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Sample Space Marine army list

HQ
One or more of the following
0-1 Coy Captain, 0-1 Coy Lieutenant, 0-1 Coy Chaplain

Battle Company
One to ten of the following
0-6 Tactical Squads, 0-2 Assault Squads 0-2 Devastator Squads

Company Support
One of the following per 'Battle company Squad'
0-X Company Dreadnoughts 0-X Rhinos/Razorbacks

Chapter Support
One of the following per 'Battle company Squad'
One of everything else from the Space Marine codex per slot. e.g. 1 Land raider or 1 Techmarine.

The style of the list is more like that found in FoW, the idea is that the list allows the player to field a 'fluffy' Space Marine company.
This is more of a 'could it work' than a proposed rule so I expect there will be some teething troubles.

Sounds fine for apocalypse scale, but how would it gel with current force organisation restrictions? Would you have to have 2 tactical squads as a minimum before even thinking about assault/devastator squads?

The idea is that Tactical, Devastator and Assault squads can be chosen with no prerequisite. You would be limited to the company maximums which are 6, 2 and 2 respectively. It may be 4/3/3 but I can't remember, there's no company chart is the 3rd edition SM codex.

It's 6/2/2 iirc. But doesn't that mean you could have very small force pointswise that's purely assault marines, devastators and land raiders or something silly? It makes the task of mini-maxing that much easier, methinks.

Sorry if I'm being rather negative, I'm having one of those days. I like the idea of balancing the support units against the mainstay units, but perhaps there should be more emphasis on the tactical squads?

Yeah, you could have two assault squads and two Land raiders, you can do that already with Blood angels IIRC. I am assuming that other armies would have a similar system to this not just Spacew Marines.

I think it's a reasonable way to go about force organization. It seems like it might break down poorly at low point costs, but not to the point where I would get too worried about it. I figure that at 1500+ points (where most games are) that a system like this would work out fairly well.

The tricky part will be setting it up properly for different armies. How would a dark eldar force be set up? How about Tau? You'll need to really give it some thought to get everything set up in a balanced fashion while still allowing armies to be flexable and diverse.

My question is what problem you're trying to solve. Is the objective to allow for armies like this:

1 Chaplain
1 Librarian
1 Commander
2x 10 Devastators (CS) w/ Razorback
2x 10 Assault Marines (CS)
4x 3 Land Speeders w/ Asscan


Or Better yet:

1 naked Hero
2x 10 Devastators (CS) w/ Razorback
4x 5 Tacticals Marines w/ Razorback
3x Predator Annihilator
3x Whirlwind

I'm not sure how Space Marines are improved by making the mainstay Tacticals optional, while counting Assault Marines

Don't get me wrong, I like Flames of War, and think it is well-structured. But FoW has a lot fewer combat elements in a standard game than 40k. FoW typically looks like this:

1 HQ
2-3 core
2-3 other

So if you were translating FoW to 40k, you'd have something that looks more like IG Platoons (naturally).

I think a FoW-style SM list should be like this:

mandatory:
1 Command Squad w/ Rhino (upgrade to Razorback or Land Raider for +XX pts), Hero (upgrade to Chaplain or Librarain for +XX pts)

2+ Tactical Platoon (2-3 Tactical Squads w/ Rhino)

optional (1 per Tactical Platoon):
0-1 Assault Platoon (1-3 Assault Squads w/ Rhino)
0-1 Devastator Platoon (1-3 Dev Squads w/ Rhino, upgrade to Razorback for +XX pts)
0-1 Elite Platoon (1-3 Terminators and/or TechMarine and/or Scouts)
0-1 Land Speeder Squadron (3-6 Speeders)
0-1 Predator Squadron (1-3 Tanks)
0-1 Land Raider Squadron (1-3 Tanks)

Something more like this would be a more direct translation.

While your idea is also valid John, I think that you'll need to remove the rhinos as being mandatory. Putting them in like that really forces the whole army into a certain style of play and cuts back on army diversity and varied tactics. Other than that though, it looks reasonable.

Following GW's more recent approach to bring SM back to the Codex Astartes, SM *should* be forced into a certain style of play, with greatly reduced diversity and far more limited tactics. Footslogging plays no part of that, but Drop Pods probably should be an option.

@Phoenix: Good point, there's precious little information about Tau army organisation above squad level, even less about Dark Eldar.

@JohnHwangDD: I'm not really trying to solve a problem, I just wondered if a simple army list that followed the fluff for SM companies could be used for 40k without totally breaking it. The FoW armylist style seemed a good place to start.

Space Marines being forced to take Rhinos seem a good idea (with a FoW style option to send them to the rear). I don't really have any definite thoughts on this nor do I think this would necessarily 'work' in 40k as it stands. 2nd edition had no requirement to take Tactical squads, My 2nd ed Dark Angels army had no Tactical squads in it.

I don't think that you gain much of anything with the proposal in terms of actual simplicity. If you follow FoW, you simply move the complexity from the highest-level FOC into the second-level 40k platoon / FoW company structures.

Per my examples, I think that your approach simply changes the way that armies would broken. GW has locked into the 2 HQ, 0-3 Elite, 2-6 Troops, 0-3 Fast, 0-3 Heavy FOC and is balancing against that baseline, so I'm OK with it as it stands. With the new "doesn't take a FOC slot" and other things we'll see more FOC tricks later.

Using the an anomaly of 2nd Edition to justify a proposal only makes it more suspect. Dark Angels without Tactical Squads *might* be fine, but it shouldn't be an option for vanilla Marines.

In Rogue Trader, every Guardsman could be armed with a single-shot Vortex Grenade. I don't think that bringing this back to 40k would be a good idea, even though it was allowed at the time.

We're actually doing this in the Revisited Project, writing FOC's that fit with the army rather than trying to shoehorn armies into the FOC.

Oddly enough however, the Marines fit perfectly with the FOC. Almost like it was designed around them...



BYE

JohnHwangDD wrote:Using the an anomaly of 2nd Edition to justify a proposal only makes it more suspect. Dark Angels without Tactical Squads *might* be fine, but it shouldn't be an option for vanilla Marines.

It was ok for all Space Marines in 2nd ed, and it's still ok for several flavors of Space Marine in 4th edition. In a list based purely on Space Marine company fluff assault marines are just as much the core of a company as tactical squads are. Game balance is not really my aim here just a fluff driven list mechanic.

JohnHwangDD wrote:In Rogue Trader, every Guardsman could be armed with a single-shot Vortex Grenade. I don't think that bringing this back to 40k would be a good idea, even though it was allowed at the time.

It wasn't even practical then as you couldn't field such an option in a game under 2,000 points and you'd get your a$$ handed to you with such an army setup.