Hello friends,
Today we will talk about Active command, a basic but very important concept for new CSW players.

Active Command (AC) is the value that indicates how many Command Points (CMD) a player has at his disposal at the beginning of the turn. Every unit requires a number of CMD points in order to be Activated and used.
The source of CMD points varies depending on the faction. Terra and Centauri armies gain CMD points through their LEADERS, while Heimdall uses  NODES. Ascaryan are a bit different, since they are classified in TROPHIC LEVELS that indicate how much the infestation has spread in an area. The Trophic Level is given by the highest level unit on the board. At the beginning of the turn, the Ascaryan player earns double the CMD points than his highest Trophic Level unit on the board.
This is one of many intersting features of CSW; the nature of your rival determines how you must play to cut his Active Command source, which will usually lead you to victory.
Why is Active Command so important?
Obviously, if a player runs out of AC he won´t be able to activate units (with the exception of CMD 0 units), leading in  most cases to automatically losing of the game.
But yet another reason, no less important, is that we won´t usually have enough AC to activate all units at the same time during a game turn, so AC is really a very valuable resource that players must learn to manage and spend wisely.

Power concepts
The Active Command available to a player each turn is usually directly proportional to his army´s potential. This means that, the more AC we have, the bigger part of our army we will be able to activate, maneuver, and use to attack each turn. This is called Army Power. Active Command and Power should not be confused, because there could be situtations where we could have one and not the other.

Example:

A Terra player with a conventional combat sword has the initiative and reaches AC 6. Since all his units are intact, he may choose which ones to activate. His Army Power is higher than his Active Command.
 This same Terra player, as the game advances, is left with just a Major and a Sergeant. He still reaches AC 6 at the beginning of his turn, but since he only has 2 units left, he can´t use all his AC. In this case, his Army Power is lower than his Active Command.

Taking all this into account, we can see how a commander could create his strategies in many different ways. He could simply protect his Leaders/Nodes to avoid sudden death, but should not forget that higher rank units are of little use without any units to activate. In some situations, having less AC is not necessarily worse, as long as we have enough to manage the threats.
Efficiency Concepts:
Not all units have the same Activation Cost. Some require 1 star, others 2, etc. We should bear this in mind while evaluating a unit, and not just more obvious attributes like movement or attack. A very high profile unit ususally demands a lot of CMD points to be activated. This is what we call Efficiency, or in other words, the balance between a unit´s power and activation cost.

Example:

Terra´s Battleloid and Hunter are two units with the same credit value, but with very different profiles. The Battleloid costs 2 CMD Stars to activate, while the Hunter costs just 1. They nevertheless offer very similar attack values. We could say that the Hunter is more efficient in terms of Attack (ATA), event though the Battleloid offers other perks ( it is Agile, has higher Protection (PRT) and Range (RNG)…etc.)

Efficiency is a paramenter we need to evaluate each turn, because a bad diagnosis could sometimes lead to a fatal error in judgement about our Army´s Power.

Combat strategies
Once we understand these concepts, we can start creating battle plans to exploit our rival´s weaknesses. CSW is very rich in Tactics and Strategy, and there are many different ways to slowly impose yourself on the battlefield. Here´s some things to keep in mind:

1. Decapitate: Give a precise and strong attack that eliminates the units that give your rival the most AC.  A bad combination could kill the leaders without any warning (just as it happens in chess). This tactic is usually easier against Centauri players, due to the nature of their army, while it is extremely hard to carry out against Ascaryan.
2. Cripple: In this case, we will seek undermining the rival unit´s Efficiency, leaving them wounded or critical, and therefore requiring more CMD to be activated and used. This tactic could prove decisive in specific cases (specially when dealing with very disperse armies), becuase it could leave the enemy without enough Power to be a real threat. Expensive units like the Chariot or the Battleloid are ideal targets for this trick.

3. Divide: If the map is big enough, you can maneuver to isolate parts of your enemy´s army. Once scattered, the effective Power of your enemy will drop, and troops won´t be within Range (RNG) to be of any help or support. If your army is quick, you can easily concentrate on one fragment at a time.
We hope this gives you a more technical insight on the tactics involved while playing CSW!.