The New Kingdom Egyptian bow and spear infantry are allowed to interpenetrate each other. One of their special abilities:
"Close fighters and close fighters with heavy axe may interpenetrate drilled Archers and vice versa in the same or opposite direction"
My question is are they:
1. Able to do this automatically as a reaction to a charge?
2. Only by spending an order in their own movement phase?
3. Or both?
[They cannot do it in the melee phase, because, PACTO, and not sure you can move units out of combat anyway].

1.  They cannot do it as a reaction to a charge as they are not skirmishers - so cannot skirmish or run away.  I guess they could do it as an intercept (not in Pacto!) move (hadn't really thought about that) if the other conditions of an intercept move are met.
2.  They can certainly do it as a prompted action in the movement phase.

You can only make a prompted move out of combat via a break-off move.  Foot cannot break off in Pacto.

Richard

Thank you.
[No rulebook, at work] Can you do intercept moves though in PACTO?
Philosophically and practically, with the ranges, it seems none too powerful to just do the interpenetration in the movement phase. By the time you are in bow range you are pretty much in charge range so there is no time to retreat behind the spear.
Just trying to figure out what is the utility of this characteristic.

Intercepts and Countercharges are not included as prompted actions on the PACTO QRS table.