The current rulebook states:

If read literally this means that if I'm to remove five unit points, and for some reasons don't want to remove tokens (too little city support for example) I may not choose to reduce two cities that has population limit of the two areas is less than four, but would have to reduce a city with a larger population limit instead, or remove tokens even though that would just require me to reduce a city later anyway (too little city support).

Personally I don't like to be forced where to take my losses, it's enough that I have to take them, so in real life I've always played that you may do this, but you may not choose to reduce three cities, if you by not reducing one of them still would satisfy the requirements. So I might chose to reduce two 2-pop cities or three 3-pop cities, but not two 3-pop cities and one 2-pop city, even if I do it in that order. In that case I would have to return one of the 3-pop cities, so that the end effect is that I just reduce one 3-pop city and one 2-pop city. In the same way, if I first remove four tokens, only to find that I must reduce 2-pop city, I have to return two of the tokens.

Trying to codify this in the new draft I came up with the following, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the text:

Any comments are very welcome!

pfff. confusing

I cannot rememeber a situation where I could not remove the exact amout of units.

The only time when that would happen is 'epidemic' where you should leave at least one token in an area.
When we are playing this always results in: "shit I have to reduce an additional city to reach the exact amount"

But you CAN reduce a city of a 3-pop area and put back 1or 2 tokens instead of three, meaning you have removed 4 or 3 unit points.

I have never read this line anyway.

I've had it come up several times in games at Redscape (most often during an Epidemic), and we've always enforced the rules as stated and had no problems. If anything, the rule space is so much simpler than any kind of "you can reduce more, but not too much"

'When a player must remove unit points he must remove the exact amount of unit points if possible. He may only exceed this, if there is no other option, and may not remove more unit points than nessecary.'

does this cover it?

I've seen several cases of the combination secondary victim of Famine + primary victim Slave Revolts. In this case there is no way you'll remove tokens, as that'll just aggravate your Slave Revolt. And in a few cases the only way to achieve the EXACT number of unit points losses without removing tokens is to reduces a city you want too keep standing (usually because it's hard for you to rebuild, and easy for someone else to clam if it has no city on it). In these instances I've read §24.5 liberally, allowing you to reduce another city in it's place, even though it would take you above the points required, as long as it's not possible to get a number closer to the exact amount without removing something you have not removed in your excessive removal.

I've also seen a case of Epidemic when it wasn't possible to reach the exact number at all. The secondary victim in question had exactly zero areas with more than one token in it and got assigned a loss of 1 unit point. According to a strict interpretation of the rules he would have had to reduce the city located in an area with as high population limit as possible, but my liberal reading allowed him to reduce any city of his choice instead. If I don't misremember he chose to reduce a 2-pop city rather than his only 3-pop city, which was a wilderness city...


That is just a (pretty good) reformulation of the 2.09 rules, not what I wanted to achieve with my 2.10 draft rule.

ok, now I understand

i'll think of it.

I think of another reformulation: