Battle Primer

Battles in ASHFALL are about territory and posture, not DPS races. This is the grammar of the front line — cover, suppression, morale, melee, and reinforcement — and how to read a fight's phases.

The four phases of a fight

Almost every engagement moves through the same arc. Naming the phases is the first tactical skill:

1. Advance — close the distance while staying in cover; open ground is deadly.
2. Pin — suppress the enemy so they can't reposition or fire effectively.
3. Flank — bring fire onto their exposed side, where cover doesn't protect them.
4. Break — push their morale to zero; a broken squad opens a hole you exploit now.

Reading which phase you're in — and which the enemy thinks they're in — is how you win outnumbered.

Cover

The map is dressed with three kinds of cover, and squads automatically snap their models to the best cover within a small radius of where you order them. A shield-pip in the UI shows cover quality before you click.

Elevation grants sight and a small range bonus on ridges. And cover is destructible: explosives and vehicles crush walls and sandbags, so the battlefield opens up as the fight ages — the strong position on minute two may be rubble by minute twelve.

Suppression

Suppression weapons — the heavy machine-gun analogs — do something worse than damage: they pin. A suppressed squad suffers heavy movement penalties and reduced accuracy, and its models dive prone. It's stuck and half-blind even before its morale gives out.

Suppression is the setup move of ASHFALL. Pin a squad, and it can't reposition while you maneuver a second squad onto its flank. The counter-grammar against a gun that's pinning you:

• Flank the firing arc — suppression points in a direction; get out of the cone.
• Smoke it — break line of sight (Free Companies squads carry smoke as a gadget).
• Charge it into melee — a gun locked in melee can't shoot. This is the classic answer.

Morale: break and rally

Every squad has a morale bar beneath its health bar. Sustained fire — especially suppression — drains it. At zero, the squad breaks:

• It stops obeying attack orders.
• It takes reduced damage (models diving to the dirt) — so a broken squad is hard to finish.
• It flees toward safety.

A broken squad rallies after time out of fire, or faster near a hero or friendly structure — then it's back in the fight. So breaking a squad isn't a kill; it's a window. It opens a hole in the line right now, and you have to exploit it before the squad rallies. Often, breaking is better than killing: it removes a unit from the fight instantly and costs you far less effort.

Melee lock

Melee-capable squads can charge into melee lock: the two squads' models pair off into a visible scrum. While locked:

• Locked squads can't shoot out, and can't be shot into effectively — there's a heavy accuracy penalty firing into melee, plus friendly-fire risk.
• Disengaging costs free hits — you don't leave a scrum cleanly.

Melee is how you silence a heavy gun, deny the enemy reinforcement, and — for the Kindled — how you live at all. It's the hard counter to a static gun-line: a squad that reaches melee takes the shooters out of the shooting business entirely. Hero duels get brief scripted sync-kill flourishes as polish, but the mechanic is the lock itself.

Reinforcement

Squads reinforce lost models mid-battle by spending Requisition — when near your HQ or a rally structure, or anywhere at all for some factions. This is why the state of the front matters so much:

• Mauling is cheap to recover; wiping is expensive. A squad reduced to two models can be topped back up. A squad wiped entirely must be rebuilt from scratch. This is the whole reason to chase runners.
• Upgrades persist through reinforcement. Weapon swaps, a sergeant, faction gadgets — a decorated squad keeps its kit as it reinforces. A veteran squad is a real investment, which is exactly what makes the campaign's honor guard sting when it dies.
• Faction differences. The Hollow Court gets no front-line reinforcement — instead their fallen models self-repair unless you confirm the kill. See The Four Factions.