In the Retreat State rules it says; 'In a Retreat! situation, all Troopers who exit the game table via the widest side of their Deployment Zone are considered to have survived the battle and can be counted as Victory Points by their owner.' I think by inference that means any trooper who doesn't ignore retreat and does not exit the game table via their deployment edge is not considered to have survived the battle at the end of the game (but still can score end of round objectives before the end of the game etc), Am I right? This rule could really stand to be streamlined in any case.
Why do you need the rules to tell you that a trooper that wasn’t killed survived? Edit: Let me rephrase that. The default rules are that troopers that “aren’t in a null state” survive (left column of the page with the retreat state, page 137).
I guess the weird wording is because in the base game, there isn't a 3-turn cap. The game doesn't end until someone has lost all their models, so the only VP the loser gets will be models that escaped off the board during Retreat. In ITS, you can get VP from models still on the table, because the game can end with those models not in a null state.
Because (as I explained in the question) there's a rule that tells me under what conditions they do survive, implying that not meeting those conditions they don't. And that confused me, hence why I asked they question. As an aside, I really feel like the tendency of some on forum to answer an honest question with a snarky return question or vague remark isn't particularly helpful. The real question is why would there be a rule that doesn't do anything practical otherwise, as far as I can tell. That might have been true in N3 but I don't think it is in N4 'A Standard Game has 3 Game Rounds, and, at the end of the third Game Round, the players will compare their Victory Points.' p137. N4 rule book I guess maybe the rule I quoted is just an artifact from earlier editions and actually retreating from your table edge has no beneficial purpose at all? Seems odd to still have a rule for it then, I thought that was the kind of thing N4 cleaned up. Hang over from N2 maybe. Glad I asked, though it still might be hard to explain next time it comes up.
The default rules tell you that troopers that are not deployed on the table are considered killed. Moving them off the table would without this rule cause them to be considered killed, but the retreat rules allow those troopers to not die from cowardice.
Huh! I hadn't noticed that. Maybe it is just an artifact from N3, then. I suppose that in missions that don't have Ends on Retreat, like Firefight, if you're in retreat there could be some benefit to escaping troops off the table to keep your opponent from killing them and increasing their score. So as @Mahtamori says, the rule would be needed to ensure that the escaped troops still count as surviving, along with any troops that you left on the table and your opponent didn't manage to kill. +1000. So much this.
I guess so, someone else mentioned similar - seems like unnecessary complexity for very little gameplay benefit though. Thanks for the answers.
