Closed Lanes: Legion is Beginning to Feel Like a One-Way Street
November 18, 2024
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This is a guide for Republic’s Clone Commandos. We’re also going to touch on Delta Squad, their unique offshoot unit. Original article by Timbo with Legion 2.6 updates by Evan “Doc Velo” Paul.
75 points: With how the upgrades for the commandos are structured, you will often be paying only 75 points for them. You may decide to tack on an upgrade bringing them to around 80 (85 with HQ Uplink). Regardless these units are very affordable and can slot into a lot of lists, being cheaper than many of the things they’d be replacing.
Defense: The defensiveness of these units almost entirely comes from their keywords. Key to this is an upgrade that we will explore more in-depth later that can do wonders. The other basic defensive tech seen is the Shielded keyword as well as Recharge. You will be able to block plenty of incoming fire, especially small pierce pools. This is still on top of clone token sharing, force barrier, Exemplar and great saves. However…. there are still only four wounds and if all the defense tech is down, Pierce really chews through these units. The jky to keeping these units alive is knowing when and how to keep their defensive tech online.
Offense: We, again, will be taking a closer look at their weapon upgrades later. But needless to say Clone Commandos can pack a punch. These units themselves output excellent offense. Being clones they also have ready access to aim and surge tokens to pump up their offense (not to mention Target). Commandos rely on dice volume and quality rather than Sharpshooter to push damage through, which means their Range 2 offense is about the same as it used to be with the cover rules change for Legion 2.6 but their Range 4 attack profile gained a lot. Before, three regular hits and a blank would only force one save into heavy cover…now it will force two on average! And since that gun has pierce…you’re now talking about killing two stormtroopers on average versus one. That adds up fast.
Mobility: The biggest part of Commandos’ mobility is of course the Infiltrate keyword. They are going to start the game wherever you want within your territory and still get BOTH their actions. This is good; they are very action intensive once in combat, so keeping them moving can be tough. Once the real fighting starts, they can progress towards POI’s and either flip to their Range 2 gun or just use their (still impressive) standard weapon.
Support: The Commandos are a support unit! This is definitely not within the established norm but breaks that up and lets us do some weird things. The most interesting thing in this case is to do with list building. You can take both ARC squads and Commandos in the same list and not feel like you’re missing out.
Complete the Mission is a new keyword that is a signature of the clone commandos. This keyword allows you to place a token (for each unit of commandos you have). These tokens offer benefits to the commandos. If the commandos are at range 1 of a token then they receive surge to block on their defence rolls. If an enemy unit is at range 1 of a token then the commandos receive Critical 2 while shooting at them. Both of these effects are excellent.
With the current rules, the tokens are placed before any deployment starts (this is a change from the prior rules where you set tokens out when you deployed each unit so take note!). Though the surge to block is nice this can often be achieved via token sharing and the tokens are actually MOST helpful later in the game when you’re usually using the larger Range 2 dice pools. Therefore, consider this as an example of where I’d typically place them in “Close the Pocket.”
This will sometimes give you the mods in Turn 1 but should ALWAYS give them to you against units contesting the points. Besides, on Turn 1 you are more likely to have shareable mods from neighbors both on attack and defense making the idea of “home” Complete the Mission tokens less useful.
The upgrade that you are required to take on clone commandos is this excellent armor. The TLDR on this armor is that after rolling defense dice on a non-melee attack (which does include Overrun attacks) if you would take more than one wound you can expend the armour and only take 1 wound. This helps make your four-wound squad feel a lot more beefy as it literally cannot be one shot. Your opponent will have to shoot it at least twice, and probably a lot more. The biggest upside to this card is obviously that you get to choose if you will use it after seeing the defense roll.
There are some decision points to be made about when to expend the armor. For instance, if you’re trying to secure an objective and you would take 2 wounds when you still have four models. Would you expend the armor in this case? The answer should probably be no, as in the subsequent shots you could take 2 or more wounds and the armor will keep the unit alive. On the other hand, if you’re in an attrition battle maybe you expend right off the bat to have more offensive potential to return fire.
Now it’s time for some pew pew action!
The armament you can bring for the commandos is both excellent and flexible.
The first side is the long-range config which allows you a full dice pool of 4 red dice with Lethal and High Velocity (and maybe Critical 2). Again, now that Cover is usually worse in Legion 2.6, this hits hard. You can also make Jedi feel really bad if you can get an open shot on them and force 4 saves with no surging to defence. Order 66 anyone?
The flip side of this card is a very different weapon. This is 2 black dice, Impact 1 (for a total of Impact 4 with a full unit!) and Scatter. Also remember you can add one regular blaster into this pool to also add Suppressive. All of these keywords combined with solid dice make it a very potent weapon. Scatter in particular does not appear that often and can let you do some tricksy things, or just put models closer or out of cover. The Impact of this weapon also adds some anti-armour hedge as three clone commandos bring Impact 12 in total, which is often enough.
Overall these weapon options are excellent, however they do have the major drawback of requiring recover actions as Republic has no way of getting free recovers on regular units through command cards or other ways. That is, except for one way which is….
This unit retains a lot of the same features as the regular unit. Changes are: Points are 100, Target 2, two Black dice instead of Black white on the basic gun, infinite courage, and Independent: Recover. The largest difference is the one I have bolded, independent recover gives this very action hungry unit another action potentially per round. This helps solve issues of readying their weapons, as well as getting their shield back which is a big help. Additionally their infinite courage is very useful in a world of 14 suppression gunlines, and it also means that your standby tokens will last until you want to spend them. Also, while you can only run one Delta Squad, remember that the recent changes in “Unique” rules mean that you can run them with two other generic commando units.
Overall Delta Squad retains the same DNA (or the exact same DNA) as the regular Commandos but puts everything on some minor steroids. Whether these better keywords will warrant the 25 point extra investment is dependent on the list. If you have three commandos and find yourself with 30 points to spare rather than 25, you may be better off equipping all of them with HQ uplinks than changing one to Delta.
Have a unit with Target 1 and will be recovering? Uplink is certainly an expensive upgrade but will ensure order control, free aims, and you will want to recover anyways. A typical Round 1 play is to deploy with infiltrate, then shoot, then recover. This allows you to get their order token AND get Target the next turn AND have the option to either shoot then move with the Range 4 gun or to move then shoot with the Range 2 Anti-Armor gun.
It is particularly useful on Delta Squad where you get free recovers, less useful on the generic ones.
Emergency Transponders offers two things to Commandos: aims which are excellent, as well as some suppression removal potential.
The reason to mention overwatch only has to do with Delta Squad. As Delta Squad has infinite courage they don’t have suppression tokens placed on them. This prevents stripping of standbys by shooting them. This is probably not ideal play with Delta Squad but there could be some weird case now or in the future that someone cracks. Whenever un-strippable standbys come into play things can get interesting real quick.
Taking three with HQ and their free upgrades is the “gold standard” way to take these units, and the advantage of pairing them with ARC troopers is that they will almost always have aims to share from their Round 1 scout moves and other moves.
Yoda is a potent partner for Delta Force, both because they can be quite deadly on Yoda’s 2 Pip turn if they are given Relentless and because on any turn he wants Yoda can guidance a “Standby” on them that cannot be shot off since they have infinite courage.
Commandos are very interesting. They at first glance seem both complicated and simple. They have a lot of keywords but not that much upgradeability. It would seem that you just learn their keywords and plug em in but they are also a little complicated unit to run. Action economy with them is critical, learning to manage it will make or break many games.
Commandos are a unit that can just do so much. They have that great combo of being able to deliver a punch, absorb a punch, and/or just go do the objectives. This flexibility is a boon to them as units that can only do one thing can often be countered by preventing said thing. It’s no surprise that both before the rules change and after this is one of the most feared units in the game.
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