[dok]

Originally Posted by Ixe

I'm still a little unclear on the selection process and how that works with respect to picking a starting side. Say my opponent wins the dice off and makes an opening bid of their army, sitting some figures, and keeping the right to place first. Do I have any option to make a counter offer that picks my army while gaining the right to place first? Is my only hope to get my army on my side of choice to trick my opponent into a bidding war that abandons pick of side?

In that same vein, it says I may make an opposing bid by surrendering the right to place first without reducing the point total. I take it this means that I am stuck at the point total they proposed and can't go back up to starting values if I switched sides. Once someone has made a bid to take an army but with deferring pick of sides, is there any way to bring the bidding back to where you can pick your own side again?

I don't see how you are "unclear" on anything here. You have what appears to be a firm grasp of how the draft works, but you are asking if the rules allow you to do other things in the bidding that the rules don't mention as options. The answer is no; the rules of the draft are as described.

Spoiler Alert!

If you were allowed to re-set the bidding by changing side choice, then the bidding could get caught in a loop. Yes, there are ways around this, but most of them are quite complicated, and the ones that do a good job of assigning some sort of "market value" to the side choice end up making the bidding take quite a bit longer. This approach gets the job done and provides a clear ratcheting effect to the bidding.

In practice, the obvious option that will work most of the time in the hypothetical case where your opponent has bid on the army you want to place across and downhill from you is to just respond with a bid that surrenders first placement with no other change. This is not a "trick" unless you feel your opponent has weakened the bidded army too much to make that a viable bid. If that's the case, then you just don't get to decide which army is on which side for that game - just like you can lose all sorts of options in all of our formats when you lose a dice-off.