Militia is the cheapest type of infantry you can get. When I talked about types of fighting infantry, I skipped two as they are less important for a newbie to care about. Wheeled and helicopter transports on the other hand are most useful for the opening landgrab, and for quick reinforcement of vulnerable sectors and overextended pushes during the midgame. The other important dimension transports differ in is speed. Generally the higher speed of helos and wheeled vehicles is offset by a higher price, leaving cost-effective midgame reinforcement to tracked carriers. Pick with an eye to how you use the infantry – something that will mostly operate in deep forest or town probably doesn’t need an expensive transport, something that pushes or defends open ground should have a transport capable of providing cover, maybe fighting off other transports, maybe even fighting off tanks. There’s other ground weapons available, including ATGM, cheap HEAT cannons, very high-end autocannons. Grenade launchers don’t dominate the open ground the way autocannons do, but they’re a bit better at support within a forest, stunning and panicking even with the shortest of bursts. Grenade launcher transports cost similar to autocannon armed ones despite being nowhere near as versatile. On the other hand since 2AV transports are both hard to oneshot and likely to die with little overkill if a oneshot does occur, you can delay the unload time for the infantry being transported by quite a bit. As trucks only have 5 health and 0 armor (which effectively doubles all damage), this makes it really bad to be in an exploding truck. When a ground transport is killed, the amount of infantry that survives the explosion is determined by the amount of overkill the transport took. The biggest difference by far is the jump between 1 and 2 armor – due to some non-linear scaling in the armor formula, 1 armor is dramatically easier to oneshot by tanks and even WW2 RPG, whereas 2 armor requires a modern RPG (16AP) or a high-end tank to destroy in one shot. Transports come with a wide variety of armor. Some decks are genuinely crippled by a lack of good midrange transport options – always taking the cheapest option is a tempting but poor choice. Choosing what your infantry comes in is just as important as the infantry itself.

I wasn’t alone if I got a penny for every time I’ve seen someone lament the lack of 1pt trucks, I’d be paying for an editor.

When I was starting out, I tended to think of transports as that expensive thing I’m forced to buy to inflate the price of my infantry.

Wargame red dragon infantry