Oh, As for your questing about why games tend to rely on dice-induced randomness...I think a big part of it is that as table-top Admirals we have far more perfect knowledge of our fleet's capabilities, our opponent's fleet's capabilities, and their respective distributions than a "real life" Commander might. This means that outcomes in a tabletop game can be predicted far more reliably than IRL (to the extent that real life applies to giant space craft!), which in turn results in reduced uncertainty. Without that uncertainty, I suspect many tabletop games would lose much of their interest, becoming elaborate versions of tic-tac-toe.
The problem as I see it is that any tabletop game that can be played reasonably fast has to make abstractions in order to model complex interactions. In real life, it's not so much that the outcomes of these interactions are random, it's that there are far too many variables involved that make their outcomes far too difficult to predict with any certainty. In tabletop games, abstractions taken to make the game playable tend to reduce the variables that make events so hard to predict in real life, which has the natural effect of making them more predictable. Thus, in order to keep things interesting it becomes important to find another source of uncertainty, which is often provided by dice rolls but could also be provided by chit draws (like sails of glory) or card draws (like a CCG).
