So school has been crazy and now that everything is all settled (lol by late october im just getting settled....) I will be posting hopefully 3 to 6 per month. So anyway I decided to discuss space marines in general in this post. Fritz over at Way of Saim Hann (one of 2 blogs on my followed list i think....) runs a very informative blog about tactics that is bookmarked and checked at least once every hour by yours truly.... seriously if you are into the tactical side of 40k and dont play a power army.... or even if you do play a power army, read it!
Anyway, enough advertisements. So he posted a small rant about space marines that I read and not to take readers away from his blog or anything, but it basically said that space marines should not be specialized armies as they will lose when they run into something more specialized than they are. (ie a gunline will be beaten by tau gunlines, biker lists will be beaten by saim hann etc)
I could not agree with this more. The new trend at my store is to have these themed armies, so we get alot of people coming in with all drop pod armies, all bike armies etc.... and not to trash these guys or anything as they are great modellers, but this just does not work, at least not for the space marine dex.
Everyone is seeing space marines and saying that you can take bikes as troops or termies for dark angels or space wolves and saying that all termie or all bike or all jump packs (blood angels) is the way to go.... repetition and all that.
Reps are good, as it ensures a goal is completed by having many chances, but a big part of this strategy is to have multiple goals that can be completed by the same unit. For instance, if you are a chaos marine player, try giving your plague marines some plasma guns. Why you ask? Well, what is your opponent most likely to send to kill plague marines? (TERMINATORS....cough) or anything with good cc weaps that ignore armor and fnp. So what is the answer to termies or stuff like that.... generally plasma! So now your opponent has to decide if he wants his termie squad to take 3 plasma guns (1 combi 2 reg) to the face in order to kill a plague marine squad. His other option of course is to send a horde that does not care about plasma, but in cc vs hordes plague marines are second to none. So really this squad is basically gonna put a serious dent if not just kill whatever your opponent sends to kill it.
This is just one option of how to diversify a squad for many roles that I use in my army (I have a pure plague army that uses this tactic) but if you are a meq army, consider this next time you build a list. Ideally, each unit should have an answer to hordes, tanks, meqs, termies. So really, for marines, they can stay pretty well vs meqs, so their answer is a fist in combat. They should have mb's which combined with a fist is the answer for vehicles (either rhinos with the fist or LRs with the mb.) The horde answer is the flamer, and well, vs termies it takes a special kind of unit to survive, and meqs are kinda screwed. So used correctly, this unit should never die from 1 turn of cc or shooting.
But how am I supposed to kill anything if nothing is specialized?
Well thats the point. Marines generally are cheap and have great staying power. So even though you can be mobile, it is easy to get your rhinos chopped up and thus they only usually exist for 1 or 2 turns. So really, as a marine player, your goal should not be to take it to your opponent, but really to get to the objective and then force your opponent to kill you, and use your diverse squads to handle anything your opponent throws at you. With this list style, you may not wipe anyone off the board, but even unsupported units should be able to last against your opponent's hammer units.
This tactic however, does not scale up. In larger games, bigger, badder things are needed to keep the opponent at bay, and thus, this pure army does not work as well. At around 2000 I would say that you should have 2 units that really scare your opponent (termies in a LR and sternguard in a drop pod come to mind) so that your troops can survive, and even then its iffy.
However, the final verdict is that in games 1500 pts and lower, this list building tactic is perfect, but when expanding your army if you start off by building this list, save your special weapons because at higher pts you will need those melta guns.
