In Part 002 we will focus on those marauding menaces, the muscle-bound Grunts. Grunts prefer to get up-close and personal with the enemy as quickly as possible, so they all have the ‘Impatient’ trait. This means they cannot be given ‘Weapons Ready!’ orders. This does limit your tactical options somewhat, but Grunts are generally excellent in Close Combat(CC) to make up for it. Even their vehicles have CC attacks! So, let’s choose a nice well-rounded Grunt army to give us some flexibility.
At Gigaton, we have created a useful Army Builder tool to aid you in your discovery. This allows you to play around with units and formations and share them with friends or export them to a print-friendly list for future reference.
Choosing A 100 point Grunt Army
The Backbone
Aside from the mandatory Big Boss, we are going to need some Regular Grunts to provide the backbone of our fighting force. These infantry units are cheap and squishy but they pack a decent punch once you get them into CC, and they are quite able to chop up even a Star Marine with their big and basic melee weapons! Formations of Grunts need to be bigger than the average Star Marine formation due to their lower Defence value, so a number over 5 is generally prudent.
Snots
Regular Grunts are probably going to come under quite a bit of fire as they close on the enemy, and they can be given protection in the form of Snots! Snots are good for two things: dying and catching bullets for Grunts, which always results in death. Fortunately for Grunts, the death of a Snot goes entirely unrecorded in the annals of history, and Snots certainly don’t have the capability to better their situation. In Encounter, incoming hits on a Grunt formation can be allocated to Snots, which have the trait ‘expendable’ and thus do not generate Blast Markers. The number of Snots one might include in a formation depends on how much fire you expect it to come under, but a good ratio is 1-2 Snots to 3 Grunts.
Fast Attack
Most Grunt units are designed to get into CC quickly, but some strap themselves to rocket packs because time is money.. Or whatever Grunts use to barter! Jumpy Grunts are useful for tying up enemy heavy weapons while the rest of the mob moves in. They are significantly cheaper than the Star Marine equivalent, so it is not the end of the world if they get liquidated early on as long as they do their job and prevent the enemy from raining down fire or pinning your mob. A solid strategy is to include a formation of at least 3-4 Jumpy Grunts in your army.
Ranged Firepower
The next thing to consider is ranged firepower. Admittedly ‘effective’ shooting is not the strength of a Grunt army, but it does help to have some kind of area denial capability in your repertoire. There are a few options in the form of Flashy Grunts, Big Guns and Gun Wagons. Flashy grunts are uncharacteristically good at shooting for Grunts, but they are fairly short-ranged. Big Guns have decent range and firepower, and being infantry, they can camp out in buildings. If they do take incoming fire, they will absolutely die faster than you can say “duck!” Gun Wagons have decent firepower, decent armour, and decent movement. Overall, they excel at being decent! They even have CC attacks to ward off would-be CC assaults, which is a bonus. However, being vehicles they cannot enter buildings, and since their armour is merely ‘decent’ they are vulnerable to most weapons. Remember those Snots? They work with vehicles too, so a formation of Gun Wagons and Snots can work very well.
Extras
So now we have a Big Boss, some basic troops, some fast attack troops, and a couple of tanks to hit from further back. This leaves us with a few points to spend on extra toys. What you choose depends on the type of game you like to play. If you like to wash over your enemy in a big wave of brute force you could go with a Grunt Mech for extra wallop in CC. If you like to perform thrusting manoeuvres(steady!) in various places you could take a Grunt Aviator or two. Grunt Aviators have the ‘Swift’ trait so they can shoot and zoom in to support an engagement all in one activation. If you want to focus on infantry and improve your anti-armour capability you could take a few Sneaky Grunts. Sneaky Grunts have the ‘obscuring’ trait, meaning they are exceedingly difficult to hit. And once they get close to enemy vehicles they use powerful Stickybombs to put them out of action. Just don’t ask where the sticky comes from.
Here’s a sample Grunt army that uses the suggested options above:
My First Grunt Army
Formation 1 (30 pts)
- Big Boss: 1 × 30 pts (Hero Tokens: 5)
Formation 2 (20 pts)
- Regular Grunts: 6 × 3 pts
- Snots: 2 × 1 pts
Formation 3 (12 pts)
- Jumpy Grunts: 3 × 4 pts
Formation 4 (22 pts)
- Gun Wagon: 2 × 10 pts
- Snots: 2 × 1 pts
Formation 5 (16 pts)
- Grunt Aviator: 2 × 8 pts
Hero Token Summary
- Hero Tokens from Units: 5
- Additional Hero Tokens: 0 (0 pts)
- Total Hero Tokens: 5
Total Army Points: 100
Like our sample Star Marine army in the previous issue, we have placed the Big Boss (SC) in a formation on his own. The interesting thing about Grunts is this isn’t necessarily the best strategy (although it’s a perfectly good one)!
You could, for example, throw in several Snots to catch bullets for him. By doing this you could conceivably save yourself from using up several Hero Tokens to automatically save hits.
Or, since Grunt formations tend to be on the larger side, you could put him in with other units and assume his formation will be big enough to resist being broken.
