Okay, I have witnessed this being played a particular way and I am fairly certain that (as written) it should be played differently.

Situation

Ship A fires on Ship B.
Ship A Rolls Attack Dice (Step 2)
Modify dice (Step 3)
Ship B - rolls Defense Dice (Step 4)
Modify dice (Step 5)
Compare Results (Step 6)
for purpose of the example...3 hits and 1 crit on attack, 1 evade on defense
Did the attack hit? Yes.. (Move on to Step 7)
Deal damage...Ship B should suffer 2 hits and a crit, but ship C (in this case a Auzituck Gunship) with a reinforce token triggers either A)DTF or B)Selflessness
A) Ship B suffers 2hits, the crit going to Ship C via DTF (When a friendly ship at Range 1 is hit by an attack, you may suffer 1 of the uncanceled critical results instead of the target ship.)
B) Ship B suffers 1 crit, the 2 hits going to Ship C via Selfless (When a friendly ship at range 1 is hit by an attack, you may discard this card to suffer all uncancelled hit results instead of the target ship.)
Now here is the issue.
Ship C should suffer:
A) 1 crit
B) 2 hits

This issue I have been seeing is that the reinforce token is being applied to the damaged suffered by Ship C, thus reducing its damage. However that should not happen. At no point does this back up to Step 6 to compare dice, particularly because no dice were rolled against Ship C.

Can someone offer me a logical argument as to why Ship C would get to apply a reinforce token to the pulled damage?

The only way I could see this work is if Ship C was Lowhhrick, and he spent the reinforce token to reduce the damage to Ship B before taking the hit with Selflessness (since it wouldn't affect the crit for DTF). Both upgrade cards cause a ship to suffer damage results AFTER the Compare Results step, meaning Reinforce Tokens would no longer have effect. Plus, the EPTs cause a ship to outright receive damage (much like bomb damage), not step in to take (part of) the attack for a teammate (like Biggs does - kinda).

Or to put it another way, the gameplay that you witnessed does indeed appear to have been handled incorrectly, by the players involved.

1 minute ago, emeraldbeacon said:

The *only* way I could see this work is if Ship C was Lowhhrick, and he spent the reinforce token to reduce the damage to Ship B *before* taking the hit with Selflessness (since it wouldn't affect the crit for DTF). Both upgrade cards cause a ship to suffer damage results AFTER the Compare Results step, meaning Reinforce Tokens would no longer have effect. Plus, the EPTs cause a ship to outright receive damage (much like a bomb), not step in to take (part of) the attack for a teammate (like Biggs does - kinda).

That is what I thought and have ruled. But recently I have seen it (via streamed Regional) played where the damage was reduced. In this case it was Lowhhrick but he did not use his ability, his reinforce was still in place when he triggered his EPT (I've seen both used btw in different builds) and he was protected from the damage via his reinforce...

I didn't think that was right but after seeing it in multiple cases I wanted to get other perspectives.

the reinforce token does not reduce in either of these situation, but Lowricht ability would reduce before either of these triggered