Hey guys

In my last game a player had his ships surrounded by non-friendly voids and non-friendly worlds. He also lost a battle at that time. So he had to retreat his units. Can he retreat to another system through a non-friendly world ?

And another question on ship movement. Rules say: ships move to any tile, but in the learn to play book paths are shown. Do they matter ?

Please help me with scenario two in the image below. I tell my friends each time that the path is legal because the ship can move to any tile in a system with an order when resolving an advance order.

Image below illustrates both cases:

http://imgur.com/QqawYyk

Ships don't need a path as such. There just needs to be a friendly or neutral void in the current or adjacent system, and no warp storm in the way. If it helps, imagine they can "teleport" through anything except warp storms.

This makes it much harder to kill routing ships than ground units, unless you somehow flood the surrounding systems with ships.

Scenario 1: the red ship can retreat to any of the empty voids in the bottom left or top right tiles. It can't go the bottom right tile as this isn't adjacent to its starting point. All this assumes no warpstorms.

You are correct about scenario 2. Yes the ship can be placed in zone 1. The rulebook is trying to show which units are moving where, not suggesting that ships need a path.