Federation Commander

Up in the rules section of the forum there has been a discussion regarding simultaneous fire declaration, and how it comes into play in competitive games when you have four ships stacked up. The gist of it being that if you give away which three of your ships are going to be firing out of the hex in a given impulse, the enemy will likely choose to fire (he was going to fire anyway) at that fourth ship so as to prevent it from ever firing.

Fine.

My question is this - why do the four-stack? Specifically, why the four-stack as opposed to a three-stack with the fourth trailing a few hexes back?

This is more a matter of curiousity than anything else. We use miniatures in our group, and are generally willing to accept the tactical 'risk' of separating our ships in order to actually see those painted minis on the table.

In the 2 games that were mentioned in that thread the opponent was Lyran (ie. with ESGs). The more ships you have in a stack the more you can dissipate the ramming damage.

I'd also add that in both those games the stacked ships were hydran with point blank range weapon - being a hex further back from the others can make a noticeable difference to the damage they inflict, so even if it was seperate it might not have wanted to fire until it got closer still anyway. So the inability to fire that ship is not quite as clear cut as long as you don't get creamed first.

But primarily it was about ESGs (or at least it was in my game, Paul might have had slightly different reasons/priorities).

Nope. Same here. Just interested in the ESGs. Also, because ESG ships can't be next to each other, at point blank range it is often easy enough to arrange four all ships in a single hex to have a valid target. In my game, for example, if I chose to go to R0 rather than R1, I could have fired all four of my ships from the same stack. I decided to stay at R1 mostly because I decided the trade off on weapons fire (I was going to kill the DN either way and likely do good damage to one other ship). I chose R1 and R3 over R0 and R2 based on disruptor to-hit and damage.