There are a number of factors which will determine which warrior swings first. In speaking of this I can only tell you what I have a 'feel' for. In no way does anyone know all the factors on how this works exactly unless someone gets to look at the source code for the program. I will ignore Kill Desire simply because I have never noticed a difference in my warriors getting the jump whether they ran a 1 KD or a 10KD.
The Factors:
1. At warrior creation, the program initiates a random string class to be used for your warrior. Each string has a series of numbers that are generated then and always remain the same. It appears random, and some strings are good for some warriors and bad for others. You'll notice this only over time. This string class is permanent and not all of them are created equal. This is above and beyond any total number of skills. You may call this 'knack'.
2. At fight time, the program calls a random string to be used for BOTH warriors. This string affects the string of the warrior. This is why you will never see two fights that are line-by-line exactly the same. But if the fights were constantly run with exactly the same string, and no strategy changes are made, then you will have the same fight line-by-line.
3. FightString-modified-WarriorString# are taken for each warrior, and #Speed + 0.5#Wit + #DeciseSkills + OE + string# + tactic + style-adjustment-weapon-weight equates to a number.
4. These bonuses could be negative in adjustments also, i.e., running with the responsiveness tactic would be the negation of Decise skills and Speed skills-- rendering them out of the compilation (gaining them in parry and dodge instead). Running with the decise tactic would increase Decise.
5. The biggest controllable factors are OE, tactic, & weapon-weight (in that order).
6. If the number for Jump does not have a disparity of a specific number then a continued clash will occur until that disparity is shown. Then the fight actually begins. You can have a series of 10+ clash statements until the program finds who starts and initiates the fight sequences.
Example: FighterA ends up with a Jump# of 60 and FighterB ends up with a Jump# of 65. If the disparity between them had to be 10 points then what would happen is that a clash statement would be printed and the steps repeated. The next number from the Fight-String is called along with the next number in each of the Warrior-Strings; the computation is done again until the disparity (for the computer anyway) becomes true. Then the fight sequence is activated.
Pagan