Count FAQ

[Dagou]

Need help to understand 2 FAQs for the Count of Carcassonne. They seem to contradict each other unless my understanding is wrong.

Here they are:
1. Can followers in the city of Carcassonne be deployed to empty roads, cities, cloisters or farms?
Yes, and when an empty road, city, or cloister is completed, players with followers in the appropriate quarter of the city [meeples in castle can only be deployed to cities, and so on] may be deployed and then scored immediately. In general, unoccupied cities, roads, cloisters do not earn very many points, and so this option in mostly useful for returning followers from the city of Carcassonne to the player's supply.

2.Imagine I have an unoccupied cloister next to an occupied shrine. I place a tile which completes both buildings, and choose to move a follower into the cloister from the City of Carcassonne. Does this declare a challenge, and if so, who wins?
That’s not possible, since the unoccupied cloister is not scored (only occupied features are scored, while unoccupied ones are simply completed). So no follower can be moved there.

[Jambo]

Yes, there are a couple of contradictions with Count rulings in the FAQ, this being one of them. The issue seems to be related to how and when followers can be moved from the City of Carcassonne:

The rules clearly state that followers can only be moved from the city when any feature is completed (with the exception of farms of course), whereas several rulings in the FAQ suggest that this occurs when features are scored.  This confusion may arise from how the Count works with farms - followers are moved from the Market area to farms when farms are scored since farms per sé don't get completed in the same way other features do. This would normally happen at the end of the game but with the addition of the barn piece, this can now occur during the game.

Based on what the Count rules state alone, this would mean that your number 1 above is correct, and number 2 is incorrect.  That is how I would play it.

[Scott]

Hmm... this might be a good question for HiG.  Are followers in the city of Carcassonne deployed when a feature is completed, or when it is being scored?

Tiberius

[Deatheux]

In my point of view, it looks like the feature is completed then scored, so that implies that we can move followers from CoC to an unoccupied feature... MY view.  i may be wrong, but it allows to "worth" or optimize the dumb meeple in the cathedral!

[Jambo]

This should definitely be a question for HiG, given the rules and the FAQ conflict with each other on several points.

[mdjvz]

I have another question about the count, it is about the following footnote:

Question: How does follower placement during the final scoring work?
Answer: In principle very similarly to the way it works during the game. The 'trigger' for the final scoring is the
player who placed the last tile and so ended the game. Beginning with the player on the left of the 'trigger' player,
each player redeploys one of his or her followers from Carcassonne to an appropriate feature [meeples in castle
can only be deployed to cities, and so on] on the board. Followers can also be redeployed to incomplete roads,
cities, cloisters or farms, since these will also be scored at the end of the game. This process continues until no
player can redeploy any more players from Carcassonne. The count still blocks the city quarter in which he is
resident. Normally the player with the most followers in Carcassonne will be the one to redeploy the last figure.

My question is about the bold underlined part: what does this precisely mean? Sometimes it seems wise to refrain (for the moment) from putting meeples from Carcassonne to a feature and just wait what your opponent does and act accordingly. Beacause of this the end condition is not clear: player(s) might just wait for each other to play endlessly... A more logical way to define the end of the process would probably be:

This process continues until all players have successivele refrained from retrieving meeples from the city of carcassonne

So if you are playing with 4 persons: the process is finished when 4 people in succession didn't retreive a meeple from Carcassone.

Mdjvz