2 hours ago, Dosiere said:

Don’t forget shoretroopers are a point more expensive base, and have a red defense die. No, you’re not missing anything. The CMO is dang expensive for what it brings.

Regardless, shoretroopers look like a nice new corps for Empire. They have a different style from stormtroopers and anowtroopers. I’m still not sure about the mortar, but it’s potentially deadly with all the suppression the empire can dish out in a single round.

I think the mortar will be handy. You can use it for fire support and then your shoretrooper attacks pool is up to 6 black, 5 white with 2 surge to crit and supressive, that seems pretty deadly to me. Critical 2 is almost as good as having surge to hit, makes them fairly reliable. Or the mortar can be used on its own, just pump out more supressive fire at range 4 alongside units like Bossk and deathtroopers. That being said, the mortar on top of shoretroopers is a fairly big investment, I'm not sure I'd always want to take a 1:1 ratio of shoretroopers to mortars, as that really starts to stack up pts wise, and I think shoretroopers would perform well on their own without the mortar. I also look forward to using shoretroopers with ewebs, sure they can't provide fire support but shoretrooper ability works on the eweb, some nice extra order control.

Total noob checking in: the mortar seems like it needs line of sight, yes? Which is odd because, you know... mortars and all?

As far as I know, there's no attacks in legion right now that don't require line of sight. Yes it doesn't quite feel right for a mortar, but I think it's still something that can be worked around, especially if the mortar is using fire support.

46 minutes ago, joewrightgm said:

Total noob checking in: the mortar seems like it needs line of sight, yes? Which is odd because, you know... mortars and all?

Yes still requires line of sight. And yes, it is odd - I advocated before this unit was announced to have a mortar team that came with a comms upgrade that said you can draw line of sight for a mortar attack from that miniature unit instead of the mortar. So direct LoS or LoS via a comms upgraded unit would suffice.

1 hour ago, ScummyRebel said:

Yes still requires line of sight. And yes, it is odd - I advocated before this unit was announced to have a mortar team that came with a comms upgrade that said you can draw line of sight for a mortar attack from that miniature unit instead of the mortar. So direct LoS or LoS via a comms upgraded unit would suffice.

This is something that could still be added into the game. Though, I'd like to see it being offered by a unit such as a probe droid rather than just a comms unit.

Though a comms upgrade could work, and this inspire more people to take the comms trooper personnel upgrades. Just limit it to emplacement trooper, and heavy units to benefit maybe?

I'm sure FFG would want to play around with no LoS attacks, but that could get pretty brutal if not used in carefully selected situations, and apparently the mortar is already pretty nasty. They may want to stabilize some stuff first. A "spotter droid" comms upgrades for Vehicles and Emplacements only to mean you can Squadsight wouldn't be awful. Actually FFG does the XCOM board game right? We can just do squadsight, we already have overwatch.

I can see suppressive snipers with crit-1 being a pain in the rump. If mortars could ignore LoS it would be much worse.

10 hours ago, joewrightgm said:

Total noob checking in: the mortar seems like it needs line of sight, yes? Which is odd because, you know... mortars and all?

When a mortor is directly attacking it requires LOS, however if I understand firesupport correctly if using firesupport to add dice it only needs to be in range

12 minutes ago, chr335 said:

When a mortor is directly attacking it requires LOS, however if I understand firesupport correctly if using firesupport to add dice it only needs to be in range

You do not understand correctly. In order to be an "eligible" weapon it needs to have range and LoS.

There are many ways they could add indirect fire. I think canceling all hit results in the modify dice step could work. Still a good way to suppress and get the occasional crit but inaccurate. Stuff like that.

The mortar, as it stands, is pretty much DOA for me. Besides the fact that'll have to compete with the Clones for my interest and list building, it really doesn't do anything that a mortar should. It takes up a corps slot from much more useful units, it doesn't have the ability to fire indirect, has a weird set of ranges, and it really isn't that great at actually putting out damage. Suppressive helps, but not when there's a fair chance that even with suppressive it'll only dish out a single token. I get that it's intended to be used with Fire Support, but I'm still not sold on fire support. It works for the Clones on occasion, but it's too iffy and situational for me to want to base an entire unit around it.

If they were worried about indirect being a problem, they should have done something like "Indirect: When performing attacks, you can use line of sight of a unit with the Forward Observer keyword" and have Forward Observer being a comm upgrade. This limits how your indirect fires can be used, but also fitting thematically. If someone wants to spam corps units with the Comm Tech personnel and pay for the upgrade, they can pretty much call for fire everywhere, but they're paying out the nose for it. If the cost of upgrade isn't enough, it'd be a simple enough rule to say that no more than 2-3 units can have the Forward Observer keyword.

I don't want to declare it DOA just yet, but I do agree it's a bit irritating that it takes up a corps slot for just 3 wounds and 3 white dice shots, I would have preferred if it counted as part of the slot the shoretroopers take up. I do think it's good for firesupport though, shoretroopers have a pretty good attack pool which only gets better when you throw in another critical 1 in there.

All that said, is it really worth the pts, I'm not sure. I will try it out, see how it does. Regardless I do think shoretroopers will be solid even without the mortar, and you can always take an e-web or two instead of mortars to make use of the shoretrooper ability.

I think the indirect fire rules you laid out are solid, that way at least you're paying pts to get your forward observer and you need to think about where you want your forward observer placed, instead of the mortar just being able to lob shells at anything in range.

On 8/17/2019 at 8:20 AM, Dosiere said:

Don’t forget shoretroopers are a point more expensive base, and have a red defense die. No, you’re not missing anything. The CMO is dang expensive for what it brings.

Regardless, shoretroopers look like a nice new corps for Empire. They have a different style from stormtroopers and anowtroopers. I’m still not sure about the mortar, but it’s potentially deadly with all the suppression the empire can dish out in a single round.

The mortar/vet gun is a slightly worse version of a sniper team for less points and a sf slot *if* you were taking vets/shoretroops anyway

Average is close to 2 suppressive tokens. It has it's uses. And it's cheap and is a corps unit. I still think more objective cards are coming out and I'm interested in other types of lists other than trooper spam and sniper spam

1 hour ago, buckero0 said:

Average is close to 2 suppressive tokens. It has it's uses. And it's cheap and is a corps unit. I still think more objective cards are coming out and I'm interested in other types of lists other than trooper spam and sniper spam

While advantage through high activations is a thing, that ain't going away.

Edit: oh and get ready for the flood of "X" trooper + sniper team vs vet/shore + detachment comparison articles.

Wait where does it say the mortar takes up a corps slot? All I can see is that he is a separate unit, but as a detachment he must still be deployed at distance one of the unit, have I missed something?

1 hour ago, Visovics said:

Wait where does it say the mortar takes up a corps slot? All I can see is that he is a separate unit, but as a detachment he must still be deployed at distance one of the unit, have I missed something?

Ummmm, the top of the unit card? It is treated as a different unit with a unit count of 1, same as the sniper card.

Edit: also, the detachment keyword explanation in the rrg is very clear about calling them a separate unit to it's requirement unit for list building

13 minutes ago, Ralgon said:

Ummmm, the top of the unit card? It is treated as a different unit with a unit count of 1, same as the sniper card.

Edit: also, the detachment keyword explanation in the rrg is very clear about calling them a separate unit to it's requirement unit for list building

I have no idea why but my head was thinking corps unit as heavy weapon, okay yeh all makes sense, oops😂

6 minutes ago, Visovics said:

I have no idea why but my head was thinking corps unit as heavy weapon, okay yeh all makes sense, oops😂

Actually, now you mention it, I remember some thread where speculation was suggesting they were a choice between the heavy and the detachment. As said the rrg and card images make it pretty clear.

Apologies if I sounded harsh😉

7 minutes ago, Ralgon said:

Actually, now you mention it, I remember some thread where speculation was suggesting they were a choice between the heavy and the detachment. As said the rrg and card images make it pretty clear.

Apologies if I sounded harsh😉

Wasn’t harsh dw

The way it was sounding in the thread was making me think as if it would take the heavy spot for the T-21B trooper, which would make sense but I kept thinking I was missing some detail

I actually like the fact that the Mortar Trooper takes a Corp slot. It means I can run two pairs of Shoretrooper/Mortar Team and more than meet my minimum 3 Corp units. Then I can focus the rest of my list on having Bossk and Deathtroopers help suppress my opponent’s units alongside the Mortar Troopers.

On 8/16/2019 at 7:06 PM, arnoldrew said:

Shoretroopers are the most elite, most expensive Corp option for the Empire. Phase 1 Clones are the cheapest, worst Corps option available for the Republic and cost the same as Shoretroopers. If that doesn't scream "elite infantry" faction then I don't know what does.

It does scream elite and I know that down the road clones will have even more elite units. But on release, if an empire player brings a list of Shore troopers, their core units cost the same and have similar stats to the only core unit available to the clone player. Simply put: at release, the clone Phase I unit doesn't feel unique due to the existence of Shore Troopers.

It's not a big deal and I am still excited to play the Clones!

3 hours ago, Draycos said:

Simply put: at release, the clone Phase I unit doesn't feel unique due to the existence of Shore Troopers.

I can see that, but there are still pretty significant differences though, notably fire support and the surge ability IIRC.

Just now, ClassicalMoser said:

I can see that, but there are still pretty significant differences though, notably fire support and the surge ability IIRC.

I spose it allows the empire to match the republic on a level before phase II comes out.

16 hours ago, Ralgon said:

While advantage through high activations is a thing, that ain't going away.

Edit: oh and get ready for the flood of "X" trooper + sniper team vs vet/shore + detachment comparison articles.

It’s 7 dice at range 4 with critical 2. Regular stormtrooper units can only throw 2 dice.