Drones

Not to be confused with Tau Drones.

The scuttling swarms of heat rays and slicing tentacles

While the prey creature warriors cannot hope to stand up to the great fighting machines in open battle, they have swiftly learned to use terrain and subterfuge to cause huge amounts of damage to the machines of the invasion force. They will hide in burrows or structures or trees where the heat rays cannot dig them out, and wait for the Fighting machines to get close before scurrying out to throw their bombs at close range. The Colonial Conclave on the home-world took in the varied reports of the prey creatures actions, and some of the finest engineers of the race came together and devised a machine to dig the prey out of their holes. When the third wave of reinforcements landed on the target world, they brought with them plans for these "Drone Machines" as well as a number of working models.

The drone machines are not fully autonomous and therefore cannot operate without a being controlling them from their tripods. This being directs the machines around the battlefield and dedicates targets for them, where the limited self control will then take over in an attempt to destroy the target. The drone machines have proved themselves highly effective against the dug in prey creature warriors, burning them with their miniature heat rays and dismembering them with their small reaper blades. In large numbers, they can even bring down the armored projectile thrower vehicles which have proved so troublesome.

In All Quiet on the Martian Front

The drones are an interesting unit to compliment your force of large, somewhat unwieldy war walkers.

The first thing to keep in mind before things like firepower and survivability is the the range at which you can actually use these little machines. If your drone starts any phase (Move, Attack, Move Again) out side of 12 inches of a tripod with a drone controller, than the drone cannot carry out any actions until its back into the drone bubble. This means that you have to slow down your tripods so they don't out pace their drones who only have a speed of 6 inches.

With that out of the way, the drones are actually quite robust for infantry. With a defense of 6 and an armor of 7, they are only 1 armor less than a Steam tank. Prey creature infantry will find taking down the drone machines to be quiet the challenge.

Drones have two built in weapons, a light heat ray and a reaper tentacle. Light heat rays don't get sweep and only have +1 power, but that means that a swarm of drones has the same firepower as a Mk I steam tank platoon. Reaper tentacles get an additional +1 power for a total of +2 but can only be used in assault.

You may add 3 drones to a Martian force for 60 points.