no mixed fleets, no fleets with more than one ship (since that reduces per ship damage)

Oh, and no ISB - or IT can't use two specific gates

No more than one SD in any given game?

This whole discussion came about because I spotted a couple of things that "looked wrong" in the current standard disclaimer

There are two ways to make a typical destroyer survive a minehit:
- Stack 5 (or more) of them
- Add a single chaff in a lower slot number

The first of those is considered a legitimate tactic, exploiting the difference between mindamage(fleet) and mindamage(ship).

The second is not, exploiting the allocation of damage in a mixed fleet to "dodge" the damage at vastly reduced cost when compared with the first.

Both rely on knowledge of the damage algorithms, as does missile chaff - and a whole host of other tactics (maximising pop growth, IS colonist shipping, calculating packet sizes etc...) rely on knowledge of the, often empirically derived, algorithms behind the game.

The original question I had wasn't even about the dodge - it was about allocation.

Allocation is built into the Stars! engine, it can't be changed without banning mixed fleets (or minefields ).

What can be done is that ships designs can be coordinated (usually) so that they aren't making the minefield explode onto nothing.

For "allocation" we are merely controlling (to a limited extent) how that mindamage(fleet) is distributed over multiple designs - conditional on the mindamage(fleet) still being allocated somewhere.

I assert that doing so is not a cheat - the damage is taken - for a numerical case study see Lowtek.

Noone expects that the damage dodge be routinely allowed

but allocation is a game mechanic that cannot be reasonably avoided.