Teleport Dropper

The Teleport Dropper is a tiger-sized, dog-like four-legged Strogg that has the ability to drop miniature teleport stations that allow reinforcements to spawn in the combat area. Teleport Droppers usually roam tight areas, such as vents, but will only attack in open areas.

A Teleport Dropper is first encountered at the very end of the Strogg Medical Facilities, and various different units are encountered a handful of times after that. They can usually be found in maze-like areas where they have plenty of room to hide and retreat while allowing hostiles to spawn dynamically in the area.

Combat Characteristics
The Teleport Dropper is programmed to spawn reinforcements to fight intruders while it runs from the player and evades attacks. It typically drops 4 teleport stations that allow 4 hostiles to appear simultaneously and hides for the duration of the fight. Once the reinforcements are neutralised, the Dropper will repeat the process of spawning hostiles. Every close proximity encounter with the Teleport Dropper results in that unique reaction. While It has a capability of biting its targets in the case of being engaged at point blank, the other form of defence they posses is spawning other Stroggs. They run at a decent speed, but since they usually run in circles around the combat area it's not too difficult to catch up to them.

The most common type of reinforcements that spawn from the teleport stations are Guards and Grunts, these can be more than one type at a time, although other enemy types can also be spawned. Fortunately, heavy duty strogg units such as Gladiators or Light Tanks are unable to spawn in as reinforcements.

They have quite a lot of health (roughly as much as a Gladiator), and can take a decent amount of damage to kill. It takes about 34-40 Machine Gun shots, 4 to 5 point-blank Shotgun blasts, 4 direct Grenade Launcher hits, or 4 direct Rocket Launcher hits to disable one.

Strategies

 * The Teleport Dropper can be a real problem if it is not neutralized as soon as possible. Even though the reinforcements that are spawned are weak units, they can quickly overwhelm you. The ability to bite is noted but it doesn't deal a lot of damage so it may be ignored.


 * Using explosives is a useful tactic due to the fact that they are able to cause a lot of damage at a moderate range and can destroy dropped teleport stations before any hostiles appear in the area. If explosives are unavailable then the nail gun or machine gun may prove to be useful, although that type of engagement may be time consuming and eventually more risky. If you have no Nailgun, use a Hyperblaster instead.


 * If the Teleport Dropper is present with other Strogg units in the area, it should be prioritised by the player in order to prevent reinforcements from spawning, which would most likely let the Strogg have a huge advantage in battle, even if there are more dangerous Strogg units, Teleport Dropper should be taken out first.

Trivia

 * The Teleport Dropper is definitely a replacement for the Parasite from Quake II and it's mostly based on it.


 * The Teleport Dropper has a similar function to the Arch-Vile from Doom 3, which makes other tough enemies spawn in the same area as the player.