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If you were a Chapter Master and you wanted to send some marines into battle, would you send an entire company? ie you might send 3rd and 5th company to a couple minor battles. But then against a more formidable opponent you might choose to send 1st company with all your vets and 2nd & 4th company as a support.

Or might you send whoever is available, so you could have 2 or 3 battles going on with troops from all companies in all battles?

Would your vets in 1st Company only ever be fighting in one battle at a time?

Basically, I want to know how I should build and mark my BA;
Should they all be from one company, with vets from 1st?
Should I limit my FOC to match the company?
How do I differentiate, marking wise, squads of the same type within the same company?

Purely a fluff question.

Start with a battle company, your first 6 tactical squads, 2 assault squads, 2 devastator squads, Captain, command squad and Chaplain should all be from this battle company. All veterans will be from the 1st company, and all subsequent tactical squads will be from the 6th or 7th reserve companies, assault squads from the 8th, and devastators from the 9th.
If you plan on fielding roughly double the 6, 2, 2 company formation, use two battle companies.
But in the end, it all comes down to this being your army, so you can do it however you like, fluffy or not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and BA have a little knee badge for each squad 1-10.

There's support for both so which idea do you like better? There are companies of entirely one unit type, and companies of mixed unit types. 2nd-5th are usually mixed, 6th-10th are reserves of a single unit type.



Battle companies are often deployed, as are combinations of reserve companies. Resources are often stretched out, so you'd find non-ideal allocations of units to battles sometimes so you can basically do what you want and still have it "fluffy".

White Dwarf #300 had an entire article about this topic.

"Unless their mission is very unusual, every Ultramarines battle force will be based around at least one battle company. Sometimes it will be supported by detachments from other companies. Some members of the Veteran 1st company and the Scouts of the 10th company will often be attached to the battle company, as will a number of battle brothers from the 6th and 7th Tactical companies operating the supporting vehicles."

rhysgm wrote:
If you were a Chapter Master and you wanted to send some marines into battle, would you send an entire company? ie you might send 3rd and 5th company to a couple minor battles. But then against a more formidable opponent you might choose to send 1st company with all your vets and 2nd & 4th company as a support.

Or might you send whoever is available, so you could have 2 or 3 battles going on with troops from all companies in all battles?

Would your vets in 1st Company only ever be fighting in one battle at a time?

Basically, I want to know how I should build and mark my BA;
Should they all be from one company, with vets from 1st?
Should I limit my FOC to match the company?
How do I differentiate, marking wise, squads of the same type within the same company?

Purely a fluff question.

I run my Flesh Tearers as a broken battle company because there are only 4 of them, there are some BA sprinkled in. I have blood angels models painted by my friend that I choose to run along side the FT as support to whatever battle is going on... I am going to separate veterans (sargents, captains and the sort with the gold helmets because I like the look. Assault marines will follow the FT black helms and same with tacs. As far as squad markings, I think I'll do something with the shoulder pads, possible the trim but I haven't decided yet... (I have a whole company I have to paint so who knows yet...)

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Blood_Angels Here are the markings. Run the strike force however you want to run them.

If your making your own homebrew chapter, you should make a chart like was posted above detailing how you want things run.

Obviously, if your running ultra-marines, or an UM successor, you should stick very close to the codex astartes formation.


Blood angels, Space wolves, Dark angels, Salamanders, white-scars, and black templar have dramatically different settups for their chapter than the chart however so if your making your own chapter feel free to change it up.