Boresight / Initiative Fix...

[nekomata fuyu]

Why force it either way? With the above system you can give both options, so give the speed play version in the main rules, and the more in depth version in a box out. I don't expect that either version will have much of an effect on game balance at all.


Also, ideas for knock on effects:
Command gets split into Squadron Command and Fleet Command. Squadron Command gives the initiative bonus to the squadron that the ship is part of, and Fleet Command gives the initiative bonus to the entire fleet.

Instead of a single fleet initiative roll off to see who deploys first, players use the ship initiatives to decide what order the ships get deployed in.

Squadrons use the lowest initiative in the squadron.

 

[eldiablito]

Keeping an individual initiative roll per ship is no worse than the old car wars system with 10 phases. Likewise, if you just leave the dice and add the modifier next to each stand, then keeping track is fairly easy:
Initiatives below zero move
Net 1's move
Net 2's move
.....

Net 18's move

You get the idea.

Honestly, the way that fleets are played today, there usually are not too many ships around (baring the 20+ tethys fleets), so keeping track of 10 die rolls would add very little to the game speed.

 

[Triggy]

Keeping an individual initiative roll per ship is no worse than the old car wars system with 10 phases.

...

so keeping track of 10 die rolls would add very little to the game speed.

Unfortunately in most games it would add 5-10 minutes per turn and this is the main reason it's not done now.

neko - although you could calculate the numbers for each ship at the start, you'd have to look up the value for every ship every time you rolled for it. However, I don't see how it would benefit smaller ships over larger ships. It would give every ship an equal chance of going first/last and would actually prevent smaller ships from acting as initiative sinks (and thereby giving the player an advantage).

All this said, it's far too big a change and there would need to be a complete overhaul of the game if players were to use the system as is.

 

[nekomata fuyu]

neko - although you could calculate the numbers for each ship at the start, you'd have to look up the value for every ship every time you rolled for it. However, I don't see how it would benefit smaller ships over larger ships. It would give every ship an equal chance of going first/last and would actually prevent smaller ships from acting as initiative sinks (and thereby giving the player an advantage).

If not playing a campaign game, the CQ value will be the same for every ship within a fleet, so you'll then only need to remember the ship's initiative modifier. It would be no different to remembering the hull of a ship or the like - which is something you'd have to look up more often if you can't remember it.
If you are playing a campaign fleet, then remembering the differing CQ values will become an issue. As it will do for special actions. Or keeping track of all the differing refits that each ship has acquired.

As for how the system would fail to benefit smaller ships over larger ships, I'm not sure quite how you come to that conclusion. For the most part, smaller ships would have higher initiative modifiers, and would therefore have a higher chance of scoring a higher initiative. If that isn't an advantage over larger ships, I'm not sure what would be. It certainly wouldn't give every ship an equal chance of winning initiative as you suggest.
Also, the stopping of smaller ships from acting as initiative sinks - firstly, this is the whole point of fixing initiative, so I damn well hope it would do :wink: Secondly, I don't see how this would be an advantage for a player (unless of course you mean the opponent).

 

[locarno24]

The main issue is that this will for the most part weaken already underpowered high priority ships, and strengthen already overpowered low priority ships, so the fleets will be in even more desperate need of a rebalance. This will pretty much mean that this idea can't happen until 3rd Ed.

I quite like the idea; if using an I-GO-YOU-GO style of game, this works well as the order of movement becomes largely divorced from the numbers involved.

The core problem with the current initiative is the ability to hide an armageddon priority Bad-Arse class battleship behind a patrol priority Weedy class scout corvette, so that the enemy can only react to the former and not the latter.


Class-based initiative bonuses were something that I thought worked well in B5Wars (albeit that a using single roll rather than rolling for each ship would indeed be a lot faster).

It does benefit bigger ships in that they should always have a fair chance of reacting to a vessel of equivalent size in the enemy fleet.

It does hamper them that they can basically never expect a boresight shot on a smaller vessel, even one on one. Mind you, that is (a) realistic and (b) an artifact of the boresight arc, not the initiative rules as such.

 

[l33tpenguin]

I've suggested a speed based initiative before, and I still like the idea. its realistic and almost completely eliminates the use of smaller fast ships as init sinks. Using priority level as well as ship speed would completely fix this. Some fleets still have a number of slower low level ships that could sink for large ships (Omegas and Chronii, for example).

To keep things a bit faster, I'd prefer a single fleet initiative roll. I would have to be rolling initiative on a 5 Arma point fleet of Drahk, Drazi or ISA... it also gives a winner to determine who goes first for moving ships with the same score.

 

[Chernobyl]

Idea

Introduce a thurst trait to replace ships speed. Indicates how quickly a ship may speed up or slow down. Turning remains the same. (move half speed to turn) Big heavy ships like G'Quan and Omega would have thrust 2. Small nimble ships like White star could have thrust 5 or 6. All ships would start a game at say speed 3 or something. During the initiative phase, you'd have to set your speed for all ships (1 inch increments). All ships move in speed order, lowest to highest. If two players have ships that move at a certain speed, (a tie), then they roll initiative to see who moves first. Boresight now just needs to strike the base of a ship.
Fighters still have speed trait - a fixed speed that they can move up to each round, fighter movement is largely unchanged - move after ships, fire before ships.

You'd need to track speed from turn to turn. You'd also need to re-evaluate effects of criticals on speed and turns. instead of reducing speed by say, -4, you might "reduce thrust to 1". instead of speed reduced by -1, say, "reduce thrust to 3". if your ship already has thrust lower than 3, then it has no effect.
Crippling a ship would reduce thrust to 1 immediately. Ships that are drifitng, have thrust 0 and turns 0. (you might get carried off the board quite quickly with this...)

Special orders would need to be tweaked. APE! would increase thrust by 50% (in whole inches, round down to 1)
All Stop! would go away, as APE! could be used for stopping thrust also.
All stop and Pivot! would now simply require you to start at speed zero.

I'd reserve "thrust 1" for crippled ships. so the minimum thrust would be thrust 2. Most small patrol ships would have higher thrust (say 4 or 5), most bigger ships would have thrust 2.

Chernobyl

 

[Da Boss]

Personally I prefer the present system of ship movement as it is reasonably fast - introducing a mechanic that requires you to keep track of the fleets speed turn turn is not really what I am looking for in a game.

Full Thrust is very good at using this system but too taxing for me to play!!!!! in general Sad but true....................

does not help the problem I know but just my feeling on the matter

 

[nekomata fuyu]

I like the idea of a ship's previous speed having an effect on the current speed, but it does need to be made more general. The system I'm using for the ruleset I'm writing is as follows:
There are 4 speed bands:
All Stop - No movement. Turning only.
Half Speed - Move between 0 and half the ship's speed.
Full Speed - Move between half the ship's speed and the ship's listed speed.
All Ahead Full - Move between the ship's listed speed and up to 150% of the ship's speed. No turns may be attempted.

If you don't use a special action, the ship continues using the same speed band as the previous turn. The ship may move up or down a speed band by using a special action, but a ship may only change its speed by one band per turn.

Before anyone picks too many holes in it, keep in mind that it's a system not written for ACTA, so things like turning are intended to be handled differently. Despite that, I imagine that it would be easy enough to adapt to ACTA.