That's just not how they were designed.  States "inherit" rules from the base state.  I think they were intended to be used so that you don't have to create separate forms for variations between approval levels of the same form.  So if your HR approval step needs to be able to edit the form fields but your Director approval step can only edit certain fields, you'd have rules in each state to disable the appropriate fields. That sort of thing.

To be honest, I have yet to run into a scenario where states would be useful.  Perhaps somebody else who does can elaborate?

States are great for things like tabbed forms where you may not always have all tabs available at each client event. Different states lets you hide the unused tabs, change what save/submit/cancel rules do depending on what tabs are visible, etc. For most of our forms we used a generic tabbed form that we created with all the buttons wired up to stub rules, with standardized headers, footers, theme, etc. Then for each workflow we create a copy of this form and add tabs for every client event in the workflow, and add a state for each tab (or set of tabs if multiple are needed in an event) where we fill in the save/submit/etc rules with appropriate actions. It makes things very consistent without a lot of effort, and it's easy to go in and make cosmetic changes without having to change 20 different forms per workflow.

Dear,

Let me explain form states as simple as i understand them.

base state's rules/actions are inherited into the new states you add, and as you said, you can not edit them in other states.... you only inherit them and you may be able to enable/disable them.

so the usage will be more like .... 

having all common rules/action inside the base state...

and you will have unique rules/actions for each form state you add.

simple example is if i have a form, that i want to show it to approve1 as read only mode and to approver2 as edit mode.

so instead of creating 2 sepperate forms... ill create 1 smart form and add 2 states. 1 for edit 1 for read only and then ill add the needed rules/actions for each one of them.

hope it helps.

Regards.

Can you add states based on other non-base states? For example, I want to make slight changes between what controls are visible or required for each Approver.  Can I make an Approver1State and copy it for Approver2State?  Or are they all based on the Base State and that's it?

No, it's all based off the Base State.