I was just casually skimming through my rulebook and I believe that I have been playing something completely wrong about assaulting units partially behind difficult terrain.
Ok, the situation in question is when one unit which is not already in difficult terrain declares a charge against a unit that has some portion of its models behind difficult terrain, and some portion of its models not behind difficult terrain.
pg. 34 of the rules states... "All of the models in an assaulting unit make their assault move following the same rules as the movement phase, with the exception that they may be moved within 1" of enemy models."
pg. 14 of the rules states... "If a unit starts its move outside difficult terrain, the player must declare if he wants his unit to try to enter difficult terrain as part of their move. If he chooses not to, the unit moves as normal but may not enter difficult terrain. If he chooses they will do so, the unit must take a difficult terrain test as described below."
Here is a visual depiction of the situation I'm talking about.
The genestealers have declared that they are charging the grey knights. The genestealer player refers to page 34 and follows the steps to move his assaulting unit. He sees that assaulting units follow the same rules for moving units, and so he references page 14. He decides that rather than risk a low roll on his difficult terrain test, he instead elects to avoid the difficult terrain in his move. So he flips back to page 34 and continues. He moves the closest model to the closest enemy model byt the shortest route, taking difficult terrain tests
if necessary. Now it looks like this...
Now we reach a point where there may be some conflicting rules, from a certain perspective. The bullet point steps on page 34 compel the next models to move in the unit to attempt to move into base contact with any enemy model within reach that is not already in contact with an assaulting model
if possible.
If possible is the sticky one here. If the genestealer player had declared at the beginning of this step that he would be avoiding difficult terrain, then the rules on page 14 prohibit him from moving any models into difficult terrain. This would make moving any more models into base to base with the unengaged grey knights 'impossible' in my interpretation. Thus, the rest of the genestealer assault would look like this.
The only other interpretation that could be made would be that the bullet points on page 34 supercede any and all of the normal movement rules, successive models in the genestealer unit would be compelled to enter the difficult terrain, which would trigger a test, yet that test could not retro-actively affect the initially moved 'closest model'. In this interpretation, this would be how the unit moved.
If a test was triggered, then the movement of the rest of the models in the unit outside from the first one would be decreased accordingly, and the entire unit would count as 'moving thrugh difficult terrain' for the purposes of lowered initiative values.
IMO the prior interpretation is the one I think is
RAW,
RAI and "how it should be played". But I'm curious to hear other peoples interpreations of those rules passages, and how you all play situations like this.
Thanks for reading and replying.
