Tactics

By studying and practicing the strategic arts of war, you can guide your allies to victory. You begin play with a folio containing five tactics. These are combat techniques and coordinated maneuvers you can instruct your allies in, enabling them to respond to your signals in combat. As you increase in level, you gain the ability to learn more potent tactics. When you gain the Expert Tactician class feature, you gain the ability to add expert tactics to your folio; when you gain the Master Tactician class feature, you can add master tactics to your folio; and when you gain the Legendary Tactician class feature, you can add legendary tactics to your folio.

Preparing and Changing Tactics

Each day during your daily preparations, you prepare three tactics from your folio and drill in them alongside your allies, enabling you to use these tactics until your next daily preparations. When you drill, you can instruct a total number of allies equal to 2 + your Intelligence modifier, enabling these allies to respond to your tactics in combat. These allies are your squadmates. A squadmate always has the option not to respond to your tactical signal if they do not wish to. You count as one of your squadmates for the purposes of participating in or benefiting from a tactic (though you do not count against your own maximum number of squadmates). The tactics trait is explained in more detail in the key terms sidebar on this page.

You can change which tactics you have prepared from those in your folio by spending 10 minutes to drill, replacing all previously prepared tactics and squadmates. This does not prevent your allies from performing their own activities during this time frame. Some tactics have a limited usage, such as the Valkyrie's Charge tactic, which can be used once per day. These tactics can never exceed their indicated use limit even if you replace them with a different tactic and then prepare them again later that same day, but you can replace a tactic whose limited use has been expended with another tactic you know any time you are able to change your prepared tactics.

Gaining New Tactics

You add additional tactics to your folio and increase the number of tactics you can prepare when you gain the expert tactician, master tactician, and legendary tactician class features. You can also add tactics to your folio with the Tactical Expansion feat, though this does not change the number you can have prepared. Because tactics folios use shorthand and signals unique to each commander, there is typically no benefit to using (or stealing) another commander's folio, though you can train with another commander to retrain one tactic in your folio to another that they know.