ARCHIVES – A Quick Guide to Battle Droids and Uplinks

The Confederacy of Independent Systems (CIS) has officially arrived in Star Wars: Legion, and they bring a new playstyle and arsenal to the table. Coming forward in a mass horde, they overwhelm with numbers, dice, and General Grievous’s stolen lightsabers. With their access to Coordinate: Droid trooper, the mindless B1s are able to stay under control and keep your forces in near perfect control every turn. However, as we’ve learned, when they don’t have an order and AI: Attack triggers, the B1s turn into a giant mess. Therefore, getting orders on them is paramount, and there are two ways to do this: command cards and HQ Uplinks. Let’s quickly examine the second option today.

The commonly accepted consensus at this point is that two uplinks in your corp troopers is the most optimal setup for activation control. Going along these lines, there are two points to discuss for the uplinks: battlefield placement and squad choice. 

Let’s begin with squad choice.  To demonstrate this concept, lets take a look at the CIS list that I like most at the moment: 

800/800

General Grievous (Strict Orders, Aggressive Tactics, Tenacity, DT-57 “Annihilator”)

2× Battle Droids (E-60R Trooper, Battle Droid, HQ Uplink)

4× Battle Droids (E-5C Trooper, Battle Droid)

2× Droidekas (Linked Targeting Array)

One of the biggest concepts to master in legion is action economy, which can simply be defined as getting the most out of every action possible. In this list, I have two rocket launcher B1 troopers, which are an exhaustible heavy weapon choice. Similarly, uplinks are an exhaustible comms upgrade. Considering you don’t want to be taking recover actions frequently, maximizing the amount of upgrades you can refresh on each recover action becomes crucial. Therefore, stacking the uplinks and rocket troopers becomes an easy choice. 

Where to place these troopers is also an important choice. Fortunately, it’s a rather simple one as well. Lets take a battle lines deployment for example. When deploying your B1s, keeping each squad interlocked and within range one of other B1 squads is important, and allows you to daisy chain orders from one squad to another. Therefore, I am of the opinion that sticking each of your uplinks at either end of the chain is the best play. By starting the order chain from one end, you guarantee that every squad down the line will get an order (unless the jammer Tauntauns have already arrived in your lines). This also gives you some flexibility because you are not reliant on recovering every turn with a squad, it allows you to spend a turn move shooting or interacting with an uplink squad while the other one triggers the orders. 

The next option, and slightly more complicated one, is the keep both uplinks on one end of the chain. This involves two slight issues to keep in mind: the chain can be more easily interrupted due to a lack of flexibility of end choice, and you have to keep a beehive-cohesion between the two B1 squads on the end, to ensure that the “inner” uplink squad can still hit the entire chain when it triggers the uplink. While this strategy does work, it is much more complicated and does not offer the flexibility of the “double end” idea. There is one specific occurrence when this may be the better choice: when facing armor. Due to a lack of impact currently possessed by the CIS, the rocket troopers may need to be stacked together to ensure that something like a Flamer AT-RT (a B1’s nightmare) doesn’t get into range.

While the CIS faction is brand new, it comes with some killer haymakers courtesy of Grievous, but even he can’t do it alone. Keeping your B1s under control and in order is crucial to success, and I hope this quick hitter gives you some basic ideas on how to do so. For the time being, the CIS only have a few tools in their shed, so make sure that you keep those tools sharp. Speaking of the CIS, I will be taking them to CAPA Cup 2019 in Hershey, PA this weekend, and we will have a battle report of the weekend ready for you early next week! Until next time, good luck with your games, and hopefully your B1 building and clone painting isn’t too excruciating. 

-Mike