This guide is from my Wargame Red Dragon "A frustrated 3,100+h veterans guide to the n00bs." guide. However, having played Warno and put these principles to the test, I noticed they still held water. I guess it's because they are more mindsets then strict metrical definitions.

The intent with this guide is to give you some basic common sense steps to do different things without completely getting stomped. It is thus not meant as an in-flexible guide from whose thumb rules you cannot divert and it won't make you a pro, instead it's meant as a quicker upgrade from n00b to mid tier.

I also updated the guide and added a few rules.
Updated 21.10.2023: Added one point about artillery and re-numbered some of the rules so they flow better.
Updated 29.10.2023: Added thumb rule 12, which is about air units, the deck starts to be pretty comprehensive now and I'll add more rules if Eugen introduces new features to take into account, such as Naval or Drones.
Update 7.7.2024: Noticed I forgot to mention helos so added a point about them in thumb rule 12.
Update 29.12.2024: Added provisionally a point 13. on drones.

I see failures in this way too often. People push with recon and tanks, then get hit from the air and lose all their poop or push only with tanks, lose all of them etc.
If you can't see your enemy, you can't kill your enemy, this means your armor unit will already be dead or panicked when they get the chance to open fire, which reduces accuracy. They might even flee if they get hit too hard and their not most elite quality.

Thus the smart thing is to have recon to increase your “optics”, AA to defend against threats from the air, combined with your main armor thrust. If your assaulting a city from open terrain, you might want to bring your infantry with you and have the armor units cover them while they enter the city.
-You might also get hit with arty while pushing, to which there are two ways to defend against this, keep moving or have your own independent counter battery kill theirs. While dispersion of your formations might minimise the damage from arty.
-Also while pushing, keep in mind that stabilisation on AA reduces your micro-management, since you now don't constantly need to stop your AA in order for them to fire at air threats. Whie pushing, the range factor of AA isn't as important as stabilisation, since presumably your constantly closing the distances anyways while on the move.
-While pushing, in regards to Recon, you need to keep the features of said recon in mind, is the optics more important, say the terrain is full of cover or if full of threats, is armor etc. features more important. You might not also have large quantities of high quality recons, weigh all trade-offs carefully.

From the above examples, many push by simply selecting their units, giving them the move fast order and then hope for the best. However, if you do that, your probably going to end up with your AA units arriving first, get fed to the enemy, then your recon and finally your tanks get wiped from the air, since your AA units where just wiped previously and you had no response. Or similar to this.

Instead, maybe move fast to the nearest safe spot, then organise your units, make sure the right units arrives in battle first with the supporting units following close by. Keep the distances such that the different unit types can support each other. As an example, you don't want your tanks to run out of AA cover and so forth. If possible try also to take advantage of the terrain.

So take the examples from the previous two thumb rules, remember the game rules. In destruction game-modes, then if your AA units shoot down lot’s of air planes, your tanks etc. kills enemy units, even if you lose your land push, you may still win the points if you do your pushes properly and the units killed are of higher values. Losing a Strela 10 in exchange for the A-10 plane, may often be a good exchange, since the A-10 cost more etc.

However, in other game modes where taking/keeping terrain is more important, quantity has a higher role. Though. the exchange value proposition is still there in the sense, if you can kill the enemies sharpest units, you can make their coming pushes or defences lower in quality and thus easier to break/blunt.

Remember certain map modes, you can 'feed' as many points you want, as long as you keep/take the zones, while in others you can't do this bc it would be giving your points to the enemy. Thus for some, instead of a A-10 plane, there may be a 'zone' in that exchange calc. However, one should not 'feed' just to mindlessly 'feed', more that you can run that point deficit if you can gain said goal doing it. This means in certain game modes, as an example a frontline player may be successful in taking/holding zones and thus gain the team lot's of economy vs their 'arty n00b' teammate (arty player only doing arty and not participating, even in passive defense, wasting ammo etc.), while their K/D is horrible vs said arty player, they have still been successful for their team.

Just remember wasting points is still wasting points, regardless of gamemode.

When digging in and defending, the terrain will often be your best friend, the terrain can hide you, extend and obstruct recon/firing ranges and so forth. To maximise the advantage the terrain gives you, you need to consider the same recon, armor, aa rule as in pushing, but now stabalisation is less important and firing ranges more important. The enemy will come at you, thus closing the distances they can engage you, thus if you can shoot first you have an advantage.

Another good thing might be to scout out the other players in the lobby, specifically what kind of units they like to use, what kind of deck their deploying and try your best to anticipate what will come at you. If you think the enemy will deploy arty, then maybe add some defence against that and so forth.

If you lose key terrain, do not be afraid of conducting counter offensives and other measures to trip up the pushing enemy. In counter offensives, apply thumb rule 1. Somethimes, if you lost the ground and are able to quickly mount a counter offensive, then you might be able to take your enemy at their weakest point, before they had a chance to consolidate their defence against you. Thus if able, contesting a zone might be smart, depending on the potential exchange values and benefits.

Cover your flanks, in multiplayer, you cannot always trust your team-mate to keep your flank. They might suddenly up and leave with their units, maybe mounting an attack and losing. Recon is the most important unit here. If you can see that something is coming you have more time to adapt, however, if you can spare the units, AA and light armor is also good.

Build logistics "trains", meaning cheaper/expendable supply truck in the front supplying units, while bigger supply truck in the back supplying the supply truck, while helos go back and forth with supply. Try to hide your supply units into the terrain if possible, so they don't get killed before emptying their supply.

Take the supply route into account, you do not want your trucks taking the fastest route, if it means getting in range of fire of the enemy.

Make your build so your deck has enough supply for purpose, meaning from the games start to end.

Some players may lock their supply from you so you cannot rely on others for it if you planned your supply badly

Optionally, if you have the chance, try to make your enemy waste their ammo and supply. This applies mainly to AA and Arty. If you have cheap useless units, place them or move them in such a way that the enemy might think their easy targets and then kill them. In fact, what you are doing is wasting their ammo by giving them cheap piece meal units of little worth.

-Shoot and scoot: After fire, move the artillery to a safe position, a smart enemy will try to kill your artillery. This may be difficult using low fire-rate or non-wheeled/tracked variants, then move them, but expect to lose them and make sure you get your money's worth when you fire.

-Be Aware From Where You Shoot From: If the enemy is smart, they will to kill your arty after you fired. If you fired from a bad position you may get frendlies killed as a result. Also think about keeping a fast escape route near from where you fired from.

-Destruction mode: Counter-Battery first, then kill enemy land forces etc. if possible/feasible.
In destruction mode you win by points, so if the enemy has the chance to keep hammering you or your allies through out the game, they might have a good income of points. However, if they lose their arty early, you lost a chance to gain points early, but given your self free reign to arty them. Artillery pieces with high reload and fire-rates are more key for counter battery than otherwise.

Alternatively, if your artillery options are short-range and bad for counter-battery, you can scrap that and focus towards supporting your pushes with artillery. Then, follow thumb rule 1, but add sensible artillery, such as artillery that has high HE is good at killing soft targets like infantry, while those with high penetration are good at hard targets like tanks, think about the type of units you anticipate killing, smoking or routing. Thus weigh what kind of artillery you will need to support your push. The sacrifice you'll have to make in this approach is you'll have to trust somebody else has your back when it comes to counter-battery, if not, you might want to employ dispersion of your units to minimise damage.

If your ambitious you can try to do both.

-Conquest mode: Points from kills don't matter, instead territory, here artying what ever makes sense from an strategic view is advisable. If enemy support their advance with arty, kill their arty, if they don't, kill their units. Ineffective enemy arty is thus less of an threat to you, even if you lose low value targets doing it. Artillery of what ever calibre and type may be of use to you, if you use them in accordance to their strengths.

-If you wan't to play as a dedicated artillery role: Do your own recon, don't ask others to spot for you with flares. Their flares may not be accurate enough and you'll take away their attention from their primary tasks. Thus, when designing a deck for this purpose, make sure your supply is sound for purpose and you have enough recon to get you those targets. While the rest of the deck may be kitted to support other players in passive defence. A good excellent dedicated artillery player is ready to fire the nano second they see the first enemy round come from their enemies arty towards you, thus keybinds, minimap and the key T is extra, extra important than to anyone else, mastering these requires practise, once mastered your deadly towards enemy arty, unless the enemy can match you of course ;).

Many will tell you there are this or that right and only way of building a deck. Instead, try to figure out your own preferred play-style and design the deck for a purpose, play-style or strategy. Do you want quantity or quality? Do you want task-based or flexible deck? And so forth. Make the deck fit you instead of listening to all the experts who play the game differently from you anyways.

Also when designing, try to imagine how you would push, defend etc. and then add the recon, armor, AA etc. in accordance.

This is a good to have, optional thumb rule. If you expect to take casualties, it might be good to have fresh replacements units nearby. In some games, the amount artillery raining down from the sky constantly simply means you will bleed units, your defence positions will get hammered etc. If those positions are critical to be manned, your supply lines are long, then the fastest way to replenish those, may be to plan for said replenishment in advance by having reserves in a close-by safer spot.

Another good thing might be to have the cheaper units at the most dangerous spots in order to contest said spot, while the more expensive ones support.

Oh man, I don’t know how often this has f-ed me, especially in 10v10 matches. Everyone hops on to the server, expecting to play 20 separate single player games, just happens to be together. Nobody marks, suddenly 5 min into the game there’s a preventable helorush on the flank, a flank that happens to be a spawn also and nobody marked that zone at the start to inform anybody that they where supposed to go there and secure it. So now the entire team, yes, I said the word team, has to scramble to go fix this f-up. Eventually all players end up having their attention spread out all over the map, instead of specialising into one zone. All this could have been prevented by a simple flare when deploying telling everybody that you got that covered, then send your units there and shot down that sneaky helo-rush and got the points for the effort.

This thumb rule may be the most intimidating or most challenging to some. Personally, this is also the area where I skip the most, because when designing decks you cannot have everything you want in a deck. However, there are ways to increase survivability of the often expensive and few air planes.

-Air to ground missions: Anti-radar, AtG, AtG, AtG - repeat
What do I mean with that rule? The best way to increase survivablity is to combine your air planes into one mission. Essentially, give their AA more to shoot at, while having limited capacity to shoot at all at once. But also so you can do more damage.

First of, to get the air planes out at the same time, select all of them and tell them to move in the general direction where you want them to go and then while their loading you give them their fire pos and other specific orders.

Secondly, adding a Anti-Radar plane, such as a MIG-25BM and then 3 bombers, but making sure the anti radar plane arrives first, increases survivability. This is because the Anti-Radar planes are designed to take on AA. They have missiles that can kill AA with radars while also having really good ECM (stuff to reduce the enemy hitting you), while bombers aren't as good in this. So you want this plane to take all the enemy missiles, even if you lose it. Because that might help those bombers from dropping their bombs and getting home safely, thus being able to bomb again later.

Thirdly, you can use artillery to suppress AA too, then the rule is to let the first shots land on target before launching the mission. This is because you want to make sure the effect on the AA has gone through before your planes come in range.

-Air to Air missions: Maneuver rather than attack unit
If you can only get 1 fighter, then make sure it's as elite as possible to increase it's survivability. Make sure your fighters fly similar, preferably of the same speed, otherwise they might arrive into combat in different times. Also do not click to attack the enemy plane manually, an experienced enemy player will exploit this and kill your plane, this is because then he know he can lead your plane deeper into his territory, potentially in-range of his AA. Instead make sure you maneuver the plane so the nose points towards you want to shoot and then turn away and fly towards friendly territory. You can maneuver by constantly telling the plane to move somewhere that is somewhere towards a side or forwards/backwards.

-Helicopters: Helicopters are a high risk, high reward unit type. Recon is critical to effective use by them. You see the helicopters are very vulnerable to AA and other threats. They are also very flexible, fast and deadly when deployed. You can use them to blunt land attacks if you see your enemy has failed thumb rule 1 and is AA-less. You can use them as supporting firepower, flying arty. You can react quickly to suprises by deploying helos. But also reak havoc behind enemy lines. Though it is also easy to defend against helos, by deploying AA and hiding the AA well. Thumb rule 5, is also useful, sometimes your ally may get overrun and the enemy then deploys helos to attack your side

-Other: You can do single unit missions, say give a single bomber a mission, but be aware of the increased risk in losing the bomber or fighter.

Drones, their new in Warno. Yet not a lot to say about them. They're really good for recon, in one game one got snuck by our lines and I got my fob artyid. Many waste them, there's usually a small number off them and they should be used for a purpose. Their usually lost quickly, so considering the exchange value, you should have an solution ready to go when you get the intel. Say arty ready to fire. Drones are also good at wasting enemy AA ammo. Their pitfall, or as of writing, most cases I see players using them as are 'woo cool new toy' then boom toy gone. Instead of using them purposefully.

If you encounter one in the field, shoot it down and brace for arty, bc an good player will act upon what he just discovered about you.

This thumb rule may still change, considering Drones are still new to Warno and are being increasingly rolled out still.