Move Order By Stand Size
Hello Leviathan fans, today I am talking about movement and providing an optional rule for order of movement. On page 148 of the Leviathan Core Rules, we discuss movement of ships in terms of largest to smallest. The official rule states that using the Size attribute of the ship, larger ships in your force must move before the smaller ones.
Based on the configuration of the force this can cause some problems, especially for ships with very limited fields of fire, such as the Terran Commonwealth’s Spiculum-class gunship. If the force is large enough this may not cause too many issues, even in repeated rounds of lost Initiative. In smaller forces though, such as with the one provided in the Academy Set this can be a problem.
This is where the story of our game developer fumbling comes into play. During later rounds of playtesting, we had switched to using Stand Size as the delineator rather than ship Size. This made a big difference in allowing sacrifice maneuvers to be done and helping to try and set up a good shot through the fire first option through the side that was forced to make the first move. Imagine this developer’s surprise when someone schooled him on the rules he wrote on the first day of Gen Con because of a missed paragraph update.
That all said, I have not really received any complaints about the rules as written and am unwilling to make an official “rules change” as it hasn’t turned out to be as large of a problem as I thought it would be. However, I present this as an optional replacement rule for the home game.
Move Order By Stand Size
Using the Stand size on the ship’s card, all larger ships in a task force must move before smaller ships. Ships with bigger stands must move before smaller ones. If there is more than one ship available to move with the same Stand Size, the player may select which one to use.
Note that the Move Order by Stand Size rule only refers to the Stand size of ships in the allied task force, or same side, that is currently moving.
Example
Ross has lost Initiative and has two Javelins, a Spiculum, and a Mauler. The Mauler has a 3-Hex Stand, so must move first. When his next chance comes around, he has three 2-Hex Stand ships remaining to move. He may choose any of them to move.