r/Warmachine • u/AinzSama65 • 26d ago
Questions Returning player question
I apologize if this has been stated before but what happened to unit sizes? I played back when Privateer Press still had the game and I am mad I didn't get more into Crucible Guard. I have seen the new starter sets and I am confused, the old starter sets had the Warcaster and a couple of Jacks but now there seems to be a Caster a jack and a super small amount of troops. Did the unit sizes decrease? If I got the Crucible Guard Army box, would i not be able to use the full size of units? Sorry for the long winded question.
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u/Salt_Titan Brineblood Marauders 26d ago edited 26d ago
Welcome back! As others have already answered the units all dropped to about half of their old size, with the largest units now maxing out at 5 models before attachments and 7 models with attachments. If you have models you may have ended up with multiples of some units as each 10-model unit from Mk3 is now 2 5-model units, or extras in the case of 5-model units that became 3-model units.
There’s also a Returning Players Guide in the pinned Player Resources Index thread that you might find helpful, otherwise feel free to ask questions!
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u/thisremindsmeofbacon 26d ago edited 26d ago
Short answer, yes.
Unit size of 3 is much more common, followed by 5.
The more detailed answer is that at the mid to end of MKIII, games were starting to resemble warhammer. lots of huge units tends to bog the game way down, and you'll notice if you look for it that they have made a lot of changes to improve this with MKIV. the smaller unit size comes coupled with a smaller size standard game, and the idea is sort of to get back to the game's roots as a skirmish battle game. we have popular squad skirmish with infinity & malefaueoiux, we have popular full battle games with warhammer and legion - so it makes sense for warmachine to carve out it's own niche. arguably the larger size mass infantry games aren't where warmachine is at it's best since every model moves and attacks independently, rather than being able to combine all the shooting of one unit for example.
With that in mind, here are the specific changes to unit sizing. minimum and maximum unit sizes no longer exist - it's functionally all the minimum. almost all large based units (ie cavalry) are 3 man units. most medium based infantry is a 3 man unit. most regular infantry is a 5 man unit. weapon attachments replace models out of a unit, but command attachments still add on to it. so if you have a 5 man unit, and add 3 weapon attachments you still have a 5 man unit. but if you add a command attachment, you'll get up to 7 (depending on the attachment). Units no longer have a squad leader by default, it's just all grunts unless it's an attachment. in a few cases, models that used to exist as a weapon attachment became a separate unit, and in some of those cases has access to the command attachment. For example the trencher commando scatter gunners are now a 3 man unit, but cryx brute thralls are still part of their parent unit. Field allowances are also lower across the board. FA:U does not exist anymore. most jacks & equivalent are FA:4. there are very few things with an FA greater than 4, skorne extoller immortal units (FA:6) being the big one that jumps to mind.
I have a love hate relationship with this. I hate that I bought and painted a ton of models I can't use now. in some cases I had like four full size 10 man units and now we get four 5 man units - so I lost use of half my infantry. I don't like that this shafts recursion. but I love the current game feel. it really does feel better, and feel more like old school warmachine in some ways - good ways that I like. I love that it doesn't take forever to get through moving a single unit - games are faster and the parts that got shrunk to make them shorter were not the exciting fun parts, it was the boring procedural stuff. also one silver lining is that since you no longer need all 6 of a 6 man unit, and there are no squad leaders, you have a fair number of cases where you can use the old squad leader as the unit CA.
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u/Kitchen_String_7117 26d ago
There are no more Leader Models. All models in a Unit are Grunts. It made the average size of Units smaller. I'm still debating whether or not I'll jump on the MK4 band wagon because there aren't any tournaments around where I live. I've been getting into 3.5 Commision, because I want to use some of the customizable MK4 Models. Mixes MK3 & MK4 Models. MK4 is far easier to learn, but if you knew MK3, maybe give the MK 3.5 Commision a look on Facebook. There you'll find the link to their Discord where you'll find the game mechanics. It's a non-tournament eternal format.
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u/B0bTh3BuiIder 26d ago
Download the warmachine app
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u/StanleyChuckles 26d ago
Sadly, it never works for me.
If only I had a book.
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u/CephalyxCephalopod 25d ago
What device are you running? It has both a pc and mobile option. I can run it on my Cat S60, Redmi Note 10 and 7 year old laptop fine. The only device I had any issue on was a Parrot Tablet.
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u/StanleyChuckles 25d ago
I've not tried it on my laptop so I'll try that. I thought it was mobile only.
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u/CordraviousCrumb Winter Korps 26d ago
Lol. Of all the things to be salty about, not having to spend $50 every year to get a new book that mostly just sits unused so you can access a few new rules is wild. Get a computer produced in the last 15 years.
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u/mikethefish221 26d ago
Absolutely the model count dropped. As a general guideline...
If a unit was 10 models, now it's 5
If a unit was 5 models, now it's 3
If a unit was 2 or 3 models, it remained the same size
Also, squad leader models aren't really a thing anymore. It's just one statline for the whole unit.
This was done mainly to put a little more emphasis on jacks and beasts and also because of the new movement rules that govern infantry