My Initiative Sink Fix (or Jumping on the Bandwagon)

[Hash]

* shrug * I've won my fair share of games. I don't like unfair or illogical mechanics. It's not a matter of IFs and BUTs, tactics should work because they make sense, not because it's a neat rules exploit.

There is nothing wrong with boresight...there's something wrong with 4 Haven Patrol boats all stopping out of range being a valid tactic to prevent an opponents from firing.

For the record, I actually like Beam mechanics Burger has a problem with dice in general

 

[H]

actually, I have to sound surprised.

staying out of range of guns is Bad?!
seems a perfectly good tactic to me. if someone was shooting me, I sure as hell wouldn't want to move closer to give them an easier shot!

Tactis are irrelevant because of dice randomness and Crits!

 

[skavendan]

actually, I have to sound surprised.

staying out of range of guns is Bad?!
seems a perfectly good tactic to me. if someone was shooting me, I sure as hell wouldn't want to move closer to give them an easier shot!

Tactis are irrelevant because of dice randomness and Crits!

if thats true play me i will borrow you a Minbari fleet and you all ahead full at me and ill just stand and beam you

 

[Burger]

staying out of range of guns is Bad?!
seems a perfectly good tactic to me. if someone was shooting me, I sure as hell wouldn't want to move closer to give them an easier shot!

Nobody said that. What is bad is, 4 Havens staying out of range or behind a planet, thereby meaning that the majority of your fleet cannot fire at the 6 Demos's that are charging right down the battle field at you head on. It is senseless.

 

[H]

no more sensel;ess than if you had a was of hermes trying to do the same thing

although I think Boresight does need some work, I liked What Triggy was saying the other day, sounded like it would go some way to rectifying issues

 

[Nightmares about Minbari]

Got another suggestion, which doesn't require massive rules changes and seams to make this less of a problem in our games.

Allow boresight weapons a slight degree of flexibility, they only need to cross the base, rather than be lined up on the stem of the figure.

This means that a boresight ship can line up on an enemy ships probable line of attack, and against the big lumbering ships hiding behind init sinks they will have difficulty getting off the boresight line, and if they do they are probably having to manoeuvre hard which may disrupt their own attacks.

It's not going to help in every situation, however it will make big lumbering targets hiding behind patrol ships a lot more difficult.

 

[Burger]

More rules based on base size are bad imo... there's already too many. Since there is no official base size and FA ships and counters can also be used, it isn't fair.

 

[Nightmares about Minbari]

As I said, we've just been using it as a house rule, would need to be more formalised for an official rule of course.

However it does make early moving boresight weapons more useful, which reduces the effect of init sinks, which to me makes it worth a bit of work.

 

[locarno24]

Odd how every argument about initiative almost invariably ends up transmetamorphoshiftizing into one about boresighted guns....

That's invariably the problem. Swarms should be able to outmanouvre larger ships - that's practically the point of having them, along with the 'compartmentization' of hit points preventing the lethal critical taking out a large chunk of firepower - but ships which do have bore-sighted guns almost invariably have much or even most of their firepower in their main laser/slicer beam. Take that away, which is far too easy to do, and they become next to useless for a reason which doesn't, outside of game rules, make sense.

 

[David Anla Shok']

you are correct. their is no reason why apart from perhaps your first ship, you can't line up a boresight.

Game on saturday, I had 2 Omegas and 3 init sinks. I thought I'd at least get *some* beam shots off. But the centauri cheesemonger had 4 havens, All Stopped right on the back line. Please tell me how I could have got a shot off, while his 6 Demos and 2 Morgrath were closing in for the kill? Even if I All Power To Engines to get in range of the havens I can only go 9", and then I can't even turn to line up the boresight.

Hmm. That is cheese. Maybe non moving ships should not be counted during the move phase?

 

[greenboy]

if you moved and fired each ship one at a time rather than moveing all the ships then fireing all the ships winning init wqould be worth while and it would solve the boresight problem

 

[David Anla Shok']

if you moved and fired each ship one at a time rather than moveing all the ships then fireing all the ships winning init wqould be worth while and it would solve the boresight problem

Or define boresight as a narrow angle of fire as opposed to a simple straight line. Even a 22 degree angle opens up at range and would give you more target options. You could at least anticipate someone moving into it.

 

[Ripple]

Since the discussion has come back up...

Boresight is not always an issue... if you play with little terrain and large numbers of ships you can most likely find something for your boresight to do. However, if there is terrain, or your ships per square foot of table is not very high, there are lots of opportunity for no available targets. That's fine, as long as your not doing a game of chicken with the three ships right in front of you that you can't target. Not because they are so maneuverable (they'd have dodge for that) but because of the compact cars playing parking lot wars.

That said...

Choosing opponents activations negates single large bore sighted ships (even with escorts) from being played... one of the things we're trying to fix.

'saving' a single ship til last only works if you have a single large ship, so same as above, but now you never take two large bore sighted ships.

equal number of activations guts races that have low PL boresighted ships as you will lose a significant number of bore sights if you lose initiative (looking at drazi here).

You have a number of issues that all need to be fixed together...
Sinks, FAP selections, Boresight...

Best bet, find a way to decouple initiative and bore sight. Several good suggestions out there...

FAP, just go back to making buying down less cost efficient... you need to fill some holes in fleet lists for this, but overall it fixes the hit point/AD issues ad reflects the advantage of extra activations.

Sinks - still an issue, but now you can look at it without drawing in additional discussion of weapon access and ship values..

Ripple

 

[Draconis]

I like the idea of the narrow angle (22degrees) for Boresight.

I think I'll give this a try, as it seems like a simple fix without having to alter anything else, yet....

Cheers

 

[David Anla Shok']

I like the idea of the narrow angle (22degrees) for Boresight.

I think I'll give this a try, as it seems like a simple fix without having to alter anything else, yet....

Cheers

We haven't played with this yet. I need to make a template for it but it should make the game a bit less stressful and more interesting.

 

[Silvereye]

Like others have said, there is nothing wrong with boresight as an arc. The problems lie with how it the boresight mechanic works when used with the initiative system and the better value of lower priority choices. Right now the fleet with the greater numbers has a much larger advantage in terms of controlling the game.

The 22º arc probably will not make too much of a difference aside from the enemy being more likely to wander into it by accident. If you cannot make a turn to line up a boresight, your unlikely to be able to squeeze a target in to that arc.

It also would not help in Burger's scenario where a gaggle of havens are skulking on the back edge of the board out of range and just annoying the hell out of you.

Like skavendan, I tend to be able to line up boresights in most turns, but then I'm proabably fortunate that my opponents are aggressive players who like to get stuck in and try and explode stuff. The usual reasons I cannot line up a boresight include my ship pointing in the wrong direction (which also does not help with foreward arcs anyway) or failing a Come About! roll, but them are the breaks of a boresight fleet.

 

[GhostRecon]

I find it amusing that players immediately draw a discussion of initiative sinks, initiative, and boresight down to accusing players of not being able to cope with the current system.

Quite the contrary, as others have made clear, they can easily work within the system. Merely that, I believe I can say, we believe there can and should be a better way. To illuminate that more clearly, Triggy is clearly and well established as a prime player, one of the best in ACTA, so he obviously has no trouble working with the current system; however, in this very thread he acknowledges that initiative could use some work. I think that speaks for itself.

Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to playtest the proposal I put forth. However, as written and proposed, I think it resolves many of the poignant issues players have with initiative sinks, while preserving the nature and spirit of the initiative system, as it is, and providing the rubric for both swarm and cap-ship heavy fleets to succeed, enjoy, and play within.

Using Triggy's Omegas example, with my system:

2 Omegas and 3 "Initiative Sinks" (As humor, I'll call these Chronos... they're barely useful for more! )

versus:

4 Havens, 6 Demos, 2 Morgath

Firstly, the Centauri player would have to move his ships 3-3-2-2-2 if the EA player was moving each of his ships individually, and secondly he'd have to move his highest priority ships first (In this case, the 6 Demos and 2 Morgath).

So, one movement phase would look like:

Omega
Demos, Demos, Demos (Hey, its a chant! Praise be, Demos, wargod of cheese... *Ahem* I digress)
Omega
Demos, Demos, Morgath
Chronos
Morgath, Demos
Chronos
Haven, Haven
Chronos
Haven, Haven

Even though the EA player loses initiative, he still has a chance to maneuver his vessel in such a way that he can affect how the Centauri player moves and selects his ship (Using the tactics of maneuver to affect your enemy's maneuver, essentially getting into his decision making cycle) AND even, with some tactical planning, get that Omega into the fight. Of course, it may not have a chance to get a boresight, having lost initiative, but the other Omega will certainly have a good chance of having a ship it wants to shoot, and that's the key here.

And what if the EA player -wins- initiative? Then the Centauri player has to move three ships first, before the EA player even has to move his Omega. Initiative still has value, but initiative sinks don't disproportionately over-affect and metagame the initiative phase.

In our current system, as Triggy and Hash illustrate, the Omegas would -never- get a chance to target those Demos and Morgath, the Havens completely affecting the initiative phase so severely that the only hope the EA player has is to bring more initiative sinks, or pray he can kill off enough of his enemy's initiative sinks that he does get enough.

 

[David Anla Shok']

The 22º arc probably will not make too much of a difference aside from the enemy being more likely to wander into it by accident. If you cannot make a turn to line up a boresight, your unlikely to be able to squeeze a target in to that arc.
[/quote]

We shall see.

 

[stringvest]

Another idea to throw into the melting pot, is card activation.

Pick a suit per side and the equivalent number corresponds to a ship.

Shuffle up per turn.

Roll for initiative, the winner then has the option to move one of his cards to the back of the pile as the cards are drawn from the pack.

There then would be no point in initiative sinks.

 

[David Anla Shok']

Another idea to throw into the melting pot, is card activation.

Pick a suit per side and the equivalent number corresponds to a ship.

Shuffle up per turn.

Roll for initiative, the winner then has the option to move one of his cards to the back of the pile as the cards are drawn from the pack.

There then would be no point in initiative sinks.

Well, less point in having initiative sinks anyway...