Archer

Why it earns its tonnage

Seventy tons, walk four, run six, two LRM 20s doing the actual talking and four medium lasers filling the gap underneath. The low-slung cockpit and the side-torso missile bins are the whole visual identity, and they have not meaningfully changed across 661 years of production.

The ARC-7C, the most heavily armed configuration on record, posts 5/5/4 on the Alpha Strike card against the ARC-2R's 2/3/3. That gap is most of what this page is about: a design that spent six centuries being good enough to keep building, with a handful of refits good enough to stop apologising for the original's limits.

What never changed. Every serious refit still finds room for a pair of missile launchers doing the long-range work, even the ones that swap LRM for MML or push the range out with Extended LRMs. The real exceptions are the ARC-9K and ARC-9KC, built around Light PPCs instead, and the ARC-6W, which drops to rocket launchers because it is a Periphery budget build rather than a frontline refit.

Six centuries of staying useful

Earthwerks Incorporated debuted the ARC-1A prototype in 2458 at the Terran Hegemony's request for a dedicated heavy fire support machine. The finished ARC-2R arrived in 2474 and became the Hegemony's standard for more than fifteen years, built across six factories into a production run that passed a hundred thousand units before the First Succession War started. That kind of number is why so many of these were still turning up in mercenary hands centuries later, Wolf's Dragoons and the Kell Hounds among the most notable.

The Star League Defense Force got its own Royal-issue ARC-2Rb in 2752, carrying Artemis IV, CASE and endo steel years before the rest of the Inner Sphere could reliably field any of it. Most of that technology went dark through the Succession Wars along with everything else SLDF-grade, and it took the Helm Memory Core and the slow recovery that followed to get double heat sinks, CASE and Artemis back into general production by the time the ARC-4M shipped in 3049. Everything built after that point is working from a deeper parts bin than everything built before it, and it shows in the numbers.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Archer configurations. These are not pod-swappable OmniMech variants, armour and structure genuinely differ by refit, so a config here can be strictly worse than another and the Trap tier applies properly.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 0 of the 26 Archer variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 26 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change what you are actually facing.

On the table

Fielding one. Know what era of Archer you are holding. The early missile boats want to sit back at range and let the LRMs do the work undisturbed. The 9K and 9KC are Snipers now, not missile boats, built to use Light PPCs at distance instead. The 6W and the C2 are brawlers in everything but name, built to close and unload.

Opposing one. At 1269 to 2408 Battle Value, this is a wide enough spread that the configuration matters more than the chassis name. If you are facing anything with "5CS" or "9W" on the data card, shoot the legs first, both carry the thinnest structure in the lineup and both are documented as vulnerable there, the ARC-5CS specifically because the Elementals at Tukayyid worked that out the hard way.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, the Archer is not the one-note missile boat it looks like on paper.

• Most configurations are tagged Missile Boat and the engine will keep them at range, letting indirect fire do the early work.
• The ARC-9K and ARC-9KC are tagged Sniper and behave like direct-fire PPC platforms instead, and the ARC-6W and Archer C2 are tagged Brawler and will close distance. Check the role on the card before you assume you know the plan.

All 26 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. Two entries, "C" and "C 2", are mangled MUL labels for the Archer C and Archer C2 Clan-tech retrofits; the table shows the raw data string.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the ARC-2R by era, straight off the Master Unit List. Wolf’s Dragoons and the Kell Hounds both keep fielding it long after everyone else moved on, which tracks.

Related designs

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.