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 step from hex to adjacent hex. 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 leg won't make you faster even if your core supports it.

Speed only holds up while your mobility rating can carry your weight. Once weight exceeds total mobility, speed is dragged down in proportion:

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

The same legs might sprint at full speed under a light frame, but barely be able to drag a heavy weapons platform along. Picking mobility is a weight decision as much as a speed one - 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 - never less than 1. 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 a hex in two ways - cost and passability:

Some chassis sidestep this entirely. Mobility with the Hover effect (Hover Packs, Hexflight, most flight units) ignores terrain move costs completely - every reachable hex costs exactly 1 MP. Antigrav skids add immunity to ground hazards like ice, dust, and water on top of that.

Elevation & climbing

Hexes have height. How much elevation difference an Icaroid can handle between each tile is its climb height - the tallest height among its mobility parts. Stairs and slopes interact with that limit:

• Stepping up more than your climb height is impossible - the hex simply isn't reachable that way.
• Dropping down more than your climb height is a crash descent: it can be done, 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 just cost the normal movement for their terrain cost.

Tall, light legs (Observer Legs, Hexflight) shrug off slopes that pin a squat wheeled chassis to level ground. Hover units and the Jump ability clear height changes outright, ignoring the climb limit for that move.

Line of sight & cover

You can only fire at what you can see. Line of sight is a height contest: an Icaroid's sighting height is its core height plus its average mobility height, and tall terrain, boulders, walls, and other Icaroids in between can block the view. Standing on high ground lets you see - and shoot - over obstacles that hide a target on the flat. How sight range, fog of war and detection work is the whole of Vision & Detection.

Terrain that doesn't fully block sight often provides cover, lowering an attacker's accuracy against anyone behind it. Soft cover (woodland, dust) is lighter than hard cover but still matters; several accuracy effects and glyphs are built to ignore a step of it.

Range alone isn't sight. Indirect-fire weapons arc over blockers, and a spotter feeding Relay Targeting lets artillery hit targets it can't personally see - the cost being deviation unless a spotter or Deploy / Undeploy tightens it. The flip side is detection: tall units are spotted from farther away, while low-profile and glyph-stealthed builds shrink their signature.

Moving: accuracy vs evasion

Movement is a double-edged sword:

• Moving costs you accuracy. Firing after advancing applies roughly −5 accuracy per hex crossed that round, so a unit that sprints and shoots will spray.
• Moving makes you harder to hit. That same motion grants evasion against incoming fire - a moving target is a poor target.

Remember that evasion only pays off in full when mobility can carry weight (see Hit chance), so the run-and-gun trade pays off most on light, fast frames and barely at all on a heavy one. Heavy platforms would rather plant and shoot; light skirmishers would rather keep moving and accept the accuracy hit.

Some parts soften the trade. Steady Platform legs cut the moving-fire penalty for missiles, and the Sprinter glyph's momentum lets a frame keep firing accurately without fully losing its movement bonus.

Footing & forced movement

Position isn't only about where you choose to stand - it's about staying upright and not being pushed around.

Stability & crashes

Every Icaroid, regardless of movement type, can crash. Stability damage - heavy on Blunt weapons and dedicated stability weapons - eats into your mobility. If they stack up too high, the Icaroid crashes, taking heavy damage spread across all its parts with shields bypassed. The full math is in Stability & crashes. There is no armor for footing - keep fragile frames moving and out of a concentrated stability barrage rather than relying on toughness. Lighter Icaroids will generally take less damage from a crash, but also tend to have less armor to mitigate the damage.

Displacement

Some weapons and effects may cause forced movement, shoving an Icaroid out of position against its will - off cover, out of a sightline, or across difficult terrain. No Displacement, granted by the Brick glyphs, makes a frame immune to being pushed. Terrain Anchor works on the ground instead of the frame: the Anchor glyph roots the hex underfoot so terrain-shaping effects cannot raise or lower its elevation. Denial works the other way too: Entangled and Pinning cut a target's movement so you can dictate the range of the fight.

Positioning tools

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