Ogre Minelayer

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*"This is a mine and it's yours."*

- In game description of the mine weapon from *Mud and Blood 2*, a popular Syndicate televideo game
## Tactical Analysis

* **Don't Tread on These**: The Minelayer is an old war machine dating back to WWII. It is capable of denying the use of vast expanses of land from the enemy all by itself. It can lay down mines in the most unexpected of areas to cripple an enemy advance, prevent the enemy from securing an ore node or tech structure, or even mine the choke to their base to stop them from even getting out in the first place.

* **Exactly What it Says on the Tin**: The Minelayer is armed with, you guessed it, mines. The Minelayer is able to deploy four mines at once, one infront, one to the left, one to the right and one right behind the Minelayer. The Minelayer takes a short while to deploy these mines and is hidden from enemy sight while doing so.

* **That Was Supposed to Blow Up With You Standing On it...**: However, scouts can easily detect the mines, allowing enemies to either go around them, destroy the mines with artillery fire or disarm the mines with an engineer. The mines cannot be directly deployed on enemies, as they have a short arming time and can be crushed while arming.

* **What More do You Want?**: The mines do the job, not the Minelayer itself, and there is very little Continental engineers can do to improve that.

## History

When the Freedom Guard joined the Continentals, not all of the men and women with it were intent on fighting the Allies so much as fighting *any* force that would occupy their homes. This included the Freedom Guard's detachment of Italian combat engineers, who intend to topple the Allies only as the first step: these brave partisans are equally intent in ridding their proud homeland of the Syndicate's corrupting influence. The Confederacy is sympathetic to this goal, in principle, but first things must come first, and so the liberation of Italy is only a dream for the partisans now fighting in the Continental rebellion. They have accepted the fact well enough, and as a sign of good faith, have brought with them a familiar sight to the Continentals: the heavy **Minelayer** once standard of the Allied Nations, possessing all the subtlety of a brick and, if anything, even worse aesthetics.

Known to the Americans as the M-93 Ogre, these machines have a simple function: laying and clearing mines. Heavy dozer plows can be set to drive up earth before the vehicles and let any mines, booby traps, or other surprises detonate harmlessly against the reinforced plow, while entire clusters of high-explosive mines are dropped from an armored hatch on the bottom of the vehicle and covered in whatever the local surface cover is in a quick, smooth operation. It takes time to reload the layer, but not long, and the Ogres carry more than enough mines for any operation. The Ogre is also a heavily armored machine, and while not intended for duty on the front lines, they can safely deploy mines in the path of an advancing enemy or cover a retreat with little fear for the enemy's guns.

So well-engineered was the original Ogre (known to its original Italian manufacturers as the Incitatus, but that name never caught on with the rest of the Allies) that today, the design has barely changed at all. The Italian partisans modified their Ogres with full amphibious capability and use them to lay naval mines as often as terrestrial mines, a fact well appreciated by the Confederacy, but otherwise the Ogres continue to trundle along just as they did years before, leaving presents for the enemy in their wake.

## Behind the Scenes

* RA1 players will remember this Allied unit.