Quote: (Moscovian @ Jan. 20 2010, 16:30 )
A forced move rule will not work.
Let's pretend that you have one portal and it is in the ZOC of a formation of scouts.  You activate the formation for an assault and fail.  You've burned your SC re-roll earlier in the turn and you are now faced with three options that the rules allow:
1. Shoot.  Nope that won't work.
2. Move.  If you move through the portal you end up in enemy ZoC and violate the rules.
3. Regroup.  Remove BMs and its over.
This is one example off the top of my head but I am sure there are others.  Forcing somebody to move will create problems.
We don't force planes to fly onto the board and face an onslaught of flak, do we?  If the player wants to stand down he can. What Jervis intended is to prevent people from burning activations off board, but we're still not providing a viable solution in this case.  Are you going to force a formation into the range of a Leman Russ formation on Overwatch?  What your proposing sounds like a forced maneuver like chess and that doesn't fit into Epic IMO.
If a player doesn't want to activate his formation off board, he can choose to activate other formations until it is his last choice.  At that point if he doesn't want to activate he just declares that he is done for the turn and it is over.  Of course that means that we need to explicitly state in an FAQ that certain activations are forbidden when offboard. But this isn't as easy as it sounds.  There are implications to each choice.
as I said before: It's not the easiest thing to have happen in a Necron army, and if it has happened, then you are screwed anyway.
By the way: a Tomb complex is the Blitz objective on your side of the table. If they have that covered for most of the game, then you are doing something wrong.
And, as I said, in such a limited case, you'd just burn your action.
Frankly, if you are coming out of a portal, into the firing arc of a Leman Russ group on overwatch, the fact that you are doing it as your Hold action, or as part of a normal movement action will have pretty much the same result: You get shot at.
You can't compare Planes with ground units, because planes have a specific order which covers them in these situations: Stand Down.
If you want to match that: Great, you will have put us RIGHT back where we started from when every Necron formation that went off board removed all it's blast markers.. you just did it in a more complicated fashion.
Either that, or you are talking about adding yet another special rule, not just to the Necrons but to every portal using army as well.
Or, it can be a simple rule, that has some
potentially harsh consequences when you fail. Just like everyone else who fails a critical activation role.
Or you could Marshal out of the portal and automatically pass your activation.
Either way, if all of you were playing it the wrong way, and avoiding this potentially harsh situation, it makes me wonder how many other downsides haven't been played properly and have skewed people's view of the army's relative power.
