@krieghund said in Submarine withdrawal question:
Moreover, the firstly aforementioned passage of the “Classic Support Document” appears to say that attacking submarines cannot even regularly retreat when they would be retreating with other units. Indeed, after having said that “Subs may retreat as above, or they could “withdraw,””, the document, on the same section, goes on stating that (as I’ve already quoted) “If retreating with other naval units, the attacking sub must withdraw first and must withdraw BACK to one adjacent friendly sea zone from which any of the attacking units came”.
These two sentences appear to be in partial direct contradiction of one an other: the first sentence is telling me that I can choose either to retreat my submarine as normal or to withdraw them under their special rules, whereas the second sentence is telling me that, if I choose to “retreat” my submarines with other naval units, I must instead “withdraw” them, assumingly under their special withdrawing rules. So, literally, this means that I can normally retreat submarines only if all remaining naval units attacking in the battle are submarines, otherwise submarines must specially withdraw if they want to leave the battle together with non-submarine units.
Is the sentence “If retreating with other naval units, the attacking sub must withdraw first and must withdraw BACK to one adjacent friendly sea zone from which any of the attacking units came” meaning the same as saying “If retreating with other naval units, the attacking sub must use its special withdraw ability” or not?
What difference does it make? Even if the subs are forced to withdraw first, the remaining units can retreat to the same sea zone they did.
One difference, which we already clarified (by you calling it “obviously an oversight”), is that the rules as written allow regular retreat to friendly and unoccupied zones, whereas they allow special withdraw only to friendly (not to unoccupied) zones (unless the submarines are “several”), but we already sorted out we should read all occurrences of “friendly sea” in the withdraw rules as “friendly or unoccupied sea”.
Once we turn all mentioned “friendly sea” occurrences to “friendly or unoccupied sea”, the differences generated by the presence of a rule which (unclearly, in my opinion) says something equivalent to “if retreating together with one or more non-submarine naval units, every remaining attacking submarine must use its special withdraw ability” (Is this what the rule is actually stating?) would have the consequences that, within a same round of combat, if there are one or more non-submarine attacking naval units in the battle after “defender fires remaining units”,
- I cannot have one or more but not all attacking submarines withdrawing to one zone while all other attacking submarines retreat to an other zone (together with all attacking non-submarine naval units),
- and I cannot decide to wait to see how many defending submarines are withdrawn and where they are withdrawn before deciding if and where to retreat either all attacking submarines or the part of them I haven’t withdrawn.
