by chreotho
rmsgrey wrote:
oneofpeace wrote:
**Spoiler**
[o]Question about roadblocks. Does roadlbocks prevent the Medic with local connections from treating disease in connected cities?[/o]
[o]Question about roadblocks. Does roadlbocks prevent the Medic with local connections from treating disease in connected cities?[/o]
That's a May spoiler.
[o]The cities are still connected, just harder to move between. Nothing there says it would impact Local Connections (or Local Pressure) so having it prevent them would be making up rules that aren't there. I'd say the Medic can still treat across roadblocks.[/o]
I have a twitter response from Rob that may have a different interpretation, but is probably worth confirming, since I framed the question in such a generic way to attempt to avoid spoilers.
Details (more May spoilers):
[o]
I tweeted the following question:
is a "local connection" broken if something is "cut" (e.g. May)
And I got back the response:
yes...
Looking at the actual wording of the relevant rules, this makes sense to me.
Local Connections: Once per turn, you may Treat Disease in a city connected to your city.
Local Pressure: If you are in a military base, you may Quarantine an adjacent city with the Quarantine action.
Build Roadblocks: ... Diseases and the Faded cannot spread due to outbreaks along routes cut by a roadblock. If a city is completely roadblocked off, do not mark an outbreak on the outbreak track when it outbreaks since none of the adjacent cities are affected. ...
(emphases mine)
So if the roadblock cuts off the connection between cities, then it makes sense that you couldn't Treat Disease with Local Connections through a roadblock.
Conversely, Local Pressure uses the term adjacent city, which is also in the Build Roadblocks rule. This seems to confirm that the cities are still considered geographically adjacent, even though a roadblock is in place (which makes sense, given the general semantics of the word adjacent). Therefore Local Pressure should be able to be used to quarantine across a roadblock from an adjacent city with a military base.
If Treat Disease with Local Connections was supposed to work across roadblocks, Rob and Matt could have used the same adjacent city terminology, but they didn't.
Thematically, it makes sense to me too. If you have "Local Connections", I would interpret this to mean that you have some medical buddies from that city who can use their own "actions" to come meet you for a drink in your current city (so you don't have to spend an action to travel), then you can give them the latest medicines and instructions on how to use them (using your Treat Disease action), and they can return to their city (using their own actions) to actually treat and remove the disease cube(s). If the route is cut, your buddies can't get to you to pick up the latest medicines. If handing off the medicine to the "local connection" wasn't needed, and all you needed to do was a phone/video call, then the power would make more sense to be a very powerful global ability, to treat disease in any one city anywhere.
For the Local Pressure upgrade, thematically: Quarantining across a roadblock does make perfect sense, especially with a military base nearby to help coordinate, confirm, and enforce the quarantine.
Just my interpretation of Rob's simple "yes..." answer. Other interpretations could be equally valid.
However, if confirmed, this may be worth adding into the May spoilers section in the FAQ at the top of this thread.
[/o]
Chris