I know this question is directed at the Patriarch, but I feel I need to reinforce my position: stateless combat instead of turn based. If the several-moves-at-once option is not popular, how about a battle solved in a single round at least? My intention is to make battling as agile as possible.

I would like any system to:
1)Not have any truly degenerate strategies
2)Be easy to conduct and participate in
3)Reward the ability to predict a single move by your opponent
4)Be asymmetric both by stat and by move in order to keep things interesting.
5)Be worth participating in (i.e. fun, slightly positive honor reward and won’t kill you unless you’re already hurt when the duel starts.)

Oh, and
6)Allows both sides a chance of winning no matter what thier respective stats are.

I think we can get there from my Duel Core proposal, which (I think) currently only fails your third point, if it and all its related proposals pass.

Maybe it’s worth putting a deterministic order system forward, on top of it, to see what the current batch of players actually think about it.

The way I see it, a turn-by-turn first-blood system would be more suited to what he is looking for.  the Duel Core system would have too much of a chance of killing you in one duel.

I don’t mind the first blood idea Yoda, but also like Kevan’s original idea of sending a batch at once. Perhaps, each Clansmen can send up to 3 or 4 moves per Round? That way there’s a high chance the battle gets resolved on the first Round.

It’s not much of a leap to make Duel Core into a turn-based or first-blood game, if people want it. Nomics need to fall forward quickly.