How Battles Work

The shape of a round

Battles are turn-based and play out one round at a time, in the play-by-email spirit - you set your orders whenever you like and the round only resolves once everyone has weighed in. A single round runs through the same three beats:

1. Plan. You issue orders to each of your Icaroids - where to move, what to shoot, which ability to use. Orders sit pending; nothing happens yet.
2. Commit. You lock in your orders for the round. So does the other side.
3. Resolve. Once both sides have committed, the engine resolves every order on the field at once, plays back the results, and advances the round counter.

There is no per-round time limit baked into the rules - a battle can be fought across days of real time - but within a single round everything an Icaroid does is decided up front and resolved together. You are planning a round, not reacting move by move.

All of this follows the setup phase, where both sides field a roster and place it on the map before round one - covered in Deployment & Setup.

The three action slots

Every round, each Icaroid has three independent action slots it can fill:

• Move - spend your move-point budget to reposition. See Movement & Positioning.
• Fire - shoot a weapon at a target. See How Damage Works.
• Ability - a third slot reserved for abilities that something on the frame grants.

Because the slots are independent, a normal round is move and fire - advancing into range and shooting in the same round. The ability slot is separate again, so an ability that costs only ability rides alongside both. Many abilities, though, consume the move or fire slot instead of the ability one - a leap spends your move, a terrain-shaper spends your fire - which is the whole of their cost. The Abilities & Stances guide lays out exactly which slot each ability takes.

Committing orders

Setting an order just marks it pending. Nothing on the field changes until you commit the round - the signal that you're done planning and ready to resolve. A round only resolves once both sides have committed:

• Two players. Whoever commits first waits; the round resolves the instant the second side commits. The order you commit in does not matter to the outcome.
• Versus an AI. The moment your commit lands, the AI generates and commits its own orders inline, and the round resolves immediately.
• Solo. A battle with no opponent on the other side resolves as soon as you commit.

Committing is final for that round - you can't pull an order back once the round resolves. A committed order that can no longer be carried out (the target died, the ability's component was wrecked) doesn't waste your whole turn; the engine falls back sensibly, as target priority describes.

How a round resolves

When both sides commit, the engine resolves the whole field in a fixed phase order - not in the order anyone clicked. The sequence is always the same, so the outcome is predictable:

1. Initiative. Every Icaroid rolls initiative for the round; phases that pit units against each other run highest-first.
2. Fire. Every committed shot resolves, using each unit's start-of-round position. Fire-slot abilities (like Raise Terrain) and autonomous weapons fire here too.
3. Move. Every committed move resolves after all firing is done. Move-slot abilities (Jump, Deploy / Undeploy, Fortify Position) resolve in this phase.
4. Ability. Abilities that cost only the independent ability slot resolve last.
5. Round end. Status effects tick and decay, ammo replenishes, destroyed Icaroids are removed, the round counter ticks up, and the engine checks for a winner.

Simultaneous resolution

Within the fire phase both sides shoot together off the same snapshot, so two Icaroids can trade fire and destroy each other in the same round - there's no "I went first, so you're already dead." The shot is locked to start-of-round positions precisely so that nobody can sidestep a committed attack by moving, and so the result doesn't depend on click order.

Movement is resolved together too. If two Icaroids order moves into the same hex, only one can take it - the engine awards the contested tile to the unit with the higher leftover move points plus mobility, and the loser holds its ground. That can cascade: a unit that fails to vacate its tile blocks anyone who was moving onto it. See Movement & Positioning for how paths and contested hexes shake out.

The practical upshot: because everything fires from the same snapshot and moves afterward, positioning is a bet on next round. Moving this round buys you evasion and a better firing line going forward; it does nothing to pull you out of the shots already committed at you.

Initiative

Inside the fire and ability phases, units act in initiative order, highest first. Initiative is rerolled every round from three things:

initiative = (brain thinking-rate × 20) + (speed × 2) + d20

A sharper brain and a faster frame both raise it, and a fresh 1-to-20 roll keeps any round from being a foregone conclusion. The Initiator effect adds a flat bonus on top.

Order matters because resolution is lethal as it goes: if a high-initiative Icaroid destroys a lower one during the fire phase, the wreck forfeits the rest of its turn - the shot it had committed never goes off. Winning initiative can mean landing the killing blow before the enemy's gun ever speaks. It does not change movement, which resolves as one simultaneous phase regardless of initiative.

Target priority

You point an Icaroid at a target, but a lot can change between committing and firing. Rather than waste the shot, the engine resolves each fire order down a priority ladder:

1. Your ordered target, if it's still alive and within range and line of sight. Same-faction and self-targeting orders are rejected outright.
2. The nearest living enemy, if your ordered target is already dead when your shot resolves - the gun swings to the closest threat instead of firing into a corpse.
3. The nearest enemy in range of your ordered target's position, if the ordered target is alive but out of range or behind cover - you fire on whatever you can actually reach near where you were aiming.

So a committed shot rarely goes to waste. The same forgiveness applies to movement orders: tell an Icaroid to advance on a specific enemy and it paths toward that unit's current position, stopping on an adjacent tile - and if the exact hex it wanted is taken or unreachable, it settles for the closest hex it can reach. Accuracy and whether the shot lands at all are a separate question, covered in How Damage Works.

Winning the battle

At the end of every round the engine checks the battle's objective to see whether it's over. An Icaroid is out of the fight when its core is destroyed or all of its mobility parts are, and a faction only counts as still in the running while it has at least one Icaroid left with a working weapon. Three objectives decide the win:

Losing your last weapon is as good as losing the Icaroid as far as victory is concerned - a frame that can still move but can't shoot no longer keeps its faction "viable." Keep at least one working gun on the field, and read which part gets hit to understand how cores and components come apart.

Putting it together

A round, start to finish: you fill some mix of the move, fire and ability slots on each Icaroid, commit, and the engine rolls initiative, resolves every shot from the round's opening snapshot, then moves everyone, then runs abilities and end-of-round effects, then checks the objective. Master the loop and the tactics fall out of it - fire before move means you plan around where the enemy is, not where they're going; simultaneous resolution means trades are real and you commit without seeing their hand; target priority means a shot rarely goes to waste; and the objective decides whether you're fighting to the last frame or just to break the other side.