Archer (Blue Alert)

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*"Guns? Too modern for my taste!"*

- Archers on why they use such anachronistic weapons

## Tactical Analysis

* *A quiver full of death*: The AROs launched by archers are high speed, high temperature projectiles highly effective against enemy vehicles, battlesuits, and aircraft, given the propulsion they need to go the distance by the powerful bows they wield and their augmented musculature. In close combat, their enhanced reflexes, senses, and strength allow them to break the necks of most other infantry with their bare hands.

* *Hey watch this*: Archers are more than accurate enough to guide their AROs into vulnerable motive components of vehicles, locking aircraft into a single path of movement or immobilising vehicles and battlesuits until they can fix the damage dealt. THis allows Epsilon to quickly overwhelm the afflicted target which is now no longer able to escape its devious trickery.

* *Annoying arrows*: The model of AROs used by Archers aren't very effective or efficient against infantry, who are much more able to dodge them, shelter behind cover, and don't properly set off the thermal pulse for maximum effect. This gives them a significant weakness to infantry in long range fire fights, and they pay for their greater speed compared to most basic anti-armour/air troops with less damage per shot than most of their counterparts. Anti-infantry vehicles are also a rather risky engagement and they are poor suited for dealing with structures.

* *I'm on a ramapge!*: The best archers are now being fitted with special "bodkin" AROs that can pierce through multiple targets at a time, making them extremely punishing to large numbers of targets. These AROs, when massed; are also significantly more deadly to infantry, letting a large number of heroic archers cut down anything but the heaviest of units trying to get past them.

## Background Information

### Formation

Geoffrey is always interested in looking for unusual solutions to problems. To subvert enemy expectations and thwart the usual expected counters. Missiles could be shot down or jammed, conventional flak cannons usually missed aircraft more than they hit, the gatling gun while effective wasn't great against heavier targets, and spectrum weapons had a tremendous; easily visible heat signature. So he set his finest minds on the creation of a man portable means of launching AROs, Epsilon's new and deadly form of guided projectile; at its foes. However there was a problem. ARO projectiles were ill suited for most forms of man porable tube launchers and the current types of vehicular launchers were proving difficult to scale down. It was then that Epsilon's engineers came upon another solution; why not a bow for the ARO?

The bow could provide the initial launch velocity and the ARO would guide itself to targets from there. It was silent, easily portable, nobody would ever see it coming, and it was relatively quick to fire compared to most shoulder mounted launchers. It was a seemingly ideal solution that earned the engineers much favour from on the disciples and the messsiah of Epsilon. There was but a single issue, and it was quite a big one. Normal humans weren't strong enough to launch the ARO with enough velocity to make it effective. A bow with a draw strength great enough to give the ARO the velocity it needed would require the world's strongest men to pull; not particularly quickly at that; and would rapidly exhaust even them. Another issue was that humans had issues setting up their targets quickly enough to ensure reliable hits on fast moving targets without the aid of bulky mechanical lock on systems. This setback did not discourage Epsilon however, as the geneticists of Headquarters' decided to simply make stronger, faster, people.

Taking notes from the Brute project, Headquarters created the "strongmen"; who would be slighter but smarter and quicker than the rather childishly minded Brutes. With augmented senses able to see even high flying aircraft or distant tanks with the naked eye, enhanced reflexes able to virtually instantly acquire and fire upon a target accurately enough to ensure the guided ARO hits its mark, and strong enough to easily pull the bow this new breed of soldier was the ideal for the weapon system. And so the Archers were amassed in secret; augmented from existing recruits or grown from scratch in Epsilon's biological vats to join the Dominion's ever growing hidden army. The armour of Epsilon's foes would be no match for these monuments to Epsilon's mastery of the human mind, body, and soul.

The Archers would be an enthusiastic corps within the growing missionary divisions; borderline sadistic in fact compared to their counterparts. Obsessed with their own strength and physical superiority over "normal" people, they constantly sought to push their already augmented bodies even further. It is joked that Archers are usually seen at gyms when they're not in battle, trying the hardest exercises they can to both improve themselves and show off to their unaugmented counterparts. While this sort of arrogance was common amongst strongmen, archers in particular tended to be particularly gleeful about the carnage they could cause. A single well placed shot could send a plane spiralling to the doom of hundreds or trap a tank in a lethal ambush. And surely such would please the disciples who had given them these gifts; and it did.

### World War III

In covert operations carried out before and during the war, the archers tended to leave behind trails of difficult to explain destruction as the rare survivors who avoided being mindwiped babbled nonsense about bowmen who stood more than two meters tall and could hit impossibly small targets from incredibly far away without stopping to acquire a lock on. Epsilon's capabilities were somewhat known to intelligence and military circles, but getting all the facts was hard; especially when the conventional armies of the Allies and their compatriots were taking most of the attention off of the growing Dominion's own efforts. And who would really believe that bowmen were a threat to tanks and modern jets anyway?

This meant that when the order came at last to betray the Allies and show the world the might of the missionary divisions; the Archers were very often dismissed as either concealing their real weapons or were some sort of bluff by the Dominion. It was only during the battle of Tela against Comintern where Epsilon archers shot down the elite "Thunder Squadron" who thought they could just fly over a bunch of bowmen on a ridge only to pay with their lives; leaving only one survivor who had a nervous breakdown afterward; and with confirmation that the Empire was also deploying high tech archers who could threaten aircraft (but not vehicles) that the threat was taken truly seriously.

Archers were constant companions of initiates as the two covered each other's particular weaknesses and were easy to amass in massive numbers, making for a difficult to overcome wave of cheap infantry who could tear through just about anything they could get in range of. These waves of soldiers were a common sight throughout the third world war, and the efforts to stop them can be marked by the graveyards of twisted wreckage strewn about the battlefields of the world. In particular, the Empire which typically disdained very long ranged or indirect fire weapons and relied on generally fragile war machines; suffered in their efforts to battle Epsilon's Archers even as the Dominion's Archers and the Empire's Archer Maidens developed a bitter rivalry and profound hared for one another.