RBP2 Lurker Discussion Thread - No Players!

[Beamup]

Beamup, as I understand it, it is legal to gift a city - it is also legal for Dantski to accept this city - everything happening in the same turn.

What is not legal is to interleave there moves. Basically if Dantski goes first, his part of the turn timer ends as soon as Spullla starts to move units. He is allowed to change city builds then, slave and change worked tiles but thats it. He is not allowed to do anything which changes the war. And accepting the gifted city certainly does change the war.

edit: It gets easy if you think about it as if all 3 parties involved in this war do have 8 hours each for making their moves which affect the war.

Apparently I have made my argument unclearly. I will try to explain further. The key point, I think we can all agree, is the legality of same-turn city gifting. The interleaved unit moves are certainly illegal, but their consequence on their own is minor, and penalties for that should therefore also be minor.

The rules as written, however, appear to make same-turn city gifting legal. Therefore, the point that has to be carefully explained in order to make this work is why a large penalty is appropriate when the action against which it is being levied is not directly called out as illegal in the written rules. And in particular, why any reasonable person should have understood that it was illegal.

I think that'll be an uphill battle. And it may help illustrate why if I step through the thought process that led to my previous post. I read the draft and thought, "gee, some quotes from the posted ruleset would make this much stronger." So I went to the posted ruleset to find quotes I could reference to support the proposition that same-turn city gifting is illegal, and despite careful examination could not. If you don't think that Spullla will do exactly the same thing (and be perfectly justified in doing so), well, I'd love to know why.

In order to make this work, the argument that "the posted rules do not forbid this, and almost-explicitly condone it by not putting city gifts on the list of phased actions" must be preemptively demolished. And I just don't see how that can be done, given that the purpose of written rules is supposed to be to ensure that everyone knows where they stand ahead of time. Maybe somebody with better diplomatic skills than I can accomplish it.

The draft, in particular, fails in this regard because it almost skims past the city-gifting point, presenting it as in the same class as moves and drafting without special explanation. But the fact that it is in that class is the central point that must be justified.

Whipping, by the way, is one of the explicit can-be-done-any-time actions and should therefore be removed from

This rule covers all ingame actions which can be done by the player and do effect war.
For example: moving in a contested city, drafting or whipping defenders, gifting gold which is used for upgrades of troops which are actively participating in a war, gifting of cities in a contested zone, ...

in any case.