Charging a Skirmish Unit

[Mark Prichard]

A couple of questions in regards to line units charging skirmishers.

(1) Can skirmishers be ignored as in you order a unit to charge a unit behind skirmishers thereby running through them? I think not but I was asked by someone else.

(2) If you charge a skirmish unit and they evade, can you choose another unit to charge or must the unit continue to chase the skirmishers until they run out of movement?

(3) What happens if the skirmishers move behind a unit, can you charge that unit?

[Charge The Guns]

Hi Mark,

Good questions. The charge / evade rules are a bit clunky. They are improved in BP2 and Hail Caesar, but P&S is left with the original system that doesn’t work so well, IMHO.

You can’t ignore skirmishers. You have to charge them. The chargers halt on the position where the evading troops started. The evaders will get away number of moves determined by a command through, but they always evade at least 1 move even if they fail the command. (Note that you can’t evade if disordered.) If they blunder then they have to abide by the blunder result.

I think the original intention was that you’d need to use one unit to clear the skirmishers, and then a second unit would charge the main target. Also need to remember that a unit can only evade once in a move, so if a second unit charges the evaders then they can’t move a second time.

If you have BP2 then I would suggest using the charge / evade rules from that. In BP2 chargers don’t stop, but can continue to the full extent of their move, if that was the order you gave them, and so continue on to troops behind the evaders.

I must admit it doesn’t come up a lot in our games of P&S as we don’t use many troops that can evade.

Hope this helps.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by Charge The Guns.

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