I do think it's a bad practice to have too many different retreat rules within a single tournament document. The scenarios that don't use retreat at all are fine; that's easy to remember. But then all the others should use the same rules, either the ones from the core rules, or a consistently modified one (i.e. game ends immediately after any player turn in retreat).
ITS contains three options - no Retreat, play to three turns (so default Retreat rules) and game ends after Retreat. However, note that 'default Retreat rules' is one of the rulebook's end-game options and can end the game early, it's just less frequent than 'game ends after Retreat'. From http://wiki.infinitythegame.com/en/Retreat! 'When a player in Retreat! has lost or evacuated all troops in his Army List, the battle ends (unless the specific end-game conditions of the scenario being played indicate otherwise).' So the rulebook default is that tabling the opponent instantly ends the game, much like in Paradiso.
Why? :( Can't we just shoot each other happily? What I'd like to see, is that after you shoot your opponent into retreat, you can spend your remaining turns unopposed, doing the missions. #panolife
Sure, you can do that all you want in the scenarios that waive the Retreat! rules. But one of the big takeaways for me from the starter set missions is that “play until the other side is dead” missions are -terrible- without a turn limit. If one of the players wants to just quit and move on to the next mission half way through, the scenario isn’t good. And that sort of “Okay, it’s turn three and there’s a clear winner, so let’s just call it and move on” happens all the time in those missions.
It's not bad that missions alter this, it's the particular way in which the ITS missions altered it that's the problem.
People can use a post-hoc justification for anything. Plenty of other people find it incongruous; the difference is the first group, who claim that the special ITS retreat rules *are* thematic, would have said that pretty much regardless of what those rules were.
I don't think anyone's advocating that the game shouldn't end at three turns. The problem is when it ends at 2.5.
Would you feel better if the game ended at the end of the round where someone went into retreat? Both players get the same number of turns, but you're still potentially punished if you table your opponent in the top of turn 1.
That would be the obvious answer. It does give an advantage to going second: you can score, force retreat and win. But I'm not sure that's a bad thing: if you're going second, have more points and put your opponent into retreat then automatically winning isn't unreasonable. In a lot of games it would prevent you getting the full 10 OP.
Pretty sure my idea was that the last man conscious on the opposing side called down an orbital strike, destroying whatever objective to deny it to the enemy. Yes, end of round would be much better.
Indeed. Unless it's a No Quarter mission, if you table your opponent in the top of turn one, the game ends. Immediately.
I would get rid of the retreat rules myself for a couple reasons. the first but lesser of the three is realism. Simply put missions tend to go better when you have less opposition. You can make up some justification for it in universe but that is not a clean answer The second and highly subjective is that it is not adding anything fun to the game. It's yet another thing to remember with more rules to track for very little gain. The third and only needed excuse to drop the pointless rule (subjective I know) is just how often new...and not so knew people mess up the rule and wind up screwing someone over. The rule is prone to being misunderstood and as such accidently exploited (I have personally seen this twice), the rule is not intuitively realistic, it's more rules bloat and another thing to keep track of.... all for the gameplay effect of missions where my opponent has been crushed I have to remember not to shoot his baggage bot and a few other things, The gameplay benefit of this rule is hardly worth the ink let alone the other issues... still for the most part it comes up only now and then so it's not like I will lose sleep if they don't get rid of it.
If we didn't have the ITS version of retreat we wouldn't have had that brouhaha in the last euro championships, for example.
Depends on the situation. I'm pretty sure dropping an orbital strike on a capital wouldn't go over very well, or if it's a location you're going to want back. If it's some relatively random spot on the map, no problem, smite it into the King of All Known Space's new glass swimming pool. You're American, right? Imagine fighting a war say, in New York City, and calling in a strike that takes out the Statue of Liberty. Even if you won, you'd get crucified by the military court. Sometimes the collateral damage isn't acceptable.
Why not just call the Inquisition from the beginning? I have problems with this. If I table my opponent I want extra points for the job well done.
Keeping the focus on objectives and disadvantaging a kill-em-all style taking over all scenarios is exactly why they've made tabling your opponent a poor win strategy. If you played N2, you remember how much less fun games were when the best strategy was always slaughter and then maybe consider objectives at some point but probably not. There are specific missions with no Retreat and big points for slaughter that support what you want. Having the rest of them be objective-based makes the game way more fun. For general slaughter there's always 40K.
