Editing WARMACHINE (section)

==Unit types==

===Warcasters and Warlocks===

[[File:202953-1366x768--DesktopNexus.com-.jpg|600px|thumb|right|It's essentially this.]]

Games of Warmahordes tend to revolve around each player's warcaster (Warmachine) or warlock (Hordes). These are powerful battle-wizards who have forged a mental link to your army's robots or kaiju, giving them direct control over their actions. Beyond this, each warnoun brings a list of spells to the table to further augment your army's abilities (or to just blast enemy models to ash), and every one ''also'' has a single-use Feat ability. This can only be used once per game, but is almost always devastatingly powerful and can basically win the game on its own if timed correctly. They're also generally no slouches in combat, with some of them being able to wipe out entire squads of normal soldiers or go toe-to-toe with heavy warjacks (though there are quite a few who ''aren't'' that fantastic in a brawl). What your warnoun does and what types of unit they synergize with is one of the most important parts of building an army and how that army works on the tabletop. No two warnouns are alike; you might be running exactly the same army list, but if you swap out one warnoun for another, you can completely change the playstyle.

Despite their incredible power, however, most games of Warmahordes require you to protect your warnoun rather than throw them into the mix. This is because they are functionally equivalent to the king in a game of chess: lose the warnoun, and you've lost the game.  

What makes warcasters and warlocks so powerful is their ability to make use of FOCUS or FURY, respectively. These are the fuel that makes your army work. 

Focus is the simpler of the two: warcasters generate focus, which they can then give to their giant robots in order to make them more powerful. Alternately, they can keep it for themselves, to cast spells. Focus is awesome and you want as much of it as you can get. What's worth spending those precious points on?

Fury is slightly more complicated, but still not too bad. Warlocks still use fury to cast spells, but they can only generate it themselves by taking damage. But your warbeasts will also generate it as they fight, and your warlock can leach it out of them. This is important, because any warbeast with fury left on it has a chance to flip its shit and just nom the closest unit, whether friendly or enemy, and every warbeast can have only so much fury on it at once before it tops out and needs to remove it to accumulate more. Your warlock can only handle so much fury per turn, so you need to manage it efficiently to keep your army under control. On the other hand, if you aren't generating ''enough'' fury, your warbeasts probably aren't doing the work they need to be, and your warlock might not have enough to fuel their spellcasting. How much can you handle safely? 

How much focus your warcaster generates (or how much fury your warlock can leach) each turn is determined by their FOCUS (or FURY) stat. This ranges from 5 (abysmally low) to 10 (stupidly high), with 6 being about average and 8 or higher usually indicating that the warnoun in question is a squishy spell-slinger rather than a frontliner. This also determines the model's control range, which is a distance equal to twice your FOCUS/FURY in inches, and is the maximum distance at which you can manipulate focus or fury. Keeping your robots or kaiju inside that bubble is important, since 'jacks without fuel aren't terribly effective and 'beasts without a babysitter can't hulk our and are liable to start devouring friendly infantry.

It's also worth noting that, when building an army list, a warnoun is effectively worth ''negative'' points. Your army's warnoun costs nothing themselves, and comes with a few free points to spend on warjacks or warbeasts.

===Warjacks and Warbeasts===

Warcasters and warlocks are your generals. Warjacks and warbeasts are their heavy hitters. While there are a few special rules that make the two play a ''bit'' differently (mostly regarding how they fuel their attacks with focus or fury), they're pretty much identical on the tabletop - save that one is a giant robot and the other is a giant monster.

Warjacks are basically seven-ton steampunk Hunter-Killer Terminator golems, tactically equivalent to how we use tanks in Earth warfare but with 100% more awesome and +2 to legs. Meanwhile, warbeasts are huge, hulking mountains of muscle and [[RAEG]], with even the smallest of them capable of reducing a man to paste with one [[Trollbloods|Giant Meaty Fist]]. They all pack crazy powerful weapons, heavy armor, and huge amounts of health, making them the most powerful individual models in an army that aren't warnouns. They also come with a slew of special "power attacks" unique to the larger models, which range from body-slamming a fucker across the tabletop to chucking them like a softball over the nearest building. The downsides are that they're usually slower, easier to hit, and less accurate than infantry, and they cost a bundle for a single model, so losing one hurts more.

Both warjacks and warbeasts also rely heavily on their army's warnoun to unlock their maximum potential for murder. They're plenty big and stompy on their own, but in order to do anything more than simply walk around and swing at things with standard attacks, they require outside help. Warjacks need a warcaster to hand them addtional focus points, which they can then spend to run, charge, make power attacks, make bonus additional standard attacks, or increase the power and accuracy of any attack they make. Warbeasts can do all of that on their own, but every time they do, they generate a fury point, and the longer that fury sticks around, the more likely that the 'beast will lose its shit and just start snapping necks like Slim Jims. They also have a maximum fury limit, and when they hit it, they can't do any of those awesome things any more, so they need a warlock about to leach all their anger away.  Both can act normally outside of their warcaster/warlock's "control range," but 'jacks can't be given focus, and 'beasts can neither generate Fury nor have it leached.

There are also a handful of models ''other'' than your warnoun which can control these giant fuckers: Marshals and Journeymen. Marshals are basically just novices who have learned to shout loud enough that their orders will get through their charge's thick goddamn skull. This is roughly analogous to trying to use a computer without a mouse; it can be done, but it's never as easy, efficient, or effective. It can still be useful, since they take some load off your warnoun, but it's not always what you want. Journeymen, meanwhile, are basically mini-warnouns, complete with their own FOCUS or FURY score, spell list, and so on. They can control things more efficiently than Marshals, but they're still strictly downgrades from your standard warnouns, so again, it's situational as to whether or not you want them. They're primarily useful for edge cases, when you absolutely must have another 'jack or 'beast but your warnoun is already run ragged.

The final real difference between warjacks, warbeasts, and regular models is the way damage is tracked. Most models just have health boxes to mark as they take damage, but these guys are too beefy for that. Warjacks have a whole ''grid'' of damage boxes, while warbeasts have a damage ''spiral''. These really aren't as complicated as they sound: whenever you take damage, you roll a die to see which column of the grid or spiral to start marking boxes off in, rolling over to the next one if necessary. As these fill up, your 'jack or 'beast might get weaker - it's still standing, but it's taken a pounding, and something important is broken. It might get slower, or weaker in combat, or lose the ability to use focus or fury entirely.

It should be noted that ''in general'' (there are exceptions, of course), Hordes armies tend to have an easier time bringing lots of warbeasts (3 or more) compared to Warmachine armies who tend to have fewer warjacks (1 or 2). This is because FOCUS is a finite resource and most Warmachine factions have few ways to generate extra, while most Hordes factions tend to have more ways to get rid of extra FURY. Also, the FURY system, while not strictly better than FOCUS, does give you a little bit extra flexibility in that there are certain cases where it's okay to leave extra FURY on your warbeasts. For example, if you have a really strong turn but end up generating more FURY than you can leech, you may leave the extra on your beasts because you're hoping you'll get lucky and they won't frenzy, or even if they do frenzy it won't wreck your plans, or you're expecting your enemy to kill one or more of your beasts and take care of that extra FURY for you, or if charging the nearest enemy is your goal. The Journeymen mentioned in a previous paragraph were specifically designed to help ease the FOCUS or FURY burden on your Warnoun, allowing you to take more warjacks or warbeasts if you so desire.

====Colossals and Gargantuans====

Colossals are like warjacks with more FUCKHUEG, because Privateer Press wanted to charge $100 per model for something, and the only way to do that was to make it really big (and, unlike Forge World models, almost actually worth it). Roughly equivalent to Titans in 40K, they can be fielded at any point level and are surprisingly well-balanced, since they have about the same defensive stats as a heavy warjack and cost about the same as two of them, but have loads more health and tons more dakka. Oh yeah, and they have TWO 6-column damage grids to play with, although they generally have less than double the health of a heavy warjack. Gargantuans are the same thing, but for warbeasts.  Because of the differences between the Focus and Fury mechanics, colossals are generally seen as mechanically superior, since their resource-manage system benefits from shrinking the number of models the caster has to juggle between.

===Units===

Basically exactly what you'd expect. Units are groups of infantry which operate as, well, a unit on the tabletop. They range from bog-standard foot soldiers to well-trained and heavily-armored specialists and elite assassins, and everything else besides.

Like in Warhammer, most models in a unit only have a single wound and are immediately killed if they take any damage (though there are a few elite infantry units whose models have quite a few health boxes). Unlike in Warhammer, models in a Warmahordes unit act almost as individuals, with the primary restriction on them being that they must stay within a certain distance of the current unit leader, and that the entire unit must run or charge as a group. Other than this, models move on their own and can make attacks individually (and are targeted individually in turn). This removes much of the "shapeless gunblob" that plagues Warhammer.

Other than the basic models, units can be expanded by adding Unit Attachments (UAs) and/or Weapon Attachments (WAs). These add a couple more bodies to the unit, as well as an Officer (a better leader, usually with some handy buffs accompanying them) in the case of UAs or a guy with a better weapon, like the Winter Guard Infantry's RPG dude, in the case of WAs. Other than their better stats and weaponry, these models work in basically the same way as the rest of the unit members.

===Solos===

Single models which act individually. Like units, this is an extremely broad category that covers everything from dedicated support models to axe-wielding maniacs. They're also usually more durable than standard infantry, with at least five health boxes being the stardard, though not enough that most can survive a direct hit from a warjack or warbeast.

===Battle Engines===

Battle Engines are recent additions to the game. They are big, durable, vehicle-sized models on the same 120mm base as colossals, built with a certain task in mind, like support or shooting. They cost about as much as a heavy 'jack, and are generally much more specialized and slightly less durable, but don't need to draw from a warcaster's focus to do their thing.  

===Characters===

Characters are not a unit type of themselves; rather, they are uniquely named units, solos or warjacks that are exceptional in one way or another. All warcasters are characters, but other characters include talented mercenaries (Rutger Shaw, Eyriss), charismatic leaders and their followers (Alexia Ciannor and the Risen, Greygore Boomhowler and Co.) or warjacks that have been around long enough to develop a distinct personality or other unique traits (Ol' Rowdy, Beast 09). Characters are unique and you can only take one of a single character in any list, no matter how big the army size; they are typically more expensive than their non-character counterparts, but also have better stat lines, abilities, weapons and skills.

====Epic Characters====

As the story of Warmahordes progresses, so do some of the characters. "Epic" characters are alternate versions of a given character based on things that have happened to them in the story. For example, when War Witch Deneghra was killed, she was resurrected as Wraith Witch Deneghra, and both of these are available as models for use on the tabletop. You can only use one version of any given character in an army.

Epic characters are ''not'' intended to be more powerful than their previous incarnations, just ''different''. Of course, there are some power differences, in the same way that some warjacks or warbeasts are simply better than others, but don't think that it's not worth fielding a given character if you aren't going to use their epic version. 

Regular and epic versions of characters used to be referred to with the shorthand "pName" (for "prime") and "eName" for ("epic"). However, recently, some characters have gotten up to their third incarnation. The Privateer Press forumgoers played around with terminology like "lName" (for "legendary") or "eeName" (for... "double epic"?) when referring to the third-incarnation characters, but Privateer Press has stated that it officially prefers the terminology Name1/Name2/Name3, which honestly is much easier.