A Series on Improving Your Warmachine Game

~Chris “Hashmal” Taylor

Introduction

Greetings! Chris (Hashmal) back with a different series of articles. While I dithered about trying to figure out what new MK4 army I’m going to play (Sabbreth’s alt model put Orgoth right back on top…), it struck me in talking on the Discord and in person that a lot of new or burgeoning casual and competitive players are feeling a bit stuck on how to improve their game. How to “git gud,” as the saying goes. This series will explore some practical steps you can take to get better, give competitive games to your opponent, win games, and ultimately enrich your tabletime experience. The target audience here is players with a few games under their belt or those of you taking your first steps into the Steamroller tournament scene. Heck, I hope even some old salts like myself can glean a thing or two: it never hurts to practice the fundamentals.

This series will be split into a few parts because my editor tells me I need to make more content this is a long subject with a lot of pieces to discuss. Here’s what I’m looking at covering:

1. First Steps and Fundamentals
2. The Four Questions I Ask Every Turn
3. Scenario Play
4. Architecture of an Assassination
5. Advanced Concepts

A bit about me, to build credibility for why you should listen to me. I’ve played Warmachine competitively since 2009. I’ve played in dozens of Steamrollers, placed high/first in many, played in several convention tournaments (Templecon, NOVA Open), was a part of the Mid Atlantic Mollywhoppers back in MK3, made a run at the ATC, been on a winning Bokur Brawl team, and was tracking towards WTC application until COVID took me out of the scene for a few years. I’ve observed and played with some of the best and kindest people to ever play this game and tried to learn what I can while they unapologetically body me on the table. I’m by no means the best player out there, but I have played competitively across three editions (and in game systems before that, even!) so I’ve seen and learned a thing or two about a thing or two.

All that said, take whatever you read with whatever grains of salt you want. There are many ways to play this game and mine is by no means correct. I just hope it helps!

First Steps and Fundamentals

So, you’ve played a few games of Warmachine. Maybe against your good friend on their kitchen table because you both just bought some models and dove in. Maybe you got introduced at your local store/club by a few veterans and had a great time. However you’ve arrived, you’ve probably hit the point we all hit: you start playing against more experienced players and you’re just getting your clock cleaned. You’re losing, you’re not sure why, what you’ve heard doesn’t stick, it all seems daunting and, frankly, a little hopeless. It’s definitely impacting the fun you’re having with the game. We don’t want that!

There are a couple of things you can do to help your enjoyment while you learn during practice games. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend everything here for a tournament setting, but hey: this is about shaping your personal experience towards fulfillment and enjoyment. I ain’t going to tell you where your fun is.

Let’s dispel a couple myths off the bat before digging in, though. First myth: you’re on your own. Wrong-o. We’ve all been there. The best players in this game got their gobs smacked too, and sometimes still do. It happens. Take some solace in the fact that you’re treading well-worn ground. You’ll find a lot of empathy in the community around this.

Second myth (you’ll hear this one all the time): Warmachine is a hard game so you should expect to lose a lot at first. The trick to this isn’t the statement. That’s perfectly true. Warmachine is a hard game. You will lose a lot at first. The myth is in pretending this is somehow unique to Warmachine. I’ve played across several wargaming systems and let me tell you…

 Wargames are hard. You’re going to lose to more experienced players at first. Period.

I’ve not found an exception to this. Any game that has an established competitive scene, war game, video game, athletic game, whatever, it’s rare to have someone roll up and start pounding veterans. Of course you’re going to lose an outsized number of games at the beginning. Your opponents know the ins and outs of this system better than you do! They are more practiced, better versed in the ruleset, and know when and how to leverage minimal force for maximum gains. They know when to swing for the bleachers or bait a walk-off score. But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn.

Let’s look at some fundamentals and starter tips to help with that.

Attitude and Framing Game Goals

Your attitude is your greatest weapon against discouragement and disappointment. Burgeoning competitive players enter games with a particular mindset: they want to win. This is understandable, but it carries risk. Because so much is tied to the outcome, a failure to achieve it can lead to negative reactions: tilting in-game, feeling defeated, and just not having a great time. In my experience, veteran competitive players enter a game with a different goal structure. They want to learn. For most games, they’re analyzing what works in their list against yours, what doesn’t, what needs to be fixed, and what can stay. They save the “win-focused” mentality for the games that matter, but even then they’re still learning, win or lose.

This is why I suggest framing your “victory condition” in advance of your games. What would a victory look like to you? Here’s a personal example.

When I first started back up in the competitive scene in MK4, I dove right in for this year’s Bokur Brawl. My victory condition for the event: I would not lose to deathclock once. It’d been four years since I’d played in a tournament, I was rusty, and I was worried about my ability to play on the clock again. I played nine games across three days. Did I win them all? Not in the tournament-defined sense. But I didn’t clock once. To me, I won every game because my victory condition had been achieved. I left the event elated.

Setting your personal victory conditions allows you to transcend speed bumps in the “git gud” process. Scenario points, assassination, army points, none of it matters if you got what you needed out of the game. When you’re focusing on improving key aspects of your play and you succeed, you cannot lose! And hey, even if you didn’t succeed ultimately, if you learned ways that you’ll succeed next time, whether it’s better positioning, faster management, automating a few decisions, you still won.

Frame the mindset and you’ll find you win most, to all, of your games. Once you’ve achieved these types of wins, you’ll find that the standard win conditions come much more easily to you. Success breeds success.

Make Purposeful Mistakes

This is the next step up from “learn the rules.” Learning the rules, both for what your army can do and what your opponents’ armies can do, is the initial foot towards improving play. How you learn those rules is the trick, though. Some people can read everything and just intuit how it all comes together, but in my experience most players learn best when they run headfirst into something.

So yeah, do that. You see an assassination option on the table? Go for it. You’ll probably miss it. But you’ll learn why you missed it and how to better analyze those options in the future. See an opponent’s heavy in threat range of yours and you think it might be a trap? Yeet on in there and find out why. Heck, maybe it isn’t! But if it is or not, you’ve still learned.

You learn a lot by putting yourself in awkward situations that you have to figure your way out of. You learn the least when you are so afraid of making a mistake you commit to nothing and let your opponent pick on you. The only thing you might glean in that scenario is maybe some enemy model rules and not to be so passive in the future. There’s a lot more learning to be done elsewhere, so don’t be afraid to jump in and get wet.

There aren’t any real stakes in this game. Take risks. Be bold. Get messy. And learn.

The Nature of Warmachine

Finally, it’s important to understand that at its heart, Warmachine is a game about trading pieces until you can leverage a board advantage that achieves victory while mitigating or denying your opponent the same. It’s not a game about tabling your opponent or scoring all the points ever. Both of those help! What you’re trying to do is trade up where you can, cheat trades when you can, mitigate times you have to trade down, and minimize or remove opportunities for your opponent to cheat a trade. These moves lead to natural attrition and scenario advantages.

A few terms, as well, that’ll help with understanding this nature:

• Trading up: when something of lower value takes something of higher value with the assumption it will be removed afterwards. e.g., in chess, a pawn taking anything that isn’t a pawn; a knight taking a rook or a queen; etc.
• Trading down: when something of higher value takes something of lower value with the assumption it will be removed afterwards. e.g., again in chess, a knight taking a pawn.
• Cheating a trade: taking something of value and losing nothing. This is often accomplished through ranged and arcane attacks, though can occur through opponent misplay or by forcing bad board presence via scenario. e.g., chess once more, taking a piece and sacrificing nothing, not even board position.

Each army does the above differently and to varying degrees of effectiveness. Part of the fun of the game is figuring out where your list falls against all three. A few Warmachine-related examples:

• Trading up is a theme in Necrofactorium, where rank-and-file 6 point Mechanithrall units can be buffed to take down sturdy battlegroup models (even huge based ones). Or when a unit of House Kallyss Dreadguard Cavalry take down my Colossal. And so on.
• Trading down is when I have to send in a heavy to remove a light battlegroup model from a scenario point to stop my opponent from obtaining a significant, perhaps insurmountable, scenario lead. Whether by misplay or attrition, this is what I had in place to stop a potential game loss, and by committing it I may be sacrificing it to my opponent’s counter attack–but also may have more opportunities to counter attack their reprisal piece, and thus the fun of the game continues.
• Cheating a trade is when Carver2 and MMD47 shoot a heavy off the board. Or when Morayne charges in and pounds a light or heavy into the dirt before Spirit Dooring to safety. Or when Infernals activate and do… well, anything (they cheat). Mitigating a cheat is when you take Shield Guards to stop ranged damage, Arcane Vortex to mitigate spells, Windstorm to make your opponent cry, etc. All of these force additional commitment from your opponent, lessening or removing the chance they can cheat a trade.

It’s tempting to use the above to get into model analyses that measure a model’s merit by how well it “makes its points.” This is a term used in other wargames to denote the killing power of a given army option. In Warmachine, while that is a useful metric, because of the positional nature of the game and how scenario interplays with army movements, I find that analysis basic and sometimes outright wrong. There is value in models existing or requiring an outsized amount of resources to remove, to the point that you can enable good trades or minimize bad trades. It’s all about the game plan.

Keep trades in mind alongside win conditions for the game (scenario and assassination). This will help mitigate the instinct to get bloodthirsty and go hog wild, only to find you killed a lot of things that didn’t really matter and your opponent is in position to capitalize. This segues nicely into how you can look at game win conditions, which we’ll cover in the next section.

~I~

That’s all for this column. Next time, I’ll dig into the four questions I ask myself every turn. They help me stay focused on what I need to do in a given turn and provide solid boundaries that I can work within to keep relevant on scenario, attrition, and clock. Until then!