Dave wrote:
@E&C - But you can do that with a broken swarm with leadership anyway, and most other armies for that matter. I'm not seeing how this is open to abuse?
Merging has the exact same potential impact on victory conditions that you've been using to argue against cross-swarm spawning. In fact, since a broken formation is usually going to have at least as many units as a typical spawn, it's actually going to be more effective at manipulating victory conditions than cross-swarm spawning.
"It's going to tiebreak. I'll Withdraw over to a formation below half, where merging in the end phase will push that formation above half strength to save points." Or... "My BTS is in danger and this swarm is nearly useless, so it's better to Withdraw over and merge to bulk up the BTS."
We've been discussing "Count as destroyed" for the merging formation as a drawback, and it is. However, it is minor. In the case of tiebreak point manipulation it's going to be simple math - which option takes more points. There aren't any other consequences to the decision because the game is over. For BTS it only matters if the BTS is the merging formation. From a practical perspective a BTS that's eligible to merge is likely to be vulnerable anyway so there's not likely to be a heavy downside to merging.
In the case E&C is concerned about, the drop unit/break/pseudo-March is that much more funky. The Nids would intentionally break just to gain the free move, because they know they will effectively auto-rally as long as they reach a synapse swarm. That might not be so bad, as the Nid player can only definitely count on 3 moves - either they successfully March or they move/break/withdraw 2. However, a Nid player could gamble on attempting a much larger move if needed to win a game.
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Edit: And while we're on the topic - any kind of merge puts a wrinkle in same-swarm spawning because you now have 2 swarm "pools" going into the same swarm.
