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Something I've honestly never even considered before are Scout Marines; from what little I understand, they're a decently popular choice, piled up into a Land Speeder Storm.

How do y'all use your Scouts? I just wanna touch base, get a few ideas floating around my brain-pan before I decide if they're for me.

10 men on foot with knives and a powerfist/combimelta sergeant.

-Nazdreg- wrote:10 men on foot with knives and a powerfist/combimelta sergeant.

O... Kay, that's great, but it doesn't really help me unless I get the context. I can get that from reading my codex. I'm looking for something a little deeper than that.

I normally take sniper scouts with Telion, put them in cover, a high building or ruin if possible, and let them shoot at high value targets.
Telion's rule that lets another scout shoot with his BS is also useful with a missile launcher in you squad, it makes taking out tanks much easier.

I almost never take another loadout for my scouts, but when I take them I give them knives and pistols with a special weapon for the sergeant.
Then I try to get them in the fight as fast as possible to hold up the enemies strong units so I can kill those units by moving in assault marines or such.

I haven't tried a land speeder storm yet, but I think I would only use it to draw the attention away from my stronger units by annoying the enemy enough to shoot at the land speeder till it's destroyed.

yeslifegamer wrote:I normally take sniper scouts with Telion, put them in cover, a high building or ruin if possible, and let them shoot at high value targets.
Telion's rule that lets another scout shoot with his BS is also useful with a missile launcher in you squad, it makes taking out tanks much easier.

I almost never take another loadout for my scouts, but when I take them I give them knives and pistols with a special weapon for the sergeant.
Then I try to get them in the fight as fast as possible to hold up the enemies strong units so I can kill those units by moving in assault marines or such.

I haven't tried a land speeder storm yet, but I think I would only use it to draw the attention away from my stronger units by annoying the enemy enough to shoot at the land speeder till it's destroyed.

Mmm, interesting. What about shotguns? Any good?

TermiesInARaider wrote:Something I've honestly never even considered before are Scout Marines; from what little I understand, they're a decently popular choice, piled up into a Land Speeder Storm.

How do y'all use your Scouts? I just wanna touch base, get a few ideas floating around my brain-pan before I decide if they're for me.

You can use them to camp on an objective. Have them just go to ground when shot at, and your sitting on a 3+/2+ cover save. Its an extremely hard unit to shift.

Another method is to put them in a storm and use them out outflank onto an objective mid-late game. You can also use the storm/scouts to turn 1 assault tanks with a PF.

Shotguns are a no go IMHO, you need to kit them out for either assault, shooting or tank hunting. Shotguns make them multitaskers and a rather bad one. They wont do enough shooting to damage anything, or assault hard enough to damage much. This is what I'd suggest...

Shooting: Either five or ten snipers with a missile launcher and Telion. when five man strong you want to use it as a SGT sniper or IC sniper with Telion's bolter, or a high BS Missile Launcher Platform. When your ten men strong you can rend the crap out of MC, and hurt them with your high BS Missile Launcher.

Anti Tank: Five Scouts with a Combi Melta in a Land Speeder with a Multi Melta. Do a 24" scout move, then move 12" turn 1, disembark 2" then shoot the meltas at tanks. The SGT is BS 4 so it is a decent shot.

Assault: Ten men with Bolt Pistols/CCW, combined with a SGT with a Power Weapon or Power Fist, outflank/infiltrate these guys and hit hard, you have 27 Regular attacks and 4 (?) Power Weapon attacks.

Just my 2 Cents. I like the first two.

The melee-scouts are supposed to be the tarpit of the C:SM, but I'm not really a fan of them. They are not really expensive and can be a nice area-denial-unit with scout and infiltrate and they don't take a too contested foc-slot (To be honest you can have as much you want as long as you have the points), but after all I rather spend the points on things that really kill the enemy. For the price of 10 you can get an Ironclad with Heavy Flamer. But thats just my personal preference and I really want to try out some sniper-scouts.

The thing with the shotgun is that you trade more melee-attacks against more shooting-attacks before the charge. You will hit nearly every time on 4+ both with shooting and melee it really doesn't matter. In my opinion in bigger squads a mix would be nice.

O... Kay, that's great, but it doesn't really help me unless I get the context. I can get that from reading my codex. I'm looking for something a little deeper than that.

Ah k sorry about that, I thought you wanted the setup

I use them together with scout bikers to swarm over the flanks while 2 tac squads push in the middle. Some drop pod dreads + sternguard comes in and thunderfires provide covering fire.
The scouts main job is to score where I cant get with the rest of my army. If they can kill something en route, I take it with pleasure.

The thing with the shotgun is that you trade more melee-attacks against more shooting-attacks before the charge. You will hit nearly every time on 4+ both with shooting and melee it really doesn't matter.

If you want to provoke morale checks, shotguns are better, if you want to achieve a combat result based morale check, knives are better because they also shift the ld value of the opponent. And shotguns can fire from 12" if you dont want to charge.

The issue is if you have Knives you also have Bolt Pistols. Shotguns are AP- compared to AP5 on the pistols.

So with CCWs you have much better CC ability and your weapon has less shots but it has an AP value.

I run a squad of 10.
9x BP/CCW
Sarge with PF/Shotgun

there's no reason not to run a shotgun on the sarge except for AP, but two shots is better than AP5.

It also helps that I run Shrike and so they can get a reliable first turn assault should I win the die roll. If not, well outflanking then getting them into close combat works well too, especially since they're troops and can grab objectives.

I run 3x five men squad, one with 5 shotgun, one 4 boltgun and 1 HB and my last is 4 sniper and 1 HB

One thing to add (if its not been said already)

Camo cloaks for 10 scouts is 30 points
Telion is 50 points and gives stealth to the squad.

One way to look at the Telion upgrade is that its only 20 more points if you were going to buy your scouts cloaks anyway (and you don't need to model cloaks on the scouts)
As mentioned earlier, this is a nice way to give a BS6 to your ML in the scout squad, which makes it much more durable and a much bigger threat.

As a small note on sniper scouts-

bs3 means you'll hit 50% of the time
In a 5 man unit thats 2.5 hits
snipers are poisoned 4+, so it will wound 50% of the time
So your 2.5 hits turns into 1.25 wounds, which has a 1/3 chance of rending (4,5,6)...


Sniper scouts on average do not make a terribly damaging unit, sadly

Jihallah wrote:As a small note on sniper scouts-

bs3 means you'll hit 50% of the time
In a 5 man unit thats 2.5 hits
snipers are poisoned 4+, so it will wound 50% of the time
So your 2.5 hits turns into 1.25 wounds, which has a 1/3 chance of rending (4,5,6)...


Sniper scouts on average do not make a terribly damaging unit, sadly

I have heard that before, but I've heard the general consensus is that the pinning checks they force more than make up for it.

I'm waiting on mine arriving, and have yet to play test any of this, though I have confirmed that the tactics abide by the rules so here's how I'll use mine:

5 man squad with telion, sniper rifles & a ML, in cover, pinning down any nasty looking unit that would give me cause for concern, such as devastator equivalents, hard hitting cc squads, popping transports etc

I'd have a squad (2 if I can) of scout bikers with locator beacon arriving on the board during set up. These would then allow me to send in my drop pod tactical marines. These drop pods also have locator beacons. The bikers allow me to put my pods exactly where I want them, this then allows my shooty-nator + terminator librarian unit to GoI over to any of the locator beacons as they activate throughout the game. I can GoI straight on to the scout bikers on turn 1, as long as my libby-nator squad is within 24" of them.

Thanks to the scout bikers, I now have 2 tactical squads (set up depending) deep in enemy territory, with a 6 man terminator squad that's capable of moving 24" per turn, so long as the libby passes his tests and all goes off without a hitch.

I don't expect any of the scouts to do mass damage, they're all about bringing the pain down from quarters that my opponent wouldn't expect them from. Anything they manage after this has been done is pure bonus.

Yes, it may be quite an expensive build but COME ON! The strategy rocks!

As an aside, the rest of my force comprises of a 4 ML dev squad, and 3x speeders with MM & HF. The tacticals have ML and flamer each and will likely split in to combat squads

Wow I never thought about using GoI on a beacon. Nice!

As far as I know, the benefits of having shotguns vs. those of having pistols and knives is if you're attempting to attack something that would absolutely shred, your scouts, and I mean tear them into little tiny bits before they even had the chance to hit back, for instance, a high enough WS to make you do less damage. (BA death co come to mind, but I'm sure there are others)

Most targets with such significant CC abilities are tough enough that AP5 won't make a difference, and you'll probably die anyways in CC. Therefore, the extra shots are more valuable than the extra CC attacks.

The flaws in my argument (that I can see) are as follows:

1: What kind of idiot who has a CC unit that tough won't try his hardest to get the charge with it?

2: What business do scouts have taking on a unit like that anyways?

So, I guess shotguns would be useful against armies such as Draigowing where everything is as lethal as feth, but it's still not as able to cover as many situations as the other builds (snipers, BP/CCW, or bolters)

So, the problem with scouts vs. tac marines is that scouts have a lot less that they can do. Without power armor, they're beholden to stay in cover or face annihilation in shooting, and the worse armor means they have less staying power in close combat as well.

This means that scouts are basically relegated to two roles. On the one hand, they can camp objectives far away from where the real battle is. This limits the liability of their fragility while still using their ability to score.

The second is to be a harassment unit that uses its scouts ability to engage in suddenly:powerfist and suddenly:meltagun operations. Being cheap and low in durability, this makes them your basic throwaway unit. It shows up and gets wiped out. If it did something in between those two, that's great, and if it didn't, then at least it was a cheap distraction. Of course, 40k pretty steeply penalizes harassing units, which is why most of them, from penal legions and scout sentinels to raptors and to, well, scouts, are pretty rare.

Scouts are more point efficient then Tactical Marines though. If they could take Meltaguns you would probably see nothing but Scout squads.

But points efficiency isn't the name of the game when it comes to space marines. When you've got a whole lot of cheap, flimsy units like a guard army has, then it makes sense to have highly specialized units.

When you're an army that has a choice between moderately expensive, flimsy units, or slightly more expensive, but much more versatile, the line gets fuzzier in general, and in the case of space marines, well, there's a reason you see tac squads.

Marine commanders may be willing to throw a few dozen points at expendable speeders, but spending hundreds of points on your only scoring units with reduced capabilities just to save a few points seems like a poor move, especially in a versatility army like marines.

TermiesInARaider wrote:

Jihallah wrote:As a small note on sniper scouts-

bs3 means you'll hit 50% of the time
In a 5 man unit thats 2.5 hits
snipers are poisoned 4+, so it will wound 50% of the time
So your 2.5 hits turns into 1.25 wounds, which has a 1/3 chance of rending (4,5,6)...


Sniper scouts on average do not make a terribly damaging unit, sadly

I have heard that before, but I've heard the general consensus is that the pinning checks they force more than make up for it.

You have to wound to pin.

Telion is worth it alone. Otherwise I find tactical marines to be more useful.

MFletch wrote:Telion is worth it alone. Otherwise I find tactical marines to be more useful.

I would phrase it like this. Lets tell the tale of two squads.

10 scouts, with a ML and Telion.
10 TAC marines, ML, MG and PF on the sergeant

The cost of the units are identical. Both of them fill the same role of 'objective camper'.
The scouts are much better at ranged shooting. Telion can either give the ML a BS of 6, or he can use his boltgun to snipe special/heavy weapons at 36" range.
The scouts are more resistant to shooting. Since Telion gives stealth, they enjoy a 3+ cover save from all fire where the TACs just enjoy a 3+ save. Both units are hard to dislodge at range.
The TAC marines are much more resistant to deep striking targets. With a MG and PF, they are less intimidated by a deep striking squad of BA or a dread.

The end result is that both can serve the role with different strengths. I personally prefer the scouts as I can find other ways to generate the deep strike protection.

To me, the end result is something the way it was with Land Speeders. They're an excellent addition if you have the points, but they're just not solid enough to make you want to rely on.

Which is disappointing, as I would more than love to do.an.entire scout army.

kitch102 wrote:Which is disappointing, as I would more than love to do.an.entire scout army.

Isn't it? But then again, it sort of makes sense. I could see someone centering a force around Land Raiders, around Dreadnoughts, around Tactical Squads, around Predators, but... Scouts?

Yeah man, I can absolutely see it! If there's a company of them, then they can fielded as a company!

kitch102 wrote:Yeah man, I can absolutely see it! If there's a company of them, then they can fielded as a company!

If you say so.

kitch102 wrote:Which is disappointing, as I would more than love to do.an.entire scout army.

There is nothing to keep you from doing it.

If you bring 60 scouts to the table, don't expect them to do better than bringing 60 TAC marines. If you brought 25 of them, (3 outflanking land speeder storm, and one squad to objective camp) with fire support (preads, dreads, etc) I can see them doing decently.

They would be awesome if only they were BS 4..