My group thinks, and I have to agree, that the "fleet initiative system",
where the side with the most ships shoots first, is kind of artificial and
contrived. And it can lead to some gamey tactics like, "Shoot up the little
ships first *solely* so I can get the initiative in later rounds". I wonder if
there's a more natural way of doing initiative?
Seems like these things could be factors in who gets to shoot first: * Quality
of fire control systems (in a campaign game, you might have tech levels) *
Crew quality and training
* Command & Control -- who's got the best admiral or the
best communications equipment? * Fleet morale * Tactical advantage (due to
terrain or fleet positioning) * Weapon rate of fire? * A random factor (die
roll) * Keeping the system simple
Any great ideas? I'd like to accomodate some or all of the above
factors (plus the ones I overlooked :-) ), yet keep it simple enough
that you could figure it out in, say, 5-15 seconds.
> Daryl Poe writes:
@:) My group thinks, and I have to agree, that the "fleet initiative @:)
system", where the side with the most ships shoots first, is kind @:) of
artificial and contrived. And it can lead to some gamey @:) tactics like,
"Shoot up the little ships first *solely* so I can @:) get the initiative in
later rounds". I wonder if there's a more @:) natural way of doing initiative?
I don't know whether the current initiative system is natural or not (to a
certain extent it is but it gets less so as the number of ships per side gets
lower) but I wonder whether it really matters. My group has found that
initiative gives no more than a small benefit to the
player that gets it. It's nice (sometimes - might be better if
initiative gave you the ability to CHOOSE who fires first) but not usually
spectacular. If you have a lot of ships, the small ones are going to piffle no
matter who shoots first. If you have few, the player that goes first usually
won't be able to do enough damage to matter.
Are your experiences different?
> Joachim Heck - SunSoft wrote:
> I don't know whether the current initiative system is natural or not
I think most turns it doesn't matter much who shoots first, as you said, but
some turns it can make a big difference. If you've got a pair of fleets with a
good mix of ship sizes (say a battleship, a couple cruisers, and a handful of
destroyers), on the turn that the battleships close within 12" of each other
it can really make a big difference who gets to shoot first, as you can take
out a big chunk of the opponent's firepower before they get to shoot back.
Does the whole game revolve around getting the initiative? No; this
isn't Silent Death. :-)
> Sprayform wrote:
My tendency is to make players do certain things because it's tactically sound
rather than because the rules are trying to enforce a certain type of
behavior. In a recent game I ran, many of the small ships were equipped with
submunitions packs, and believe me, the saavy players picked up on the fact
that they better direct the fire of their massive ships at the heroic small
ships, or they were going to eat a lot of damage.
Now if you wanted to give the battleship pilots a trade-off to make
like "if you don't return fire then such-and-such a bad thing will
happen", that'd again put the control back in the players hands.
In reply to Joachim Heck:
> I don't know whether the current initiative system is natural or not
No, not at all. I tend to find the advantage given is relatively
minor...
Regards,
Another thing I did in the second playtest of my stargrunt scenario and at ECC
was a form of fleet initiative.
At the start, we rolled D6 for each captain. Given the size of the ships and
their rarity in the SG universe, I figured there were no incompetents at the
helm. Anyone who got a 6 was 'legendary' and likely the admiral.
So, side initiative was determined as follows: Each player rolls and
contributes 1D6 worth of value to the pool. In our game at ECC, that meant
each side's pool had 2d6 (in the playtest, I think it was 3).
Now, the 'legendary' captain (admiral, whatever he is) contributes 1D6 for his
player but he gets to roll 2D6 and take the best one. An incompetent, if he'd
been there, would have rolled 2 and taken the worst.
I kept it so that the number of dice on each side were balanced. I figure this
represents a sort of aggregate contribution from the various ship's officers
and the legendary leaders contributions can well persist beyond their own span
(for the rest of a game) as they include the training, insight, etc. passed on
to subordinates.
With uneven player counts, I'd let somebody roll 2 seperate dice or maybe let
one side use slightly bigger dice or something.
This was 'per player' not 'per ship'.
As it turned out, the Tauri maybe won the initiative once. They'd roll good
dice every so often, but the Lucians would pull out a 1 or 2 point better good
roll. That had a bit to do with the Tauri's misery.