If I am reading the rules correctly, routing damage completely ignores a unit's hit points? In other words, if a unit with 4 hit points is forced to take one point of routing damage, then that unit is effectively routed and out of the battle?

Its an interesting concept and works well to prevent armies composed of all high tier units while simultaneously preventing the loser from having all of his troops destroyed in a given battle. However, I could see how this would be frustrating as well: "Oh look, your initiative 2, 1 hp character just routed my initiative 5, 4 hp character." The damage at early intitiatives is compensated by the hit points, but it seems the only affective way of guarding against a rout is numbers.

Then again, that depends on how frequent a rout will be, etc. Also, since combat is limited to a single 'round' per initiative, its not quite as big a deal as if combat were to keep going. All in all, I am excited about the mechanics as they stand as it seems like it will interesting impacts on how the game flow goes (i.e. a defeated army that rallies in the spring to take back a keep or a retreating army that falls back into terrain away from the attacker's primary objective, forcing the attacker to choose pursuit and delay their objective or push on and risk a rallied force at their backs).

So, what do folks think of Rout damage vs Damage damage?

As we have 4 kinds of effects (rout, damage, special ability and miss) chances to get rout will be something like 1 out 4, so not so often I guess. That's a good thing. The bad thing is that my luck sometimes misses the chance to meet me on some days and I'll surely get a bunch of routed troops frequently

Personally I prefer to kill opponent than left him with a pile of upside down units.

Having 4 different abilities doesn't make the chance of any one happening 1 in 4. It probably varies between the unit base types with rectangles/hexagons having the most and circles/triangles having the fewest.

triangles miss 40% of the time and there the majority of 1-2 initative units, so I can't imagine them routing enemies much.

You may find this post interesting

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=162&efcid=1&efidt=241041

Maybe I'm missing it, but I didn't see anything in the rules about this: Can you assign damage to routed units?

Say my knight is routed by my opponent's initiative one units, and then his initiative two units deal 1 damage. Instead of assigning it to one of my stnading units, and thereby reducing my strength at the end of the battle, can I assign it to my routed knight?

I believe I saw somewhere that you had to assign it to standing damaged units first, then standing units, then routed units.

Rulebook, pg. 22:

When assigning damage during battle, a player must place the
damage on a previously damaged unit (if able). If he does not
have any damaged units, then he must assign it to any one of his
standing units. If he does not control any standing units in the
battle, then he must assign the damage to one of his routed units.

Ah, I remembered that first part, but I guess I missed the second part. Thanks, guys.

I think the most interesting thing about the combat is that you have to rout previously undamaged units, if possible, and you have to damage previously damaged units, if possible. This makes for the maximum number of casualties per battle.

So does this mean that a "routed" unit is considered at full health in regards to taking damage? Also, to clarify, routed units do not count towards strength in end battle correct?

Yes, if you have no standing or damaged units left when there's still damaged to be assigned, it will have to be assigned to your routed units which still retain their hit point values. And only standing units count towards your strength at the end of a battle.

In my first game wimpy low initiative units routing slow, high initiative units wasn't a problem. First, as someone noted, triangles don't cause many routes, nor do circles for that matter. Second, the big units are generally the harder ones to get (higher up on the production dials) so you are very rarely in a situation where you've got a big unit without smaller units available to soak up the rout results.

Of all the various mechanics with random elements, I think combat felt the most clean and least arbitrary. Cory did a fantastic job with the balance of unit types, damage inflicted, and quantities that tend to be available.

It actually makes good sense rp wise. If a unit or battle line was routed on a traditional medieval battle field its troops were usually not harmed meaningfully, often they were frightened and scattered. Often this happened as a result of disrupted formations do to cavalry charges, concentrated archery, or barbarians yelling at you. These things seem to happen before you re actually stuck into the melee so the routs should happen before damage.

The units needing to take damage until dead makes sense too, as it represents troops stuck in, for whom rout is instant death as they are soo close to enemy troops.

The orbs going off is well timed before the rest of these results as they seem to represent spells, tactics, and/or supernatural abilities. I'm really happy with how combats play out.

Kias said:

For what it's worth, in Battlemist (the predecessor to this game), you would lose a battle if you had no more foot soldiers. They were typically the weakest units, but they were VITAL to battle as you had to have them to not get wiped out.

It made for some interesting recruiting decisions, because you would rather recruit your more powerful archer and cavalry, but if you neglect your staple foot soldiers, you would not last long.

Kias said: