This came up in a game yesterday. My model was facing a H1 wall with my opponent’s model a few inches on the other side. His model had fly and wanted to fly over my unit and charge him in the rear. Being new to the game, we did a quick search through the book but didn’t find anything about it.
Could someone point to the page in the rules that would cover this? Secondly, does anyone else find the rules are disorganized as I do?
Been a while since I played but if I remember it correctly, you have to go in a direct line if you want to get the free attack that comes from a charge. If you manouvre around like that, it would not count as a charge but rather a “move into contact”. If you want to attack as well, you need to have an action left over, or possibly fatigue the model to attack.
Charge is a special type of Run action, and is therefore covered in the Run action on page 17. Fred is correct in that your Run will only qualify as a Charge (thus giving you a free melee action) if it takes the most direct path to the model you are engaging.
Note also that the rear attack bonus of +1 crushing only applies if you STARTED your activation in the rear arc of the enemy model. If you start in their front arc they can watch you move around them and you won’t catch them unawares to get the +1 crushing. See Armour Roll -modifiers and bonuses, page 30
A reasonable thing for the flyer to do would be fly over your model as a walk action to engage the rear (if they had enough movement, which they should if they were only a few inches away), then next short action is melee. You wouldn’t get the rear arc bonus, but the model being attacked also wouldn’t get the obstacle armour bonus. However this also means on the retaliation (if there was one) the flyer wouldn’t get the obstacle armour bonus either because it’s not in between them.
The rules felt weirdly laid out to me at first as well, but it makes more sense when you realise there’s not really a ranged phase or melee phase. There’s just rounds and turns. So that’s how the rulebook is laid out. What’s the structure of a round? Alternating turns. On your turn what actions can you take? Lists of actions. Then it goes on to explain how movement works for move actions (as that’s probably the first thing you’ll do), then ranged attacks (the next most likely thing you’ll do), then melee etc. I find the index is actually quite a good index and saves me a lot of flipping around.