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I was just wondering what your thoughts were on bringing back the Black Tide?

The Black Tide is a 4th edition reference to throwing as many 20-man Crusader squads on the field as possible. With the new point reduction to marines, it's very possible to field over 140+ marines on the field. You'd play it very similar to Green Tides and slowly march towards your enemy for board control and the eventual assault. You could even use Centurions in the middle of these tides and get a constant 5+ cover save for intervening models. The only weapons I can think that is AP2 and ignores cover is Tau weapons with the help of Markerlights. The other weapons that ignore cover don't have high enough AP or strength to effectively kill centurions at T5 and 2 wounds each.

Very rough idea but does Dakka think is possible to bring the Black Tide back? Competitively? I'd argue it could be a very boring list for some, but it might be competitive. Throw in some cheap hunter/stalkers and it could be an army with a lot of board control.

Cheers.

I actually love the concept of a horde of tactical marines. It will take some jiggling around with to pull off though. AA defense is a must, 3 hunters backfield would go a long way against the the hellturkey death incarnate for this list.

Firstly, I'd note that you'd actually do this better with CSM. CSM squads can come in up to 20-sized blobs, and they can take dudes with power armor, 4's in stats, and a BP+CCW for only 13 points. Not only are they cheap, but EVERYBODY gets power armor, and 4's in statlines. And they can then take marks to give them interesting things like +1A, +1I, or +1T, and then they can take icons to make them VERY interesting, like reroll charge range, or FNP, or let's start everybody on fire. Or fearless, which is going to be more useful to a tide army than ATSKNF.

Also, of course, DA bolter banner spam can do this pretty well also, having also cheap marines, and having a LOT of dakka.

Anyways, I've tried out something akin to this with CSM with khorne berzerkers. Not so high in numbers, but with terminators and other goodies (berzerkers are also more expensive, pointswise). The verdict I came to is that power armor tides are probably the only truly viable foot lists at the moment....

... but. The problem is that 6th ed hates foot lists SO MUCH, that it's still not all that great. As much as people have whined about hull points, mech lists still are just plain stronger than foot lists in this edition, and gunlines are still just plain better than armies that need to close range to do their heavy hitting.

What's going to happen is that a list like this is going to work great, and then you're going to come up against tau dakka and just die before you make it there. Or you're going to come up against wave serpent spam, and watch as your opponent scoots backwards on VERY difficult to kill vehicles and even if you manage to make it over there and kill serpents, then your guys are going to get gunned down by rending shuriken weapons en masse. Or you're going to come up against mechvets or henchmen in chimeras and you're going to take unsustainable casualties, even for a power armored horde as heavy weapons followed by mass, possibly prescienced plasma rips into everything.

6th ed has given just too many advantages to the shooting phase to make the movement phase all that terribly worth using nowadays, much less building an army that relies on it. At least, if you're trying to win games.

If that's not your main concern, though, or you just don't have a lot of mech players where you play (for some reason), then yeah, you can probably do fun things with a power armored foot horde. They're not even that bad of an army if your opponents don't bring hard counters.

At some point, though, your opponents, sick of getting run over by space marines, will pull out their chimeras, or wave serpents, or missilespam/riptides, or any of a big pile of options, and every game is going to devolve into unpacking your minis and then rushing them forward, desperate to get serious killing power into range while packing back up fistfuls of your models at a time. As you frantically grasp for a chance to do anything, you'll be able to take a moral victory if you can actually engage with something. But it will still be a phyrric one as you get tabled, yet again, without really doing much.

Such it is for assault armies, and such it is for foot armies in this edition. You play the game on hard mode, and take full savor of the few, extra-challenging wins you manage to claim in what is possibly the most spectacular way you can claim them.

It's the bitter-sweet life of a die-hard kind of army. That, in the very least, looks really, really awesome as it goes down to defeat.

Allaros, assault isn't entirely dead... Janthkin won the Anime Expo with an assault based Seekers and Fiends list. Kenny Boucher has placed top five at multiple GTS with his nurgle circus (which unlike a the standard Tzeentch circus or Bill Kim's Slaneesh circus has almost no shooting). The Seer Council is an amazing assault unit. It's just Marine Assault that's in trouble

What interests me about Black Horde is that it's even cheaper than Chaos Hordes, at 12.5 ppm. Plus know no fear, and they can take CCWs as well. You're probaby still right, but it's interesting