Armoured Clash: Starting Out

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Armoured Clash lately, so I figured I’d get together some tips for starting out. I’ll also probably do separate posts for the individual factions, Union is already pretty far along.

What is it?

Armoured Clash is a 10mm combined arms tactical wargame, set in a pre-world war alternate history with a steampunk/weird science edge. Landships rumble forward supported by tanks and cavalry while lines of infantry march to their doom and artillery rains down fire. Tripods shoot deathrays while hunted by opposing air support.

A Crown armoured column blocked by Union mechs

You generally want to bring a mixed force of infantry, tanks, cavalry/bikers, and artillery, with an emphasis on infantry and cavalry to hold objectives. Hanging back is a quick way to lose on objectives. Gameplay has been smooth, with very few gotchas. I’ve written battle reports for a few of my games, available here if you want to get a sense of how a game goes.

Due to being quite new, at the time of writing Warcradle is still releasing factions, currently at 6 out of 8. The remaining 2 factions are planned to release this year, though I could see Sultanate slipping into 2026. Each faction starts out with a plastic infantry and an armour sprue building a variety of units and a larger resin centerpiece model.

Game Size

Starter games work well from 700 points, that being about what you get in an intro box. Standard game size seems to be settling between 1.5K – 2K points. The core rules include a system for scaling what you can take depending on the game size, avoiding the common issue of games only working well in a narrow range of point values.

Rules

All rules for the game are free, available on the Armoured Clash website. Resources has the game rules, Factions has the individual army rules under Orbat (Order of Battle). Assembly instructions can also be found here. The cards are currently not available on the website for unknown reasons.

Buying In

A faction’s intro box comes with 2 infantry and 2 armor sprues and resin figures for making an alternate commander, as well as all the game material except for the card decks. This comes out to between 650 and 750 points, perfect for a demo or learning game.

The starter comes with 4 of each sprue instead, as well as a resin behemoth, some terrain sprues, and all the game material. This comes out to around 1700 points, depending on how you build your list (a reinforced unit being cheaper than 2 basic units). 1500 is a fine way to play the game, so this amounts to an army in a box.

I would generally recommend buying the intros and starters over the squadrons when starting out, they’re cheaper for what you get. It’s also very likely that they’ll release new resin models with existing plastic sprues, so you’ll end up getting more over time anyway.

What you get in a starter box (some assembly required)

What to Build

This seems to be the most common question that I’ve seen from new players. In most cases options are well balanced, so going with what you like the look of isn't a bad plan. I’ll go into specifics in the faction posts to follow, but here are some general tips.

Always build 2 sprues worth of a unit to ensure you can build a legal list. 2 sprues make a basic unit, 4 a reinforced, and 6 a full strength unit.

Indirect Artillery is better than Direct Fire Artillery. I’d generally also lean towards anti-light artillery, especially if it has torrent.

Anti-Air is nice to have but not essential. Don’t feel like you need to build the anti-air option.

Scoring units win games. Rule of thumb 50% of your list should be scoring or helping your scoring units stay safe and get to objectives (transports).

Assembly

Warcradle makes amazing models, generally on the same level of quality as GW or better. Resin models are almost always great as well, no failcast here. Infantry usually comes in one piece and can be painted well on the sprue, while vehicles and artillery are usually 6-10 good sized pieces. Their little mecha can be somewhat fiddly to assemble though, comparable with a standard GW Legions Imperialis kit.

I would also recommend cleaning sprue gates off well and dry fitting on your first build of a particular model. Sometimes gates are placed on the underside of a piece to thicken the gate, which doesn’t come off on the initial clip, which can make the pieces not come together properly if you don’t cut it off.

Magnetizing between different options is recommended on the Behemoths, but runs the gamut on difficulty for other unit choices. Someone will usually have an approach on the Discord if you need help.

Painting

Vehicles paint up easily and well. Enough detail at the scale to maintain visual interest, not so much to make it painful. Infantry, on the other hand, is very detailed for the scale, which is both a blessing and a curse. They look great with just a basecoat/drybrush/wash or contrast, but the detail invites you to keep going and that can quickly take a lot of time or scare one from even getting started. Don’t overthink it.

I like leaving my infantry on the sprue but clipping out a strip to ease painting. Gluing multiple models to a base makes it harder to paint everything in my opinion. I’d also recommend painting the flags, it adds a lot of character to the units.

Works well for me