Well over on Warseer Archangelion was having difficulty transferring his Vanilla Marines to BA. Enter the every altruistic Kirby who offered his pinkness as assistance. The ensuing PM was sent back:
“Well Kirby, as I said, I have grown to enjoy the hard hit of sternguard with plasmas and a second squad of them with meltaguns both in drop pods, and one with a libby with null zone (for the inv sv take out). I put both squads in pods with beacons and drop them into the enemy lines. If they have a raider, usually by that. The meltagun (all weapons are combi weapons) equiped boys have ALWAYS come through with popping their target tank. The plasmas(again combi) then shoot the contents (my oppoenents play chaos alot so they tend to have some term champions or something in there) I have found that I usually wreck these targets no problem. My problem is what happens next. The sterns get assulted, and within a few turns, die. I usually take some vanguards to counter assult (using the beacons for the no scatter). But they are somewhat unreliable, and so damned expensive!
For the rest of my army, I simply love my sniper scouts. They camp out in a ruin that I have reinforced with a master of the forge... still haven't tried out a cannon yet... but I hear good things.
I have tried different aproaches to the army, like takeing a few ironclads, or using bikes... but I just can't seem to round it out.
I tend to be a more in your face player when it comes to marines. I do like the scouts (which appeals to my Tau side) But I feel that the Marines should be a hard and fast hitting force that cripples the opponent quickly and can hold their ground. I have found the first to be somewhat true.. .but the second, at least for me, I have (clearly) some issues with.
I was looking towards the BA because they seem like a more direct and hard hitting force that has some better stain power (via FNP).”
Well for BA we’re not going to be able to use scouts/ironclads/bikes as they don’t fit into our roles here. However, VV are at least more useful in a BA list and BA have much faster mech than their Vanilla counterparts. So let’s see what we cannot do here remembering Archangelion wants plas & melta sternguards in Pods. We’ve already used 2 Elite slots then which means we don’t want to use that final Elite slot on a Furioso so we can have some FNP/FC bubbles outside of the Honor Guard. This makes the Sternguard more survivable on the drop but limits our saturation. We also need a 3rd pod so both Sternguard can drop on T1 if needed. For this reason I decided to support the Pods with Mech rather than Jumpers as Mech is much more capable of supporting the Pods early (i.e. not T2). We also want to include a libby or 2 and then will most likely back this up w/Preds & Rbacks + VV. Let’s see what we can get.
Sternguard x7 w/5 “main” combi + 2 “minor” combi in Pod w/Deathwind & locator = 265 each. I’ve split the combi weapon types up for more flexibility as this is the hall mark of Sternguard. One squad will have 5 meltas and 2 flamers or plasma and vice versa. Whilst I think having both with max melta is better, we’ll stick with this for the time being. We’ll also drop 100 pts into 2 Sanguinary Priests. One may not always cover both squads on the Drop but for the moment only one is going with the Sternguard as well as a Libby w/Shield & Blood Lance. We’ve already used 730 pts! 2x VV squads w/Jump Packs sets us back 165 each as well putting us just over the 1000 pt limit. Time to add the mech component.
This will obviously make up of ASM RBacks + Preds and since we’re using VV, well we stick with Dakka Preds then for 100 each. ASM w/meltagun, IP in RBack w/TL-Heavy Flamer is 145 pts each. Taking 3 and 4 of these respectively puts us at 1940 pts so we’ll drop one of the RBacks leaving us with 1795 points. So problem with this list atm is it’s very broken up. You’ve got 16 models coming in via pods which want to sit within a 6” bubble backed up by 6 Fast tanks and then 2 DSing squads. The concept seems very SM but might not be as competitive as we would hope. It is fitting to the request though of being in your face so what can we add to the list? A libby in an HG rhino would be best but that sends us quite a few points overboard and we still don’t have the 3rd pod.
We could add in the HG in a pod w/a couple meltaguns and still have some points to play with but this still makes the army very disjointed. Let’s look at what we have:
Libby w/Lance & Shield
HG w/3 meltaguns, Pod
2x Sang Priest
7x Sternguard w/5x combi-melta, 2x combi-plasma, Pod w/Loc & Deathwind
7x Sternguard w/5x combi-plasma, 2x combi-melta, Pod w/Loc & Deathwind
3x 5x ASM w/meltagun, infernous pistol, RBack w/TL-HF
2x 5x VV w/JP & glaive
3x Predator w/HB sponsons
All for 9 tanks, 47 infantry & 1975pts. Not bad in terms of what’s on the table but again is suffering from being disjointed and doesn’t really have an answer to multiple super-units outside of flooding. So whilst it fits to the fluffy idea of what Archangelion would like and isn’t exactly a terrible list, it’s not exactly screaming out as top tier. Whilst this may not be what he wants, we always like competitive armies :P.
What can we do then to streamline this list and make it bit more competitive and strong overall. Maybe we’re trying to fit too much into the list and should just forgo the VV in place of Baals and replace the Preds w/Rifledreads (meaning the HG can also go in a Rhino). That would IMO be the more competitive choice but would be up to Archangelion. So whilst I go back to studying...brainstorm my pink army =).
