To Slay the Hydra: Military Orders Fusiliers

I recently painted up my Fusiliers (well, one done, working on the other two) and it got me thinking about them and their importance in my lists builds. When I was buying into the game, I was offered the Panoceanian half of the Operation Icestorm box from a local, but I was a little gun-shy about making the purchase, because I was uncertain how much of the pieces I'd actually use. In the end, though, I was sold on getting that sweet Father Knight sculpt I wasn't likely to get anywhere else... but in the end, the piece from that set that has received the most time on the table are the humble Fusiliers.

Ready and willing to be pretty basic and straightforward!

Military Orders has some interesting options for Lieutenant, and by interesting I mean it's either Joan of Arc, Gabriele de Fersen, or something that probably feels really awkward to have as your lieutenant (although I've been enjoying some Sepulchre Knight LT action lately but... more on them another time.) Very nearly every LT option we have is expensive, pays some kind of SWC cost (and is also expensive), extremely aggressive, or some combination of all of those. Some, of course, bring a ton to the table; Joan of Arc is a prime example of an obvious LT who still brings a ton to the table with her brutal statline, fireteam options, and of course +1 SWC and Inspiring Leadership. That said, you may not want Joan in every list... and sometimes you need a better option than a Teutonic Knight that costs a point of SWC just to be your LT.

So, in comes the humble Fusilier. They're simple pieces, but very functional and we can bring three of them. The most common use I have, of course, is to just run three regular, 10 point combi rifle Fusiliers, and one of them is the LT. It's fairly obvious it's one of them, but you force the opponent to decide if he wants to potentially waste orders hunting down a Fusilier prone on a building in your deployment area who turns out to be the incorrect one between the three. Obviously this makes your Lieutenant squishy and easy to kill once found out, but it just makes them difficult to justify hunting down without really particular tools.

Hidden Lieutenant is obvious, but what else do we get with them? Well, a lot of options really. One of the strengths of a Fusilier is being able to bring just about whatever you want for relatively cheap. Want a Missile Launcher on the cheap? You've got one. MULTI Sniper? You bet. That said, they're very fragile, have no real bells and whistles, and for me if I want a heavy weapons option I'll probably splurge on an Order Sergeant going into a Fireteam, a heavy infantry model that can act as a good gun platform, or a TO Camo Infiltrator up there being a pain. However, some options are very good, the main one being the hacker. The Fusilier Hacker is the cheapest hacking option available to Military Orders (or Panoceania in general, I believe). In Military Orders this is significant due to our heavy reliance on Heavy Infantry, some of which extremely hackable (looking at you, Magister Knights...). Relatively cheap Fairy Dust feels, to me, like a necessity in all but extremely Order-Sergeant reliant builds (Hospitallers and Father Knights can get by without it, but it's still nice to have.) Also I play around a little with Crusader Brethren, so being able to supportware their drops in is a necessity.

Fusilier LT best girl.

Overall, I think three Fusiliers is just a necessary purchase for running Military Orders. We have few cheap orders, and our three Fusies can get us a cheap LT and some cheap orders run our high powered, angry Knight teams, or cheaper access to a hacker than we would typically have. Many of my lists start out with a Hospitaller/Magister Knight fireteam followed by three Fusiliers to fuel them up a bit before digging too much into all the extra bells and whistles of the list, just because I've found these little guys invaluable. So tell me... how do you run Fusiliers? Do you run them at all? Have you found anything else to be more efficient in their role in a list? Or are your Fusiliers always just Sepulchre Knights, biding their time?