@Gamerman01:
Wonderful. Â A complicated game that takes forever to play just got more complicated, with more options. Â Bad enough the ANZAC declare war on Japan while UK stuffs a destroyer right in the Japanese fleet loophole never got closed. Â Now I need to think about over-buying when I have to buy carriers to catch planes, especially with Japan.
That’s right, the carrier tactic will still work. Â You only have to place them if the planes live, but you have to buy them to make the attack. Â Over-buy, lose the planes, then get the money back from the carriers. Â LOOPHOLE!
You unilaterally closed the fleet avoiding combat with subs/transports rule, Krieghund, I thought you would do the same here. But if I haven’t learned anything else, I have learned that you are unpredictable. :-P
I didn’t “unilaterally” do anything. I closed an unintended loophole after consulting with Larry to be sure it was unintended (though I was already 99.99% sure that it was).
This case, however, is a little different. Let me give you some historical perspective.
Revised introduced the concept of limited mobilization based on the IPC value of the territory containing the IC. This led to the possibility of over-purchasing, which had not existed before. The solution applied at that point (in the FAQ) was to destroy any over-purchased units without refund (though the “friendly” option of refunding the IPCs was also offered as an alternative). This worked fine in that game, as it couldn’t be exploited much.
When AA50 came along, the concept of damaged ICs was introduced. Under the rules of that game, unmobilizable (is that a word?) units were held over in “limbo” until a later turn. This created the potential for abuse of over-purchasing because a power whose capital was about to be captured could get rid of IPCs more easily by refusing to repair its ICs and buying units that it couldn’t produce, which would be held over and then destroyed upon capture of the capital. This would effectively destroy IPCs, keeping them out of the hands of the capturing power, while at the same time leaving the ICs unrepaired, costing that power more IPCs to repair them.
In later games, the concept of refunding the IPCs for over-purchased units was introduced to avoid this problem. Of course, this can also be abused, but it seemed the “lesser of two evils”. I’m really in interested to hear any stories of real-world abuse of this rule that benefits the abuser to any great extent, by the way.
Given all of this, you may ask, “Why don’t you just disallow over-purchasing in the first place?” That’s a great theory, but how would it work in practice? If none of the players notices the over-purchase, when the mobilization phase comes along a problem is presented - what to do with the excess units. That leaves us right back where we are now.
There are only two alternatives that I can think of to the ones outlined above. One is to redo the purchases, which seems like rewarding the mistake (or intentional act), as purchases can then be done with the benefit of knowledge of the turn’s events. The other is to select the units to be returned randomly, which would help prevent abuse, but seems to overly punish a simple mistake.
So that’s the story of why the rule is the way it is. As for not knowing about it before now, it’s been in the rules since AA42, 1st edition (2009). I really would think that if the rule were open to abuse to a great extent, it would have been discovered before now.
