A quick word from the Ref!

July 5, 2017

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A quick word from the ref…

a word from the ref

By Tim Bancroft

I’ve ref’d a fair few wargames competitions. Before each, to be honest, am always a little apprehensive as some competitions get a little… tense.

For the Antares Day, such apprehension vanished into thin air: the attitude of the tournament players was superb, every question being asked in the spirit of ‘We want to get this right’ or ‘I want to make sure as I don’t want to unfairly gain an advantage’. This is a brilliant approach and one which really added to the fun on the day!

It was great to see the June 2017 rules update was read and applied by all! However, there were a few misunderstandings that cropped up that might be worth letting everyone know about. To be frank, they all crop up on the boards from time to time and, as a result, all have appeared in previous FAQs or are in the pending FAQ. Rick and Tim also have a number of applicable rules explanations that may be of interest on the Antares Delhren blog’s Antares Insights.

In Assaults, there is only one round of follow on combat, to make two rounds of hand-to-hand combat in total: it does not keep going! If the single round of Follow On Combat ends in draw, survivors take Breaktests, if appropriate, but must then disengage (p.43).
A unit firing multiple slingnets at a target only ever puts one extra pin on the target, even if all hit. A subsequent round of shooting may well put another slingnet pin on the target as the source of pins isn’t counted separately (p.87).
A sprinting unit forces the attacker to reroll any hits but only if caught mid-sprint. Mid-sprint is when the Run is interrupted by an Ambush or if the sprinters are making an Assault (Fast units with a current Run order also always force hit rerolls). See p.29 and, for halving hits from OH blasts, p.35.
A Break Test must be taken if shot at and the unit ends up with more than half its starting models as casualties. This applies even if models were lost in previous shooting or assaults. So if a unit of 12 Outcasts loses five models in a round of shooting, it just takes a pin and doesn’t test; if the surviving seven models then take just one more casualty from shooting, the unit takes a pin has to take a Break Test as the six survivors are half the starting total (even though one casualty isn’t half those surviving – p.44).
A subverter matrix cannot operate if forced to go Down, even if it takes a dice from the bag to do so. Only when voluntarily succeeding at a Reaction or when taking an Order dice from the bag can it do so (and for the latter, even if it fails the order test and goes Down – see p.122).