Greetings, Generals.
It has been several weeks since our latest Global Update went live, and thanks to your feedback, we are now in a position to lock many of the ORBATs and solidify the changes. Following your feedback (thank you, eagle-eyed Generals), we’ve made further changes to ensure the ORBATs and rules are in the best possible position. We’re thrilled with the final result of these changes, as outlined in our summary below.
Powering up
But what about the Great Powers? It’s worth saying up front that one ORBAT that will not be locked at this stage is the Union, which is reinforced by the release of the Union Assault Regiment. Rather than locking this ORBAT only to move it back into a beta state five minutes later, we will be going from one beta version directly into the next, with rules for the new units added and a handful of additional tweaks—such as a shuffle to how Fireteams operate—for you to enjoy on the tabletop.
The remaining ORBATS will be getting locked, with a small handful of tweaks made to most. Imperium Scion Grenadiers and Teutonic Armiger Castellans both got a points reduction in light of the changes to damage output made in the global update. Alliance Becerrillo War Dogs received a further points reduction, and Empire Green Banner Flame Teams got a small Range increase to help them make Opportunity Fire against charging Infantry units when On Lookout. Sub-zero units in the Commonwealth are now immune to the Hoarfrost Aura special rule (and probably always should have been).
The Crown had a bit more feedback than most, which, given that the Crown Superheavy Regiment release coincided with the Global Update, was within expectations. A handful of Traits were tidied up to clear up some confusion with the Pre-planned Defence Boon, and we slightly improved the transport capacity of Challengers to enable them to act as a command bunker for Rifle Platoons when at Full Strength. We also updated the wording on Emplacement so that the Drake Field Gun can benefit from this rule while it has a Barricade marker—an oversight on our part which should now be remedied.
Potent Portals
The biggest ORBAT changes were for the Sultanate. We made some significant updates to how portals worked in an attempt to improve an opponent’s interactions with them. However, our change to confirming Target Acquisition in the Core rules actually meant that portals, when used with the Portal Strike rule, became even more powerful, as there was no way to draw a line of sight to the charging unit during the first Reaction Step. This was not our intent, and so we have updated this rule to allow units to measure range and draw a line of sight to the Exit Portal when resolving Opportunity Fire.
We have also changed the penalty for purposefully collapsing a portal by ending a move on a marker, from that unit being suppressed to now only being Disordered, making it far less punishing. Finally, we have received new feedback regarding the To The Winds Boon, which enables a unit to attack and then dive back into a portal to escape retribution. We have made this a once-per-battle Boon—it’s still super powerful, but doing so every turn was creating a play experience that we wanted to shift away from.
Finishing Touches
And that is it for the ORBATS! The final rules update at this time regards withdrawing from combat. This rule has already been errata'd from the original 1.0 Core Rulebook in an attempt to better guide generals, rephrasing it as a sequence of events to follow. An extensive selection of examples aimed at illustrating how this should work (in several battlefield situations) was also published in the Designer’s Commentary. Unfortunately, this created a whole new set of ambiguities, and there remained debate regarding what “directly away” actually meant. As such, we have taken this “simple to read but hard to execute” rule back to the metaphorical drawing board (actually, back to our gaming tables). We started by restating what the goal of withdrawing is. For transparency, this is twofold: 1) at the end of a Close Quarters Combat, no enemy units are still within 1" of each other and 2) combat can be used to push units off of Strategic Objective Markers that they were controlling.
The original version of the rule instructed the losing unit to make “a full 3" move directly away” in order to achieve that second condition, whilst the errata’d version had several caveats and conditions regarding arcs, all aimed to help achieve the same. The wording in the latest version simply states the necessary outcomes and consequences at the end of the Withdraw move and leaves players to move their models however they like, as they would with any other move. They cannot end the move touching a Strategic Objective Marker (so achieving our second goal) and any model that ends its move within 1" of an enemy model is destroyed (achieving the first goal). That’s it! You do not have to move the full 3", but you increase the risk of getting surrounded and destroyed if you do not do so. We have also removed any other requirements about facings and arcs, as these were leading to a lot of the complications.
We appreciate that making such a fundamental change to the core rules is not really the goal of a beta-to-locked-step process, so we are extending the beta process for the core rules for a few more weeks, specifically to gather any feedback you have in your games regarding this matter. Please try out the (hopefully) simplified withdrawal rules, and if you encounter any rules problems, please submit them via the feedback form.
We’re confident that the above changes are beneficial to the game, helping bring units and rules interactions more in line with our original intentions (or substituting them as a result of feedback from our community.
Stay up to date with the latest Armoured Clash news and releases on our Facebook, Instagram, and X and on the Warcradle Studios Blog.