Slitherine

If we're going to classify South Saxom ploughboys (fyrd) as shock troops than I agree that the situation at Hastings can be simulated in AoW. However this misses one important aspect. If you initiate a feigned flee and your opponent isn't suckered and stays put, then you have moved backwards creating a potential gap that your opponent could exploit in their next movement phase. As the rules stand at present, if the opponent passes a CMT and doesn't charge, you don't evade.

If a charge doesn't contact an enemy, there should be some penalty for undrilled troops. Drilled troops' commanders would realise that a charge isn't going in and would sound trumpets/wave standards etc to call a halt and hence would have moved forward but remained ordered. Undrilled troops (South Saxon ploughboys, Medieval French/Polish knights etc) would not be disordered by a charge going in - they'd all arrive at the same destination (the enemy's front rank. However not making contact will have individuals stopping at different times - older & wiser sooner, young and rash continuing the race too far. A suggestion then - undrilled troops failing to contact in a charge drop a cohesion level. This lasts until the beginning of their next charge declaration phase, ie it's temporary but they are vulnerable during their opponent's charge phase.

I like that, fwiw

Thanks for the interesting suggestion.

One of the challenges is to keep a balance so there is no sure fire winner. Having played a lot, I suspect that if we DISR such troops even temporarily it is likely to be too exploitable and too easy to murder Undrllled troops. So I am interested in the idea but not keen on the side-effects.

I do like the concept of being able todo the feigned charge that you are looking for however, and will post a couple fo possible ideas to our forum that might get the same effect without the downsides/explotitation. We'll see what we can come up with to simulate hastings/mongols more fully.

Si

One possability would be to put into an unformed state - as if some bases had pushed forward to (try to) contact - and requiring to unit to reform in its bound.

There would also need to be a penalty to the CMT for unformed troups (-1, or right 1 column) - but that would be no bad thing on its own. The penalty probably should not apply to shock troups testing not to charge.

I think that undrilled troops are already in trouble with the current budget system.
Adding the proposed cohesion drop would be very extreme IMO. Remember that some LF can trigger charges since they are shooters. 2 such consecutive moves and the undrilled would end up fragmented before contacting the main enemy line.
I toyed with the idea of having pursuers being disordered (but not disrupted) at the end of their first pursuit but eventually rejected it because it was too difficult to identify a means to recover from that state.