If you add a unit upgrade card to a unit that has a defense of 4 of 2HPs can you assign damage to that upgrade to avoid loses of other minis? For example, you have a Rune Golem upgrade with a unit of Spearman. You receive 4 Wounds. Instead of loosing an entire tray of spearman from the rear could you assign 1 wound to the rune golem? Basically utilizing upgrade cards and characters and wound buffers? Or must you assign damage to the rear until you now longer have a 2nd & 3rd rank?

Unless there's accuracy involved damage is always assigned to the back rank of trays.

On top of that, you never assign damage to your own units. I guess your opponent could choose to assign 3 damage to your Front Line Golem instead of removing three spearmen but I can't think of a reason that they would do so.


RRG, pg. 9:
'22.1 When a unit suffers damage, the attacker—or the unit’s
opponent when the damage is not caused by an attack—
assigns damage to one figure at a time until all of the damage
has been assigned.'

RRG, pg. 9:
'22.3 Damage can only be assigned to figures in the backmost rank
of the unit.'