Another Dodgy Optional Rule?

[Eckerslyke]

Actually you don't need a huge stack of counters, a single skirmisher of a different nationality will do the trick......

Good point . You put me in mind of one of the optional rules I am more comfortable with, the one which prevents an overrun by a defeated unit into a hex occupied by skirmishers. It makes sense to have that OFF, as BigDuke66 suggests.

OT, but as an interesting aside, when one side in a battle is an alliance of more than one nationality, could an overrun by a defeated unit take place into a hex occupied by allied skirmishers, rather than just those of the attacker's nationality? I'm not sure. I see no reason why it should not. Worth experimenting with, perhaps.

For NME to work properly, Partial Retreats has to be off. Something to do with the coding. I think if you check Partial Retreats then in theory a beaten unit can fall back onto the adjacent stack unless the stack is at maximum limit already. I'm unsure what effect though checking it has on NME.

Am I right in thinking, then, that the phenomenon I described earlier, of a small defeated force not vacating a hex simply because all the retreat hexes were 'full', is solely due to these two rules, i.e. partial retreats off and NME on? If that is the case, then I certainly think they cannot be used together without some safeguard against their misuse by a 'gamey' battler simply to prevent movement by victorious units into territory which is theirs by right, having won it fair and square.

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You correctly identify a big part of the problem here, which is that the optional rules are not well documented or understood, particularly in the effect they have when used together. I certainly don't understand them fully, and I can understand SnakeEyes' comment (in another thread about optional rules) that the topic tended to make his head hurt. I know the feeling! The problem for me is particularly acute because I enjoy big battles, long scenarios, and if the optional rules are not selected carefully, I suffer from any mistake I may have made for a long, long time. If my scenarios were smaller or shorter, at least the suffering of having to put up with the consequences of choosing the wrong set of optional rules would not be as prolonged!