Playing a game of 1914 and an interesting question came up…
Germany controls Picardy, Lorraine, and Burgundy, and has large stacks on Burgundy and Picardy.
France controls Paris, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Brest, and has a large stack (~20 inftry) on Paris, but few other units. Hoping to prevent a collapse, Britain has reinforced Brest and Italy has reinforced Marseilles, but there are only 2 infantry on Marseilles and 3 on Brest.
My question is, at what point during the combat phase does a political collapse occur? I know the rules say “immediately,” but I’m wondering if that creates an unintentional advantage for the attacker.
For instance, in this case, Germany can easily overpower the Allied units in Marseilles and Brest, taking control of those TTs for a total of 10 IPCs and forcing a French political collapse. However, they most likely do not have enough to take Paris.
What Germany could do is simply move a single infantry into Paris and use the rest of their units to take Brest and Marseilles. If those two battles are resolved first, they force the collapse and thus the removal of all French units from the board. That means that they’ve sidestepped a large French stack in Paris and taken the capital, previously defended by over 20 units, with a single infantry.
Is this the correct implementation of the rule?
The check for a power’s political collapse is done at the end of that power’s turn, not during the combat phase. The effects of the collapse are resolved immediately when it occurs, but it does not occur immediately when the power’s threshold is reached.
Ok, thanks for the clarification - looks like we missed that in the rules.
One follow-up question: can any power collapse on any turn?
Obviously, in this scenario France has the next turn so it wouldn’t make a difference, but could France collapse during Russia’s turn?
A power can only collapse (politically or economically) on its own turn.
I thought only Russia can collapse.
They are talking about the Potential Tournament Rules’ Political/Economic Collapse rules, which the base ruleset doesn’t have. It has the separate Russian Revolution rule which is similar (and probably influenced the PTR collapse rules), but has distinct conditions which only apply to Russia.
In the designer’s Tournament rules (which can be found here), any power can collapse, and Russia has no special rules (the Russian Revolution rules are not used).
