Movement & Positioning

The move budget

The battlefield is a grid of hexes. Each round an Icaroid may spend a budget of move points (MP) to move between hexes. That budget comes from speed, a stat contributed by your mobility components. Speed is averaged across the mobility parts, not summed, so bolting on a second slow mobility component onto a unit with a faster one will make you slower.

Speed only holds up while your mobility rating can carry your weight. Once weight exceeds total mobility, speed is reduced proportionally:

base speed = avg(mobility speeds)
if weight > total mobility: speed = base speed × total mobility / weight

Therefore, light high-speed legs with low mobility may end up being slower than heavy tracks with much higher mobility for a heavy unit. Picking your mobility component needs to factor in your weight as well as your desired speed, as well as whether you expect to face enemies that can inflict stabiltiy damage. The higher your mobility, the harder it is to crash your units; a crash may not be a huge threat to a light unit, but heavy units can be nearly destroyed by crashes, so keep your mobility high to resist incoming stability damage as much as possible. For more details, see Weight, speed & mobility.

Terrain & move cost

Entering a hex costs at least 1 MP, but many terrain types cost more. A hex's cost is the sum of its base terrain cost plus any weather, battle damage, and ground scatter sitting on it. You can only stop on a hex whose total path cost fits inside your budget. The full layered model is in Terrain & Environment.

Ground obstacles change hex cost and passability:

Some components or effects may let you avoid or negate certain movement penalties. The Hover effect granted by Hover Packs, Hexflight, most flight units, and some ichor glyphs ignores terrain move costs completely, making every reachable hex cost exactly 1 MP to move through. Antigrav skids add immunity to ground hazards like ice, dust, and water on top of that.

Elevation & climbing

Hexes each have a height. The height of a mobility component dictates how much elevation difference an Icaroid can handle between each tile of movement. The tallest height among its mobility parts counts when multiple mobility components are present, so a tall mobility component and a short one together will still let you climb tall terrain.

• Stepping up more than your climb height is impossible; the hex simply isn't reachable via a normal move.
• Dropping down more than your climb height is a crash descent: it can be done using a manual command, but it costs extra MP and triggers a full crash on landing (the same heavy damage covered under footing). You must manually queue a move involving crash damage; pathing will never automatically take a path that results in a crash.
• Any terrain height differences smaller than your climb height are handled automatically and at no other cost.

Tall, light legs (Observer Legs, Hexflight) shrug off slopes that force a squat wheeled chassis to stay on level ground. Hover units and the Jump ability both ignore height changes outright and can climb any height difference.

Moving and evasion

Movement keeps you slippery and hard to directly hit or crit, but also makes you less accurate. Each hex of movement you order on a turn grants 5% evasion and -5% accuracy, so units relying on crit chance may need to stand still for a round to maximize their chance of landing a key crit. Likewise, moving rapidly can help avoid enemy crits so long as your mobility is higher than your weight. If your unit weighs too much, its speed and the resulting evasion are both reduced.

Footing & forced movement

Positioning is also critical to avoid crashes and fatal shoves.

Stability & crashes

Every Icaroid, regardless of movement type, can crash. Stability damage applied by Blunt weapons and dedicated stability weapons eats into your mobility. If stability damage is higher than your mobility stat, the Icaroid crashes, taking heavy damage spread across all its parts. This damage bypasses shields and half of armor, so it can be a very effective way of bypassing the defenses of elite, heavy enemies. The full math is in Stability & crashes. There is no defense against stability damage except for having high mobility and low weight, so keep vulnerable units moving and away from enemies using concentrated stability damage rather than relying on your durability. Lighter Icaroids will take far less total damage from a crash, but also tend to have less armor to mitigate the resulting damage.

Displacement

Some weapons and effects may cause forced movement, shoving an Icaroid out of position against its will. This can push a unit out of cover, into a vulnerable sightline, or across difficult and dangerous terrain. The No Displacement effect, granted by the Brick glyph, makes a frame immune to being pushed. Terrain Anchor also fixes the ground under an Icaroid, ensuring its elevation cannot change. However, beware the Entangled and Pinning effects, as they can cut a target's movement to the point of not being able to escape a bad area.

Positioning tools

Beyond raw legs, a handful of abilities, effects, and glyphs exist to help you win the ground game: