Request: Simultaneous combat

[Groggy]

You all have good points about initiative and surprise affecting battles at warppoints. My concern is primarily with fleet firing orders. Someone replied with a proposal for ship-based instead of fleet-based firing order; this doesn't sound all that hard to do and would go a long way toward realizing simultaneous combat and movement. And I like how crew experience, ship speed, etc. all play into who get to move and fire first.

A few years ago I wrote a C++ program to simulate battles with simultaneous movement and combat, lots of text output but I never managed to couple it to a GUI. Based on that experience, I don't think it would be all that hard to implement this. I also included the effects of ship explosions causing damage to nearby ships, that would be a cool feature to add as well. Give people second thoughts about using point-blank or short weapon range.