Hi, Sean, Here is my writing on the marines. Emil Contents: I.Intro. II.Marine Tactics: 1.Rhino shield. 2.Firefight sneak. 3.Suppression. 4.Fake Disruptors. 5.Hard points. 6.Mechanization. 7.Imperial terror. 8.Containment. 9.Morale dumps. 10.Titan armament. 11.Attrition. III.Detachment samples. IV.Marine Strategy: 1.Stomp Chaos! 2.Stomp Orks! 3.Stomp IG! 4.Stomp Tyranids! 5.Stomp Eldar! 6.Stomp Squats! I.Intro, or "Let the marines be marines". After playing Eldar for quite a while in Epic40K, I bought and started playing the Marines. One of my motives was that the marines are an army which works very differently from Eldar; thus the experience would help me broaden my horizons. If there is one single dominant feature in the marine army, it unquestionably is versatility. The pillar of the army is the marine tactical and its upgrades, all of which combine excellent armour, good firepower, decent range, and savage assault. The upside of versatility is that if you lead the marines, you do not need to spend nearly as much time in your Reclusium customizing your army for the different opponents, since whatever balanced force you choose should be able to do well against any opponent. The marines are the least surprisable army in the game. The downside of versatility is that you always pay for it in points regardless of the fact whether you have customized your force or not. Suppose for example, that you buy marines to shoot with. Unfortunately you pay not simply for their firepower and range, but also for their other boosted stats. Thus the marines are never cost-efficient if assigned to specific tasks, but are always cost-efficient if they end up doing almost everything in a battle. The conclusion to be drawn is that you must let the marines be marines to maximize efficiency. This means you should not be afraid to be shot or close-assaulted while you keep your marines on overwatch to utilize rapid fire. Most bullets bounce off marine armour. Even if you lose the close combats, it will not be by much, and stubbornness ensures that next turn you will be on overwatch again. Thus you simultaneously use all marine specials. If you thusly lead your marines to do their best and most, is defeat really a possibility? This profound wisdom is at the heart of the fighting methods of my marines. It asserts the worth of big tactical companies, which should be kept on overwatch. That means they should be quickly deployed in good firing positions, so that they can spend the rest of the battle showering the enemy with torrents of rapid fire. The way to do that is to employ that rare gift - the cheap, fast, and spaceous rhino. All you do is march on the first turn and unload in a broad front. Then let the bolters do their job. The marines have many fine vehicles, e.g. the best tank in the game - the land raider. In my opinion though, their mission is to support the infantry, which should always be the bulk of the force. Resist the temptation to build your army around land raiders, predators, and whirlwinds. It is not that infantry exists to protect the vehicles, it is that vehicles exist to support the infantry. Due to the unreliability of reserves, drop pods should be used sparingly, only for very specific tasks, e.g. take out the enemy artillery or encircle his flank. The good news is that they are free. Thunderhawks are definitely too expensive to be used for transportation when you have free drop pods. They are the best bombers though. Unfortunately, I very seldom get to see them more than once per battle on 2000 point scale. By the fourth turn, the battle is usually already decided. The only good use they have is to show up once to take out a key enemy detachment, e.g. artillery. The marines are a 45cm range army, so THawks are the marine siege artillery rangewise. II.Tactics. 1.Rhino shield. This curious marine property was first noticed by Glenn. Once the marines have marched and unloaded to good firing positions, the rhinos lose a lot of their worth, since their main task, transportation, has been fulfilled. A way to utilize the empty rhinos is to advance them in front of the marines, so that they catch bullets instead of the marines, since they have the same armour of 5+. The problem that Glenn saw with this was that if the marine line gets assaulted, the rhinos being in front will really lose the assault for the marines with their value of zero. In the opposite arrangement, the rhinos will support with one each. I developed that idea into the conviction that it is in fact preferable for the rhinos to be in front unconditionally. Since shooting happens before assault, chances are that many rhinos will be shot dead before the assault phase instead of marines. Then the enemy assaults and kills rhinos instead of marines, but puts more blastmarkers (BM) since the rhinos fight worse. The summary goes like this: a. rhinos back - more marines are shot dead, more hits are put on marines in close combat, fewer marines on overwatch next turn; b. rhinos front - fewer marines are shot dead, fewer marines take hits in close combat, more marines on overwatch next turn, a couple more BM are put on the marines. In my opinion it is much more important to preserve the life force of the tactical company rather than receive a couple fewer BM. Combat experience has proven the wisdom of this conclusion against most armies. The tyranids are a notable exception and are discussed specially in the strategy section. 2.Firefight sneak. A problem that the marines face against close combat armies of low firepower value is that it is so beneficial to be on overwatch that it is a waste to put them on assault just to firefight back the assault wave before it hits them. A marine tactical has four times (!!) less firepower on assault than he has on overwatch. One way to deal with this is to buy a ravenwing or jump-packed assaults to do the job, while the tactical companies are invariably on overwatch. I stumbled over a subtler and sneakier way to do it, which helps the tacticals to do everything by themselves. In many cases it is possible to sneak up on the enemy using the overwatch 5cm move to close up on him within 15cm. Then overwatch goes normally, but winning initiative in the assault phase means the overwatching marines firefight away the wave. Thus no ravenwing or JP assaults are necessary. 3.Suppression. This is a counterintuitive effect of firing rules. We stumbled over it in my gaming group. Suppose your marine line of six tacticals and two devastators faces a triangle of orks, which points towards them with one of its vertices. Suppose all tacticals are barely in range only for a couple orks, whereas the devastators have all orks in range. According to rules, you roll eight dice in the open on overwatch and allocate hits regardless of the fact that all six tactical are really too far away from all but two orks. This is very counterintuitive at least for somebody like me, who comes from the point-to-point shots system of Epic Space Marines. A way to think about it is that the devastators effectively increase the range of the tacticals to 45cm. Barring cheese, you should consider this effect in creating your marine tactical detachments. The devastators suddenly became even more attractive just now. The term 'suppression' derives from the rationale Sean Upchurch came up with about this effect: the tacticals fulfil a "keep their heads down" order by providing suppressing fire, which allows the devastators the breathing space necessary to take very rapid and accurate pot shots. 4.Fake Disruptors. This is the way the marines compensate for not having any disruptors. You basically split the firepower of each of your tactical detachments among as many opponent detachments as possible, but still having a good chance to get hits. Thus each enemy detachment gets a BM for taking a hit. The next tactical detachment repeats the procedure. The result is a big number of enemy detachments with a lot of BM each. To increase this effect and also supply my tactical companies with a certain degree of autonomy from my panzer company, I include a support weapon (tarantula/rapier) in each, since a hit bestows an additional BM as from a superheavy weapon. The only downside of this trick is that it assumes there is not an enemy detachment which you really want to unload on before it has fired back. Barring this exception however, this is a pretty useful trick. 5.Hard points. This is the property of the marine army to have the highest availability of units with saves among the humanoid armies. Terminators, captains, and librarians form hard points in terms of survival ability against fire, close assault and wipe-out. I like boosting up my tactical companies with all three types. The +10 points for a captain are more than well spent on a save, 6 assault, and free jump packs. The librarian is the same deal since 10 out of the +20 is the standard for being a psyker. A terminator's doubled longevity is more than well worth the +4 points. Glenn was the first to make the most spectacular use out of all this. His tank company got stomped by a tyranid assault. The tyranids were ready to declare a wipe-out, score the BMs and add half the company's MP to their morale, when the marine captain ejected from the wrecked command land raider and ran away on his jump packs with all BMs. 6.Mechanization. This is how you fully mechanize a tactical company solely with rhinos. I got this trick from Glenn. The problem is that the detachment structure does not allow you to buy extra rhinos to transport terminators and AT. A way to go around it is to buy land raiders, but a lot of land raiders quickly approaches cheese, and also slows down the entire company to 20cm from the 30cm of the rhino. Razorbacks are fast, but inefficient. The trick is to sacrifice the free jump packs of both the officers in the company and make them buy a rhino each. That opens two spaces for terminators and/or AT. 7.Imperial Terror. As I had the chance to mention in my writing on Eldar strategy, some units are much more worth it for the purely psychological terrorizing effect on the opponent, than they are for what they can actually do. The whirlwinds being the only barrage weapon in the marine army are an example of terror troops. Whenever you have them, the opponent always thinks twice before bunching up his troops. The fact that the entire enemy assault wave is staggered over 30cm in depth rather than 10cm for fear of the whirlwinds is much more valuable to me as the marine commander than the extra die or two I would roll otherwise, since low wave density means many will not make it to assault my marines. Thus more marines survive and more marines overwatch next turn. All you have to do is find the ballance between not being cheesy and having enough weight in whirlwinds to scare the opponent. Up to this point, two whirlwinds in each of my three mechanized tactical companies have always been enough. That will probably change if my gaming group reads this ;) . The imperial battletitans are another example. They are tough enough to convince the opponent that they are practically indestructible, so they are ignored, which ironically makes them indestructible. Contrary to expectations, the land raiders are not terrorizers. They are just as dangerous as they look. Treasure them, but beware of cheese. THawks as bombers are the terror of any interceptor but a gargoyle. 8.Containment. I already talked about containment in General Eldar Strategy. The same idea can be utilized by the marines with two important corrections. First, the marine jump packs are not nearly as cool as the Eldar ones and the marine assaults are more expensive and less savage than fully upgraded swooping hawks. Since most of the casualties in JP dets come from close assault, the marine assaults are just not that good. In my opinion they are just too expensive to be used as containment troops, since expendibility is a primary requirement. There is no point to sacrifice a more expensive unit to protect a less expensive one, and that is exactly what you will end up doing if you protect the tactcals with assault marines. Second, the normal bikes and attack bikes, while not skimmers are in my opinion better than the Eldar jetbikes and vypers. At least in my gaming group, we almost never play on a map where skimmerism is of big value, since we do not want to get the slow-moving armies handicapped any further than they are by nature. We also pop up at the beginning of the shooting phase for realism. With skimmerism out of the way, the attack bike beats all records of efficiency at mere 10 pts a pop. It is as good as a vyper at less than half the price! In my opinion, containment is the primary role of the ravenwing, so it has to include attack bikes. Against units of low assault, a ravenwing of normal bikes supported by vindicators is worth trying. 9.Morale dumps. At the advent of Epic40K, all Imperials were pleasantly surprised by the toughness of the imperial battletitans. They are tough to shoot down and reasonably tough to kill by assault. That makes them a nice storage facility for morale. Against most armies, reasonable BM removal rolls mean the titan keeps you in combat for one extra turn when everything else of yours is broken. Beware of taking them against tyranids. Once they realize that they are the army which kills imperial titans most easily, the titan will switch roles from the hunter to the hunted. The same effect can be achieved by means of big and/or tough air detachments. I cannot remember the last time my THawk 'nuclear death' detachment got broken. The really big win for the marines in this respect is the ability to have very big companies of very tough troops. My standard mechanized tactical companies contain over twenty units of armour 5+ or better. Such a detachment costs a lot and is very tough to break. Thus a well-constructed marine force has this dump effect intrinsically and at no extra cost; in fact, you are paid for it since you buy fewer HQs. 10.Titan armament. In my opinion, the only two worthy weapons are death rays and heavy weapons batteries. A vortex is good only if you are absolutely certain that the opponent will take shielded war engines. Close combat weapons would have been worth it if they doubled the assault value against any unit. Titan barrages are a waste of points when you have whirlwinds, and you always will if you are wise. Besides, titan barrages lack the artillery special. Finally, the opponent will be spread out due to your whirlwinds, which further decreases the effectiveness of your titan barrages. Megacannons seem lucrative for extra BMs, but this is only an illusion - DRs do it better. What would you prefer, 2 BMs and a hit 5 out of 6 times or 1 always with some chance for another and a hit? The combination of HWB and DR means you can handle anything. You cannot lose DR shots due to BMs. You are unlikely to lose firefights. 11.Attrition. Some armies have very high assault troops without saves (e.g. genestealers and exarch aspects). For those, a marginal victory in close combat is a loss, since they will be the first to receive hits, and hits kill them. The size of the marine companies and the marine high assault are truly devastating against such troops. It is even worse if you follow my example to take as many officers as possible with a lot of terminators, since saves negate a lot of the bad consequences of losing an assault. It is a unique property of the marines to be most able of all armies to survive and recover from assault losses exactly due to such factors. Attrition is most effective against Tyranids and Eldar, but Chaos can also be affected since a terminator is basically just as good as a daemon in assault (3 instead of 4) particularly due to the save. III.Detachment Samples. mechanized tactical companies: capt, lib, 2 term, 6 tact, 5 rhinos, 1 AT, 1 razorback, 2 whirl capt, lib, 2 term, 4 tact, 2 dev, 5 rhinos, 1 AT, 1 razorback, 2 whirl capt, lib, 1 term, 1 AT, 4 tact, 4 dev, 6 rhinos, 2 whirl ravenwing: 3 bikes, 9 attack bikes lib bike, 12 attack bikes lib bike, 10 bikes, 5 vindicators panzer: capt JP, 4 LR, 3 Pred capt JP, 5 LR, 2 Pred terminator drop: capt JP, lib JP, 10 term assault drop: capt JP, lib JP, 14 assaults JP IV. Marine Strategy: 1.Stomp Chaos! Attack bikes are a must as containment for the daemons. The assaults are terribly expensive for this, especially since daemons have saves. The second biggest threat are the nurgle engines and THawks are the only way to get rid of them. A reaver can hold a flank against anything but greater daemons. Use the land raiders to pick out the knights and CSMs; leave the daemons to the tacticals since their armour is 4+ anyway. Have a good number of devastators or your tacticals may end up defenseless against noise CSMs and knights. Death-ray that annoying supreme commander. Terminators and officers are a must due to attrition effects. Fake disrupters are very effective since nothing is more devastating to Chaos than daemon waves frozen with BMs. Rip daemons with HWB and DR the CSM land raiders from a safe distance. Try to keep your infantry in buildings since then they are untouchable to cavalry-class daemons. Always consider prep-barrages since the marines will be on overwatch anyway, especially when facing greater daemons who will otherwise run away out of range. Firefight sneaks can be frighteningly effective. Bloodthirsters and lords of change is how imperial titans die; only shielding helps since those monsters can charge 75cm! In my opinion that is quite unreasonable. Nobody can convince me that something should be able to charge my titan from outside his DR range. Fortunately, our Chaos player takes them very rarely in a homogeneous detachment. 2.Stomp Orks! I am afraid the orks are the army designed to be beaten by the marines. The marines just are better in everything. The only challenge is presented by the big guns and the pulsa rockets, but there are enough AT and DR to pick them out. DR the warlord and AT the weirdboys (no save!). There is no point to drop. There is no point to bomb, since there will always be enough shielding. Containment with attack bikes may be necessary only to keep the land raiders safe. It is my hope that there can be a greater challenge if I do not take an imperial titan and the orks take a gargant and DR speedstas. Recently our ork player started developing a gretchin shielding. Basically gretchin catch bullets for the nobz, skarboyz, shooty boyz, big gunz, and pulsa rokitz of the same detachment. The strategy seems pretty effective. A way to counteract it is firefight containment with a ravenwing of attack bikes. One must be careful to be barely within 15cm of the gretchin, so that the bikes firefight only the gretchin rather than the entire orky wave. 3.Stomp IG! I have not led my marines against IG yet, but here is what I expect. The only real problem is IG artillery and there are four good ways to deal with it: assaults drop, terminator drop, ravenwing assault and Thawk 'nuclear death'. The titan and the land raiders should dispatch the leman russes. I expect the tactical companies to wipe out the IG infantry line in two turns of overwatch. Then the rest is a mop-up. The marines are particularly resistent to IG artillery since the marines have tank armour. The IG infantry is particularly sensitive against rapid-firing marines since army structure makes IG dets small, i.e. susceptible to wipe-out. This is probably the only case when rhinos should be back, since once the IG line collapses, you may want the rhinos to be alive to transport the tacticals to the IG artillery. 4.Stomp Tyranids! The chief problem with the bugs is their ability to drop in large numbers. They can drop all their infantry plus disruptors. This means that establishing a line will only get you encircled and eaten. In my opinion, mobile strategy with the marines against bugs is fictional, since they are very slow without their rhinos and loading and unloading leaves too much to initiative counters. A loading and unloading rhino moves 20cm, which is less than the move+charge rate of any bug. You also need base-to-base contact and you sacrifice rapid fire. It just does not work with tactical companies. The conclusion is that you need to form a bubble of tacticals and terminators, with all the guns sticking out like the barbs of a hedgehog. The core of the bubble is devastators, whirlwinds, and land raiders. Ideally the bubble should be in open ground, so that different dets can support each other with fire, and at least 30cm away from any buildings or forests, so that nothing can assault without being shot first. A titan is definitely necessary for morale storage. HWB are great against little bugs. The terror factor makes the bugs try to go around the titan, so a titan can hold a flank. This will work until the tyranid commander realizes how fragile in close combat the titans actually are. Two big things you pay in your titans for are reparable void shields and armour, but none of these will help you when the genestealers jump on your reaver, followed by a hyve tyrant. In the best case the bugs will be only +1, but if they use biovores on the titan, they may be +4 easily. That is one broken and quite likely dead titan. The hunter has become the hunted. The bugs have one bane and his name is 'marine tactical'. Just keep on overwatch and put as many BMs as possible, since those are what loses the battle for the bugs on the fourth turn. Fake disrupters! The big tactical companies are hard to wipe out, so the bugs are really suffocating towards the end of the third turn. Forget about containment, bikes, assaults, and all vehicles but land raiders and whirlwinds. Attrition is the way to kill tyrannids. Once the genestealers are dead, the assault total of the tyranid detachments drops by half. Since the tyranids are fast, devastators are a must especially for suppression as described above. Sad battle experience has indicated that the rhino shielding does not work against the bugs. Six rhinos in front means 12 more positions for the bugs to bite at undisturbed. The average assault of the bug is 4, so that means +48 in assault; that probably means another +1 modifier and more hits diverted to tacticals. It also increases the depth of the your belt without improving the range. Thus bugs, which normally would not have made it, will. Forget about rhinos altogether against the bugs, or they will lose the battle for you! Unfortunately, the lack of rhinos means you are very slow. Hence you must consider a ravenwing and JP assaults especially to take out that annoying biovore det that will always drop in a forest out of range of your whirlwinds and shell you for the rest of the game. Now something completely counterintuitive: do not try to AT synapse creatures, instead kill carnifexes. He will always have enough synapse creatures. Carnifexes are rampaging tanks and it is assault dice that kill you most. Putting hits on a tyrant just asks for the bug to make its save. Every shot counts, do not waste any. A dead bug now is better than a chance at a dead bigger bug. Mow them down quickly, methodically, and guaranteedly. In the same way, do not put hits on tyranid warriors in close combat, but on genestealers. Make it a goal for yourself to break as many dets as possible by the end of the fourth turn. Then it is very likely that you will emerge battered but victorious, which is very typical for the marines. A standard bug strategy is to hide behind hills and in forests in expectation of the assault phase, when they are guaranteed to move. A sure way to spoil their fun is to load up on whirlwinds. I am always extremely tempted to do so and it does take me a lot of effort to limit myself to two whirlwinds in each of my three identical tactical companies. Finally, I must fulfil my sacred duty to the Emperor by warning you about the bug artillery. All have 60cm range. That means that if you, like me, try to lead a pure marine force, you are always at a great disadvantage, since the marines are a 45cm range army. Thus a dactylis at 32 pts is as good a barrage against marines as an IG basilisk at 41 pts, is twice harder to bomb since it has 6+ armour, and is much tougher with assault of 2. I cannot think of a more efficient unit in the entire bug army! The biovores can drop and will exactly where they need to. They will literally bleed your morale out and there is nothing you can do about it unless you take assaults, but then guess who gets disrupted. With five BMs even stubbornnes means less than 1 in 3 chance that the det will move. It is all very sad. 5.Stomp Eldar! I have not faced Eldar yet mostly because I was the regular Eldar player in the group before a switched to marines. Here are some ideas though. Assault aspects should be susceptible to attrition due to lack of save. The Eldar have the blight of small dets and a wipe-out penalty; that should make them really hurt when they face the marine tactical companies. The marines have enough firepower to make titans fail holosaves enough. The land raiders should sneak in range under cover or they will really regret those pulsars. The mission of the land raiders is to blow up the titan and those aspect-laden wave serpents. An imperial battletitan should stay ready to deathray any engine of Vaul which is foolish enough to pop up; that will be a death sentence since they do not have void shields and a deathray causes an automatic critical. Night spinners can be really dangerous in large quantities; a big Thawk bombing group should be able to penetrate the nightwing screen and nuke the spinners. Alternatively, a terminator or assaults drop should be very discomforting. A ravenwing is pointless against jump-packed aspects, since they will attack from too far deep. However, an Eldar army based on wave serpents can be seriously hurt by a heroic ravenwing. It is my opinion that a balanced Eldar army is very unlikely to win against a standard marine force. 6.Stomp Squats! I believe the squats are just a badly designed army. It is probably the army which is most open to abuse since it contains completely unreasonable units like the goliaths, support artillery, and the thunderfires, in abusive dets. Let us follow a simple calculation: The goliath range and attack dice work out like two bombards (siege artillery) at 54 pts each. Additionally, the megacannon BM special means it also contains a disruptor which always hits. A nurgle engine is a disruptor at 31 pts, which has worse range and does not necessarily hit. Say the disruptor plus the ignore-cover plus the always-hit plus the pick-out then are worth 52 points. Then the price of the megacannon should be 54+54+52=160 pts rather than 75 pts. The goliaths can be taken as main force in large quantities. One might argue that the squats need the megacannons since they do not have flyers, but why would you use flyers, when the goliaths do a better job more often and on overwatch, in case, God forbid, you miss? You can hide in buildings and forests from the bombers. There is no cover against the goliaths. Topologically speaking, the map is completely flat and open from the viewpoint of the goliaths. On standard maps, a range of 125cm is basically infinite. Also flak and interceptors cannot stop goliath shells. A deadly addition to the goliaths is the support artillery, which is cheap and can be taken in large quantities too. In combination with the goliaths it will put so many BMs that most likely you will not be able to assault, which means another turn under a hail of fire, with even worse chances next time. Meanwhile you accumulate BMs like a madman and you soon lose without even half of your army broken. All Squats do is put their army in a small patch at the very end of the board. Five megacannons, sixteen support artillery, six thunderfires, and a dosen thunderers will blast you to smithereens every day. What is the point of trying to take objectives when you can win on a regular basis without them? Taking a titan is pointless. Even if your luck has turned and there is no cyclops to vaporize you immediately, the goliaths will shut you down and/or silence the DRs. To absorb BM with the HWB, you need to enter the 45cm zone of death. Also while the titan is creeping forward, the rest of your army is being obliterated. Under such circumstances, the only reasonable thing to do in deep maps is to let Thawks nuke det after det on strafing runs to minimize flak while you keep out of range with the rest of your army. Advance only if the squats finally advance or Thawks finally drop below a meaningful number as a result of thunderfires. On another fight-cheese-with-cheese note, why not take several IG deathstrike launchers, indeed one for every goliath? Well, you need line of sight, but on most maps that will not be a problem since the launchers are three times faster than the goliaths. On deep maps you can race down the edge to get in a position while still being out of range. Once in sights, launch those babies. Even at the shamelessly low price of 75 pts the goliaths are still more expensive than the vortex at 53 pts. I think all this could be avoided with more reasonable stats and/or point values. If the goliaths were 160 pts, one would think twice about taking five of them since that would be almost half of his army on a 2000 pt battle. Support artillery should be what it says it is - support. This means at least one warrior for every supporting artillery piece up to a low maximum per detachment.