Re: Infantry Walkers!

At 12:56 AM 11/20/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Kenneth Winland wrote:
> 
>>	   What do people think about infantry walkers?
>
>>	   I am just starting to paint up a bunch of walkers for DSII,
so I
>> have yet to find out their value in that scale.  I think that they
have a
>> role...in theory.
>
>The only, rpt, only use I have for walkers in Dirtside II is in the
>heavy weapons platoons of my Varangian Guard Orbital Insertion Infantry
>Regiment http://www.angelfire.com/va/basileus/guard.html
>For 141 points, I get a GMS/H on legs, whose only advantage over a
>68-point grav jeep w/ GMS/H is the fact that I can drop it from orbit. 
>If walkers ring your 'cool bell', then so be it.  Just keep in mind
that
>they end up very dead, very quickly against equal points in real
troops.
>
>John M. Atkinson
>

Depends on how you use 'em.  Treat your IW like little tanks, or use
them
as scouts, and they tend to die quickly.  However, if you make proper
use
of cover, and deploy them along with regular infantry or PA, they can be
quite effective.  We tend to have lots of large forests on our boards,
and
the IW can move through them without much problem.  I try keep my IW in
the
woods as much as possible, coming to the edge only to fire, and then
re-entering cover on the next turn.  Reasonably effective, and (perhaps
more importantly) annoying as hell.  Even better is having the IW pop
out
of a river...especially when the enemy is driving away with their backs
exposed.  They also work pretty well in an urban environment (for a few
rather blurry pictures of one of our urban boards, see
http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim/Monsters.html  --it's one of our
Monster
games, but the board is pretty typical), where they can move with a lot
more freedom than most tanks.  My experiences may be atypical, as we use
very densely terrained boards, but I find that the flexiblity of the IWs
makes them pretty useful.

John X Crimmins
johncrim@voicenet.com
  "...is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian.
They control information.  Don't ever piss one off."
  --Spider Robinson, The Callahan Touch.