Snowtroopers Unit Guide (Legion 2.6)

This week is the hood-wearing, flamethrower-wielding Snowtroopers (Hazard Troopers?).  The Empire needs flamethrowers on hot planets too, right?

Snowtroopers are the close assault force of the Galactic Empire.  Slower than their less hooded counterparts, they can still lay down fire while advancing and boast some excellent close-range weapons.  And by some, I mean one (the flamethrower), because the T-7 Ion is hot garbage not that bad!

Hi, by the way. This guide was written by Kyle Dornbos and updated for Legion 2.6 by Evan “Doc Velo” Paul.

The Good:

• Durable
• Can fire while moving
• Devastating to multi-troop units in cover (with flamethrower)
• The only source of Ion weapons in the Empire (weird, right?)

The Bad:

• Slow
• Expensive
• Poor melee aside from the flamethrower

The Ugly:

• The T-7 Ion.  Ew. Geez dude get with the times 

Overview:

1 wound, 1 courage.  Standard faire.  Don’t get cocky.

Offense

Your basic Stormtrooper profile; 1 white dice with surge.  Not terrible but nothing to write home about.

Snowtroopers really shine when you give them weapon upgrades.  The flamethrower is quite popular, with good reason.  Though the range is short, you add 1 black die to your pool for each mini in the target unit.  They barbecue large trooper units in cover, though they tend to have problems with single troopers (more on that later). The ion gun, formerly an exhausting weapon and general meme (as you can see above), is now a very legitimate choice. Snowtroopers also benefit significantly slightly from grenades. Sadly, in order to make room for Riot Control Troopers having any purpose whatsoever, the rules change downgraded the melee attack Snows get from a black dice to a white one so they won’t be killing many Jedi anymore.

Steady, their singular keyword, is solid.  This helps offset their slow movement, as they can double-move and still shoot.  Two speed 1 moves is the same as a speed 3 move.  If you want to be constantly advancing your Snowtroopers (hint: you want to do that) they can keep throwing down suppression as they move up the table.  Steady also helps to mitigate the negative impact of being suppressed, as they can effectively still take two actions (speed 1 move and shoot).

Defense

Red defense die.  Nice and durable. 

Speed 1

If Snows had Courage 2 this would be much less of a liability, but when suppressed this can make things tough if you need to rush towards a point. A source of Compel, however, can make this a lot more moot. If a Snowtrooper is still suppressed after a rally you can even shoot after the move action given from Compel then Recover for your other action, which will keep you out of the panic zone going into the next turn. Luckily, Compel is pretty easy to come by in the Empire between Commander Vader and Krennic so you should have no problem getting those chilly butts in gear!

Upgrades

Personnel

Gonna drop the blue text here, this article was one of our older ones and thus we ended up re-writing the remainder fully.

When it comes to generic Imperial personnel options, the Medical Droid and Astromech are just about as decent on them as anyone else, though the Speed 1 will mean you can’t exactly rush across the map to get heals done. The Officer can give you another courage which can be useful for a flamer unit to make sure they can get there. I wouldn’t worry about the Comms Officer, there aren’t any comms upgrades that really mesh well with the unit.

As far as Snowtrooper unique personnel upgrades, there is of course the classic “Fifth Trooper” (a regular Snowtrooper for 8 points) which isn’t usually going to be worth it. There is, however, a slightly more interesting argument for the new “double stuffed” upgrade that was introduced to many Corps units in Legion 2.6:

It’s sometimes a bit confusing to me with regards to the pricing here, this squad upgrade of 5 troopers is only 4 points more expensive than a standard squad while the Rebel Veterans squad upgrade is 15 points more than that base unit, despite adding the same number of troopers. In any case, we will likely write a whole separate article about how to think about these in general but suffice it to say that there IS an argument for taking maybe one doubled-up Snow squad, and it has to do with that heavy weapon that the original author of this piece lambasted oh-so-cruelly…

Heavy Weapons

If you’re new to this game, know that the ion gun used to exhaust every time it shot, and also did not have Critical 1. So, jokes aside…it DID suck. Now that those changes have been made, however, it’s a much different ballgame. While 2 black and a white isn’t going to blow the doors off, it’s at least…decent. It’s pretty good. Not bad. Average. Middle of the road. It’s the gun version of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Lucasfilm fired the Lego movie guys who were making the old Ion gun and hired Ron Howard to make it serviceable. And you know…that’s enough! Steady is a really good keyword, and so is ion.

There are plenty of droid troopers and vehicles out there that a mass of ion weapons can mess up pretty bad. It’s also got a use against many armies that run neither of those things since at least a few of those armies have units with shields (such as Republic Commandos, Sabine, or Mandalorian Super Commandos) that you’ll be glad to make go “womp womp” before the defense dice come out.

Here’s the part where the double-stuffed squad comes in: adding all those extra dice makes it more likely that you’ll get that one wound through to hand out that all-important ion token. Since the squad upgrade is barely more expensive than the unit, I’d therefore advocate for considering running one doubled-up Ion snow squad as a sort of anti-electronics specialist team.

There’s one more Snow-specific heavy weapon though…

This weapon actually got an upgrade with Legion 2.6 in that it’s usable in melee whereas it was a strict range 1 weapon before. A single black dice per model in the enemy unit is relatively weak compared to the vehicle-based and Mandalorian ones that are usually a black AND a white dice. Additionally, Snowtroopers used to be able to add the flamer to a frag grenade coming from every trooper in the unit, but now that grenades are only one-per-attack that strategy is obviously out the window.

At the end of the day, since many games feature somewhat of a brawl in the middle of the map, it’s not a terrible choice but it’s also not optimal. Honestly I think that the flamethrower is (ironically) mostly for Blizzard Force lists that are forced to take two Snowtroopers anyway, and even then I’d only worry about it if you don’t have Vader as your melee threat of choice. If you want a flamer unit in a non-battle force list to handle the “fracas” you’re actually much better off with a flamer Dewback (better dice, Relentless, faster) for 18 more points.

I did want to at least acknowledge that Inferno Squad members Del Meeko (nice guy!) and Gideon Hask (yeesh…) are also available for Snowtroopers. Del has a potential role to be a source of repair for a vehicle-heavy squad. Steady is a nice keyword in combination with a long-range gun, but modern Legion is much less about poking each other for half the game like it sometimes used to be so your mileage may vary. Gideon is even tougher since face-up orders aren’t usually plentiful enough that you want to put them on a corps whose basic attack is as wimpy as what Snows get.

Grenades

Impact grenades are the money option here, and this is true for Snows with either heavy weapon if you have some extra points to spend. For Ion snows it gives you a chance to get to Impact 5 to really make sure a vehicle gets an ion token. Flamers, on the other hand, get something that makes both their ranged and melee attacks slightly better for a unit that was going to be diving toward the enemy anyway. It also gives flamer snows a role to transition to if your opponent brought droids or vehicles but was rude enough to have low mini-counts generally. I wouldn’t bring them every time but its a fair use of 3 points.

For the gear slot, we have the one upgrade that pretty much everyone agrees is just plain awesome in Legion 2.6, especially for a unit that moves slowly anyway. This effectively gives you an extra half-turn of movement, and that’s worth 5 points most of the time.

List-Building Tips

Non-Blizzard Force

It’s kind of nice that this unit is more than just a flamethrower-carrier in non-Battle Force lists, which was pretty much its exclusive role in the past. Things have, in fact, flipped as far as that goes: in my opinion it’s now the Ion carrier unit. Once again, the Empire doesn’t have access to any other Ion weapons so if you want the chance to slow down vehicles and melt enemy shields they are a pretty good answer. A Snowtrooper with the T-7 Ion gun, Recon Intel, and Impact Grenades is 74 points which seems reasonable for what will likely usually be the unit holding down the fort in the back. For context, a DLT/T-21 Stormtrooper is only 4 points less than an Ion Snow but its guns do roughly the same damage but do not have Ion or Steady. Stormtroopers basically need aims in order to leap over the Ion snow in terms of offensive efficiency, so if your list can’t enable that then I don’t think it’s crazy to run a couple of these as your back-line. The main reason in my opinion to run Storms is actually their Speed 2 move, but if the remainder of your list is fairly fast you won’t necessarily need that.

So yeah, let the past die Empire players, run a list full of Ion boys!

Blizzard Force

Here’s where the flamer has a potential role since Vader is otherwise the only melee threat Empire gets. The Ion build above is also just as legitimate here as well, though I’d say this is more the case if you are not running an AT-ST because that’s a list where you’ll benefit more from the anti-vehicle tech. Blizzard Force is also the best place to consider running Medical Droids or Astromechs as personnel attachments since you’re obligated to bring two Snows anyway so you may as well make use of them. The Stormtrooper Heavy Response Unit is still the best choice for true ranged offensive efficiency among your corps, however, so I usually wouldn’t run more than two Snow units even in their namesake Battle Force.

Summary

Snowtroopers were a hipster/meme unit for years before Blizzard Force made them a common sight once again, but I’m happy to say that with Legion 2.6 we’re likely to see them in all sorts of Imperial lists now. Due to their slow speed, they aren’t ideal to spam the field with but their new and improved Ion gun is a nice addition to consider for meeting those pesky Corps minimum requirements. That Blizzard Force Battle Force box was a great deal already but it’s even better now that all the units you get out of it can go into any list (especially if it has Compel to mitigate the speed issue). In any case, let us know what you think in the comments, and watch out for wampas!