To help us forge a stronger narrative in our games and make our games have lasting impact as we work through the crusade campaign there is a progressive tier, buffs and de-buff’s mechanic built into the crusade system to help us better tell our story. Our units will progress, improve and potentially become bruised and battered in the theatre of war.

Ranks
As your Characters and units gain experience through game play and heroic feats on the battlefield they begin to climb the Ranks and while only Character keyworded units can gain the heroic or legendary rank all units can work their way to battle-hardened.
Below is the chart regarding experience to rank so we can plot our heroes path. You may notice these symbols correspond to the right side of the Crusade cards for your units to keep a live track there aswell.

So I hear you asking “what do ranks do for us?” ….Say less fam.

Battle Honours
Once a unit gains enough experience to gain a Rank (and every rank there after) it gains one Battle honour. Now this isn’t the only way our Characters and units can gain them and there are plenty of built in rules and rewards in missions which could see your unit reap the bounty of the battlefield.

Importantly here we make a note that as we gain a battle honour we must also increase the crusade points of that unit on the crusade card and the order of battle by 1 (2 if they have the titanic keyword).

Now battle honours have many variations and lots of different ways to flavour your units. In the core rules and tyrannic war publication you will find plenty of battle traits, crusade relics and Weapon modifications to choose from and you simple choose which category you’d like to flavour your unit with and choose something that suits your narrative or roll the dice and let lady luck make your choice for you.

It’s probably worth a note here that with the wrong mindset you can really turn a unit into a true death star and put the fright of a lifetime into your crusading pals as you list off an ungodly amount of specific well combo’ing Battle traits.

General advice “Be Cool”.

abaddon the despoiler

Battle Scars
Now what the emperor giveth he can just as easily taketh away. As your hardened units spend much time on the battlefield they can become less than combat efficient as they take orbital bombardment after orbital bombardment. To help represent this after a battle all units that were destroyed in that game must take an Out of Action test. Super easy, just don’t roll a 1. Any result of a 2+ means they are fully restored to your order of battle with no negative effects but a deadly roll of a 1 (James Roe I’m looking at your Warpsmith here) and the test is failed resulting in one of two things, you can either select a battle honour they have previously gained and lose it or destroy the unit if they have no battle honour OR roll for a battle scar which range from all sorts of negative effects which will persist on that unit for future battles.

That’s it for today folks, we are going to have a look at the balancing mechanic of Crusade tomorrow called Crusade Blessings and how we can score some sweet additional glory with Agendas.

Keep Crusading.