The Engineer Team unit focuses on creating breaches into enemy bases through walls. They plant a bomb that does a huge amount of damage to the wall and if there is no wall they use the charge against the nearest building. They then function as a weaker Fire Team.
Office Description
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Purpose[]
The final infantry-type squad that can be unlocked at the Office, the Engineer Team is essentially a highly specialised infantry squad that is designed to breach enemy bases.
Strengths[]
Unlike the other three squads, the Engineer Team is intended to be exclusively deployed as a support unit. Whereas the Fire/Heavy Team squads are purely designed for offensive use, the Engineer Team lacks the raw firepower or movement speed of the former, nor the weapon range of the latter.
Their intended usage is to break through the Walls of enemy bases, which they are very effective at doing so thanks to their use of demolition explosive charges. In contrast to Tracked UGVs, which can only demolish two to three individual walls at a time and have a long delay before they can do so again each time, a single Engineer Team is more than capable of destroying an entire section of walls and can do so in a rapid succession instead of having to wait between cooldown intervals.
Their other advantage is that they can instantly destroy enemy traps like APERS Mines from a safe distance without having to take damage or manoeuvre around to avoid them.
Weaknesses[]
In spite of these two upsides however, the Engineer Team has many more drawbacks which inhibit their usefulness.
For starters, it has no use outside of destroying traps and walls; the former is pointless if the base doesn't have any traps placed in that direction. The second is usually impossible to accomplish under normal circumstances without the Engineer Team being heavily damaged or being killed off.
This is because they move far too slowly which turns them into easy targets for Machine Guns and Mortars. Likewise, they need to be right up close to the walls before they can demolish them with their explosives.
Most of all, Engineer Teams also take up an enormous amount of space at the Barracks, requiring 4 slots per squad compared to the other three which only require 2 at a time. They also cannot be garrisoned into Pillboxes, which prevents them from being able to participate in the defence of your base as well.
Usage[]
Overall, Engineer Teams are an extremely niche infantry squad that is generally useless even for their intended role. Hiring more Fire Teams or Heavy Teams is preferable and would be a more efficient use of your resources.
As with the Fire Team and all other infantry squads, the Engineer Team is able to gain veterancy bonuses provided that they survive battles with a minimum of one squad member left alive.
Abilities[]
Disarm Traps[]
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Sappers can detect and detonate hidden mines before they can damage your units. They disarm mines in a 20 meter radius.
Ability description
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Disarm instantly destroys any traps that are within visual range of the Engineer Team. Disarm does not distinguish between any particular type of trap, and will be used even if the trap isn't a threat to the Engineer Team (i.e. Drone Traps).
Disarmed traps count as being "used", and need to be manually rearmed by the defending player after the battle regardless of whether the attacking player won or lost the match.
Be aware that traps will still explode and inflict damage on any units that move into the blast radius after being disarmed.
Trivia[]
Before the release of Update 1.14, Engineer Teams could not disarm traps and were only capable of destroying walls.[1]
The Engineer Team's Disarm ability is extremely unreliable and often causes more problems than it solves.
An example of this is when the defending base has a Drone Trap and Davy Crockett placed closely together. When the Engineer Team gets within range to use Disarm, it will often prioritise destroying the Drone Trap instead of the highly lethal Davy Crockett.
Alternately, the Engineer Team will disarm the trap far too late and get caught in the blast, which will usually severely injure or outright kill the Engineer Team.
Engineer Teams are strangely depicted using a wide assortment of weapons from ArmA 3.
Their main render image for instance, depicts them using the PDW2000 submachine gun but their in-game models are shown armed with black-painted versions of the MXC carbine instead.
Likewise, their Office icon represents them with the "Punisher", an airburst grenade launcher-type weapon that was scrapped early in ArmA 3's development (based on the real-world "XM25 CDTE"); they never wield the Punisher in actual gameplay.
