Alpha Strike Damage Allocation

Allocating lots of damage is one of the things that slows down Federation Commander the most.  This is an alternate way of doing damage allocation for lots of damage. In this system, the various boxes on the ship card diagram are categorized.  These categories are the same as the official DAC, meaning that they go by the colors of the boxes on the ship card diagram.  They are:  Hull, Control (bridge, flag, emer, aux con), Power (warp, reactor, battery), Systems (lab, shuttle, transporter, tractor, probe), and Weapons (phaser, torpedo, drone). How it Works When massive amounts of damage are taken, instead of rolling the 1d6 several times to select the damage tables, use the chart below to determine how many hits should be allocated for each of the major categories. Any time a hit is taken on Hull, any hull box can be marked.  The same is true for Power hits...any power box can be marked (including batteries). System hits are marked in this order:  lab, lab, shuttle, transporter, tractor, repeat the sequence.  After the second time through the sequence, the probe takes a hit.  Players could agree to allow the player taking the damage to mark whatever systems they want. Weapon hits are marked in this order:  phaser, phaser, phaser, torpedo, drone, repeat the sequence.  Or, players can agree to let the player taking the damage to mark whatever weapons they want. Whenever all boxes of a category are damaged, but more are called for, the next point is scored as one frame damage.  The remainder of the hits go to the next category (to the right).  A player can elect to not accept damage to the last remaining box of a category, but must take one frame damage.  If there are any remaining damage points for that category, one more frame damage should be taken and the rest transferred to the next category to the right. Directed targeting still works with this system.  Use the other charts for each type.  With directed targeting, if all the boxes in a category are damaged, any extra damage points for that category cause one frame damage.  The rest of the damage points for that category are skipped and not recorded.  They are essentially lost. Criticism The "Alpha Strike" system is based solely on average percentages of statistical randomness in the actual Damage Allocation tables.  The element of luck and lucky hits has been removed.  This might be a small price to pay in order to resolve large amounts of damage quickly.  If the number of damage points to be resolved are low, the normal procedure of rolling for one or two damage tables should be used.  This preserves the element of luck and randomness.  Once huge numbers of hits are scored, however, one wonders how much luck really matters if a ship is going to be gutted or destroyed anyway.  This system makes that process quick and easy. Since we have begun using this system, our group has been able to play games faster and keep players more interested.  Instead of rolling a die for every 10 hits and going across the damage table, we are able to take care of lots of hits in just a few seconds. Below is the chart showing the numbers of damage points for each category for numbers of hits from 21 to 100.