THE DILEMMA OF ACTION USAGE
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Assumptions:
- You have at least a bit of a choice what figures to use, meaning you do not own only 10 or 15 :-)
- You build your army for a standard tourney. This means 200 points for you and 2 actions per turn.
- The "doubleturn": This is a time unit I created because of the nature the Warriors of Mage Knight use actions. In most cases, you do not want your figures to push if you do not have to or it is not beneficial, so we assume that each figure only moves every other turn. This is why I will use a time span of two turns (hence doubleturn) to measure action-usage.

So what does this leave us with ? In a standard game, you have 4 actions to spend per doubleturn.

So let us elaborate the action usage. How many actors in an army is good ? Whats the problem with too many or too few actors for your actions ?

Case 1) Fewer than 4 figures

This can work, but at the beginning, you end up either wasting actions, or pushing alot, or both. If one gets killed, things get even worse. Most figures are ok for their points, no matter how much, but an army that only uses 3/4 of its allowed actions will always be at a disadvantage! So while the Hierophant may be ok for his 145 points, if you are not using your other 3 actions and the occasional command bonus well, he will end up losing because while he shoots once, the enemy shoots up to 4 times in the same timeframe.

Case 2) 4-6 figures

Most of the time, this will work out good. Almost always, one or two of those figures is a support unit like a healer, or enhancer, and will not be used much until another figure is badly damaged, and this way just "borrowing" the action of the damaged unit.

Case 3) More than 6 figures

This is the hard one. IMHO most sucessful armies have more than 6 figures in them, but those are not individual warriors running all by themselves. This is where formation usage comes in. Having 4 actions means you can have 4 formations moving in each doubleturn. So whenever you want or have to use more than about 5 warriors, group them in formations. There are different kinds of formations, tough. Some of them just behave like one or two big units, for example in the Gunner/Demi combo, where the Demis are just there for the enhancement, but there are groups like a *** Boomer with two **Fusers at his side, where the smaller figures most of the time boost the better one, but some-times just shoot something themselves. This is where it gets complicated, and beginners get confused. How many actions does such a formation really use ?

Our Boomer/Fuser/Fuser combo uses just one action to move it. So in the first 4 turns or so, lets assume it uses one action. After this, it will shoot in formation to break the sometimes high defenses. So for another 2-6 turns, it will most of the time just use up one action. But as soon as some enemy troops are softened up, three seperate shots would be much more effective as one with an attack of 11. Does this mean you have to count those three figures as 3 actions when building the army ? Of course not, becaue after those 6-10 turns, you will have lost some other units OR some of this formation will be damaged/dead, freeing up actions. The gist is: a formation like this tends to use about one of your four actions at start, and later about two, which is ok because you will not still have all your figures in good shape by then.

Another classical case would be Troll/Troll/Priestes combo. To move them, you need one action. To shoot, you need two. To heal one Troll, you need another one. How does this resolve ? The last case can be dropped, because if the Troll really needs healing that bad, he is in no shape to fight, and the Priestess just "borrows" "his" action. Thats oversimplified, but lets keep it that way for now.

So it comes down to one action at start and 2 after moving into position.

By now you should have noticed that action usage breaks down into two to three seperate blocks:

Roughly for the first 4-6 turns, both armies tend to just move around taking positions and trying to commit the enemy to a bad move. During this time, any formation uses up one action per doubleturn, no more.

The next block is the heavy battle with fresh figures. During this time, groups with few heavy hitters and much support use up one or two actions, while groups of equally hard hitters take one for each warrior.

Then there is the last block, which happens after some of the Warriors of the formation have taken a beating and/or there are weakened enemies nearby. In this phase, our Rebel group would still use two or even three actions, and the Trolls would roughly stay at two.

So the two groups in our example here used up: 1/1/2,5 and 1/2/2 actions during a battle.

What did all this ramblings have to do with army composition ? Simple, I tried to show you that if you use more than about 5 figures, you have to use formations and try to look at the middle and late parts of a battle, not only if you can move them all at the beginning.

Of course you can move 4*3 Fusers in two turns, but when it comes down to fighting, you would have been better off with one single tough figure instead of three weak ones, because you will never get to use more than one of each group. Again, this is oversimplified, you would of course have the added flexibility of shooting all three of one formation and neglecting another one totally for this. But then, for what did you bring them with you if they just sit and watch the show ?

Another thing to take into consideration is figures that have a special way of dealing with actions, namely those with Quickness and those with Command. Except for the Amazon Queen, until now all figures with Quickness are more or less just harrassers and living shields. Because of this, I tend to ignore them totally in my action usage math. If you use many Shades or Scouts, maybe count about three of them together as 0/1/1.

Command gives you about 1/3 action every doubleturn. Again, so long as I have only one warrior with Command, I tend to ignore this for the math, but again, the Queen is an exception. She has both Quickness and Command, so IMHO she is almost paying for herself, letting you add her like a Shade to any army without really increasing the action count. If you have two or more Commanders in your army, then lets just assume you have 5 actions per doubleturn and wish you luck rolling sixes, ok ? :-)

So how many figures should end up in my army ?

Depends on the composition of loners, harassers, supporters, and formations. Most of the time when making an army, I try to get an army with an action usage like this: 2-4/4-6/3-4

This way I can set up fast, use most of my figures efficient once hell breaks loose and still have a good number of useful actions in lategame.

This ended up beeing rather long, but I tried to make some examples so my ramblings clear up a bit. I really hope all of you understood what I said :-)

General Stormfox

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