Infinity Unit Review: Marauders, 5307th Ranger Unit

Next up on my USARF unit reviews are the Marauders. They're an important part of the USAriadna Ranger Force, as their only source of a Haris team. Marauders are a solid mid-field unit, carrying a variety of weapons to punish anyone that gets too close.

Profile

First off, Marauders have a very similar stat line to Grunts, moving 4-2 with Arm 3, and they have an extra point of BS and WIP. It's their special skills that differentiate them significantly from Grunts, able to deploy an extra 4" up the board with Forward Deployment, and extremely obnoxious to kill with Dogged. Jungle Terrain and Stealth are situationally helpful, the later is likely to come up more often in your games. Being able to sneak up behind someone, or move around enemy troopers without triggering AROs can be quite handy at the right time.

The "standard" profile carries an interesting combination of equipment, with a heavy flamethrower, rifle, and heavy pistol. Obviously geared for close ranged fighting, a dogged heavy flamethrower can cause a major headache if it gets into the right spot. The rifle helps close the gap, and if your enemy is within range of both the rifle and the flamethrower, they'll have to make the choice between shooting you and taking the flamethrower hit, or dodging and letting you shoot at no risk with the rifle or heavy pistol. I would also consider the boarding shotgun with mines version as a fairly standard profile, and one I've been considering a lot lately to run as a mid-field solo piece. The extra deployment range helps to get them in a defensive position and you can really hold an objective well with a shotgun in cover surrounded by mines, on an ARM 6 dogged model.

The only specialist available to the link is the Paramedic. This is a bit awkward as the unit has dogged, so you are unlikely to get much use out of it, but it is nearly essential to add to a link when you're playing ITS missions.

The Haris option for the link is the only Haris in USAriadna, but you do pay a hefty premium of 1 SWC. This can be an issue in some lists, but as I've talked about before, there are so many 0.5 SWC weapons available, that you can easily make a list around that SWC tax.

Special Weapons

Their SWC profiles offer a solid set of weapons covering every range band. The heavy rocket launcher is my favorite choice, when linked firing at B3 with a template weapon is just brutal, and a B5 assault pistol will really surprise people that get too close. The MSV1 on the heavy rocket launcher and sniper rifle help quite a bit when dealing with enemy camouflage, mimetism and ODD units. In a Haris, both the sniper rifle and heavy rocket launcher are fantastic choices, gaining the extra burst to make their normally low-burst weapons into powerhouse guns, I've even considered running a Haris of two snipers.

The Molotok is another brutal weapon, though I tend to leave it out of Haris teams. In a 5-man link however, a BS15 Molotok is going to get work done!

Overall, the Marauders are a mid-field nightmare for your opponent. The 5307th carry a potent combination of mid-short ranged weapons with shotguns, heavy flamethrowers, rifles and molotoks, with long-range support of heavy rocket launchers and snipers with MSV1, making them a versatile and resilient unit to push up the board.