[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Pocus:

Revision of attack rear:
It has been aknowledged by the devs that the bigger the formations are, in the front of your army, the lower the chances are that an enemy squad on attack rear will really attack rear. I'm unsure its realistic, but gameplay wise I can tell you that against any significant sized army, this 'magnet' effect is so strong that any attack rear order will fail miserably.

I didn't know we had acknowledged that. AFAIK the attack rear order gives your soldiers a target from one of the rearmost units. If there are many units in the rear when target is selected there might be problems. Big armies in front does not affect the targeting.

The targeting works something like:
1 Select single rearmost unit.
2 Random chance of ignoring.
3 Repeat with second rearmost target etc

Hold and attack rear can be useful if you want enemies to split up a bit to choose more permanently rearmost targets.