To Blind the Eye: The Bulleteer Armbot

Among the first set of games of Infinity I actually played was a tournament in my local city of Salt Lake. I had only played one full sized game prior, but I'm a very "into the deep end" kind of player when I like something enough to want to get into it more competitively. In my experience, more is learned from tournament style events than any other time in a tabletop wargame. One of those games was against a spam of Panoceania remotes.

It never occurred to me that a style like that was viable (now I know better) and playing against them, I sort of fell in love with the adorable little robots. It didn't take long for me to pick up probably my favorite of the Panoceania remotes... the Bulleteer.

We just want to love you!

For one, I didn't realize the box comes with two of the little bastards! My hype was pretty real when I realized I had not just one but two of these cute little buggers. I'm not sure what it is about remotes, especially the PanO ones, that I find so endearing but I'm just happy seeing these little guys running around. But who cares how fun they look (well... a lot of people do), what do they actually do?

Bulleteers are a "short" range combat remote and is AVA 2. With a 6-4 move they certainly aren't slow, BS 12 is reasonable especially when joined with stuff like the hacker you had to bring anyway giving them Marksmanship Lv. 2, they're ARM 1 and BTS 3 with a single point of structure so they're not exactly taking hits well, and they bring G: Remote Presence, Repeater, and an ODD: Optical Disruptor to the table. Repeater is great, especially for the hackers I tend to use (Fusilier on a building prone for the whole game most of the time) because to receive buffs, the Bulleteer can be anywhere on the table it wants. Really what makes these little guys just a pain in the side, though, is their Optical Disruptor.

Your two profile options are either a heavy shotgun version which is 17 points and no SWC, and a spitfire which is 1 SWC and 23 points. Pretty cheap, especially in Military Orders where I play where many of our non-cheerleader options are closer to 30, if not considerably higher. This puts him at a comparable value to spitfire options like the MSV 2 Spec. Sergeant, who is one point and .5 SWC higher, but with a bit of a different role on the field. For the points, and with me often bringing a hacker for Fairy Dust for my big Heavy Infantry fireteams anyway, I've been hard pressed *not* to throw a Bulleteer into builds. I basically have always taken the Spitfire version, and have no experience with the shotgun; I'm sure it has its place and it's very cheap, but is going to have to be more of an aggressive piece than how I'm using him.

So what is he doing? Well, he's getting involved in a coordinated order with a few other pieces, using his considerable move to get into a good defensive position, and spending most of the game in suppressive fire. Of course the option is there for him to get more aggressive, but... a lot of my list designs as I've worked more and more builds together have been around setting up lots of denial so my HI fireteam can work largely unopposed and without being flanked. This little guy is an absolute beast on suppressive fire with his ODD + the MOD from Suppressive giving enemies a -9 on their shots against him. Get him into cover and you're dealing with a considerable -12 MOD to your roll trying to fight this little guy. Even MSV 1 troops are having a degree of difficulty, it's not until you hit MSV 2 where it counters it completely, and even then you have three shots, which will at the very least give you a chance. If you stack in a hacker throwing in Assisted Fire for the round, the opponent won't even benefit from cover, which makes even this little bot's BS 12 into a very good place.

All in all I've just found that even when the Bulleteer doesn't do a ton of upfront work, he's order-intensive enough to handle to either seriously slow down my opponent or force them out of a line of fire entirely. On my side he requires very little investment, just a coordinated order to get him where I want, maybe one more for him and/or my hacker depending on his positioning or buffs that I want on him, and he's going to then spend the entire game in suppressive, being a serious pain to deal with.

What are your thoughts? How do you use Bulleteers on the table? You find any neat tricks with them we can all use? I, for one, am excited to keep playing with this crazy little bot.

I may not be where you think I am...