Fleeing

Development and Playtest ACKS Domains at War Playtest
1

I don’t see it anywhere, so technically I know the answer, but I wanted to toss this one up anyway:

When a unit flees, the main inconvenience is that there’s unplanned movement that depending on positioning may result in a forced rout - there’s no extra AP costs or anything other than the distance of movement to take into consideration for activating the unit the next turn to turn it around and come back?

And as fleeing isn’t a rout or a voluntary retreat, the unit the General is attached to causes no penalty if it flees and doesn’t make it off the battlefield. (which, now that I think about it, makes meeting the lines beyond “half-court”, as it were, important for those impromptu flee-to-routs, espc. for fast units)

Just ran into this very situation - as I said, I’m pretty sure the rules are clear on everything I mention, but it’s just one of those things that struck me as it happened.

2

Koewn,

Your assessment is correct. The impact of fleeing is as follows:

1. The unit may flee off-board, routing it. This is an implicit game mechanic that penalizes players who try to gamely "hug the back of the map".

2. The unit's flight disorders it and puts it facing the wrong direction a good distance from the fighting. If it's a commander's unit, his troops are now probably out of zone of control. If it's not, then the unit is probably out of ZOC.

3. Fleeing units tend to leave your line in terrible disarray. 

If you experiment with morale rolls for fleeing generals, let me know. It has some realism to argue for it, but I worry that it would be too punitive and result in the game becoming overly-focused on "whack-a-general".