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I am looking to take up a new hobby and I have heard a lot of positive things about Warmachine. I read the quick rules on their website and was wondering if someone could give me any advice about starting this game. I am also curious as to the size of the armies in the standard Warmachine game, judging from the battlegroup boxed sets they don't look very big. I am thinking about starting Cryx and i friend that is thinking of starting Cygnar. Any insights on how the Cryx play would be appreciated.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Warmachine_Factions_at_a_Glance#Cryx

That original article isn't great, but it's what I came up
with when we started.

You're likely to see 1 Warcaster, a scrap thrall, multiple
bonejacks, and infantry. Helljacks aren't great, so they
are often fielded for specific roles, or people just go large
and put in the Deathjack.

Cryxian armies tend to have fast elements, debuffs, and
mindless units.

Cryx will field more models numbers wise, due to
investing fewer points in helljacks.

Also, a lot of what you field will be based on warcasters.

The battlebox gives you a basic caster and warjacks.
Denegra is supposed to be very good as a warcaster,
but you'll tend to play her in the backfield casting spells
through her arc nodes. Where you go from there will
depend on how you want to expand.

PS Warmachine armies tend to have more infantry than
warjacks, whereas Hordes armies tend to include more
warbeasts than infantry.

Another quick question, I know it says on the Hordes website that Hordes and Warmachine take place in the Iron Kingdoms and I was wondering if these two games can be used together, e.g. Horde army vs. Warmachine army.

Yes, they can, and the systems work very well together.

Two things to keep in mind:

1) Fury is basically the opposite of Focus. Casters HAVE focus, they give it to warjacks and cast spells with it. Warlocks have a fury LIMIT. The warbeasts in the army GET fury [rather than spend it like warjacks] by doing special actions and boosting attack and damage rolls [up to a certain point] and on the following turn the warlocks draw this fury off their warbeasts to use for spells. If they can't draw off all the focus [the warbeasts are fighting too hard], then there's a chance the warbeasts will go nuts.

2) Fury and Focus are NOT THE SAME. If you use a caster like Kreoss [Protectorate] and cast Lamentation [enemy spells cost double focus to cast] it will have NO effect on a hordes army that uses fury to cast spells unless it explicitly says so.

Also the one difference between Hordes and WM is that many WM warcasters work as well or even better without warjacks. On the other hand Hordes casters don't work at all without beasts.

The Cryx are dependant on the light warjacks(also know as bone chickens). So normal 500 pts Cryx army could contain about 3-4 light jacks and 20-30 infantry models. In comparison the Cygnar army I'm gaming with has 22 figs all together.

With the prevalance of jack warcasters though it's a lot easier to field a jack heavy force. And there are a lot of jacks that can mow down a lot of infintry. I'm playing Mortenebra a lot lately and you can easily play 5 jacks with two or three being helljacks, and power them all with the help of terminal velocity. That spell lets you use a lot of warjack abilities that you would normally have to use focus for, for free.

Skarlock, before you buy any Cryx models buy a Skarlock.

When you take bonejacks, either Deathrippers if you're cheap or Nightwretches if you have the pts. but never Defilers.

The models that first caught my eye in the Cryx miniature range were the Deathjack, Seether, Harrower, and Bane Knight models. I was wondering how well these models actually performed in a battle.

mournwhelk wrote:The models that first caught my eye in the Cryx miniature range were the Deathjack, Seether, Harrower, and Bane Knight models. I was wondering how well these models actually performed in a battle.

Deathjack is nice, the two other Helljacks (Seether and Harrower) are decent. Most casters have enough focus to power one heavy jack though, so only one of those would fit in generic list. Specialized jack caster of course can take more of jacks.

The Bane Knights are one of the most powerful infantry in the game, they perform really well especially when you bring the solo Bane Lord Tartarus along. Then they are a truly infernal force.

I recommend the skarlock too, one should not leave home without it. It's one of the must include solos in WM.