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Joined: Tue Jul 26, 2005 1:20 am
Posts: 23
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As others have pointed out, in rules design there's a significant trade-off when writing rules between making them easy to learn, and making them precise and clear enough that they have unambiguous effects in unforseen scenarios.
Epic tends towards the former. The usual style is to describe what commonly happens, then describe what happens in several special circumstances. This creates ambiguity when novel situations arise (since there's no "underlying rule" to apply that "generates" both the common and documented special circumstances).
When enough people ask about a particular scenario, the gang who know Jervis add something to the FAQ to cover it. :-)
This is one of those gaps. Though they describe a unit-by-unit procedure for determining which units get hit first, it's not clear whether the terms "front" and "back" are just descriptive of what you get when applying the unit-by-unit rules in the common situation, or whether they're first-class concepts in the rules and there's supposed to be a way to find the "front" of a formation in all circumstances.
But, for the record, I think it's the former. I think "front" and "back" are just descriptions. Epic's smooth blend of rule, rationale, description and example can make interpretation difficult, but I think it's this:
I'm underlining what I think are hard rules and italicizing what I think is rationale, description or example.
Suppressed Units: One unit that has a line of fire and is within range may not shoot for each Blast marker on the formation. Units are suppressed ?from the back to the front? of a formation, with the front and the back being determined by the location of the target formation. The units that are the furthest away from any units in the target formation are suppressed first, on the basis that troops lurking at the rear are more likely to keep their heads down than the more gung ho chaps at the front! If several units are equally far away from the target formation, then the controlling player may choose which to suppress.
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"Front" and "back" lose any intuitive applicability when formations overlap, which is why I think these aren't first-class rule concepts.
The language in 1.9.6 is regrettably loose, since it states that hits have to be allocated to targets within range and line of fire of "the enemy". I wish this said either a) "the firing weapon" or something like b) "any weapon on any enemy unit from the firing formation", but I'm not sure what it means.
(The latter interpretation is analogous to the rules interpretations that give you 'range stretching', but it's easy to come up with scenarios with argument-provoking results. The former has fewer odd cases, but makes order of hit allocation important because of restrictions on "doubling up" and is slow without speed rolling.)
I play with a), with speed rolling, so in my Epic "ground attack sniping" is totally legal. It doesn't offend me, though - it seems reasonable that aircraft would target anti-aircraft units, and this kind of positioning exposes the aircraft to as much AA fire as the defending player cares to field and position correctly.
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