Slitherine

Recently ran into a situation where my unit of cataphracts contacted Spanish foot unit, unfortunately I misjudged the distance and my Roman heavies could not charge on the same turn. the Spanish had 2 units side by side and the one unit in front of the Romans had moved just slightly ahead of the unit the cats had hit. Next trun when I charged my Romans they hit the unit beside the cats, had extra move left so should they have continued into both units since they had 2 bases beyond the end of their target unit or as we played it they stopped at the target leaving about a 3/8" gap between the Romans and the other Spanish unit. Main reson I ask was that my intention was to engage the entire Spanish line but with the 2 units being offset my cats went down only getting 4 dice to the Spanish 6 each melee.

crude picture to hopefully make it somewhat clearer. The staggered line between the mediums and the lights was only about 1/4" or less : SM= Spanish Mediums, SH=Spanish heavies, CA=cataphracts, RL=Roman Legions

Edited by moderator- I hope this is right

picture didnt quite work out right, there was a spanish 4 pak in colum beside a 4 pak in line which was fighting the cats. beside them was a 10 pak of heavies who the romans chaged with an 8 pak of heavy foot. i thought i would hit both the heavies and the mediums with my legions who should have ended up beside the cats.

Can you please use the CODE commands to make a text diagram with spacing? I'm not clear which gap you refer to

Hard to be sure without tighter diag however ...

When you charge you always press forward if you can - and indeed must do so if this is allowed. This press forward is perfectly entitled to hit any BG already engaged if it can do so frontally or with a legal flank charge. The only exclusion would be to do a side contact with a base already frontally engaged that was not a legal flank charge.

My impression is that you had a file free that should have stepped forward to egnage the spare file inthe gap but not 100% sure without a diag. Maybe the general point above helps.

Si

Assuming that the edit I have done to the diagram is correct then why didn't the Roman legionaries 'step forwards' into the Spanish mediums? Check out stepping forwards on P54 and the diagram on P56

They should have and fought a 4 dice vs 4 dice impact phase as far as I can see.

Si

Hammy
your edit got it right. I was wondering if the Romans should not have continued into the spanish mediums even though their target was the heavies and the mediums were slightly behind the heavy line but I still had the extra moves to close the gap and hit the mediums.
Alas my poor ctaphracts should have had some extra help from the legions and not had to deal with all those extra overlap dice. Thanks for the answer.

Yes as long as in setppoing fowards rthey went less than 2MU from the initial line and at least had corner to corner contact with the rest their BG they would do so. So if they were more than 30mm back you wouldn't step foward, if less or equal to that then you would. All depends on how far back, If the daig is roughly to scale I expect you are in with them.

Note again there would be no choice about whether they set forward - you always do if you can and don't if you can't.

Having said charge everyone tries to do so, no"charge except you lot on the ovelap and you ebhind him who we want to break at the last minute and acvoid hitting those guys to your front and ........aaargh" as commander gets ridden over by enemy troops while issuing long winded and pointless orders.

Si

Do troops have to step forward into terrain that would disorder them? Its not an exception in the step forward rule

And thus .... you've answered it yourself already

A charge is a charge is a charge is a bl***y difficult thing to stop going forward once started; and so it should be.

Si

philqw78 wrote:Do troops have to step forward into terrain that would disorder them? Its not an exception in the step forward rule

It may prevent shock troops from being forced to charge but IIRC steping forwards is just one of those things.