Army Composition

Army composition is the process of putting together units to form a legal army. It will vary based on the operations that you wish to fight. For the current cycle, here are some rules of army construction:

• Ground armies must include at least four mechs or vehicles in order to be legal.
• The BV difference between the highest-BV and lowest-BV units must be no more than (400 + army BV/10). Note that infantry do not count for this purpose, and that bonus BV from having a skilled pilot is ignored for this purpose - the base BV number, which will appear in brackets, is always used.
• An army must not have two units of substantially different weight classes(light and heavy, light and assault, or medium and assault) without a unit in each weight class in between. This is known as the "stairstep rule".
• An army that wishes to attack a planet using a drop operation may not contain vehicles or infantry.

There are also some general rules of thumb that most players use when deciding how to build their armies.

• Armies are generally best composed of units with similar movement speeds, to avoid units getting strung out and defeated in detail.
• Slow armies should be able to fight at any range that a faster opponent may choose to stay at. Faster armies that can dictate their desired range by moving around appropriately can pay less attention to this.
• If you know where the fight will take place(which will generally be the case if you're an attacker) should plan for it. In cities or heavy woods, there's very few long lines of sight, so long-range direct-fire weapons like PPCs, AC/2s, and AC/5s become nearly useless. Movement is also very hemmed-in, so jump jets increase mobility substantially. In open fields, the exact opposite is true - jump jets have little effect on mobility, and long-range weaponry can damage an opponent substantially as they close the range to you.