The best ARO pieces are the warcor and the Chaiyi Yaokong. They're cheap, still cost an enemy order to remove and will be a huge nuisance if they aren't taken care of. They're closely followed by Kuang Shi - pistol shots and dogged still have just as good crit chances as anything else, are hard to shift and they also bring chain rifles. I generally set up hidden deployments that then reveal these pieces as my opponent tries to attack, so defend in depth and force your opponent to spend orders removing cheap stuff ideally in your second order pool, then counter attack with a rui shi or su jian in your main pool. You can play with more aggressive ARO pieces - probably the 5 man Wu Ming link with rockets or zhanying missiles are amongst the best. Just be prepared to lose a 30+ point model, as all ARO pieces go down to the right active turn attacker. The light rocket launcher Wu Ming is the best, as the ARO is painful, good at catching links making poor movement, and has a good chance to go prone and survive the turn with one wound and leaving your 5 man link intact. Su Jian panzerfausts are quite a good option provided you don't cover too much of the table with them. They do have the benefit of taking a lot of punishment before getting knocked out and you can sophotect them back up if they can go prone after being a speed bump. If you can get the spitfire Su Jian forward and into suppressive fire that can also hold the enemy up for a long time. Rui Shi are occasionally useful because of the MSV2. If you can cover some irritating impetuous smoke thrower like Yojimbo or McMurrough running up a flank it can be worth throwing your Rui Shi under the bus to stop a first turn alpha strike. This doesn't really work on paper, but those models will try to run up a flank, and I've had a few games where I could leave the Rui Shi out just covering the model I want to ARO against while remaining hidden from the rest of the table. If you can go on an attack run with marksmanship up, then leave the Rui Shi on suppressive somewhere hard to outrange it can kill a lot of enemy models and smoke / camo / surprise shot won't help the enemy remove it. TR bots are good... they're just the first model in the game everyone has to figure out how to deal with to get good. Everyone will have a dozen plays to do it, from just using smoke to ignore it, smoke & visor tricks, TO camo tricks etc. Being able to spam 3 is nice for some missions though. ISS is a faction that does it's best work in the active turn. Better to deal with an incoming swiss guard / jotum / link team by throwing chaff in it's way and counter attacking than by letting it chew serious points or swc out of your list.
