[Suicide Junkie]

CQ, That sounds perfectly sensible to me...

The faster ships with longer range weapons stay out of range.
If they warp in, they get burned until they can open the distance (which happens to be quite a lot of distance with stock weapon ranges; too much IMO, relative to the combat map size).

Fyron:
Other absurdities?
Initiative issues do matter on the first turn of combat, if the ships start within range of direct fire weapons.

In the case of missile weapons both sides get to fire and both sides get to hit, no problem.

If direct fire weapons are being used at a warppoint, the defender fires first. A reasonable, but hardcoded, WP defense advantage.
If direct fire weapons are being used in deep space battles, neither side gets to fire first, since they are all out of range.
In that case it is pretty much random who fires first as they charge into weapons range.

In empirical testing, I have yet to see any non-warppoint battle where the order of play made a difference.
Even in warppoint battles, who fires first doesn't matter much.

In CB, initiative questions are completely swamped by ship designs, fleet composition, and most importantly; strategies and formations.



Contrasting with SE5, and putting aside issues of moddability (more flexibility in most things, losses of others such as multiplex and inf. range missiles)

We have a pro:
- Initiative is moot.
Two ships with equal range will both fire before either takes damage. Often, ships with 10-20 difference in range will fire before the other ship's damage is applied.

We have a big list of cons:
- Shipset choice affects combat results.
- Turn processing speed affects combat results.
- Rolled hits (such as PD) may not actually hit, depending on the timing. (Very noticeable at high time multipliers.)
- Ships can overlap into token stacks (at least as bad as any initiative issue, IMO)
- Combat processing is SLOW!


So, that's why I say SE4's combat system is superior.
Deterministic combat given the random number seed is an indicator of many good properties.

***

What if SE4 were upgraded to have a system which works exactly the same as currently, except that ability loss is deferred until the end of the turn.
IE: Some particular ship may be targetted by the first volleys. Everybody will see that it is destroyed, or has lost all weapons as currently and stop firing when appropriate. But retains its ability to fire back with previously undamaged weapons and movement points. At the end of both players' turn, the ship explodes or loses its weapons.

Note: Attackers would see the abilities being lost. Taking out the Self Destruct or Master Computer, ECM, and fancy armors for example.
The ship taking all this damage would be oblivious to the ability loss until the end of turn, and so would fire back with full Combat Sensors, talisman, weapons and multiplex abilities.