Rule Clarification - Scrambles

[Komiserik]

First time poster, short-medium time reader.

My cousins and I were playing a game (fairly new to the Alpha 2&3 rules) when a scramble question (argument) came up. If the defender scrambles their fighters to defend from the attackers bombardment, can the attacker then divert any fighters/tacs they had committed to the land attack and use them to attack the scrambled defenders?

We thought we had it figured out, but were recently playing a game on AAA and it didn’t allow the attacker to divert the planes…

Apologies if this has already been discussed…too many pages to look through…

[kcdzim]

Nope.  Once attackers moves are set and FINALIZED, then the defender can choose to scramble.  The attacker is not permitted to revise - they need to plan for scrambles to occur and task accordingly.

[Komiserik]

ahhhh thank you so much! I thought that this was the case, but they convinced me otherwise because of some weird wording in the rule books.

[Spendo02]

Its a pretty straight forward setup:

Attacker declares ALL combat moves and then you request defender to decide on Scrambles/Intercepts.  This indicates you have concluded all your combat moves for the turn.

At this point, the Attacker has passed the point of no return and is stuck with all the decisions just made.

You’ll get a lot of mileage out of requiring the attacker to request scramble decisions with the understanding it indicates they have concluded all their combat moves.

In the case where there are no scrambles, just require the attacker to announce something along the lines of, “That ends my combat move phase.”

Generally it is VERY important when playing in person to make sure you announce the transition of the phases and don’t muddle up combat and non-combat moves.  Not saying people all cheat, but it sucks when you lose track of unit movement and end up double moving something that impacts the game dramatically (like moving a bomber to Hawaii in your combat move phase and then non-combat moving it in the same round to one of the smaller islands and now being in striking distance of unprotected Japanese TT which should have been safe but now are not).