The vagarities of base sizes and rank bonuses.

I had been inspired by the use of mounted heroes inside of non mounted units to provide armor bonuses and a few extra attacks out of a single 'slot' in a formation of units.

This led me to quite an odd situation, and one I figured I could share with you folks for a bit of deliberation.

What happens when the mounted model is larger than the neat 25x50 sized base?

The key example I wonder is a 50x50 herald of khorne on a juggernaut inside a unit of bloodletters (who are 25x25)
The front rank of '5' would look simply like the full command and the juggernaut, as well as the second rank, and then a third rank of 5 and so on.

What would this units rank bonus be? Would it be 3 if it had 4 ranks, or 2, because of the 50x50 model inside of the first two ranks.

Other sources of Fantasy (warseer, etc.) have given wildly different answers, which is why I came here particularly as I'm pretty kosher with most of the rules interpretations given here.

From what I understand, whatever spaces you take up, in this case 4, is still counted toward ranks.

So for instance, if you have a squad of 11 Saurus Temple Guard, with a Slannn in the second rank, taking up 4 spaces, you will actually get the +2 combat res from rank, the same way as if you had 15 Slann.

I think this is primarily the reason why the character must be unit strength 4 or less, they don't want a character taking up a whole rank.

Ovich wrote:From what I understand, whatever spaces you take up, in this case 4, is still counted toward ranks.

So for instance, if you have a squad of 11 Saurus Temple Guard, with a Slannn in the second rank, taking up 4 spaces, you will actually get the +2 combat res from rank, the same way as if you had 15 Slann.

I think this is primarily the reason why the character must be unit strength 4 or less, they don't want a character taking up a whole rank.

I'm in that same train of thought as well (I had entirely neglected to remember the details about a character and their US).

But there's always precedence to check on a ruling (since it's open to interpretation).

In addition, the Juggernaut still counts as a Calvary model -in spite of the 50x50 base size- which is why I asked, as a model that size doesn't normally (barring things like the Slann, Screaming Bell, Grail Reliquae - which are larger,) end up inside a unit of infantry.

I agree with Stephan.

It was one of the Changes in the 7th edition that people had a tough time accepting at first. If you go to the character section, it's pretty clear that any character can join a unit unless it's a flyer or a chariot. A Flyer cant join a unit and a Character on Chariot can only join a unit of chariots. It makes no mention of Unit Strength or base size. Now, most monstrous mounts that are unit strength 5, are flyers. So in general, if a character model is unit strength 5, it can't join a unit.

No where is it actually written that the space taken up by a Character is part of the ranks. But I think it's one of those Wacky GW things where a person has to say, "it's not written anywhere that the ranks don't count either"

maybe people are thinkign that it works the same way as the Screaming Bell, the Bells' entry actually says that even though is like 3 ranks deep and displaces models, that the unit pushing it counts as having a rank bonus, so you could have 3 rats per rank and the bell taking the space of the other 2 and the unit counts as having 3 ranks