Titanomachina: Initiative Issues

Lately I've received feedback about how initiative works in Titanomachina. In case you don't know how it works, every player gets 25 habitat blocks at the beginning of the game with their Titan figurine. Of those 25 habitat blocks, 24 are available to be placed on the board and 1 goes into the initiative stack. Players stack the initiative stack in the order of their personality cards, from highest to lowest. Going from the top downwards and looping around is the order in which players take turns. Playes can change their position in the stack by activating sensor systems for the Scan action or by activating extra armour systems for the Block action and taking damage to that system in order to trigger the Telemetry trait of that system. 

If that last part seems really kludgy it probably is, as I've received feedback that makes me come back to why that was implemented, and how it could be changed without disrupting how the game works too much. The first problem is that when you're at the top of the stack another player can knock you down to the bottom of the stack if you activate an extra armour system to defend yourself. Apparently it feels bad to have that happen on top of all the other results of being attacked (damage, positional change, losing cards in hand). The second problem is that an attacker can essentially earn themselves a free consecutive turn if they're shooting another player directly below them in the initiative stack. I'm kind of okay with this, but apparently again it feels bad to some players. 

Part of the reason for this is the telemetry rule, and part of this is that the initiative stack works by the person with the next block in the initiative stack takes the next turn regardless of whether the initiative changes that turn. Having chewed on it for a bit, I think this can be resolved without radically changing the core of the design. 

Firstly, I think it's a matter of changing the rule about who goes next in the initiative stack: the player that would have gone next if the initiative hadn't changed. It kind of kicks the problem down the road, because there is a purpose to mixing up the initiative and creating that imbalance in the number and order of actions. But it prevents weird effects depending on the number of players, and prevents increasing a player's position in the initiative stack from giving the previous player a 'free shot' so to speak, meaning that the Scan action doesn't double its time-cost. It's also about the minimum that can be changed in the rules. 

Secondly, I think changing the extra armour system is a good idea, and removing 'telemetry' from the game. Much like how I changed 'ablative armour' to 'extra armour' because 'ablative' is apparently obscure (and it is) I think telemetry is un-necessarily confusing and difficult for players to grok as they learn, and outweighs the benefit to the experienced players to have. Yes, it can be used to reverse the initiative, rewards aggression, and so on, but most of that might be retained if extra armour exchanges the telemetry trait for a scan action, giving it a pro-active purpose as well as a reactive purpose. Which also ties into the aforementioned problem with giving the previous player another immediate turn by increasing your own initiative, as giving up an extra armour card to give them another shot on you seems like a strong disincentive to play the card. Giving up extra armour to attack them first seems like a better structure of incentives and choices, at least from the perspective of dealing with these 'problems.'