Legion Troopers: What You Are Actually Shooting At

Legion troopers are the Legion’s standard infantry, and they are what you fight on every level of every map until the map’s commander steps out. They are grown in vats, welded into suits, and pointed at whatever the Legion wants broken next.

There are thousands of them. They all fight the same way: walk forward, fire, reload, repeat. The sameness is the design, not a shortcut. A conscript is a component, and a component does not need initiative, judgement or a reason to be there.

They are not impressive individually. They are a problem because of what they are made of and how many of them there are.

Every Legion suit is salvaged, patched and mismatched, and the reason is simple: the Legion has no supply line. It has a conversion line. A trooper that falls is stripped for parts, and the parts go into the next trooper. The suits are made of each other.

That is where the rust comes from, and it is where the Legion’s name comes from. Nothing it fields was manufactured for the soldier wearing it. It was manufactured for somebody else, or for something that used to be somebody else, and then rebuilt around whoever was available.

The weapons follow the same logic. Shotguns, blades, SMGs, sidearms, leaking Hazard canisters — no apparent doctrine, no matching kit. The board you play on is the Legion’s armoury, and the Legion’s armoury is a junk drawer.

A trooper on level one of Lock & Load and a trooper on level seven of Steel City are the same design, the same silhouette, and the same behaviour. What changes is how much health it is carrying and how hard it hits back.

That is not the Legion getting better at making soldiers. It is the Legion getting better at allocating material. A trooper deeper into a territory is standing between the gunner and something the Legion cares about, so it gets more of the parts, more of the plating, and a bigger weapon. The conscripts themselves are identical.

It is also why the campaign difficulty is what it is. You are not fighting new enemies as you go. You are fighting the same enemy with more behind it.

The lore is specific about this and it is worth not glossing over: the Legion is "an army of conscripted machines and the people who were welded into them". It does not recruit. It converts.

Some of what walks toward the gunner was, at some point, standing where the gunner is standing — a person in a foundry city that the Legion reached before he could do anything about it. The game does not make a big show of this, and it does not need to. It is the reason the gunner keeps walking.