Q for Doug - Fleeing Units & River Crossings

[vince hughes]

Doug kindly replied, and here is most of it.

"Hi Vince, that's a fascinating question since I've never run into that situation either. Intuitively, the unit would try to flee back across the river rather than just stay put where it could get shot at, and the only question is whether or not there should be some penalty applied to the river-crossing dieroll to account for the fact that the unit is demoralized. There's nothing in the core rules about it, so I'd say let the unit flee into the river hex with the ENG and then make the river-crossing dieroll next turn as normal. However, if you want to take into account the fact that getting a unit across a river might be harder to accomplish if the unit is demoralized, you could apply a house rule and add a +2 penalty to the river-crossing dieroll for a demoralized unit.

Also note that if a demoralized unit enters a river hex as above and then enemy units move so that they no longer can hit the river hex with DF, then the river hex becomes a safe hex and the demoralized unit must remain in the river hex. It cannot cross back to the other side of the river unless and until it is no longer demoralized or the hex is no longer safe because enemy units have moved back into position to hit the river hex with DF."

As well as Doug's input, it is also worth noting there that if the ENG subsequently becomes DEM and had to flee, that the rules say that DEM units have to flee to the side of the river they were came from. In that case, any DEM unit that was trying to re-cross were obviously left stranded and would go back to the enemy side.

As I said in the first instance. I was not worried what the answer was. Only that we had an official one.

Might be worth, whomever is responsible adding the above to the annotated rules as a side note for future reference.