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Question for the forums:
Lets say there's a bastion with a tactical squad embarked inside. Can a squad of chaos bikes move onto the battlements above them from the ground below, outside the bastion?

Obviously a squad of jetbikes or a skimmer or whatever could fly up and land on the bastion's battlements. But can a unit move from outside the building to the battlements without going through the building if it doesn't have some special permission like Jump/Jetbike, etc?

Page references appreciated if there's a hard answer one way or the other

I think it would depend on the situation, if you are talking about say, an imperial bastion specifically, then I would say that they can't get on the battlements, only jump and jetpack units are allowed to go directly to battlements without going through the inside of the building first, which bikes cannot.

I suppose offhand it might be possible to deploy on top of it "with like SM bikes" if you started the game with the terrain in your deployment zone, but then I don't think you can ever leave or move if you did that. The chaos bikes would have to attack the building if your occupied it, if you were on the battlements they would have to shoot at you and be unable to assault. If you are on the battlements, you deployed there but didnt supply the bastion in your roster, then I think it would still be an unclaimed building and count as unoccupied if you were on top. The chaos bikes would be unable to assault the building because you cannot attack unoccupied buildings if i recall.

The Movement rules tell us moving vertically is covered with your usual movement, and Bikes have no restriction on moving vertically.

Basically if their movement is sufficient to get them up and onto the battlements, they can do so.

That's kinda what i was coming to the conclusion of as well. I thought in previous editions (maybe?) there was a rule about being able to climb onto the battlements of a fortification from the outside or to jump down from on top, without being jump units or the like. Maybe it is just as simple as " if they have the movement they can do it"

while the rules have no problem because fluffy people moan about this regularly they made it explicit in the terrain section of the faq

Bikes, superheavy walkers, walkers and monstrous creatures can climb any terrain while moving and assaulting

With the caveat that you may rule that models can only reach places they could in real life which requires common sense (an example might be saying units that only move 6" can't climb an 8" vertical bastion but this is an optional rule) every I've played accepts anything with a 12" move being able to move that far vertical.

U02dah4 wrote:
while the rules have no problem because fluffy people moan about this regularly they made it explicit in the terrain section of the faq

Bikes, superheavy walkers, walkers and monstrous creatures can climb any terrain while moving and assaulting

With the caveat that you may rule that models can only reach places they could in real life which requires common sense (an example might be saying units that only move 6" can't climb an 8" vertical bastion but this is an optional rule) every I've played accepts anything with a 12" move being able to move that far vertical.

That last part you mentioned isn't RAW at all.
If a unit can only move 6", then it cannot move onto an 8" vertical bastion. Period. There's no common sense ruling or player agreement needed - You count the vertical space when measuring. (Usually this means measuring with the tape measure forming the hypotenuse between the movement forward and the movement up.)


Also, here's the full quote from the FAQ, for posterity:

Q: Can Bikes, Super-heavy Walkers, Walkers, and Monstrous
Creatures move and/or assault units on the higher levels
of ruins?
A: Yes. For simplicity and ease of play, the core game
rules allow most models to climb any piece of scenery.
Use the ‘Wobbly Model Syndrome’ rule if it is not
possible to place the model in the position it is meant
to be occupying. If you wish, you may want to say that
models are only allowed to move to places that they
could reach ‘in real life’, but you will need to apply a
certain amount of common sense and discretion in
order to make such a rule work well..

(Weirdly, the FAQ actually uses the double period. I do not know why.)



The reason that this rule was changed is because it made certain kinds of terrain far, far too punishing for armies that relied heavily on bikes. If you played, say, Ravenwing (Or if you were an Ork player going with Speed Freaks), someone playing Tau or Eldar could plop down a couple multi-level buildings on the board and then safely ignore most of your army for the entire game.

The key words in the rule are "climb any piece of scenery" so not any piece of scenery provided you can make it to a flat surface at the top. Along with

"Use the wobbly model rule if it is not possible to place the model in the position it is meant to be occupying"

So 6" up because its half way through a climb its not possible to place the model so use the wobbly model rule.


It is exactly the if you wish clause that prevents this but it is an optional clause. (I actually support using this clause in exactly this way if you cant make it to a flat surface you can't do it but RAW without the optional clause you can.