The long anticipated Clone Commandos are finally fully revealed for Star Wars: Legion. Today we’re going to look at this unit. We’re also going to touch on Delta Squad.
Clone Commandos
Strengths
- Great Upgrades
- Flexibility
- Complete Objectives
Weaknesses
- Action Hungry
- Only Four Models
- Susceptible to Pierce
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.
Defence: 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…. they are still only four wounds and if all the defence tech is down, pierce really chews through these units. Key to keeping these units alive is knowing when and how to keep their defensive tech online.
Offence: We, again, will be taking a closer look at their weapon upgrades later. But needless to say that Clone Commandos can pack a punch. These units themselves output excellent offence. Being clones they also have ready access to aim and surge tokens to pump up their offence (not to mention Target) as well as Fire Support options for those big punches.
Mobility: The biggest part of Commandos’ mobility is of course the Infiltrate keyword. They are going to start the game where they need to be. This is good; they are very action intensive once in combat, so keeping them moving can be tough. Alternatively, this unit can be an excellent mobile option to complete objectives and not actively be fighting. Infiltrate plus decent defensive tech equals an army that is quite good at Recover the Supplies.
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. How this affects list building will be very interesting to watch.
Complete the Mission
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 (read 3)). 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.
Early thoughts are that you will want to place 1 token in a place that your commandos can use it defensively and then use the other two tokens to try and get the Critical by placing them in areas your opponent is forced to go. Some lists may have enough surge access that the defensive bonus is negligible and you will end up using all three offensively.
Clone Commando Specific Upgrades
The upgrade that you are required to take on clone commandos is this excellent armour. The TLDR on this armour is that after rolling defence dice on a non-melee attack (does that include overrun? What about deflect?), 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 defence roll.
There are some decision points to be made about when to expend the armour. 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 armour in this case? The answer should probably be no, as in the subsequent shots you could take 2 or more wounds and the armour 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). This pool doesn’t feature any sharpshooter which is definitely a con, however it should reliably force two saves through cover with Pierce 1. Let’s also remember we can still fire support this pool, though you lose high velocity to do this. With all the dodge that was in the meta before, maybe that is gone now? 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!) 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….
Delta Squad!
**Side note before we get to the rest of the discussion. Rules as Written, Delta Squad having a dot before Clone Commandos means that you couldn’t run any other Clone Commandos with them. For the purposes of this article we’re going to assume that isn’t true and will be clarified in a later update.**
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.
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 yet to be seen but could definitely pay off.
Other Notable Upgrades
So Commandos like aims and will be taking recovers? Why not slap on O-push for some value. If this upgrade were still four points I think it’d almost be an auto-include, but at six points makes it a big decision. It is particularly useful on Delta Squad where you get free recovers.
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. Some lists will probably make this work, but you need to squeeze all the value you can to make those 10 points back.
Emergency Transponders offers two things to Commandos, aims which are excellent, as well as some suppression removal potential. Transponders is a bit of a nonbo with Target 1, but getting an aim when you don’t have an order or a suppression off a unit that made a daring box grab could easily win you a game.
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 unstrippable standbys come into play things can get interesting real quick.
This card would be a slam dunk to include on commandos right? Wrong. It is still an option, but that little text about the points cost being four points more for support finally matters. SA is 8 points on Commandos, that is quite an investment.
Lists
This list seem familiar? TLDR is it takes the standard Yoda Padme ARCs list that has been doing the rounds and trades ARCs for Commandos and adds some medics while we’re at it. This list has a lot of the same strengths as that list. You trade a fair bit of in game mobility for infiltrate and flexibility. One weakness of the ARC version is the lack of significant impact.
This list boasts impact 14 not counting the lightsaber as well as some fairly significant Critical potential. Armour probably won’t stand up under that fire. This list importantly also trades some firepower for excellent objective potential. Infiltrate just offers so much potential. Additionally you may want to consider dropping a medic for instance to get a bid and play for objectives.
Want a full Clone list? Here ya go.
This list is just a lot of clone troopers all wanting to shoot at and fire support the enemy.
A couple important tricks with Rex plus Commandos. First of all, Take that Clankers is fairly decent for them as it can allow them to extend the range of their shorter range weapons. One thing this can allow is to use one long range weapon, 3 basic blasters at range 3 after taking an aim to allow you to have a large dice pool with 3 potential aims. You could also extend your scatter gun to range 3 for some fun shenanigans with ranges.
The other big trick is to use Scouting Party after Infiltrating. The clone commandos could get to some rather exciting areas with this trick, and also prevent your opponent from screening out placements in the same way, or, in a bad case have them mistakenly think they had screened something out which they did not.
Also remember Call me Captain. That command card when utilized properly with commandos could shred the opponent. 7 red dice with pierce 1, or 8 black 3 red are both excellent dice pools, that you could utilize 3 times, plus all your other shots in a perfect world.
Final Thoughts
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 complicated unit to run. Action economy with them will be 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 will be a boon to them as units that can only do one thing can often be countered by preventing that one thing. Commandos with their flexibility will need to be stopped on a few fronts.
