by Antistone
You have a mandatory objective to get hollow men to defect by getting hollow men onto 3 havens.You also have a turning point that triggers if you end the game with hollow men onto 3 havens.
Firstly, it seems like you could theoretically complete the objective without triggering the turning point if something removes one of the hollow men before the game ends. (I know of at least two ways this could theoretically happen.) I imagine that's an unintentional loophole, and it's not very likely to happen, but it seems like it could easily have been avoided by just opening the window from the objective instead of using a turning point.
Secondly, this seems to imply you need to lose population from 3 havens on purpose. We're going to knowingly kill friendly civilians because we think it will get some enemies to defect, and we think they'll have useful information for planning our invasion of a place that might or might not be withholding a cure. Yay.
I checked if maybe the rules for hollow men say that only cities suffer population loss...nope ("locations").
I thought maybe the window I open when I get some hollow men to defect might prevent it...but the window isn't opened by the objective, it's opened by the turning point, and turning points resolve after population loss.
Maybe I could put shelters on the havens to prevent the population loss? Well, it's pretty hard to get a shelter onto a haven:
[o]The Build Shelter action requires you to discard a card matching the city's color; havens have no cards matching their color.
The Structural Engineer allows you to use a card of any color to build a shelter. But the Build Shelter action refers to "cities" rather than "locations", so this probably still doesn't work.
The Builder can simply place a shelter somewhere without using the regular action...but it also says "city" rather than "location".
Aha! The Vector Control Expert can use an action to place a shelter in his location! And I thought he sounded weak...[/o]
But wait! Even if I got a shelter onto a haven, it wouldn't help, because shelters only prevent exposure and population loss in cities (their rules use the word "city" rather than "location"). So even after finding a special case that lets me put a shelter there, it still doesn't help!
Am I missing something?