A Series on Improving Your Warmachine Game

~Chris “Hashmal” Taylor 

To read part 1 of our Leveling up Series, please check it out here https://boosttohit.home.blog/2024/08/12/leveling-up/

Introduction: Part 2

Greetings! Chris (Hashmal) again, returning to this series. In Part 1, we laid the ground rules and talked about both the nature of Warmachine and how you can frame your mental space so that “losing” becomes “winning” and helps you get through some otherwise difficult early game experiences. 

Now, we’re going to pivot to Part 2, wherein we redefine “winning” here, and for the remainder of this series, as the in-game understood definitions of victory. We’re focusing on the Steamroller format, as that is the largest consistent competitive game ruleset. It gives us a common language to speak with.

In Warmachine, there are three ways to win: via a scenario victory as defined in a given Scenario; via assassinating your opponent’s Warcaster/Warlock/Clearly Superior Master; or via deathclock. Every move you make in a game progresses towards one of these three win conditions. The rub, always, is getting there before your opponent does. 

This article builds a framework for how to approach each turn so that you’re keeping your win conditions in mind and moving towards them at pace with, or faster than, your opponent. We’ll touch a bit on clock as well. Following articles will provide some chewier content for scenario play and engineering an assassination run. I didn’t plan a dedicated “clock management” article because I believe a combination of in-turn activation priority, understanding of scenario play, and when and how to assassinate will all lead to faster play and proper clock management. 

Now, on to the main event!

The Four Questions I Ask Every Turn

The biggest challenge players have initially is not knowing what to do or when to do it on a given turn. It’s tough when you’re mid-turn to tactically pivot because you realized something you forgot. It’s also very tempting to move off an original plan because an opportunity opened up because you rolled well, got a neat slam, whatever, and you really want to capitalize. In either case, sometimes it makes sense to shift your plan and sometimes it doesn’t. You can accommodate each by asking yourself four key questions when you begin every turn.

1. Can I assassinate and what would it take?
2. Where do I need to be to live?
3. How many scenario points can I get for myself?
4. How many scenario points can I deny my opponent?

These are listed in priority order. Take a minute at the beginning of your turn to go through each, building plans to answer all questions before activating and moving models. 

The trick here is that you only need to activate and move the models that answer these questions. All other models are free agents, able to be activated or not depending on board state. This gives you a solid set of plans to execute turn-over-turn while leaving room to capitalize on good fortune. Or, as is more often the case for me, redundancy for when your best laid plans go up in a pair of rolled 1s. This also helps when your clock is low, because you’re focusing on what you need to activate and nothing else. 

As you get more experienced, you’ll be able to tactically flex these in-turn plans to best capitalize on board state situations. For example, you get a big Crit Devastation roll and an opposing Heavy is thrown 5”, now unexpectedly entering melee threat range of your big hitting Heavy. You were going to use that Heavy to score an objective, which would take you to +3 victory points and put the onus on your opponent to respond or lose, but this is such a great opportunity to take a big piece of theirs off the board. If you have a “free agent” battlegroup model who can also score that point, you can now tactically flex your original plan: your Heavy goes to mop up theirs while your other battlegroup model achieves your original plan. If you don’t, you’ll have to make a game-time decision as to whether you go for their vulnerable piece but cede the point or not. It’s impossible to say what the right call is here without seeing the whole board, but I find more often than not that sticking to your four questions plan will yield consistent results. The fun of getting better at the game is identifying these situations and making the right calls when they arise.

Now, let’s dig into each question a bit to best understand what they’re asking and how to answer. 

Can I Assassinate And What Would It Take?

There’s a reason this is the first question. Assassinating your opponent’s Leader is the quickest way to win the game. If there’s a solid opportunity on the table to do so, it merits taking. Because assassination runs are resource intensive, it also supersedes all other questions: if you’re going for it, it makes sense to juice your odds as much as you can and commit. Keep the other questions in mind, definitely, but this takes priority.

The nuance here is that past Turn 1 the answer to this question is often or almost always “Yes, but…” How you complete that sentence determines how solid that opportunity is. Usually the answer is “Yes, but it’ll take almost everything I have and if it fails I am probably going to lose” or “Yes but the odds of it working are pretty low.” If you’re playing an otherwise fair game, these aren’t solid opportunities, as you’d be gambling your game away. 

But if their ‘caster is out in the open camping little to none because you forced a big move or they got bloodthirsty, well…

Personally, I rarely go for assassination runs, even when they’re mathematically solid, if I feel like I can win the game via scenario. This is me and my style of play and is not the “correct” or “best” way to play. The way I see it, steamroller incentivizes scenario victory over assassination with regards to tiebreaks, but if you’re going for a total win in an event, who cares about tiebreaks? I look instead at scenario as more consistent and reliable. If I’m winning and their leader is exposed because they had to make a play, I’d rather double down on what’s led me to win up until this point, staying safe myself. That leads nicely into the second question.

Where Do I Need To Be To Live?

Whether you go for it or not, the next best thing you can do is recognize that your opponent can also end the game immediately by assassinating your Leader. The “quickest way to end a game” door swings both ways. After all, turnabout’s fair play.

The second question dictates where your Leader needs to end their turn. This is usually a combination of outside of (most) threat ranges, outside of Killbox (usually!), behind a chunk of terrain, hugging a Colossal’s leg for safety, what have you. You can plan all other turn movements around knowing where you want your lynchpin model to end up—but plan this one first. 

Note that this question doesn’t involve Focus/Fury/Essence camping or what your Leader needs to do during that turn. We’ll cover that in the next question.

How Many Scenario Points Can I Get For Myself?

We’ve crossed assassination off the list and made sure our Leader is safe(ish). Now, we focus on our other main path to victory: scenario-based victory points. Our priority with asking this third is to get as much as we’re reasonably able to. Creating a victory point advantage puts pressure on our opponent to react, possibly to overextend, and can yield further opportunities for victory as turns progress. In this instance, it pays to be greedy.

When answering this question, you’re identifying the scenario objectives you can reasonably get. These fall under two categories: open objectives and contested objectives. Open objectives are ones that are currently unopposed by the other player. Easy example: an objective on your side of the field that your opponent either can’t easily get to or just hasn’t yet. Open objectives require little decision-making on your part, as all you have to do to score points is move the requisite model(s) in range. You can position for future turn defenses at this time too, though that’s a game-state decision.

Contested objectives are ones currently held by your opponent. How well they are being held dictates your activation priority. A central objective held by a couple of infantry models won’t take much to clear and control on your part; one held by a Colossal will take much more. Assessing how likely you are to clear an objective and what’s required to clear will drive your in-turn plan. It will also drive what you cast with your Leader and what you’ll be camping afterwards, with the rule of thumb being lower Focus/Fury/Essence camp is higher risk. You will learn with time when you can spend down and when you need to “turtle up” and camp high.

Even with this in mind, you might not be able to clear points. What you can’t clear, however, you can contest.

How Many Scenario Points Can I Deny My Opponent?

It isn’t until we get to our fourth and final question that we care much at all about what our opponent’s army is doing. That’s because what they do is to a varying degree predictable, but ultimately unknowable (unless you can see the future). We control what we can and let our opponent respond in kind.

Scenario point denial comes into play when you can’t clear an objective. That Colossal I mentioned in the last paragraph? You might not have what you need in position to kill it. But one 1-point solo can stop it from scoring on your turn as well as a 17 point heavy. And denial of points dictates a response from your opponent. So, sometimes it’s more valuable to jam up a point than to overextend to clear one.

Answering this question and the preceding one forms the basis for a scenario-oriented turn plan. You’re maximizing your gains while minimizing your opponent’s. Done consistently, this will yield a VP advantage that can be leveraged into a game win. Of course, this assumes you’re also stopping your opponent from doing the same thing via advantaged trades and strong positioning. That’s a topic for another article.

Wrapping It All Up

That’s it! Answering those four questions each turn forms the basis for a flexible game plan, one that keeps win and loss conditions firmly in the forefront of your mind. 

To wrap it all up, let’s cover those models that aren’t necessary to the answers to those four questions. Sometimes you have extra solos, units, or battlegroup models that aren’t necessary to execute a turn’s game plan. So what do we do with these? This is where flexibility comes in. If they have guns, you can use them to ding some damage onto something guarding a point to juice the odds that your heavy clears it off. You can set them up for responsive counter moves on objectives you hold, anticipating your opponent clearing your objectives. You can further block LoS to your Leader. And so on!

The important thing to remember is that these are optional things. You want to execute as many optional activations as you can, layering their support to assist in answering those four questions above. But, especially as turns run long and your clock ticks down, these optional activations can be reduced or outright eliminated to save time. Quickly identifying what you have to do is useful in a short time situation because you can just focus on that.

Next article, we’ll dig a bit more into scenario play, positioning to take and hold objectives, and how to layer threats so that you can ensure your ability to react to your opponent’s actions. Until then, thank you again for reading!