G'day AbusePuppy,
I tried to send you an email but I think my browser was naughty.
I would like to hear your thoughts on why the Scouts are *not* like Speeders, as per our small discussion on Space Wolf Grey that never came to fruition.
I think they have the exact same job of taking out Armour and give the gong to the Speeder in every category bar mêlée ~ of course :P
I am always open to being wrong and love being illuminated so I can get madder skeeyulz.
Cheers, Marshal Wilhelm
Came out of this discussion, which ended up rather circuitous, but (in my part of the conversation) brought up an interesting thought: how similar are Wolf Scouts and Speeders, anyways?
Both of them tote a single (usually) Meltagun. Both have the potential to arrive at inconvenient places, and both are fragile enough that they tend to be thrwaway units. However, in my opinion, they have grossly different roles in an army, not to mention occupying different slots (and thus competing with different units.)
Let's not be hasty, though; to be fair, I'll play Devil's Advocate, because it isn't hard to see how they could be considered the same. Let's start by looking at the basics of each unit.
Land Speeders are exactly like their Space Marine counterparts, save for the rest of the contents of the book and how they play into the army design (which is rather relevant, but not something we'll go into here.) They are fast, fragile, and in the iteration we're discussing, carry a Multimelta and Heavy Flamer, giving them good anti-armor and decent anti-infantry capacity. They function as a harassment unit, able to go nearly anywhere on the board and threatening a rather large area around them (12", nominal 24" range on the gun). They are, however, relatively easy to shoot down- however, as vehicles, it is quite possible for them survive a significant barrage of firepower and escape largely unhurt with only a bit of luck.
Wolf Scouts, on the other hand, differ significantly from their SM counterpart. They are Elites (and thus not scoring and in competition with some other very good units), but come with WS/BS 4, giving them a lot more potential.They can be giving any one special weapon- almost always a Meltagun and have a few other useful options, such as bringing a Wolf Guard along for a Combimelta, Power Fist, or Meltabombs. With their variety of special deployment rules, they can arrive almost anywhere on the battlefield, but once there they are stuck at standard infantry speeds. With Behind Enemy Lines it is possible for them to screw up and not come in from the right board edge, but they generally do what is needed.
So both of them, in terms of comparison, are melta delivery systems with reasonable, if not particularly great, survivability. Are they the same?
No. Most definitely not.
The Speeder is an on-board threat that pushes the enemy back- it can easily move forward and aim for early shots with double penetration. In a vehicle-heavy list, it adds saturation, relying on offering other targets in order to stay alive. It is mobile, able to go to whatever part of the battlefield we need it at on any given turn. It excels most in a mid-range shooting SW army as a way to wreck heavy tanks without sacrificing a squad of Grey Hunters. (Remember, SW doesn't get any other Melta- think about that next time your hear that Tacticals suck. Rushing your troop squads in the enemy's face and disembarking is a dangerous plan.)
The Scouts are an off-board threat, a potential unit to wreck anything the enemy leaves within 12" of their board edge. Unlike the Speeder, they push the enemy forward, since they don't want to hug the back edge for fear of being shot/assaulted. They are protected from attack by virtue of simply not being on the board until they arrive and do their job, but they are not a mobile unit, simply being very flexible in terms of arrival points. If there are two targets you want to kill on opposite sides of the board, Wolf Scouts can only kill one of them. Their main usage is to force the enemy into a "rock and hard place" situation when running an extremely aggressive SW force with TWC, etc.
Hopefully it should be clear that, while they are both able to reach many points on the table and carry a melta weapon, Wolf Scouts and Land Speeders are utterly unalike based on their own qualities alone- this is not even to mention the units they compete with (TWC, Lone Wolf, Dreadnought, Wolf Guard), which give them even more difference in application.
