Art De La Guerre

[Za Otlichiye]

While looking at the Stakes issue, I was struck by the Rally rule:

[KevinD]

[Za Otlichiye]

My confusion is more about "why?"
Conformance usually occurs after you charge (move so the conformance bit doesn't matter),
or the enemy group has charged your unaligned units,
or the enemy has charged a flank or rear.

I would assume that conformance is (almost always) mandatory and therefore you cannot rally.

I guess this does give some additional penalty to those who have been caught in the flank or rear. They spin around, but they can't make up losses from last sequence.
And further encouragement to keep everything aligned.

[Ramses II]

You are correct that conformation occurs after some form of movement, but in “timing of conformation”, after a melee a unit only conforms if it does not move away or charge something else, so conformation is not always mandatory.


What the rules are presenting is quite reasonable; you cannot reorder (rally) the ranks of a unit while it is on the move, the soldiers have to stop and “rally around the flag”, even when in melee. 


And as for “partial alignment “, which may occur for various reasons, the subsequent conformation can be considered to be actual movement, unlike the more usual situations where conformation is merely a game mechanism to facilitate the game calculations

[Za Otlichiye]

Yeah, I forgot the case of melee results leaving you in non-melee contact. Okay there is some sense of "reorientation" here. Probably don't need to overthink it.

Interesting. On page 45 I see that rallying prevents Uncontrolled charging. [thanks Mike]

Okay, that leaves rallying-continuing melee - routing your enemies-uncontrolled pursuit and contact-mandatory conformance. Since it's unpredictable and you can't rewind, I guess there is no prohibition in this case.

[Mike Bennett]