Star Wars Legion: ARF Troopers is the first Grand Army of the Republic set to be released in the new style by Atomic Mass Games (AMG), and I must say it’s not a moment too soon. After a significant delay these beauties are finally available for purchase, and having picked myself up a box a few days ago here are my initial thoughts and feelings of the newest addition to the Clone Army. I’ll provide for you with a rundown of the entire contents of the box, with a review of each piece starting with the models themselves before coving the cards and finishing off with a consideration of their rules and abilities and my opinions for running them on the table. Without further ado, let’s begin!
The Clones
The first thing you’ll notice when opening the ARF Troopers is that they are on a sprue unlike the old Phase I and II Clones, so make sure to bring your clippers! Although it’ll take you a few extra minutes of clipping before you can get to painting and building, the advantages of the harder plastic that the sprue facilitates are very easily noticeable upon a quick comparison with an unbuilt Phase I Clone I had lying around. The details on the ARF Troopers are a lot sharper, which should make them more forgiving to paint and allow them to pop a lot more on the battlefield. The hands and DC-15A Blaster Rifles are also slightly smaller than before, with the rifle measuring 28mm from muzzle to stock compared to the original 33mm. As far as I can tell everything else is roughly the same size, but that half a centimeter is definitely noticeable if you have both in your army. The comparison of the two rifles did make me notice one positive though: lack of bending! If you’ve been playing Legion for a while now you’re probably familiar with soft plastic’s habit of bending, especially with lightsabers and long blasters, but hopefully the transition to hard plastic will make that a thing of the past.
Star Wars Legion: ARF Troopers is the first Grand Army of the Republic set to be released in the new style by Atomic Mass Games (AMG), and I must say it’s not a moment too soon. After a significant delay these beauties are finally available for purchase, and having picked myself up a box a few days ago here are my initial thoughts and feelings of the newest addition to the Clone Army. I’ll provide for you with a rundown of the entire contents of the box, with a review of each piece starting with the models themselves before coving the cards and finishing off with a consideration of their rules and abilities and my opinions for running them on the table. Without further ado, let’s begin!
The Clones
The first thing you’ll notice when opening the ARF Troopers is that they are on a sprue unlike the old Phase I and II Clones, so make sure to bring your clippers! Although it’ll take you a few extra minutes of clipping before you can get to painting and building, the advantages of the harder plastic that the sprue facilitates are very easily noticeable upon a quick comparison with an unbuilt Phase I Clone I had lying around. The details on the ARF Troopers are a lot sharper, which should make them more forgiving to paint and allow them to pop a lot more on the battlefield. The hands and DC-15A Blaster Rifles are also slightly smaller than before, with the rifle measuring 28mm from muzzle to stock compared to the original 33mm. As far as I can tell everything else is roughly the same size, but that half a centimeter is definitely noticeable if you have both in your army. The comparison of the two rifles did make me notice one positive though: lack of bending! If you’ve been playing Legion for a while now you’re probably familiar with soft plastic’s habit of bending, especially with lightsabers and long blasters, but hopefully the transition to hard plastic will make that a thing of the past.
New ARF Troopers (Left) and old Phase I Clones (Right). Just look at those sharp edges and improved details!
In terms of model customizability, your options are unfortunately limited. Each clone can choose between a Temuera Morrison-style unhelmeted head and a two-part ARF helmet, which remind me of the B1 Battle Droid heads but should hopefully be less fiddly to glue due to their size. You are also given a selection of mini terrain pieces to pose your clones on top of, including my personal favourite: a tiny BBQ grill complete with kebabs. Or I guess space kebabs, this is Star Wars afterall. Aside from these there are no other customisation options for the clones, their poses appear to be fixed and the heavy weapon trooper only has one weapon option. Each mini does have a unique and relatively dynamic pose, but if you intend on picking up multiple boxes your clones are going to start looking ironically similar to one another.
If you’ve not built any Legion models before, in terms of assembly you’ll require plastic clippers to remove the pieces from the sprue, and glue to attach them. Pretty much any plastic or super glue will work fine, just look for ones advertised as being for modelling. As for paints, that’s more down to personal taste than anything else (do not taste the paints!), but you’ll probably want an acrylic model paint such as Army Painter or Citadel. Just make sure to do a single colour base coat to start (spray paints make this quicker and easier) and always thin your paints with water to preserve details and make the paint last longer.
The Jedi
It’s time to move on now to the Jedi Guardian. The Jedi is on the same sprue as the clones and is therefore similarly detailed, and the lightsabers (yes, plural, I’ll get onto that soon!) have also undergone the same slimming routine that the DC-15As did. Hopefully this doesn’t make them too fragile, I’ve broken more spindly antennae than I care to admit when cutting them from sprues, but they are at a more realistic scale to the shows and movies. As for customisation, you have slightly more options than for the clones. For the head you can choose between a bare headed Zabrak or a hooded Zabrak. So great news if you happen to like Zabraks. The exciting part is the lightsabers which you have three options for: a traditional lightsaber held normally, a traditional lightsaber held in reverse Ahsoka-style, and a double-bladed lightsaber. This should be enough options to give you some creativity when building, although southpaws like myself will be disappointed to learn that all the lightsabers are held in the right hand, also ruling out making them wield two sabers without requiring some serious kitbashing. The only left hand option is an outstretched arm with an open grasp as though manipulating something with the force, which is pretty cool but I’ll have a left handed lightsaber next time thank you AMG.
Other Components
Now for the rest of the box. In terms of cards we have the unit card and three upgrade cards, which I’ll cover in more detail in the next section, with additional copies of each in German, French and Spanish. This is a nice change from the old sets which were in language specific boxes, and also gives you lots of spare cards to pop in a sleeve and put behind a printed proxy card whilst we wait for the official cards to be released for our older models. Speaking of sleeves, the upgrade cards are now larger to match the rest of the cards and all of them fit Stand Card Game Sleeves (the same size as Magic the Gathering and Pokémon if that means anything to you). The unit card no longer has reminder text for its abilities on the back, so you’ll need to check the Core Rules until you’ve got them memorised, and the upgrade cards are looking a little bland now as they’ve no longer got any art on them, but the larger size does make them more readable.
AMG seems to have cut back on the number of small cardboard pieces this time around, so the only ones you’ll be getting are the order tokens. As has been the case in all the new releases, this includes two options, the old style GAR specific token and the new style generic token. This means you have an option that matches your older models and an option that is a lot easier to reuse for other armies, another handy minor improvement.
If you’ve not opened a box of Legion models for a while you may not be aware that they no longer include the assembly instructions. In their place is a leaflet with some of AMG’s Legion social media pages and a QR code to the assembly instructions. Why they couldn’t have given you the paper instructions instead of the code I don’t know, but Here’s A Link to the instructions page to save you the hassle of scanning for it (it’s just a generic page with all their assembly instructions which you have to search individually unfortunately, but it’s the same one the QR code takes you to).
Bringing them to the Battlefield
66 Points
Observe 2 (Put 2 Observation tokens on an enemy at Range 3 which you can spend during an attack to reroll 1 Attack Die)
Scout 1 (Take a free Speed 1 move the turn this unit deploys)
Low Profile (Automatically makes 1 Cover Save whilst in Cover)
Unhindered (Ignores Speed reductions from difficult terrain)
It can take the following upgrades:
· Squad Leader
· Heavy Weapon
· Personnel
· Comms
· Training
· Grenades
Cache: Surge 1(The unit starts with 1 Surge Token which isn’t removed at the end of turn)
Cumbersome (Cannot Attack and Move in the same turn)
Impact 2 (When attacking a model with Armour, you can turn 2 Hits into Critical Hits)
Charge (After this unit takes a Move Action it may make a free Melee Attack)
Leader (This model is treated as the unit’s leader and you can only have one upgrade card with Leader)
Sidearm: Ranged (This model cannot use the Ranged weapons on the unit card)
Pierce 1 (You can cancel 1 non-critical saving role)
Now that all the details are out of the way, I can get on with my analysis. At 66 points ARF Troopers are 10 points more than Clone Trooper Infantry and 2 points more than ARC Troopers, which seems a little bit more than I would have expected considering they’re less manoeuvrable than the ARCs and don’t get to reduce enemy cover with Sharpshooter, but probably not too expensive to be worth running, considering Low Profile will help a lot when trying to keep them alive, something my ARCs seem to struggle with, and the observation tokens can be used by any of your units so aren’t wasted if you don’t need them for the ARFs. They also have twice as long a range as the ARCs, so you should be able to stick them in some cover in one corner of the battlefield for them to pick off enemies from a nice safe position. Their basic stats are all the same as your standard Clone Trooper Infantry which is no surprise, although losing the Reliable 1 which generated surge tokens every turn is a little disappointing considering the ARFs don’t surge to hit on their own. As a result you may want to keep some other clone units nearby to generate surges (and other green tokens) to share between them.
Speaking of surge tokens, the ARF Trooper Duo upgrade is a nice way to get 50% more shots and wounds as well as an extra surge token at the start of the game. These extra two models work out at the same points rate as adding an additional clone to the Clone Trooper Infantry squad (13 points per model in both cases), which helps make the initial points cost feel better and definitely seems like a worthwhile upgrade if you’ve got the points to spare.
The RPS-6 ARF Trooper upgrade is only 1 more point than its identical counterpart for Clone Trooper Infantry, but makes up for it with a distinct bonus in how you’re likely to be using it. Whilst the infantry will be trying to take objectives and likely get within the minimum range 2 of the RPS-6 making it redundant, the ARFs with their maximum range of 4 are much more likely to be able to consistently use it, making it a very useful tool if you know your opponent is bringing armour.
The Jedi Guardian, whilst a fun addition to this box, seems a little out of place. Granting this unit benefits to charging into melee range is certainly an odd choice considering the ARFs want to be staying as far away from enemy units as possible. Fortunately, the guardian is not exclusive to the ARFs but can be equipped onto any special forces clone troopers, which include the ARC Troopers who are much better suited to close quarters combat. If you can’t afford to take Fives with your ARCs, coming in at just over half as many points and with only one fewer attack die (and they’re red rather than black!) the Jedi Guardian is definitely an alternative to consider. Meanwhile you’re probably better off running Echo, ARC Marksman with the ARFs to grant the entire attack pool immunity to deflect and to generate an extra surge token every turn.
In terms of other upgrades for the ARF Troopers, Duck and Cover to increase your cover and guarantee the use of Low Profile to negate some hits and the HQ Uplink to give the unit orders when they’re out of range of your commander are both upgrades I’d consider using. My ideal build for the unit would probably be to add ARF Trooper Duo, Echo, ARC Marksman, and Duck and Cover for a total of 146 points, making a highly durable unit of seven models with long range, accurate weaponry that can take as many as 8 shots per turn.
