“You have something I want. You may think you have some idea of what you are in possession of, but you do not. In a few moments, it will be mine.”
Moff Gideon was obviously talking about knowledge of how to use his units rather than Grogu. In this article we are going to cover how to play and list build for Imperial Remnant, but first let’s find out what benefits and restrictions we get by taking this battle force over normal empire or the other battle forces.
The Battle Force
The allowed units list is very short and one of the more restrictive battle forces. The first thing that is confusing when you look at the above is that you can pick special forces units…but you’re not allowed any special force units in your list so how does that work???
The short of it is before you take a duplicate of any unit you must have one Stormtrooper, one Shoretrooper, one Scout Trooper and one Death Trooper unit in your list. You can also use any combination of these units to meet your minimum three “corps” requirements, even though you’ll still use their regular “special forces” order tokens during the game itself for the scouts and death troopers.
The second list building rule Imperial Remnant have is one of the strongest any battle force has!
This allows any of our “Corps” units to be able to take any heavy weapon upgrade in any squad so you can put a sniper rifle with Stormtroopers or put a T-21 with some Death Troopers. The important thing to remember with this is the heavy weapon upgrade has the stats of the unit it is attached to. When you take that scout trooper sniper rifle model on a stormtrooper. You now have surge to hit and red dice saves and when you take that T-21 storm trooper model in scout troopers he now has white defense dice. What this does open up is for people to model thier own scout troopers carrying said heavy weapons or giving the death troopers a different heavy weapon if you wanting to keep the squad aesthetic.
List Building
Absent commander build
When list building for me there are two options for Remnant. The first version is taking a generic officer and having her just sit in the corner doing nothing all game bar claiming that back objective on turn six. The reason for this is to abuse this battle force final special ability.
By giving up the ability to issue orders we gain Independent: Aim 1 or Dodge 1. This is really strong since it gives every unit in our army the ability to be either aggressive or defensive just by being away from our commander. We don’t have to worry about panicking too much since all units bar the Stormtroopers and the Shore Troopers are courage 2. If we are going down this route, then we need to take units that can survive taking a few a shots while we try and get those units out of the bag.
The first unit that comes to mind as able to get shot a few times while we try and find it from the bag is the Dark Troopers. The full armour and two health per a model are a great start before we even start spending points on the heavy weapon upgrades. The fact we also get two tokens in the bag gives us a higher chance of also pulling them from the bag to activate if they start receiving too much damage.
There seems to be two main ways most people are now running this unit. First is fully decked out with the assault cannon, frag launcher and possibly the extra man. This is quite expensive since the points update coming in at 227 points for the whole unit! The one upgrade we do not need is the programmed loyalty due to the play style we are enforcing with hiding our commander. We get the same benefit without having to pay the points cost.
The second way to run the dark troopers is just with the assault cannon. This is more leaning into the range three gunline approach of this list and making the Dark Troopers a big distraction from the rest of your army. The one heavy weapon I never see a use for is the Mertalizer which is a big shame. It has one of the best weapon names ever and if it had pierce one then I believe this would make it viable but until then…it just isn’t.
To back up our choice of Dark Troopers and our officer we need some corps units. Let’s start with the mandatory Stormtroopers and Shore Troopers. With the low courage we are going to use these as our box grabbers.
Now to add some back up fire power let’s look at taking some Death Troopers with the config upgrade and a free aim every turn since we are beyond range two of our commander. Then you need a heavy weapon. The rifle gives you six black dice at range four with pierce one, suppressive and precise two to allow you to reroll up to four dice. This should be about five hits on average so after cover you’re doing some good damage. If your facing lots of troops, then you can take the RT-97c. This turns your dice pool into one red, four black, three white, which again gives you on average about the same amount hits but gives you more variance on the top side.
If you are facing lots of armour in your area you can look at taking the HH-12 which gives you impact three and the recover also synergizes with the Death trooper config. The courage 2 the efficiency since most of the time they will be able to recover and shoot and still have the aim from the battle force ability. Overall, Death Troopers are the second biggest threat in this battle force and can be quite a surprise to people since they are not seen much outside of this battle force, and having that surging red save can also make them quite troublesome to remove! Be wary though, any Mandalorian player will happily remind you that red surging saves fail more often than you might want!
At this point in list building, we need to decide if we want to lean into more troops or add some mobility to our list. If we are wanting to go down the more troops option, we will need to add a unit of scout troopers before we can take a second unit of anything else. For this list I’m going to take some mobility since this will open some deployment options that will screw with our opponents hopefully and since we don’t care about being near our commander or bunching splitting our forces leads more into mobility and what better than taking some bikes.
The best part about taking bikes with Remnant is again the free token. If you are in the danger of being shot, take a free dodge. Then you can do your compulsory move, aim and shoot. This gives you that consistent fire power while also having some survivability. If your bikes are safe, then take an aim so that they can double move and shoot to catch your opponent off guard. Be careful with this since we have no order control and if we pull them too early they could receive too much fire power in return.
After taking some bikes we have a few points left over so I’ve taken Improvised Orders to help us with some order control either to help draw a unit out of the bag we really need or to stall when we pull the bikes too early. What is important to know about this is the only order we give out is to the commander so once we have used Improvised orders, we can go with her next to recover to get a second use from it in the same round!
This is an updated version of my worlds list from last year where due to the points changes to the Dark Trooper heavies, I’ve had to drop the scout troopers but has given me the flexibility of choosing heavies that are not just the HH-12.
The main way to play this list is as I’ve said hide your commander at the back to make sure every unit starts with a free token. Use the Double Dark troopers as a scare tactic while the other troops also dish out damage. The bikes are there to add some flexibility and to help where needed. For the command cards remember that all the abilities from Pinned Down and Coordinated Fire still trigger even if the units have not received an order!
Loyal Commander build
The other way I’ve found to play Remnant is by having an active commander so that you can take programmed loyalty on the Dark Troopers. This play style is very different to the above since this one focus more on objective play.
This time we are going to start with a single fully decked out Dark Trooper squad. The reason for this they are going to be walking across the battlefield with our commander to make sure they keep that free token every turn.
By taking Moff Gideon we can always make sure the Dark Troopers have an order and we save this order till we have activated the unit from the bag. This enables us to pop our unit out, shoot at the enemy with an aim token. Then activate them a second time on our next activation to shoot and then hopefully hide behind some LOS blocker. Your opponent only gets one activation to respond to this play style.
The objective behind this is to keep the Dark Troopers alive so that when it comes to turn five or even six we can teleport our Dark Troopers with Gideon’s two pip to the enemy back objective and threaten it with a unit that can either contest the objective or score it to get the win.
The rest of the army has two themes. First, the cheaper troops which we have taken as a requirement before we can take multiples of other units are there to make sure we can score our home objectives and to just provide distractions. If we are playing an objective like hostage, then try and have a face up token and forgoes the free token. Use Ruthless to triple move with the objective to safety. otherwise, our core units are just activation padding.
The second hammer we have is three Death Troopers setup for range four firepower. They have a weight of dice, high courage, and the ability to stay away from the commander to receive that free aim. This unit is essentially providing covering fire till the Dark Troopers can engage from turn two onwards. The surging red saves will keep them alive once they are hunkered down in heavy cover while also dealing high damage to our opponents.
By having these three strong hitting units our opponent is forced to either focus these down and ignore the Dark Troopers or focus the Dark Troopers and then be shot by these every turn. Most armies will be able to deal with one at a time nut not both.
Remnant Conclusion
Remnant has one of the highest win rates based on my previous article about battle forces. There is a strong reason to run these at a tournament. If you are just wanting to run Dark Troopers for fun because of the Mandalorian then also look at this battle force. I have outlined two ways to play this battle force which are both very different play styles but similar in some ways with list building. The main thing to remember is the free token at the start of the turn if you are beyond range two of your commander. This alone is primary reason this battle force is quite strong.
I hope this article helps people with list building for Remnant and gives you some tips on how to play the lists!
