Seems that ya'll are still finding ways of making things happen ingame that make the devs scratch their head and say "How the heck did they manage that??!!". So when the Allies suddenly had several brigades routed this morning, players were left a little confused. DOC takes a minute to explain what happened:

Fallbacks!

We had a situation that caused a lot of confusion in Bouillon earlier on, where a fallback was issued but the Division HQ and it's brigades were routed off map instead of to their designated fallback.

Well we found why that happened there, but not in other fallbacks that have been made, ie: what made that one different.

It's the same reason we tell the HC's not to leave Divisional HQ's frontline.

If a brigade falls back as part of a fallback option it first looks for the Div.HQ it belongs to. If it can't reach HQ it then looks for a sister brigade in a linked town to the falling back brigade. If it can't reach one of those (1 link range) then it looks for a town it is still linked to that it can use as a last ditch attempt to fall back to.

If all those options fail (do not exist) then it is routed off map.

All the above applies to BRIGADES.

Not to Divisional HQ however, which is not allowed to be placed frontline. If Divisional HQ tries to rout to a town that is frontline (such as Sedan was when Bouillon fell) it will instead rout off map, and that means all its brigades will follow it. We are going to change this so that it will rout frontline if it has no other choice before it goes off map, but that requires new host binaries so it can't be changed right now.

So until this gets changed the same advice applies that we always made clear, and why you are not allowed to put Divisional HQ's in a frontline town. If they are trapped frontline by enemy moves and you don't move them out (which you should always do) then if you do a .fallback WITH THAT HQ IN THAT FRONTLINE TOWN it will rout off map, and take its daughter brigades with it.

Fallbacks still work fine with brigades as long as their Divisional HQ is not with them in the frontline town you are falling back from.