Warmachine/Tactics/Gameplay Basics

The Turn

A turn is made up of three phases; the Maintenance Phase, the Control Phase, and the Activation Phase.

Maintenance Phase

This is the part of the turn where you resolve continuous effects ("Am I on fire? Am I being corroded by powerful acids?") and generally clean up after the previous turn; remove AOEs that expire and clean up your spells that weren't upkeeps.

Control Phase

Usually you plan your turn during the other guy's turn, but this is where it starts; refresh and allocate Focus, pay for upkeep spells and generally get ready for shit hitting the fan. This is also the first part of the turn where the differences between Warmachine and Hordes become obvious, because this is where the two games' resource systems come into play for the first time.

In Warmachine, warcasters use FOCUS to power warjacks. Every 'caster produces a set amount of focus points, which they can then allocate to 'jacks to enable them to make powerful special attacks, boost their damage output, run, charge, or whatever else - but the warcaster also needs focus to cast their own spells, and "camping" focus - keeping a couple of extra points around - bumps up the 'caster's ARM so that they aren't so horrifically squishy. As of MKIII every warjack in a battlegroupnow "powers up" generating 1 focus for itself. As a result, Warmachine is a game of resource management; focus is awesome, and you don't have enough. What's important enough to spend those precious tokens on?

In Hordes, warlocks have to manage FURY to keep their warbeasts from going out of control and eating their own army. Warlocks don't produce fury points. Warbeasts do, and they produce even more when you try to make them run, charge, boost their damage, or anything else. The warlock's job is to leach this fury away and dispose of it safely, because a warbeast with fury left over is in danger of going berserk. As such, Hordes is a game of risk management; fury is dangerous, but you need it to win, so where's the balance point between "too much" and "not enough"?

Whichever system you're playing, this is where the meat of the resource play happens. Warcasters allocate focus and warlocks leach as much of it as they can. That's basically it.

Activation Phase

This is the bulk of the game turn, because it's where all your little models actually get to do cool shit like throwing lightning and gettin' proppa choppy.

Models in Warmachine activate in any order the player wishes. Each element of an army activates individually in their own mini-turns; a model (or group of models) that have activated can move, perform an action, and then end its activation. Alternatively, they can run (double their SPD) to get somewhere quick, and then end their activation immediately after, or fuck moving and get a bonus to hitting things with their shooting. They can also charge, which is probably the most important thing to know and will be explained below.

"Taking an action" generally means "hitting or shooting something", but can also mean "making a special attack" or "using a special ability". It does not, however, mean "cast a spell"; warcasters and warlocks can cast spells at any time during their activation, so long as they don't interrupt their moving or action to do so. No drive-bys, but other than that, you can toss spells any time so long as you can pay for them.

Unlike in Warhammer, models always make attack rolls as individuals, and against individual targets (unless they have the Combined Attack special rule, but it's still functionally the same even then). Units do not fire and take hits as one character, so positioning of individual models becomes much more important in comparison, since a single model in the wrong place can really mess up someone's day, be that yours or your opponent's.

Attacking itself is fairly simple: roll 2d6 + (MAT for melee, RAT for ranged) + (other modifiers) and compare it to your opponent's DEF. If you equal or exceed it, you hit, and roll damage. Damage is equally simple: roll 2d6 + (POW for ranged weapons, P+S for melee) + (other modifiers), then subtract your victim's ARM. If you rolled high enough to actually deal damage, your opponent will mark this on that model's damage track (health bar, printed on the unit card and usually tracked using plastic card sleeves and dry-erase markers). If the damage track is filled up, or the unit doesn't have one (usually because they're single-wound infantry), they die.

Special actions are magic spells, abilities or other things that aren't part of your usual soldier's skillset and aren't usually offensive in nature; it's things like repairing a warjack or digging a trench. Some require a skill check (roll 2d6 and pray for lows) while most are just 'okay, break out the shovels'.

Special attacks are... well, special attacks. They hurt people, so they tend to require a check of some kind, but this isn't always the case (the Thunderhead's 'Energy Pulse' Special Attack just zaps everything within 6" regardless of any checks). The most common check you make would be a Magic Ability check, in which case the ability rating (the x in Magic Ability [x]) becomes the RAT equivalent.

Charging is, as mentioned above, the most important special action that can be taken, since Warmahordes games often swing on one player or the other getting a brutal charge in. A charge basically gives a unit a SPD boost under the condition that they move in a straight line towards their target, and must end the move in melee range. If they don't make it, their turn is over, but if they do, then the first damage roll resulting from the charge is boosted.

A boosted roll adds a bonus die to the roll, so you'd be throwing 3d6 instead of 2d6. Obviously, boosted rolls are much more dangerous than non-boosted ones, and it's in your best interest to boost as many of your rolls as humanly possible - but you can only boost a given roll once, so no 7d6 rolls for you.

Both attack and damage rolls can be boosted, but it's often hard to get that extra die. The most common way to boost a roll is by spending focus (or generating fury) points, so boosted rolls are usually the domain of your warcaster/warlock and their warjacks/warbeasts. This makes your big guys the stars of the show for the most part, but, as mentioned above, anybody can get a boosted damage roll by charging their opponent, and some units have special rules that give them boosted dice in other situations. Even the lightest of infantry can do a lot of damage with the proper charge.

Once every model in your army has taken their activation, the turn ends, and your opponent readies up to do the same to you.

Terrain

Terrain can affect unit actions, being beneficial such as giving defense bonuses, or slowing you down preventing you from reaching a target. You and your opponent should agree on what everything is before deployment.

Open, Rough, and Impassable

Open terrain doesn't impede progress and lets you move normally. Rough terrain slows movement, and impassable terrain is exactly what it sounds like.

Features

Any piece of terrain that isn't the ground itself is a terrain feature, like walls, buildings, and forests.

• Water comes in two types: shallow and deep. Shallow water slows you down and can make warjacks stationary if they're knocked down in it. Deep water can hurt infantry and destroy jacks, and prevents most actions.
• Trenches protect against blast damage and give cover as long as the source of either isn't in the trench.
• Forests are rough terrain that grant concealment and mess with Line of Sight.
• Hills can be either rough or open terrain and elevate models, letting them see and be seen over models of equal or smaller size that aren't elevated. They also provide a DEF bonus against attacks from below.
• Obstacles are anything you could climb and stand on top of. Anything you'd need to climb over but couldn't stand on - like a fence - is a linear obstacle. Linear obstacles don't slow your movement, but cannot be charged through unless the model has pathfinder. Walls that are less than 1" thick are linear obstacles.
• Obstructions are stuff that can't be moved through or climbed over, like a house or really big rock. Obstructions grant a DEF bonus against melee attacks if the target is obscured by it.
  • On a side note, there's Smoke. Its not a regular terrain piece, but an AOE that can be dropped by certain models. Smoke gives concealment to models within it and blocks line of sight to models behind it, making models that generate it extremely powerful defensively.

Cover

Cover, as you'd expect, is a DEF bonus against shooting and magic attacks granted by terrain. Concealment is a smaller bonus that comes from stuff that would conceal a model but not stop something, like bushes or smoke. Cover is a large bonus that comes from stuff that would stop something. The bonuses don't stack.