Posted: Mon Jan 25, 2021 10:27 am
I like Twilight Imperium 4 a lot, and I have encountered the faction in question in a recent game session. The potential difficulties in regards to timing and order and whatnot did not occur to us. So, just to clarify and be sure that I am on the same page:
According to PhoneLobsters interpretation of the rules, it should be allowed to:
1. Activate a system and explore one planet in that system which contains one or more of your units,
2. place or move one sleeper token onto a planet that was thusly explored and does not yet have a sleeper token,
3. remove the freshly placed sleeper token and replace it with a PDS.
Am I getting that right?
If so, I do squint a little and scratch my head and go, "wait a minute...".
I do not think that such a sequence of actions would be particularly over powered or unbalanced or what have you, but it does make me wonder how and when conditions and states are checked. My gut feeling in this particular instance is, "That cannot be right", based on the following reasoning: The rule says, "After you activate a system that contains 1 or more of your sleeper tokens, you may replace each of those tokens with one PDS from your reinforcements." So, basically I say, "Hey, I am going to activate that system over there! It does not contain one of my sleeper tokens at the time of declaring the activation, so any 'after activation' effects do not see any tokens and therefore do not interact with them!".
That is a using of the word "after" and the concept of time and order of events that I would intuitively apply in an everyday, garden variety sort of way. I kind of put a mental bracket around the whole "activate a system" activity, and since at the starting point of "activate that thing!" there is no token, there will be no interaction with such a token after all the activating is done. But. That would be a "when"-situation in the context of the game, wouldn't it? A "When"-event would check if there is a token, unravel all its effects, and be done with it. If there is no token "when" the system is activated, then there is no interaction with it, period.
So... the mistake on my side occurs when I think of the declaration to activate a system as the definitive point to check fo all states of a given system, regardless of qualifiers such as "Before", "When" or "After". I basically equate all three of these.
The knot in my head is created by my everyday concept of "doing X" - I activate a system without a sleeper token, therefore it cannot trigger any effects that require a sleeper token. When I declare that I activate a system, it does not yet contain a sleeper token, so how could it trigger an effect that requires such a token? In my everyday concept of time and space, "Activate" is a singular event: I declare that I activate a system, I put a token onto that system's game tile, done. Everything that follows comes after the activation. But I am mistaken, the situation is not that simplistic - instead, the game does kinda pry this "activation" process open and allows to cram all sorts of sub-processes based on "when" into it, doesn't it?
So, in layman's terms the rules do actually say, "Activate a system. Apply any potential "On Activation" effects. After you have done that, check if there is one of your sleeper tokens in it. If there is, you may replace it with a PDS."
Is that about it? That would be sneaky - instead of putting the whole "Activating a system that contains X", the conditions would have moved from the beginning to the activity to its end. After working through all the steps involved, I can totally see that this might be the intended way things should work. By changing the wording to "After[wards] [...], check if...", we would remove ambiguity about the whole "activating a system that meets a condition" thing (although we would still have to deal with the correct order of multiple "after activation" effects, of course). It feels to me that a lot of the controversy stems from different assumptions what the terms "after" and "when" should mean and how they should be applied.
Am I being to simplistic here?
According to PhoneLobsters interpretation of the rules, it should be allowed to:
1. Activate a system and explore one planet in that system which contains one or more of your units,
2. place or move one sleeper token onto a planet that was thusly explored and does not yet have a sleeper token,
3. remove the freshly placed sleeper token and replace it with a PDS.
Am I getting that right?
If so, I do squint a little and scratch my head and go, "wait a minute...".
I do not think that such a sequence of actions would be particularly over powered or unbalanced or what have you, but it does make me wonder how and when conditions and states are checked. My gut feeling in this particular instance is, "That cannot be right", based on the following reasoning: The rule says, "After you activate a system that contains 1 or more of your sleeper tokens, you may replace each of those tokens with one PDS from your reinforcements." So, basically I say, "Hey, I am going to activate that system over there! It does not contain one of my sleeper tokens at the time of declaring the activation, so any 'after activation' effects do not see any tokens and therefore do not interact with them!".
That is a using of the word "after" and the concept of time and order of events that I would intuitively apply in an everyday, garden variety sort of way. I kind of put a mental bracket around the whole "activate a system" activity, and since at the starting point of "activate that thing!" there is no token, there will be no interaction with such a token after all the activating is done. But. That would be a "when"-situation in the context of the game, wouldn't it? A "When"-event would check if there is a token, unravel all its effects, and be done with it. If there is no token "when" the system is activated, then there is no interaction with it, period.
So... the mistake on my side occurs when I think of the declaration to activate a system as the definitive point to check fo all states of a given system, regardless of qualifiers such as "Before", "When" or "After". I basically equate all three of these.
The knot in my head is created by my everyday concept of "doing X" - I activate a system without a sleeper token, therefore it cannot trigger any effects that require a sleeper token. When I declare that I activate a system, it does not yet contain a sleeper token, so how could it trigger an effect that requires such a token? In my everyday concept of time and space, "Activate" is a singular event: I declare that I activate a system, I put a token onto that system's game tile, done. Everything that follows comes after the activation. But I am mistaken, the situation is not that simplistic - instead, the game does kinda pry this "activation" process open and allows to cram all sorts of sub-processes based on "when" into it, doesn't it?
So, in layman's terms the rules do actually say, "Activate a system. Apply any potential "On Activation" effects. After you have done that, check if there is one of your sleeper tokens in it. If there is, you may replace it with a PDS."
Is that about it? That would be sneaky - instead of putting the whole "Activating a system that contains X", the conditions would have moved from the beginning to the activity to its end. After working through all the steps involved, I can totally see that this might be the intended way things should work. By changing the wording to "After[wards] [...], check if...", we would remove ambiguity about the whole "activating a system that meets a condition" thing (although we would still have to deal with the correct order of multiple "after activation" effects, of course). It feels to me that a lot of the controversy stems from different assumptions what the terms "after" and "when" should mean and how they should be applied.
Am I being to simplistic here?