How to Master Battle Mate
TLDR: Battle Mate is a simultaneous-turn tactics puzzle. You give each unit an order queue of up to eight steps - one order per step - press Execute, and every unit on the board, yours and the enemy’s, carries out its orders at the same time across eight ticks. Arrows resolve before movement each tick. Win by destroying every enemy by tick 8; score higher by doing it in fewer orders. Master it by reading the enemy’s telegraphed route, opening with an archer volley while the enemy still holds, and flanking soldiers from the side or back with cavalry.
How a Battle Mate turn actually works
There are no alternating moves. You plan first, the enemy’s orders are fixed and shown to you, and then a single Execute resolves all eight ticks at once. Understanding the exact resolution order is the whole game, so commit it to memory:
- Orders commit. Each unit reads the order in the current step. A turn changes facing immediately, before anyone moves.
- Arrows fly first. Every archer that orders SHOOT looses down its line before anyone moves, aimed at where targets stand at the start of the tick. The volley travels in a straight line from 2 to 8 tiles ahead (it skips the tile directly in front) and hits every enemy on that line - it does not stop at the first one.
- Movement and melee resolve. Surviving units then move in order. Contact combat happens as a unit enters an occupied tile.
- The dead are cleared at the end of the tick.
Because arrows precede movement, a ranged unit has the initiative on the tick it fires. That single rule decides most exchanges.
The board never lies: every enemy follows a fixed playbook, and its planned route is telegraphed as faint dots. Enemies typically hold position for an opening window, then advance on you. Read those dots before you queue a single order - your whole plan is a response to them.
The three units, and the exact math that governs them
Every tactic in the game is a consequence of these numbers. Learn them cold.
Archer (your damage engine). Orders: WALK 1 tile, turn, or SHOOT. A volley kills cavalry and enemy archers outright and deals one of the two hits a soldier needs to fall. A SHOOT is a single order, so a stationary archer can fire on every tick, or mix in turns to re-aim. The catch: the archer is glass. Any enemy that reaches the archer’s tile, from any angle, kills it on contact. Keep it screened and keep it back.
Cavalry (your hammer). Orders: WALK 2 tiles, or turn. One WALK carries it two squares forward, so it closes distance twice as fast as anything else on the board - that speed is its whole identity. Cavalry instantly kills any unit it enters from the side or the back. But a cavalry that strikes a soldier on the soldier’s front face dies in the clash while the soldier lives. Cavalry also dies to a single archer volley.
Soldier (the wall). Orders: WALK 1 tile or turn. A soldier shrugs off a cavalry charge to its front (the rider dies) and takes two archer volleys to kill. Soldiers have no contact kill of their own against other soldiers or cavalry - they block and they brace.
The two mistakes that lose clean positions: driving cavalry head-on into a soldier (your cavalry dies, the soldier does not), and shooting a soldier once and treating it as dead (it needs two volleys, and after the first hit it may walk off your line before the second arrives). Both come from forgetting the unit math above.
Front, side, and back: the geometry of a kill
“Front” is the face a unit is looking along; “back” is directly opposite; the other two faces are “sides”. A contact attack’s angle is decided by the direction the attacker moves into the tile, not by where it started. If your cavalry moves north into an enemy, it strikes the enemy’s south face. If that enemy is facing south (toward your cavalry), you hit its front; if it faces any other way, you hit a side or its back.
This matters for exactly one match-up: cavalry into a soldier. Hit the soldier’s front and you lose the cavalry; hit a side or the back and the soldier dies. Against archers and other cavalry, contact from any angle kills, so geometry only governs the soldier clash.
Flank, never joust: to break a soldier with cavalry, spend a step turning so you enter from a side or the back rather than driving straight into its shield. A WALK to draw alongside, a turn to face inward, then a WALK into the flank is the canonical soldier-killer. Two WALKs cover four tiles, so the cavalry usually has the reach to swing wide and still arrive in time. If you cannot get around it, shoot it twice instead.
Make the archer do the work: the volley is the most efficient kill in the game because it is ranged, penetrating, and a single order. Line enemies up along one rank or file and one SHOOT clears every cavalry on it at once. When the enemy holds in a column in front of you, opening with SHOOT on tick 1 - before anything moves - is almost always the highest-value action on the board.
Timing: aim where the enemy will be, not where it is
Simultaneity is the skill ceiling. Your tick-1 volley hits enemies at their starting cells, because nothing has moved yet. A volley you fire on tick 4, after turning to re-aim, will hit whatever is on that line on tick 4 - which is rarely where the enemy started. Use the telegraph dots to read the enemy’s position tick by tick, then aim your later shots at the cell it is walking into.
The flip side is danger. The same advance that walks an enemy into your line also walks it toward your archer. If the dots show a cavalry reaching your archer’s tile on tick 5, your plan must kill it (a volley, or a screening body in the way) before tick 5 - or move the archer off that cell.
Open before they wake: spend the holding window. While enemies sit still you have free, perfectly predictable shots. The cleanest solutions land their decisive volley on tick 1 or 2 and use the remaining ticks only to mop up, leaving the rest of the queue empty for score.
Fewer orders, higher score
Score is the number of unused order steps across your surviving units, plus 100 for each enemy destroyed. Destroying the enemy is the goal; the leftover-steps bonus is the tiebreaker that rewards elegance. A four-order plan that wins beats an eight-order plan that wins. So once you have a line that clears the board, look for the shorter version: can a turn be dropped? Can one volley replace two moves? Every step you leave empty is a point in the bank.
The shortest line is the best line: there is no cost to think in - the only thing the score counts is how many of your eight steps you did not need. Plan the kill first, then prune. A turn you can avoid by starting an archer already on-line, a second WALK you can skip because cavalry already moves two, an extra volley you do not need - cut each one and watch the score climb.
Reading the setup: map, army, and advantage
Before a round you choose the map (6x6, 8x8, or 10x10), the army size (how many enemies), and the advantage. Advantage is the numbers balance: on easy you outnumber the enemy and gain a cavalry wing alongside your archer; medium is an even fight; hard sends you in outnumbered with no wing. Start easy on the small map to learn the resolution order with one archer and one or two foes, then add map size and enemies as your reading of the telegraph sharpens.
Learn the engine on easy first: with the cavalry wing and a thin enemy line, you can experiment with flanks and timing at low risk. Only climb to hard - outnumbered, archer-only - once your tick-by-tick aiming is reliable, because there a single wasted volley loses the round.
A practice path from beginner to flawless
Phase 1 - the volley. Easy, small map, one or two cavalry. Win every round with a single tick-1 SHOOT down a lined-up column. Goal: internalize that arrows fire before movement and that one volley clears a row.
Phase 2 - the flank. Add a soldier to the enemy line so the volley alone cannot finish it. Use the cavalry wing to come around the soldier’s side or back while the archer handles the rest. Goal: never joust a soldier’s front.
Phase 3 - the clock. Medium and large maps where enemies advance before you can line them up. Practice aiming later volleys at telegraphed future cells, and screening your archer from the unit that would reach it. Goal: plan all eight ticks as one simultaneous picture.
Phase 4 - economy. Replay solved boards and shave orders. Drop a turn, let cavalry’s double step save a move, swap a needless volley for an empty step. Goal: the shortest possible win.
Treat every loss as a replay, not a reset: when a plan fails, watch the tick log to see exactly which tick and which unit broke it. Almost every loss is one of: a soldier shot once, a cavalry jousting a front, an archer caught by an advancing unit, or a late volley aimed at an empty cell. Name the cause and the fix is obvious.
The mastery metric
You have mastered Battle Mate when you can look at a fresh board, read the enemy telegraph, and state your winning line before touching a single order - which unit fires on which tick, which flank the cavalry takes, and how many steps you can leave empty to bank the score. When your plans win on tick 1 or 2 and finish with steps to spare on the large map at hard advantage, the simultaneous turn has stopped being a guess and become a calculation. That is the whole skill: seeing all eight ticks resolve at once, in advance, and choosing the shortest line that leaves no enemy standing.
Battle Mate
Program each unit's 8 orders, then execute · all units resolve at once over 8 ticks. Flank, charge and shoot to break the enemy line
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