Updates from the front

A mission in more than one act

Until now a battle asked one question and took one answer. You were given a task, you managed it or you did not, and the fight ended there. A mission can now turn. Reach what you were sent for and the ground shifts under you: fresh orders, a new clock, and an enemy that stops holding its ground and starts hunting.

A second act needs a way out, so a force can now be ordered to leave the field rather than hold it. It needs company as well. Reinforcements can be written to march on at a given turn instead of standing about from the opening minute, which means help that arrives late, and help that arrives too late.

• Missions can run in stages, with the objective, the turn limit and the enemy's temper all changing the moment a stage is met
• Two new ways to settle a battle: carry something off the field, or spend a unit to finish what it started
• Reinforcements arrive to a schedule instead of deploying with everyone else
• Sentries keep their post and raise the alarm when they catch sight of you, so coming in quiet is finally worth the trouble
• Two forces can take the field side by side, each keeping its own colours and its own hand of cards
• Sound, music and the rest of your settings survive closing the game

A shot lands before it tells

A cannon ball takes a moment to arrive, and until now the battlefield did not wait for it. The men it killed were already down and the nerve it broke had already broken, all while the shot was still visibly in the air. The field holds its breath now: nothing moves, nothing falls and nobody cries out until the shell comes down.

Units driven from the field leave it, too. A broken regiment that reaches the boundary is gone — not slain, simply gone — and it no longer stands there like a ghost you cannot strike.

• War machines: the death, the broken nerve and the ground given up all wait for the shot to land
• A routed unit that leaves the field is no longer left standing on it
• Tactic cards announce themselves over the unit they are played on, so a card played against you is never a mystery
• Field boundaries look like the fences they are, instead of stone walls nobody could cross
• Tablets: the hand of cards is laid out to be read at a glance, and the largest battlefields no longer open zoomed to a corner

Drums from the first blow

A battlefield should sound like one the moment you arrive at it. Until now the very first fight of a sitting could open in silence — no drums under the line, no rain on the shields — and only find its voice on the second. It opens with its voice now, every time, whichever road you took to it: a Quick Battle, a Skirmish, or a campaign mission.

And it knows when to hold its tongue. Set the phone down or lock it and the field goes quiet with you, then picks up exactly where it stood when you come back to it.

• Battle music and weather sound from the first battle of a sitting, not only the ones after it
• The game falls silent when you lock or set down your phone, and takes up where it left off on your return
• On a phone the board no longer slides beneath the notch or the rounded corners — units on the outermost ranks stay in full view

No line holds with its back to nothing

Nerve has an edge to it, and now the field has one too. A broken unit driven back to the boundary of the battlefield does not stand and die there: it goes, and it is gone for the rest of the fight. Your enemy claims nothing for it — those men are routed, not killed — and where a campaign keeps a warband between battles, they answer the muster again next time. Give ground carelessly and you may find you have given a whole regiment away.

The briefing has moved to where it belongs, too. You are told what the battle asks of you before you set your line down, since that is the one thing that ought to decide where a line goes.

• Rout: a broken unit that reaches the edge of the field leaves the battle. It is not slain — no victory points for the enemy, and a campaign warband gets it back
• The briefing comes before deployment, and closing it begins the battle. Leaving without a fight is still offered, and now says as much
• When the enemy seizes the initiative you are told before they use it, rather than while they are already upon you
• An army raised at a stroke now spends its purse properly, fielding the best it can afford across the whole line instead of padding it out with peasantry
• Keeps and towers across fifteen battlefields now give the shelter their walls promise

Set two of a kind against each other

Some grudges are between kin. You can now field the same army on both sides of a battle — Ork against Ork, the High Kingdom against a Free Company of its own hire — and never lose track of which is which. Each rival takes its own colours and its own name: the red-kitted Bloodtusk Horde against the blue-woad Frostfang Horde out of the frozen north, their war-paint and shields marked apart, each army standing on its own team colour so a glance is enough. The choice is there for a Quick Battle and a Skirmish alike.

• Same-faction battles: pit an army against a mirror of itself, each side in its own colours, war-paint and tribe name
• A Round now announces itself at the head of each turn, and counts down the rounds that remain when a battle is on the clock
• Fireball bursts across the whole of the ground it catches, and the fire falls together with the harm it does rather than ahead of it
• Cannon and catapult shots land in a proper bloom of fire and smoke
• A hex that shelters you names the building giving the cover, instead of calling it open ground

The rules, explained where you choose them

Two commanders can set the same battle to play very differently, and the words alone don’t always make the difference obvious. So wherever you pick the rules now — a quick battle, a campaign mission, a skirmish — there is a small mark you can tap that explains them in a sentence: what a command card actually does (it wakes a whole group of your units at once, not one at a time), and what the fuller combat rules add on top. If you would rather be shown than told, the same panel walks you straight into the tutorial.

• One consistent rules picker across Quick Battle, Campaign and Skirmish, with plain-language help a tap away
• The Skirmish army builder now shows each unit the way the campaign roster does — its portrait and its stats — and reads those stats for the rules you are about to play
• A campaign mission can set its activation and its combat rules independently

Nerve, and a cry to steady it

A unit whose nerve breaks is no use to anyone until it gathers itself, so it no longer steps up when you call the line — it waits, and steadies at the turn of the round. For the moments you cannot afford that wait, there is now a Rally Cry: an order that hauls a shaken unit back onto its feet at once, free to fight the same turn. It belongs to the tabletop rules, where nerve is a thing that can break in the first place.

• Shaken units stand aside until they rally, rather than being offered a turn they cannot take
• Rally Cry, a new command order under the tabletop rules: steady a broken unit at once and it acts again
• A slicker way to set up a Quick Battle — sweep the arrows to choose the army on each side, each behind its own battle portrait
• Battles keep their voice with the cutscenes off: the clash of the blow and the cry that follows it, instead of silence

An even hand on the sound

Every sound the game makes was levelled to a single baseline, so a spell no longer drowns a sword-stroke and a unit answering the call no longer leaps out over the fight around it. The music and the weather sit where they always have, beneath the action — what changed is that the effects on top now agree with one another.

• Sound effects brought to a consistent level across unit calls, combat, spells and the interface
• Quieter card sounds, so playing a hand no longer talks over the battle

Warmasters comes to the desktop — and the name loses its space

There are now native Mac and Windows builds alongside the mobile ones: the same engine, the same campaigns, as a proper desktop application. The Mac build is universal, so one download runs on Apple silicon and Intel alike, and desktop saves live in a file you can back up or sync rather than buried in app storage.

The game is also now Warmasters, one word — which is what the logo has said all along.

• Native desktop builds for Mac (universal) and Windows
• A battle now opens with its card, and nothing moves until you say go — no more landing in a fight and losing a turn while you work out which units are yours
• The Army Book gains a Rules tab — the whole ruleset in short sections you can find mid-turn, showing only the rules actually in play, with one press to read the other set
• An "i" that explains the HUD, for everything the tutorial doesn't cover
• The guided tutorial is now the tutorial: finishing a lesson offers the next lesson rather than dumping you into a battle past every rule you haven't met
• Haptic feedback across the interface, and an audio pass on the menu theme