Talk:Stress/@comment-120.22.186.253-20190503021909/@comment-454133-20190503162944

BTW when a player's fleet cares enough about going first or last (whether that matters most during combat or activation), they will often leave points unspent in their fleet to create an Initiative Bid (or First Player bid in 2E -- sorry if I use these interchangeably, second edition changed some names around). The bid is very valuable to an order-sensitive fleet because the player with the fewest points spent gets to choose who gets the first player (initiative) token.

If you're flying with aces that want to arc-dodge foes, that initiative bid lets you force them to go first whenever PS matches. That means your aces can often outfly their aces, by virtue of rolling and boosting out of arc. If you have Whisper, Hot Shot, etc or your opponent likes to shut your expertise down with Tactician, you might want an initiative bid to make sure you can give initiative to yourself to shoot first.

Note that if two or more players care an awful lot about initiative, this can create a bidding war where they each try to leave more and more out of their fleet to guess and beat what their opponents will bid. Eventually you have the tough decision between losing the bid but bringing more useful upgrades, vs winning the bid at a steep cost. Tournament players often fight very hard with their points to control initiative. In second edition I've seen 15% or more of a fleet's points (more than the cost of a TIE Fighter) go unspent just to seize initiative, which is crazy, but those players' fleets apparently depended extremely heavily on activation/combat order (and they could afford the points -- the bid was more valuable than what they could add with those points).