// Battles

Deployment & Setup

A battle is half-won before the first round resolves. This guide covers the setup phase: locking in a faction, fielding a roster against a point budget, where on the map your Icaroids are allowed to start, and the slice of the battlefield you can already see the moment the fighting begins.

The setup phase

Every battle opens in setup, before the round counter starts. While a battle is in setup, each side builds its force one Icaroid at a time - picking a frame from your collection and placing it on a starting hex. Nothing can move or fire yet; you are laying out the board.

When you're satisfied with your force you mark yourself ready. The battle leaves setup and the first round begins only once both sides are ready - the same commit-and-wait rhythm that drives every later round, covered in How Battles Work. Against an AI or in a solo battle, readying up starts the fight immediately.

Choosing a faction

Your first deploy locks your side to a faction - Welter, Solari, Ironfall, or Chorus. Once committed, every other Icaroid you field this battle must belong to that same faction, with one exception: common frames, which carry no faction allegiance, can fight under any banner.

So you can mix faction-specific Icaroids with common ones, but you can't field two different factions side by side. Decide your faction by the force you intend to build, because the first frame down sets it for the rest of the battle.

Common frames are flexible

A common Icaroid is a safe pick when you're undecided - it slots into any roster. A faction-tagged frame is a commitment: the first one you deploy decides what the rest of your force is allowed to be.

Deployment zones

You cannot start an Icaroid just anywhere. Each side owns a deployment zone - a band of columns down its own edge of the map. The zone is one quarter of the map's width: the host holds the leftmost columns, the guest the rightmost, and the broad middle belongs to neither side at the start.

zone width = floor(map width / 4) columns

A wider map gives a deeper zone to spread out in; a narrow one packs both sides close from the opening round. Placement inside the zone is yours to decide, and it matters - a frame's starting hex sets its opening sightlines, how far it has to march to contest the center, and which terrain it can reach before the enemy does. Read Terrain & Environment for what the ground under each hex is worth, and Movement & Positioning for how far a frame can actually travel from where it lands.

The point budget

Most battles cap each side with a point budget. Every Icaroid has a build cost - the same cost the Engineering Bay shows, tallied from its cores, components and glyphs (see Building an Icaroid). As you deploy, the engine adds up what you've spent and refuses any frame that would push you over the cap.

That turns roster-building into a trade-off: a few expensive heavyweights, or a swarm of cheap frames that can lose half their number and keep fighting. The victory conditions in play should steer the call - a threshold objective punishes putting all your points in one basket. A battle with no budget set lets you field whatever you can bring.

What each Icaroid starts with

Every frame enters the battle at full readiness:

Full structure. Each Icaroid deploys undamaged - see How Damage Works for how that structure comes apart.
No shield. Shields charge during the fight rather than starting full, so an opening alpha strike lands on bare armor.
A full magazine. Ammo starts topped off and replenishes a little each round end; the capacity and refill come from the frame's components.
A full move budget on round one. Speed is computed when the first round opens, so a frame can advance out of its deployment zone the moment the battle starts.

Shields are earned, not issued

Because frames deploy with no shield up, the first exchange is often the most lethal of the battle - there's no buffer yet. Factor that into where you place a fragile frame: out of the opening lines of fire, not in them.

The vision you start with

You do not begin a battle blind to your own ground. Your entire deployment zone is terrain your side surveyed before the engagement, so from turn one it reads as already seen - its hexes show their terrain and height even where no deployed Icaroid currently has line of sight to them.

That seeded knowledge is memory, not live sight. It is dimmed last-known information: it tells you the lay of your own land, but it does not reveal enemies moving through it. The instant one of your Icaroids lays eyes on a hex, live vision takes over and extends that memory outward. Everything past your zone - the contested middle and the enemy's edge - stays dark until something on your side can see it. How that sight is drawn, and what blocks it, is the whole of Vision & Detection.

Putting it together

Setup, start to finish: commit to a faction with your first frame, fill out a roster that fits the point budget, and place each Icaroid inside your quarter-width deployment zone - already knowing that ground, but blind to everything beyond it. Ready up, wait for the other side, and the first round begins. Good placement reaches the cover and high ground that Terrain & Environment rewards, keeps fragile frames out of the shieldless opening volley, and sets the sightlines you'll fight the first rounds from.