Editing WARMACHINE (section)

===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.