@Krieghund said in Some cases of transport-related rules across "Axis & Allies" games from Classic to the most recent ones:
@Cernel Cases 1 and 2 are legal in versions up to and including Revised OOB, but not legal in Revised LHTR or later. Cases 3 through 5 are not legal in any version.
Thank you for the clarifications.
In particular, I got the doubts because the rules for Revised LHTR (2.0) do not clearly state (in my opinion) that a transport which took part in a battle cannot do anything else at all until the end of the turn.
Regarding the cases 3, 4 and 5 (assuming that case 5 counts as bridging, thus as the transport moving albeit within the same sea zone), I understand that they are ruled out at least by the sentence
Once these sea units have moved and/or participated in combat they may not move or participate
in the noncombat move phase of the turn.
(obviously assuming that “they may not move” means “they cannot move” so not “they are allowed not to move”)
Moreover, am I right to understand that a transport which offloads one or more units without doing anything else is not moving, yet it is participating in the phase?
If so, the aforementioned excerpt would also make case 2 illegal, because the transport participated in combat and would then also participate in the noncombat move phase of the turn. Right?
I’m just not sure that offloading one or more units during the noncombat move phase means participating in the noncombat move phase because the transport can be seen as being purely passive (as even an allied transport can do that outside of its turn).
Similarly, if a transport participate in combat, does its cargo count as participating in combat too? For example, are units which were cargo of a transport which participated in combat during the current turn considered units which participated in combat? I’m quite certain they do not, but I somewhat see a similarity between their passivity and the passivity of the (possibly allied) transport which do nothing but offloading other units.
Still regarding case 2, I assume that just offloading does not count as a movement for the transport (although making the transport unable to move for the rest of the turn).
If offloading as in case 2 counts as the transport itself making a noncombat movement (by moving to a coast-line within the same sea zone), how do the rules clarify that?
In any case, since the quoted excerpt only refers to units being in hostile sea zones at the start of their controller’s turn, it leaves case 1 open.
Regarding case 1 (beside the fact that it would be of course forbidden if we can assume that offloading from a transport counts as moving the transport), the only thing which I’ve found seemingly forbidding what at the case is the following excerpt.
Transports can move to friendly coastal territories and load or offload cargo, unless they loaded,
moved or offloaded during the combat move or combat phase.
This would cover the (common) case (1) of taking part in a battle by moving to the sea zone of the battle (however it would say nothing about the (very rare) case (2) in which an already loaded transport starts the turn inside a hostile sea zone and does not move).
The first problem which I have with this excerpt is that whether the “or” are inclusive or exclusive is not clarified. I assume that they have to be inclusive, so the excerpt can be more clearly re-written as
Transports can move to friendly coastal territories and load and/or offload cargo unless they loaded,
moved and/or offloaded during the combat move and/or combat phase.
(I’ve also removed the unnecessary comma before “unless”.)
However, this is not a major problem because I think that it is quite obvious that the “or” of this sentence are actually “and/or”. Of course, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with just writing “or” to mean “and/or”: that’s just common English and makes perfectly sense in situations where the inclusiveness is already clear enough to deem unnecessary to resort to writing “and/or” instead of just “or” (which I assume is the reason the “and/or” was not used in this sentence but was used in other ones).
The main problem which I have with this sentence is that the main clause (specifically, as re-written, “transports can move to friendly coastal territories and load and/or offload cargo”) can be understood as talking about a situation in which we are both moving and loading/offloading. In this case (if we read it that way, which I believe we can), the whole sentence would say nothing about cases in which we are moving without loading and/or offloading as well as cases in which we are loading and/or offloading without moving.
To be clear, the aforementioned re-written quote can be read as
Transports can both move to friendly coastal territories and load and/or offload cargo unless they loaded,
moved and/or offloaded during the combat move and/or combat phase.
My assumption is that this is not the intended meaning of the sentence and that the “and” in the sentence was actually intended to be an “and/or”, so the actual sentence was supposed to be
Transports can move to friendly coastal territories and/or load and/or offload cargo unless they loaded,
moved and/or offloaded during the combat move and/or combat phase.
Correct?
If this is correct, let me point out that (whereas in English you can surely write “or” to mean “and/or”) I believe that you do not usually write “and” to mean “and/or”, which would make the sentence not very clearly written (only if my interpretation is correct of course).
Alternatively, it may have been intended to be a case of “it can do this and can do that”, in which case it could have been written (writing “and can” instead of only “and”) as
Transports can move to friendly coastal territories and can load and/or offload cargo unless they loaded,
moved and/or offloaded during the combat move and/or combat phase.
The sentence could have been written even more clearly (at the cost of being harder to read) as
Transports can move to friendly coastal territories and/or load and/or offload cargo, but they can neither move nor load nor offload if they loaded,
moved and/or offloaded during the combat move and/or combat phase.
So my understanding is that each of the last three sentences which I’ve written and quoted is equipollent to the excerpt. Correct?
Sorry if I’m missing something obvious and thank you.
(I actually do believe that the Revised LHTR rules are some of the best written Axis & Allies rules.)