In Part 003 we will focus on everybody’s favourite meat shield, the conscripted IDF. These heroes of their own realities just keep on coming even after comrades have died in droves. Fortunately they aren’t expensive to replace, and the empire is in no danger of running out of bodies soon. What individual IDF infantry lack in staying power is more than made up for by their excellent array of armour. They have what is arguably the best tank in Encounter: Phase One, and they can also take advantage of Flame Tanks that ignore cover, artillery to soften up the enemy from further away, and plenty of other interesting toys to boot.

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 IDF Army

The Backbone

The mandatory IDF Supreme Commander is the starting point for your IDF army, and a good starting point is to load up with regular Infantry for him to command. These units are rubbish individually, but at a cost of 2 points each, you can take quite a few. And when you have quite a few units all firing at once, something is bound to get through. Generally speaking you’ll want at least 5 Infantry in a formation, but even then you’ll need to bolster them somehow. A great way to do this is by adding a vehicle or two into the formation. They will have a higher Defence rating, and you can allocate incoming hits to the more resilient units to save losing too many Infantry on the way into a fight. The IDF APC is a good start, with a Defence rating of 5 it can soak up plenty of incoming firepower, and it comes with decent ranged weaponry to strike back at the enemy. We can also add a very reasonably priced Commander to the formation to provide additional resilience. He is a Hero and can take advantage of Hero Tokens, thus giving him access to automatic saves among other bonuses.

Ranged Firepower

So now we have our main thrusting formation, we can look at employing some serious firepower. The IDF excels at ranged combat and there are a few ways we could go here. One option would be to use artillery to pound the enemy into submission before they can get close. A combination of Griffin Heavy Mortars and the smaller Mortar Teams do a great job of thinning out masses of lighter units. You could also go with multiple Fire Support Teams hiding in the cover of buildings with which to pepper the enemy as they approach. Since you are likely early in your Encounter career, we should start with the straightforward and effective option: the IDF Main Battle Tank. This has an impressive Defence value of 6, making it impervious to small arms fire, and many heavier weapons. It also has massive range on its main gun and formidable secondary armaments. They are expensive and there are a number of ways we can protect high-value units, one of which we will cover below, and others we will cover in future guides.

Extras

Now we have the main backbone of our army and some heavy support, we can think about a few additional units to provide tactical flexibility. If you are likely to encounter massed infantry units hiding in buildings, you could do worse than taking a Flame Tank. If you feel like going for the ‘Disrupt Supply Lines’ victory points, a couple of formations of Scout Walkers would be ideal. For our suggested starter army we will choose a very interesting unit to compliment our existing options in the form of Snipers. These are weak and expensive units, but they have a trick up their sleeve; they have the ‘Sniper’ and ‘Obscuring’ traits. This means they are very hard to actually hit with ranged weapons, and they hit more easily and always get to choose their targets when making attacks. This spells trouble for high value enemy units, including commanders. A formation of two Snipers will be a useful addition to your army. We have a few points left, so let’s take a single Mortar Team. This unit is unlikely to cause actual damage, but it can fire ‘Smoke’ which is extremely useful for screening your fleshy Infantry and high value tanks. If it dies in the opening moves of the game… IDF meat is cheap anyway!

Here’s a sample IDF army that uses the suggested options above:

My First IDF Army

Formation 1 (25 pts)

Supreme Commander: 1 × 25 pts (Hero Tokens: 5)

Formation 2 (31 pts)

Commander: 1 × 10 pts
Infantry: 5 × 2 pts
IDF APC: 1 × 11 pts

Formation 3 (20 pts)

IDF MBT: 1 × 20 pts

Formation 4 (18 pts)

Snipers: 2 × 9 pts

Formation 5 (6 pts)

Mortar Team: 1 × 6 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 and Grunt armies in previous issues, we have placed the Supreme Commander (SC) in a formation on his own. Unlike the other two Supreme Commanders he is better suited to sitting back and using superior ranged firepower to destroy enemy units from afar. In fact, he is excellent in this role, as Hero Tokens can be used to guarantee hits that would otherwise be difficult to pull off, for example into cover or through Smoke.