Not as important as a functional caps-lock key.

Outside of bids and usefulness, there's also synergy. Look at Eaden Vrill's ability. "When performing a primary weapon attack against a stressed ship, roll 1 additional attack die." That's great! Get your opponent stressed, then Eaden comes along to take advantage. But he's a PS 3. So you have to make sure your ships that are throwing out stress during the combat phase have a higher PS so your targets are guaranteed to be carrying a stress when he shoots. You need to make sure a combo you have in mind works based on who's going when in a given phase.

If I had one small wish for the game, its that VI didn't exist.

If I had one huge wish for the game, it would be that the PS concept was less granular, and the stronger rules were put in place to make equal PS decisions simultaneous (aka, secret action selection rules and parallel attack resolution timing).

As is though, I like that the game has gotten to a point where extremely high PS is valuable. It's better than the days where you spent a ships worth of points to make a single, unmoddifiable attack (since you lost your action flying into the low PS models) before getting blown up by the 2 ships you were up against because you spent so many points on PS. I consider that a huge improvement in the grand scheme of things.

If I had one small wish for the game, its that VI didn't exist.

If I had one huge wish for the game, it would be that the PS concept was less granular, and the stronger rules were put in place to make equal PS decisions simultaneous (aka, secret action selection rules and parallel attack resolution timing).

As is though, I like that the game has gotten to a point where extremely high PS is valuable. It's better than the days where you spent a ships worth of points to make a single, unmoddifiable attack (since you lost your action flying into the low PS models) before getting blown up by the 2 ships you were up against because you spent so many points on PS. I consider that a huge improvement in the grand scheme of things.

VI can't not exist in the current rules with PS being so important. With order of movement being so static in this game (or any wargame really) an equilizer must exist. To remove VI the whole PS system needs to change otherwise the low and high extreme disparity become even more significant.

Not really, it just means pilots sit where they're designed to sit. I mean, as dumb as Advanced Cloaking Device is, its actually a somewhat elegant card on PS7 Whisper. It's the ability to further bid and counterbid that really creates the disparity, and in particular completely removes the space for models with a strong ability but no EPT. VI's issue is just that it basically exists as a "if everyone's super, no one is" demand upon the game that limits the EPT design space.

That said, I agree with what you said regardless and I'd much rather have a less granular PS system and less static order of movement by making it function more simultaneously, but that's a pretty major revamp.

Ok to clarify - that can't work in the current system because of how they designed the first few waves where high PS pilots also had the best skills and low ps ones had crappier more situational ones. It's currently improving however - brobots is a good example of a good mid ps list. Just to reinforce how important PS shift is they have now introduced Adaptability - a 0 point PS shift card.