I've been skipping the Samurai and focusing on Saito/Oniwaban. Saito has smoke, they both have marker state, and the enemy has to work hard to anticipate where they're coming from. Combine it with Ryuken-9 and Yojimbo's koalas to help stall the enemy in the midfield, often within an Order or two of your hiding CC Specialists, and suddenly it's pretty easy to initiate that CC.
Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill," there is only "open fire" and "reload." And yes, you can combine them all. You shouldn't be trying to get into CC with anything that has even MA1, so you should be Berserking on die+12. Remember, once you get stats above 20, it becomes a bonus to your die roll. So if you don't Berserk and turn it into a normal roll, you're hitting them on CC26, so +6 to whatever you roll and critting on 14+ on the die. You should only be getting one ARO as you close to CC. If you are drawing more than that, you may not have enough terrain on the table. Can you shine a laser pointer from one side of the table to the other? If so, you definitely don't have enough terrain! It's a box of 4, anyway. Shotgun, Spitfire, and two with blades. One of them is dual-wielding, so makes a good proxy for Oyama. Sadly, Oyama's model is tiny compared to the box of 4.
I was wondering can Tachikoma in appropriate colors be used as Rui Shi/Lu Duan proxy? I have a spare one to convert/paint.
Eh, I was doing a split box deal on them. As for Rui/Shi, I'm grabbing a Kameel to be my wee Tachikoma to proxy for whichever S4 bot I want to run.
