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A few weeks ago a friend and I were in a game. He had DA. and I had Nids. During my assault phase, I charged one of his units with one of mine.
He opted NOT to do Overwatch.

Fine.

After my Nids charge, I then declared another charging unit to charge his DA unit that I had just charged with my first unit.
He said NOW he would take his Overwatch.

I told him he couldn't. They were in Base to Base (B2B) contact.
He then said that nowhere in the book does it say that B2B means you cannot fire.

I laughed.

This has been a cardinal rule in almost (if not every) tabletop wargame that I have played. We then looked through the book. After about an hour of looking, I said that once our units touch they are Locked. locked cant fire.

He said yes, you are correct. But it doesn't count as being Locked until the start of the first Int Phase.

Well needless to say we didn't finish the game.

But after looking at the rules for the past few weeks, I'm starting to see where he is coming from.

It seems as though that there is nowhere in the book that strictly says that if you are in B2B that you cannot fire. It just says that Locked/Engaged Units cannot. It seems that you only check to be Locked at the start of the Int Phase.

Am I reading too much into this or could he be right?

There is a thread on this already...

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/473537.page

 Grugknuckle wrote:
There is a thread on this already...

Two threads...
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/474025.page#4727338

Yep...But I think this is the real answer you're looking for.

"Units that have one or more models in base contact with enemies are locked in combat. While a unit is locked in combat, it may only make Pile In moves and cannot otherwise move or shoot." P.23

The problem is that all throughout the "charge move" section it talks about models moving to engage, and moving into close combat...in fact at the bottom of pg 21 it states "if you follow this sequence, you will end up with all the models in the charging unit in unit coherency, having engaged as many enemy models as possible with as many charging models as possible."

Under "Moving Charging Models" on the same page, the first sentence references "Charging units must attempt to engage as many....*snip*".



*Edit*
Ninja'd by Grug.