We played a game tonight and a problem came up which wasn't explained by the rules. Someone made an all or nothing move as ally, abandoning all planets he had to be able to bring 3 ships to the encounter to ally with the player on offense. If I am correct, the rules state that if you abandon a planet, you effectively loose it and cannot gain it back unless you attack another player's colony on it. He abandoned all planets but the alliance was cancelled by a force field card. Could he then place his ships back on his planets, which would be against the rules if I understand correctly, or not? And if not, where would his ships go ?

Prosperoo said:

I get the sense from the rules on page 13 (Stripping A Planet Of Ships) ... that the moment you remove all ships from a planet to include them in an encounter ... that the planet colony is lost and your ships cannot be returned there. When there are no colonies to go to, ships go to the warp.

In your example, I would say that those 3 ships end up in the warp.

Ah. That's more or less how we played it. Thanks for the info.

Yeaup, sucks to be him. Once you take it off the planet, it's gone. If no planets to go to, they end up in the warp. On the player's next turn, he can get one out to use in his challenge as part of the Regroup phase, but that's it.

(Here's hoping the Rebirth artifact comes in the next expansion)

-shnar