yikes! fleet scuttled by victory

[ndrose]

Nasty sequence of events:

November: French fleet sinks Russian fleet after fall of St Petersburg.

December: French fleet, icebound, has to stay in St Petersburg.

January: Russia surrenders. France has access, but (if I understand what happened correctly), the rule that foreign forces can't stay inside the capital even with forced access is applied to the fleet. However, the fleet cannot move out because of the ice. So, the entire French fleet is scuttled!

Savefile from reinforcement phase, right after Russian surrender, just before the fleet is consigned to the bottom of the harbor.

[Jimmer]

Ouch.

[delatbabel]

In actual fact if you read the EiA rules in detail, you're finding the wrong bug.

(a) it's not in fact correct that the French fleet enters St Petersburg when St Petersburg falls and the Russian fleet gets beaten.  The French fleet stays in the St Petersburg blockade box.  The rules actually state that a fleet can only *enter* a blockade box if the port is enemy controlled, it doesn't require the fleet to *leave* the blockade box (either to the port itself or an adjacent sea area) immediately it becomes friendly controlled -- it can stay there.  So the French fleet should never actually have needed to enter St Petersburg.  In playing EiANW it appears that as soon as you capture an enemy port (in your land phase), any fleets you have in the BB are automatically moved to the port, which is wrong.

(b) If the French fleet does enter the St Petersburg port, the rule (from EiA) is being applied correctly here.  France can't leave a fleet in St Petersburg, voluntary access doesn't apply to fleets in any port let alone capital city ports, therefore the fleet must leave and because the sea area is frozen, is scuttled.

So the correct thing for the software to have done would have been to have left the French fleet in the St Petersburg BB until the ice thawed, at which point it would have been free to move to the Baltic sea zone.  In theory, if the French player had captured St Petersburg in October and voluntarily moved their fleet in in November, the Russian surrender in January would have correctly caused the French fleet to scuttle.  However since the port was captured in November the fleet should now be in the blockade box.