Medium foot and rough terrain

[Vespasian28]

I've been playing FOG for a few years now but this little thing has been annoying me too long now without seeking an explaination/reasoning behind it.

I had a unit of Thracian MF offensive spear holding a flank straddling a piece of brush and plantation. There are enemy cavalry and heavy foot lurking around but on the first opportunity they charge out of their perfectly reasonable defensive into the open because they were not wholly in rough ground. Doesn't matter that they were 90% in rough, or even 99.999% they still have to test to not charge.
However, if the precious Heavy Foot(are you detecting a certain bitterness here ) are even remotely likely to stray into terrain that disorders them they don't have to charge.

It's hard enough to get terrain down for your mediums to operate in but it does appear somewhat skewed to get them out of it whilst the heavies have the choice to go in or not.

[hazelbark]

I've been playing FOG for a few years now but this little thing has been annoying me too long now without seeking an explaination/reasoning behind it.

It's hard enough to get terrain down for your mediums to operate in but it does appear somewhat skewed to get them out of it whilst the heavies have the choice to go in or not.

1) I've found it pretty easy to get terrain if you want it except in steppe
2) Not entirely in suggests to me they are not trying to stay in.
3) The authors had to draw a line somewhere and the picked one.

[bbotus]

3) The authors had to draw a line somewhere and the picked one.

Yes, and it is a big difference from WRG where a unit could be disadvantaged in the open because it was fighting a unit with a back corner touching terrain.

[ShrubMiK]

Interesting situation though.

If a BG has it's front edge outside of terrainI would agree it should be treated as outside.

If it has its front edge in but its back edge outside, I wouldn't have thought it should charge involuntarily, but it shounds like the rules would allow this (I suspect it's going to come up only very rarely because it would need narrow terrain and a BG formed deep).

And where the front edge is partly in and partly out...well, my first instinct was that it's wrong but on further reflection I don't know. I guess you can argue that involuntary charges are about a few individuals going off half-cocked and taking the rest of the BG with them, so maybe that's reasonable.

Perhaps allowing a +1 on the roll if more than half the BGs frontage is in terrain would be a decent compromise.

[Polkovnik]

I had a unit of Thracian MF offensive spear holding a flank straddling a piece of brush and plantation.

Surely you could have fitted the whole BG in one of the pieces of terrain ? Then it wouldn't have been a problem.

[jonphilp]

As a regular opponent of Vespasian I can confirm that when he needs specific terrain for his battle groups the dice gods tend to ensure that the terrain ends up in his opponents half.

[Vespasian28]

Surely you could have fitted the whole BG in one of the pieces of terrain ? Then it wouldn't have been a problem.

Quite agree. They were entirely in terrain to start with but had to move in response to the enemy and ended up with one of their 8 bases partially straddling a gap between two terrain pieces and off they went.

I have always found the charging off on your own rules a touch harsh. It's probably to keep things simple but having no modifiers for medium foot in terrain or any troops uphill of the enemy is a bit annoying. I am no expert on troop psychology but I would have thought the problem would be getting them to leave a favourable position. Conversely, it appears heavy foot never charge impetuously into terrain that would disadvantage them.
Also the inabilty to re-roll for drilled Elites and Superiors seems counter intuative, to me at least. Undrilled Elites and Superiors are exactly the sort to go off on their own!