Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9890645-20130922190810/@comment-11490363-20130923173002

Actually, the more that I think about it, I think that an initiative property would solve this problem completely. Most combat systems use this to determine order, instead of just randomness. R5s would have higher initiative obviously, the values would have to be balanced somehow, but that is not hard to do. This would stabilize the damage range and make decks much more predictable.

Surprise attacks could be done still, by increasing the initiative of all surprisers by some large value or doubling it, depending on the implementation chosen, so that most of the time they would attack first, but some bots could still have higher initiative and not be surprised, it has a real-world feel to it.

when you are attacking, you could maybe spend an extra battle cube to do a surprise attack. Otherwise standard initiative would apply.