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Recently, I've been wanting to start Warmachine. After recently chosing my list and preparing to purchase the Cygnar box, I began wondering about mercenaries.

Ok.

1. Can Mercenaries be fielded as an army in itself?

2. Are there limits to mercenaries? (besides the obvious [will not work for this faction] warnings)

3. What is your personal expierience with mercenaries?

Cryonicleech wrote:Recently, I've been wanting to start Warmachine. After recently chosing my list and preparing to purchase the Cygnar box, I began wondering about mercenaries.

Ok.

1. Can Mercenaries be fielded as an army in itself?

2. Are there limits to mercenaries? (besides the obvious [will not work for this faction] warnings)

3. What is your personal expierience with mercenaries?

1. & 2. - Mercenaries can be fielded as a stand-alone army only if you adhere to the Mercenary Contract rules. If you have Prime: Remix, they are found in there. Or you can get the basics of it here. Basically, you pick a contract and can only use the models that contract says you can use. Sometimes the contract also gives you a bonus.

3. Mixed, but I only use Searforge or Rhulic based Highborn or 4 Star. Magnus and the Pirates I have little experience with. In general, merc solos are fantastic, and their jacks are usually weaker but cheaper than their faction counterparts. The units suffer because they need to be balanced to work with multiple factions, otherwise no one would use the comparable faction units. The warcasters run the gamut of weak to strong just like the factions.

Cryonicleech wrote:Recently, I've been wanting to start Warmachine. After recently chosing my list and preparing to purchase the Cygnar box, I began wondering about mercenaries.

Ok.

1. Can Mercenaries be fielded as an army in itself?

2. Are there limits to mercenaries? (besides the obvious [will not work for this faction] warnings)

3. What is your personal expierience with mercenaries?

1. Yes. What you do is select one of the Mercenary contracts, and those lists declare which
models can be used together in an all mercenary army.

2. They are limited by the wording of the contract. The Talion Charter, for instance, only allows
for privateer models, so that's all the pirate mercs. You don't get access to other mercenary,
warcasters, or solos. The only thing that seems to be very unrestrictive are the warjacks. Rhulic
warjacks only work for rhulic warcasters, but all merc warjacks can work for the other
mercenary warcasters.

3. Talion Charter is great big fun, but very synergy/combo dependent. You're banking on
keeping certain solos alive to make your infantry formidable. I think they're being defanged
in Warmachine Mark 2, though.

malfred wrote:The only thing that seems to be very unrestrictive are the warjacks. Rhulic
warjacks only work for rhulic warcasters, but all merc warjacks can work for the other
mercenary warcasters.

I thought that Magnus has some 'Magnus-only' jacks.

To the OP. If you've picked up the Cygnar boxset, I'll look at mercs that Cygnar can field and the Precursor Knights (which are Cygnar Allies and can be taken in some merc contracts). That way, you're picking up models that can be fielded in at least two lists.

dietrich wrote:I thought that Magnus has some 'Magnus-only' jacks.

He does, the Mangler and the Renegade.

In MkII the Mangler no longer has the 'Magnus only' rule but as the MkII rules are WIP this may not be the final wording.