Could you explain the purpose of the randomized initiative? You also don't speculate ranges for possible initiative values for ships (other than the +5 for diplomatic status), so I don't know if 1-20 is supposed to be a small difference or if it could be a really big difference.
I like the addition of ATKSPD. Should introduce a good variance in ships if assigned well.
[edit] Oh, wait. Are you saying all ships have a random initiative and there is no base value per ship? [/edit]
It says it rolls the 1-20 then adds the ship's initiative value, so makes it sound to me like each ship (class I'm assuming) will have it's own initiative modifier that gets added to the roll.Originally Posted by catswift
Yes, it would be along those lines. For instance something like a Planet Killer would have a lower initiative since it is a bigger ship and takes longer to fire it's weapon, and would have an attack speed of 1. Where as something like a fighter would have an initiative of 20, since it's smaller and faster and doesn't require it's weapons to charge.
We'll come up with some numbers and post them when we get some basics working and we'll look for feedback for everyone to see what their thoughts are.
Two obvious issues related to randomness:
1. How is order resolved when multiple ships end up with the same initiative? Can we guarantee that the resolution order is evenly distributed between the the two combatants?
2. Random target assignment. The fact that all ships are making sub-optimal choices does not remove bias in the event of lopsided ship attack ratings. If one fleet is made up entirely of ships that can one-shot any ship in the other fleet, random target assignment isn't a problem, but if a fleet of smaller ships is going against a fleet of larger ones, random assignment will distribute their damage in a way that will destroy the minimum number of ships possible. This seems problematic, since you'd expect smaller ships to focus fire on larger ones to maximize their effectiveness.
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