, and Veteral crewed ships get 3 cards. This increases the chances
of drawing a higher quality crew early in the game. When a Regular or Veteran
crewed ship's card is drawn, the player may fire the ship or wait until the
card is drawn again. If the player chooses to wait, the next card in the
deck is drawn and that ship/player has an opprotunity to fire.
comments inserted below
> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 10:55:34 -0500
we are definitely on the same wavelength here. we do exactly this. as a
preview to our other rule writeups, the admiral's limited priviledge orders
are also used for causing rerolls to morale, hit and threshold rolls. the
command decision for the admiral is to determine for what to use the his
limited influence and when. you should see the players sweat out these
decisions, but they are also smiles of enjoyment!!!
and yes, higher quality admirals (and staff) provide more influence, but they
cost more.
> Crew Quality:
great! i have heard of this idea before, but forgot about it. thanks for
posting it.
how about this idea for adding admiral's priviledge
to your multiple-card idea above: when a card is drawn, the any fleet
admiral may invoke a "Priority Order". that admiral may choose any one ship or
fighter flight to activate instead of the ship drawn. any subsequent card(s)
drawn for the activated ship are ignored. if multiple admirals invoke a
Priority Order simultaneously, the activated ships fire (and are damaged)
simultaneously. alternate rule: instead of simultaneous fire, the admirals
issuing a Priority Order roll d6 for fire order of selected ships, modified by
admiral quality.