Email in: 1500 vanilla marines wall-style!

"Kirby (or distinguished authors),

Had a list I'd value your input on. I'm trying to rope my younger brother into 40k, as he enjoys models, painting models, and I would love more opponents. To that end, I wanted to land him a list with a decent number of defensive/offensive options as a birthday and/or Christmas present. Here's the list as its currently conceived:


librarian
3x10 tactical marines: plasma/missile
x3 rhinos
x2 dreads: x2 tlac
assault termies: th/ss
x2 landspeeders: mm/hf
x2 preds: ac/hb
total: 1500

Tactics-wise, i'm thinking shield-wall is what I'm aiming for: blast the speeders up 24", then move the rhinos/preds up, using smoke from a couple to cover the rest. The termies move/run behind, while the dreads park in corners or other decent areas and provide supporting fire. turn two, rhinos move up and turn sideways, form a wall to drop marines behind, while dakka preds take up shooting positions. Then shoot stuff as it advances, while termies provide assault deterrent until later-game. Additionally, all the stuff on this list is fairly inexpensive to get ahold of second-hand other than the terminators. What are you're thoughts? I realize that vanilla marines can't hold a candle to newer codexes in terms of raw smashy-power, but they are pretty resilient when it comes to holding the midfield and shooting up anything that gets close. Anyhow, i've got a good six months to tweak the list, so hopefully it'll be wicked-awesome by then!

Thanks!
~shas'el mike
Michael
The chickens are restless...."

For 1500, the list is fine though I'd rather melta/Missile or flamer/MM on the tacticals in Rhinos. Melta/missile is very capable of combat squadding whilst flamer/MM is great in midfield. Plasma/Missile loses you some melta and melta is great :P.

Otherwise, use the Terminators aggressively. Use deep-strike or gate (and maybe teleport homers?) to push them up the field and pressure the opponent/protect your juicy bits, don't run them as a second wave.

It's a nice list to move up to 1750 and 2000 with as well - up the Terminators to full and then start adding more Speeders + Preds and potentiall tacs in RBacks, etc.