Flight + attack rear

[DarkAvenger211]

Hey guys. I was just wondering how the finer points of attack rear work.

I just had a battle in which there were massive amounts of undead on both sides. they were basically smacking up to each other from both sides and going no-where.

The thing is though my god was in that battle and could fly. His tactics were to buff himself and then attack the rearmost enemy. Which at the time would be a massive amount of priests (and a single general further behind them too)

Instead of doing so however, he literally flew directly into the middle of the 2 undead armies, I actually don't even think he could have gotten any closer to the front than he had. There was definitely enough room to fly into the rear, but he didn't.

How does attack rearmost work exactly, will they ignore it sometimes even if it's a perfectly acceptable move?

[llamabeast]

I don't know, but I think it's something like this: The unit takes a check for each unit that it has to fly over to see if it gets distracted by it. If it does, then it attacks that unit instead. Obviously your pretender got distracted by the very first unit it tried to fly over.

This mechanic exists to stop "attack rear" being too powerful, and it also applies to units on the ground. For example flanking cavalry will often get distracted and move in to attack the enemy's front unit, but sometimes they will make it all the way to the back.

[bbz]

Is the same mechanic valid for all the other orders like attack large enemy monsters?

[JonBrave]

I'm sure it is, my guys never seem to attack who I want them to

[llamabeast]

No idea, sorry. I can't even remember my sources for this answer so I may not have it quite right.

[Samhain]

My understanding of the mechanics of "attack/fire large enemy monsters" as well as personal experience is that it is far more reliable than "attack rear". Also, as llamabeast's understanding of the latter suggests, I've found attack rear to be much more successful when there are fewer different units on the opposing side. Though, I don't know if it a difference in the number of groupings of units or the number of types of units.

[Corinthian]

I wonder what kind of check it is though? It cant be a moral check because I have seen pretenders and longdead horsemen fail the checks. And both of those automatically pass all moral checks.

[DarkAvenger211]

I don't think they "Automatically" do. They just have a huge morale (something like 50).

That being said it would be extremely unlikely that my pretender should have failed (He is undead and also has a morale of 50).

[Soyweiser]

Perhaps the check is not related to morale?

[Mauxe]

I would think that placement would effect the check as well.
If you have to fly directly over an army you should get more distracted then if you were starting at the top/bottom - unless the AI always flies in an angle towards the rear-middle.