Hello, everyone! So, as I have won my Jager, I've got to analyse it. As of now, it is a quite rare miniature, which was not released to general public. So, a unit itself generally not available without secondary market or ITS wins. In our community, Jager is considered to be more of a shelf trophy and less of a good model on the battlefield, so there is no problem of effectiveness vs. availability. But what is the general consensus? What do you think? Is it allowed to proxy limited release unit? Is it more effective then a glorified deer's head on a wall? Where are its strong points?
Its a good model with nice Irregular discount, and can make all your enemy HI/TAGs really, really worried with his E/Mitter and Mono CCW.
You can always proxy any miniature on the Army, as long as the opponent is ok with it (people usually is unless you are mixing troops like mad, kinda "look this riot is Juana, this Orc is De Fersen, this Suryat is HMG Hospitaler, this Brigada is a regular hospitaler, and this Mormaer is another hospitaler" XD), and on tournaments with the allowance of the organizers. That being said, I would not suggest to carry 2 Cube Jaegers. One is ok, depending on what else you have access to, and I value more the SMG profile (Suppresive Fire on the enemy's side, non-hackable specialist, etc...), the Mono CCW I see it as "unoptimizer tax", so I would not count on it being very useful.
Jaeger has great CCW with Stealth, but bad CC; good choice of weapons but low BS; sorta good WIP but only Paramedic. I cannot get what makes them tick for an expensive and rare to get model.
Rarity of getting them has nothing to do with the unit itself. Apart from being able to proxy as xagroth said, there will be a general release version anyway.
For Caledonia, the Cube Jeager's usefulness 100% outstrips it's availability. However since its not available at all, and would only be slightly more useful than a volunteer paramedic, I can live with that... In vanilla Ariadna, its outshined (outshone?) by the availability of 51 flavours of medic at half the cost, which I think is true of most armys really, even in pano where Joan can make it a regular trooper, its not any better at healing than a Fusilier or Acontecimento regular, and Bolts, Kamau and Bagh-Mari all come with mimetism or Veteran for similar costs...
Mono CCW isn't all that expensive in the grand scheme of things and as a flanking model with dangerous weaponry it's the SWC cost that's expensive in my opinion. The intended way, I think, to make the mono CCW work is to immobilize a Jotum and then mono it instead of spending some 4-5 orders SMGing it to death.
Of course not, my opinion is very Yu Jing-centric and somewhat tainted by a few armies I am considering buying into (Pan-O is not one of them). Had JSA had access to CJ, I might've had different opinions as well.
I play Aleph mostly and I can't wrap my head around Jager. It is so utterly lacking in focus... Yes, you could immobilize a TAG and then CC it to death? mut C14 can very possibly fail.
20 pts Ekdromoi closing from behind and getting Engaged with the TAG... AM3, DA Weapon, CC gets to "cannot fail" levels... It's a nice cheap AD specialist, however, something Aleph lacks to an extent.
Personally I think the mono CCW is a red herring. What we have is an AD:2 specialist for less than 20 points, this can be a massive boon to some factions (like PanO whose cheapest AD Specialist is 28 points) but not that great for others (Nomads already have Tomcats). The SMG lets it work as a Suppressive Fire speedbump, and the E-Mitter is a fun opportunistic flanking weapon.
It depends on the faction If you need a cheap AD specialist then they are that, but if you play a faction that already has that... like I could take a Tomcat or Hellcat for only a few points more and 0 SWC, and they're quite a lot better. They aren't that appealing because they're decidedly average in performance, and it's easy to find someone who does the same job but better for slightly more.
I was pleasantly surprised to run into them in two of my 4 games at Saturday LVO. I see it as a cheap problem solver. Need to crack some armor? Push a button? Bog down a high-cost target that's bad in CC? All doable. It's very versatile that way. You won't be reliably fileting TAGs with Mono Crits in the same way that Shinobu does, but you can still jump into CC with a TAG or HI and make the opponent seriously worried about attempting that F2F roll without burning a bunch of orders to bring in outside help to break up the fight. And the two different weapon loadouts bring nice choices. As mentioned, you can hunt a big target and make use of the very versatile and cheap SMG, or you can take down big game or clear clustered troops with the shotgun. All good choices. Since I'm primarily focusing on NCA, Acon, JSA, and (eventually) Varuna, there's appeal across the board there. The Garuda's great but isn't a Specialist, is vulnerable to hacking, and limited by all the things REMs are bad at. The Akalis is fine, but lacks that big threatening toolbox (there's a full 10 point difference in cost if you just want a Specialist who can push a button, and the Akalis is slower and vulnerable to hostile Hacking.) JSA likes having any AD at all, so net gain there. And Varuna's AD choice remains to be seen, but converting the Jager to look like a Helot could be fun too.
They're humanoids, two arms two legs etc, but have large swimminh tails, are hairless, and have a rubbery mantlet on their head that protects their brain. Kiiiind of like that fishman dude in Shape of Water is how I imagine
