N4 USAriadna Ranger Force - First Impressions

Anyone who has read my blog before probably knows that USARF is likely my favorite army to play in all of Infinity. They don’t have tons of bells and whistles, but they do have lots of armor and fire, which I greatly appreciate. Now that N4 has been here for a minute, I’ve had some time to digest the changes for my beloved army in the new edition. It doesn’t take long to find some griping on the forums or Facebook* about USARF, but honestly, I think it’s mostly a typical internet negative feedback loop, rather than actual issues with the gameplay surrounding the army.

N4 Changes

Now, I’m not going to dig deep into the general rules of N4, but I do want to talk about a few core mechanic changes which directly affect USARF players.

Critical Hits. First off is the critical hit change, simply put, instead of taking an automatic wound from the attack, the hit causes one additional save. So a missile critical in N3 would cause one automatic wound, plus two saves, while in N4 it causes 4 saves. Overall this isn’t a huge change, since losing the F2F roll is huge anyhow, but it does mean that all our ARM3 troops became slightly tougher in the face of a critical hit.

Hacking. At first it’s easy to ignore the hacking changes in N3, we have little to no hacking, and very little of our army is hackable… or is it? Now that Spotlight is an ARO, any of our troops moving through enemy repeaters now have to worry about becoming Targeted. This is a huge deal for Ariadna where we could previously walk through repeaters with impunity. Being Targeted isn’t the end of the world, but if the enemy has a guided missile remote, it can be very problematic. Also since it gives the enemy a bonus to fire at you, it plays directly against a large weakness of USARF, turning F2F rolls in your favor through modifiers.

Multi-Spectral Visor. Our troops armed with MSV1 can shoot through smoke, though at a hefty -6 penalty. Overall this is AWESOME, if you can use smoke to put that F2F in your favor anyhow, or zero someone out to shoot back at you, it’s well worth the massive penalty. This also means that smoke is ineffective in face to face rolls against MSV1 armed troops… which is both good for us (we only have MSV1) and bad for us (we rely on smoke). This is an incredibly important change to be aware of, and the full implications of it will take some time to feel out.

Tactical Window. Finally, if the broad N4 changes, this one is probably one of the biggest for our army. In effect, we cannot make an army with more than 15 troops. If you were playing a serious grunt spam before with minesweeper muls to get near 20 orders, you’re going to be disappointed. I honestly never thought that was the most competitive way to play the army, and most of my lists clocked in at 14-16 orders anyhow. There is definitely going to be some debate on how to split your order groups though, I’m leaning towards 8/7 most of the time. The biggest deal about this change is that you’re going to have to take some of the more powerful (read expensive) options to fill out points, but these troops are not bad at all, and were just overshadowed by order spam. Now that order spam isn’t a thing, we can take other cool units.

Unit Changes

Now, I plan on going back and updating all of my previous USARF unit review articles, so I won’t get too deep into them, but I think it’s worth talking about some of the biggest changes.

The Unknown Ranger. Holy hell this guy got BEEFY. While he was difficult to justify in N3, his new N4 profiles are just incredible. In combat he’s pretty terrifying with buffs to his CC stat, gaining Martial Arts L2 (which is N3’s version of L3), Shock Immunity, Mimetism (-3), Tactical Awareness, and an MSV1, The Unknown Ranger does what The Unknown Ranger wants. While we did lose Chain of Command, all profiles are specialist operatives, so he can still push buttons. I think this chonk is going to make it into many lists in N4.

Devil Dogs. We all know that I was already a proponent of the Devil Dog, and the N4 rules did nerf both his smoke, and super-jump, but both profiles lost 8-9 points… so that’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Furthermore, the change to shotguns means the Heavy Shotgun (my favorite profile) now dishes out a disgusting B2 DAM15 direct template… I almost feel bad for the Chain Rifle.

Airborne Rangers. Another unit that’s easy to gloss right over, I’ve always wanted to run more Airborne Rangers, but was always turned off by Parachutist. Well, Parachutist has been upgraded to work how Airborne Infiltration worked in N3, so you can pick which side to deploy on, at the time of deployment! Couple that with shedding a point here and there, they’re starting to feel a lot more viable.

Grunt Infiltrators. Probably the most feared unit in all of USARF, by those who had faced them, Grunt Infiltrators got a load better in my book! They’ve now upgraded their Inferior Infiltration to FULL BLOWN INFILTRATION! That right there is incredible, and probably why Unlimited Insertion won’t be popular if you’ve got USARF in your local meta. I’ve never been a huge fan of the infiltrator myself, when it comes to developing winning strategies for tournaments, relying on a 40% chance of success has often left me disappointed, with 3-4 heavy flamethrower stuck in my deployment zone. Now I’ll continue to take a couple of them in an army, over-infiltrating when appropriate, but otherwise setting up a midfield full of heavy flamethrowers sounds quite nice to me.

Overall Impressions

It’s clear that USARF did not receive as many exciting changes as other armies in this edition, and I really wish they’d have done a bit more with Minutemen (MOV 6-2, X-Visors and Regeneration, or all as Paramedics, would fit them quite well, and make them very unique), but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with USARF. On the table, they’re going to still piece-trade like nobody’s business, if they don’t outright survive due to the ease of getting cover (for a lovely ARM6). With the cap of 15 troops, you’re going to have more terrifying threats like Mavericks and Devil Dogs for your opponent to handle.

There are still going to be tough matchups, but that’s not new for USARF, and we genuinely have more tools to handle them (and even more direct templates). I’m looking forward to getting to our Ariadna week on Late Night Wargames so that I can play a few more games with my freedom fighters, and once the world gets back to normal, bringing them to tournaments will be a must.