Warhammer

Why it earns its tonnage

Seventy tons is enough to carry two particle cannons and still have room for a fight at close range, and light enough that a 280 keeps it at a genuine 64 kilometres an hour flat out. Most heavies pick a lane. This one refused to, and the brief is the reason: wreck anything its own weight or under, which means being ready for all of it.

Look at what is actually bolted on. Two Donal PPCs in the arms for the reach, and between them they land about what an AC/20 lands but from the other end of the field. Two Martell mediums and two Magna smalls, one of each in either side torso, for the middle distance. A Holly six-rack over the right shoulder for when somebody gets underneath your guns. And two Sperry Brownings with two hundred rounds in the centre torso, which exist for one reason and that reason is people on foot.

There is a weapon on that machine for every range on the board. That is why it lasted. A Marauder is a specialist and a very good one, but if the enemy closes it has a bad afternoon. A Warhammer changes which trigger it is pulling.

The bit nobody mentions is the searchlight over the left shoulder. It works as a light, fine. It also ties directly into the O/P 1500 tracking gear, which turns a three-hundred-year-old design into a very capable night fighter. The electronics on the whole machine are dated and simple and they keep working, which is also why it kept getting handed command jobs it was never specified for.

And on the quirk list: rugged, stable, ubiquitous. Three words that between them explain six centuries of service better than any stat block.

Warhammer or Marauder?

You will have this argument eventually so let us have it now. Both are twin-PPC heavies from the same era. On our Marauder page I said the Warhammer is the cheaper, cooler one and the Marauder is the tougher, longer-ranged one. That is still true and here are the numbers again from the other side.

A 6R is 70 tons at BV 1299 with 18 single heat sinks. A MAD-3R is 75 tons at BV 1363 with 16 single heat sinks. You save 64 Battle Value, you run 2 degrees cooler a turn, and you get short range missiles and machine guns the Marauder does not have.

What you give up is armour, 5 against 6 on the Alpha Strike card, and a point of long range damage. The Marauder hits harder further out and soaks more on the way in.

My honest answer after years of patching both: take the Warhammer if you expect the fight to close, and take the Marauder if you can dictate the range. And if you genuinely cannot decide, take a WHM-6D, which fixes the armour complaint and the heat complaint at the same time and costs less than a Marauder anyway.

Six centuries, five a year

It survived the Succession Wars for a reason nobody planned: there were Warhammer factories everywhere, across the Inner Sphere and out into the Periphery, and none of them made very many. Ronin Inc. at Wallis never managed more than five a year. Five. But there were a lot of Wallises, and a plant that turns out five a year is a plant that is very hard to bomb out of existence permanently.

When the Helm Memory Core came back, the Inner Sphere manufacturers started turning out Lostech variants. The Periphery did something more interesting and just kept building the original, for mercenaries and for whoever else turned up with money and no questions.

Then the best story in the chassis. After the Clan Invasion, StarCorps decided to modernise the old girl properly. The plan was one new variant out of the Crofton plant. Word got around inside the company, other departments decided they wanted in, and everyone descended on Crofton for a week-long conference to settle the details.

By all accounts that conference was a good deal more celebratory than anyone had budgeted for. What came out the other end of the negotiations was not one new variant. It was four: one each for the Federated Suns, the Capellans, the Free Worlds League and the Lyrans, each using technology specific to that realm. Some of them got their first proper fight in the FedCom Civil War.

And a detail I like more than I should. They did try to replace it. The Thug was designed to do exactly that. The Warhammer is still here.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Warhammers available in the same era, not against the rest of the game. Whether a Warhammer beats a Marauder is a real question and it has its own section above.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 1 of the 31 Warhammer variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 31 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change how the machine plays.

On the table

Piloting one. Do not play it like a Marauder. The temptation with twin PPCs is to sit at range and plink, and you can, but you are leaving half the machine in the bay when you do. The Warhammer wants to open at long range, walk in taking two or three turns of PPC fire, and then still have lasers and a six-rack when it arrives. Watch the heat on the approach, because arriving hot with three movement points missing is how these come back to me in pieces.

Fighting one. Stay out or get past. The worst place to be is the middle distance where everything it carries works at once. If you can stay at extreme range it only has two guns and it has to overheat to use them. If you can get inside PPC minimum range the twin cannons are dead weight, though mind the missiles and the machine guns. Against the XL fits, the 6Rk and the 7CS and the 4L, go for a side torso and the fight is over.

What I see go wrong. People alpha on turn one out of nerves, then spend turns two and three at walking pace with a to-hit penalty while the enemy closes on their terms. And people forget the machine guns exist right up until infantry is climbing the legs.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, this is the part worth knowing. The engine reads the role tag on each variant, not the chassis name, and the Warhammer is overwhelmingly tagged Brawler.

• Brawler fits, which is most of them including the WHM-6R, get short-range weighting and a strong positive aggression modifier. They will close. They will not sit and trade at range while you set up.
• The WHM-9D, WHM-8M and WHM-8K are tagged Sniper and behave in the opposite way: long-range weighting, negative aggression, holding distance for a clean shot.
• Skirmisher fits like the WHM-10T and WHM-5L sit in between and go after whatever is already hurt or cut off.

That is the useful contrast with the Marauder, which is mostly Sniper. Put a lance of Warhammers against a lance of Marauders in OpFor Command and the AI will drive them at each other from opposite directions, which makes for a far better game than either mirror match.

All 31 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. BV is Battle Value 2.0.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the WHM-6R by era, straight off the Master Unit List. Note that it is the only entry on this site so far that appears in every single era. Other variants are far narrower, and the Lance Builder filters this properly if you are building to a specific year.

The rest of the family

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.