KarmikazeKidd said:

No I am not! THere is no theory. There is a definition of a word in the English language which is properly and accurately defined. You are telling me that I am wrong because some game designer used a word incorrectly. You refuse to accept that the designer might have made an error.  I have never used the word "instantaneous" in this thread. I have not tried to "wed" words at all. You have brought that into it. I have given you the official definition of the word and you refuse to accept it. I have not misunderstood the word at all, though, I fear that the designer may have done so. You most certainly have and tried to put words into my mouth, which I clearly have not mentioned.

 I think this rule can be explained by mechanical procedures. If I get a critical hit, I need to put a face-up damage card by my ship card to indicate that it received a critical hit. If I don't do that, it forces players to memorize how many critical hits were scored between two attacks by pilots of the same skill level. What if Wedge scored a critical hit but the Imperial player didn't put a face-up damage card on Vader right away. After Vader attacks, the Imperial player could claim there was no crit and the Rebel player could claim it was two. The damage has to be revealed as it is received to keep track of it.

Likewise, if the ship already had a crit and it gets a new one, how is a player to know which is the new and which is the old? You don't. You just count both of them. It's a simple solution to a potential conflict.

Another option they could have done is included more crit tokens so that you apply crit tokens during simultaneous combat, deal face-down damage cards, and then flip a number of those damage cards face up equal to the number of crit tokens you have. But they didn't include that many crit tokens so I seriously think this ruling was meant as a means to keep track of damage and avoid potential conflicts between players.

Big Al said:

No hard feelings Al.  I have decided to limit my use of capital letters to the beginning for sentences, proper nouns, and acronyms.  And you're right this has been blown out of proportion.  So I'm going to let it go.  And there "Rule Questions" link I was talking about is not in the forums.  If you scroll to the very bottom of this page, you'll see a grey link labeled "Rules Questions", next to "Help" and "User Support" in the disclaimer.  Most people miss it.  I did in the beginning.  It actually brings you to a page where you can send a email to FFG to ask questions.  But don't expect an answer back right away.

Roy

 Al, it's ok. We're not fighting here, it's just a friendly discussion. For clarity, I wasn't trying to imply you ever said the word instantaneous. I brought that up on my own. And I agree that they could have phrased things better to avoid confusion or objection to the term. There's no denying that. But my point was that ultimately, you are using an incomplete understanding of the word to make your assertions. Things can be said to happen 'at the same time' or concurrently even if they don't happen at the very same instant in time. Simultaneous is not meant to be so specific a word, though it is (as I granted you) quite often used in this manner. You and I can simultaneously fire 100 rounds at each other. But you might get lucky with your 5th round and hit me in the shoulder, making the latter half of my 100 rounds less accurate. Do you see what I'm saying here? Just because they didn't phrase things as best they could, doesn't mean it was incorrect. And please don't paint me as a fanboy that doesn't think game designers can ever be wrong. I do think FFG does a better job than most, but they are hardly infallible. But I've been around much worse. I played MageKnight, and Wizkids was just horrid with their rules management in that game.

The rules are not at all ambiguous on this issue.  They spell out exactly how to resolve the situation.  There is no need for an official answer on the subject, you already have it in the rulebook.

The argument that you believe the designers made a mistake with the rule is complete nonsense.  There are many cases where this is true in many games.  But that is only the case when the rules have holes in them.  There are not any holes in this rule.  The rulebook leaves no question on how the situation works.  So to assume that the designers somehow got a rule wrong despite purposefully wording a rule in a particular way is completely illogical.

The rules doesn't work how you think it should, that doesn't matter at all.  It works as the designers think it should work.  Not only that but you, Al, did not have an understanding of the initiative rules involved in the situation or the advantages that are granted by having or not having the initiative  which could lead to the designers specifically making this rule.  Because it is very clear that they purposefully wrote the rule in a certain way, as there is no ambiguity.