Hey all. Was throwing this out on the LOS Facebook page and wanted to see if anyone else had similar thoughts:
Quick question. Will there be a release of human soldiers not wearing Powered Armour? I’m thinking about troops that maybe garrisoned somewhere or in a support role and won’t always be needing to suit up in a PBA? There’s lots of scenarios that might dictate the presence of non-PBA’ed troops and gamers would probably like the flexibility as well (ie: when army-building)
Perhaps consider PBA-equipped Commandos as Heavy Infantry while guys pulling guard duty or starship crews as Light Infantry or something similar. Make sense?
I think it’s good that the humans have the PBA-equipped commando as the “face” of the faction, but I think it would also make sense to throw in less-armoured variants as well for a number of in-game reasons.
When we made fan-made conversions for using other manufacturers figures in LOS (https://stevegibsongames.wordpress.com/legions-of-steel/legions-of-steel-conversion-files/), we found it challenging to model unarmored or lightly armored figures. When the baseline figure (GM+0) is a servo-assisted powered armor trooper, and the light power armor was GM+1, that left you very little room in a game based on D6's. The logical extension would be flak vest and helmet, GM+2, and unarmored civvies at GM+3. It's tough to balance a scenario when you have such soft and easy to kill troops. A whole section of GM+2 figures could be wiped out with a single K-pulse grenade thrown somewhere in the vicinity of them (like around the corner from them). The way the UPVs seemed to work in the past, half the cost of a figure was its blaster. So you spent a lot of points paying for weapons that would never survive to be used in a fight. My preference would be a D10 or D12 based system, but that's not the plan. Ultimately, we just fudged it, making flak vest and helmeted figures GM+1.
Cyber-Techies. They've learn how to Jack a enemy bot (basic level techie can only jack Nightmares) when within 6 squares and Line of sight. Similar to the runaways Jacking the PBA's, but with programs that override the security programs in the Steel bots so that they can use them offensively.
That is a project I would like to get to as we develop the line. I am very interested in that too. We will be coming out with an army for the Auslanders, the humans left behind on Abandon during the last large confrontation there about 50 years ago. They will be less armoured up with a more nomadic-cyber-tech look. Here is an image that inspired me for the Auslanders from Igor Kotsuba who did the 7Gen Paladin PBA design.
I will be working hard at making this faction look different and awesome but will first be working on and releasing the Fantasians, Infranite and Black Empire.