Runewars: Combat Preview – To Battle!
It’s time to take a look at the combat of Runewars!
We’ve already taken a look at the dial and order system in Runewars as well as the movement mechanics. Now let’s talk about something that’s sure to get the blood pumping: COMBAT!
After you’ve positioned yourself to charge or fling powerful magic, there is only one more thing to do – that’s start the combat and attack! So how exactly does that work in Runewars?
Every unit has a card that breaks down their abilities and their attack profile. In this case, the Spearmen roll a red dice and a blue dice for melee combat. It doesn’t matter how large the unit is, they will only roll the number of dice on their profile. However, unit sizes do count – more on that later…
They don’t have ranged attack ability on their profile so they cannot make a ranged attack in game. The dice themselves are all custom and have a variety of different results:
Now, the dice aren’t the only way to get these results. Your modifier dial can also add to these results as well as your surge ability, morale or accuracy results. Basically, there are ways for your units to swing above their weight class depending on a lot of situational effects.
Ranks Matter
In Runewars, the size of your units can directly impact your dice results. You might not roll handfuls of dice for a big unit, but those extra ranks will certainly help with adding extra damage. The wider your unit the more damage you can do in a combat. Here’s an example of how those ranks help:
In this example, between the dice and the dial there are a total of 3 hits results. When you’re attacking each hit symbol deals damage based on the number of figure trays facing your target – in this case 3. so that means 3 trays and 3 hits each = 9 damage!
For every full rank of trays behind your front rank, you can choose to re-roll an number of dice. Even a partial rank allows you to reroll a single die in your attack.
Taking Damage
Every unit has a Defense value and a Wound Threshold. The Defense value is the number of damage they can take before a wound is inflicted. The Wound Threshold is the number of Wounds a model in the unit can take before it is removed.
From the card above, a Defense of 1 and a Wound Threshold of 1 means that for each point of damage the unit takes, they lose 1 model. If they had a Defense Value 2 they would have to take 2 points of damage before receiving 1 wound. If they had a Defense of 1 and Wound Threshold of 2 they would have to take 2 damage to lose 1 model.
From the example above with the 9 damage, if the reanimates are also 1/1 that means they would have lost 9 models. However, if they could have raised their defense up to 2 via the dial or other means, they would have only lost 4 models – that’s a pretty big swing!
Unit Morale
After comparing results and completing the attack you may have the opportunity to spend morale results and tokens. This is a check to see if there are other effects that will occur. The number of Morale symbols spend determines the number of cards you’ll draw from the morale deck. For example, if you inflict a morale test with 2 symbols, you’ll get two cards.
Each morale card has a number of icons at the top. The number of symbols limits the cards you can trigger. If you have two morale results to spend you can only activate one of these cards, not both – you’d need 3 for that!
If you’d like to learn more about how the combat works then check out FFG’s full write up HERE. Runewars is coming to a tabletop near YOU!
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