#Are grenades ever worth it? is there a way to make them viable without breaking the game?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

undone holly
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Do you guys feel grenades are ever worth it? I feel its a little silly that they can only be used at range 1, limiting their use to units that are essentially built for melee. Would making the grenades range 2 break them? Are there certain grenades that are simply useless? What do you guys think?

digital oak
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Sonic imploders were released a while ahead of the new panic rules but still have no real purpose. You can’t stack the suppression and you can’t split fire multiple grenades since all identical weapons must be in the same pool. Same issue with the droid poppers. A high velocity or immune deflect grenades might be useful at range 1 but otherwise it’s just not worth taking any grenades

teal kestrel
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Some heavies are already range 1, which makes grenades worth it sometimes. My loaded black suns always have frags since they don’t surge and I’m already trying to get to range 1 for the magdet. Frags on flame snows has also been a thing for a long time. That being said, I think frag grenades are pretty much the only useful one.

restive heron
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I'd love to see all grenades made stronger but probably just make them all expend when used

upper mural
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I think you can make arguments for smoke given the cover changes on some units? Cheap mobile cover for low profile units is not bad.

Perhaps making a grenade launcher upgrade available to increase grenade range would be good, or make grenades an extra mini? Might bloat too much though

tardy basin
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I found frenades on Z6 GAR , to crazy good

raw pasture
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Grenades on units be airdropped can be useful

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I’d be interested in expend grenades for range 2

tardy basin
azure viper
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I really like smoke Grenades for Melee Units to advanced, but I dont take other granades

raw pasture
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smokes just need the board to give them value

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which I think is pretty hard to do... you can usually grab heavy or light cover just by swinging minis left and right as you even just run in a straight line

azure viper
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It is more situational, but still only three points

upper mural
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I agree with goodluck, can be board dependant but makes an open field much more appealing to push if you have a smoke. Can move, dodge and smoke grenade or double move smoke.

azure viper
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Or just save your Force user if he stays in the open when you mess up

undone holly
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got it, so it looks like mostly everyone either uses smoke grenades or frag grenades and the others aren't really used

teal kestrel
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Impact grenades are meh since you don’t really want to be that close to any piece of armor. Concussions grenades are a bit lackluster since most range 1 weapons have blast already and at range 1 your target is less likely to have cover anyways.

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Droid poppers speak for themselves. Just shoot droids and they die. Don’t need ion lol.

raw pasture
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I’m team impact grenades if you are an aggro list your corps carrying those can threaten armor still.

I’ve done LAAT drops with clone shotguns with impact nades

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That’s nasty. Drop out of a LAAT 7B1W 1-2 surge tokens 2 aims. Impact 5 pierce 1

sand acorn
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Run frags on full black sun spam and you will be convinced that they are worth it

echo mesa
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Grenades need to be indirect. If you could throw them over walls or around corners they’d be instantly interesting and viable.

tardy basin
echo mesa
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lol. Alex Davy was an Infinity fan, which has some pretty cool rules for grenades

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Surprised he didn’t include indirect fire actually. I know they had a bias for simplicity.

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As I recall, he said in a podcast that they actually had another symbol originally on the dice, to allow for other design elements…

undone holly
echo mesa
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I think the general problem with grenades is that the don’t scale well with a tabletop game. According to Wikipedia, re: real life grenades:

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“Modern fragmentation grenades, such as the United States M67 grenade, have a wounding radius of 15 m (49 ft) – half that of older style grenades, which can still be encountered – and can be thrown about 40 m (130 ft). Fragments may travel more than 200 m (660 ft).”

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That means in real life terms, a Legion model could easily throw a grenade from its deployment zone on the long edge of a Legion map to the opposite side of the map (3 real feet) with no problem.

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And the wounding/killing diameter would be about 16” (!!!) or half the board!

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(If I have my 30-second math right)

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That’s just not… very good for the game.

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Granted there is a ton of terrain to consider…

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But I bet the Legion designers just don’t really want to deal with grenades because they wouldn’t make for a very good game so they just made them weak and short ranged and moved on.

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I played Advanced Squad Leader back in the day, and they basically abstracted grenades down to doubling attack value when in close combat (adjacent or same hexes as I recall), which with about 40 meters (120 feet) per hex.

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So range 1 for Legion Grenade lethality might make total sense in that regard, even though it’d be more realistic to allow them to be thrown to range 2 or 3 on a Legion measure.

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🤷‍♂️

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I saw some optional Legion Rules one group produced which gave an extra die on all attacks coming from a height advantage, and an extra defensive die when defending from height. Probably makes some sense, but at the cost of extra rules complexity in what is already a pretty complex game.

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And would it actually make Legion better?

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I think that’s the main thing here.

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I’d like to see some “optional rules” for legion that might be attempted for a “season” or two of competitive play - that might tell the story of whether or not more lethal grenades would be a good or bad thing for the game.

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(Infinity does this all the time. Seasons with different rules and scenarios are a huge part of that game)

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After Legion is fully flushed out with all units for every faction (and probably the First Order faction in the future, maybe some High Republic factions), I’m sure we’ll see some tweaks to scenario and probably seasonal variations.

night kraken
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I use Frag grenades on my black suns squad, squad goes in the bus. bus take them to target. squad comes out, target goes BOOM

undone holly
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Yeah real life numbers dont make sense for legion. Or even starwars for that matter. We have actually seen impact grenades as well as thermal detonators in use a lot of times in various medias, and i each one the shrapnel never travels far. If you watch the scene in clone wars season 7 where the jet troopers throw grenades. Each explosion is pretty localized

stray jasper
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Give b1s a grenade slot and their usage will go up real quick

azure viper
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Oh please AMG

valid lichen
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I’ve had some pretty good interactions with Rebels/Ion trooper/impact grenades. Took out more than one ATST that way.

tribal lynx
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I think grenades are well worth it. There is a higher risk and reward attached to it. Thats the trade off. If you buff the grenades theres no risk and then certain abilities that extend range would make them especially deadly. Imagine ttc with an already range 2 frag grenade.

echo mesa
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No seriously competitive lists use grenades as far as I am aware.

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Does anyone have the data handy on this? (I am too lazy too look)

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If we want them to see more use (do we?), there’d need to be some changes to compel top tier lists to forgo something else in order to take them.

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The real question is: do we need grenades in this game at all? Is it not deadly enough at close range? Is extending the range a good thing?

stray jasper
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You see em occasionally on black sun

echo mesa
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There is so much abstraction in this game, you could potentially argue that grenade damage is already factored in to the dice and armor values currently anyway.

echo mesa
stray jasper
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Did the pink sun list from worlds past year have grenades? I can’t remember

echo mesa
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🤷‍♂️ doesn’t really matter that list does not show up often and was counter meta at the time anyway as I understand it.

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At some point after Legion is fully flushed out, perhaps there will be “seasons” where they do temporary rule changes for 6 months or a year. AMG could use these periods to make small modifications to the core rules and see how they play out across the meta. Infinity does this really well and it works.

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Give all corps units grenades (or all “heavy core units” or something) for free and see how it warps (or doesn’t warp) the meta and what the players think about the change.