Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hi all,
I generally liked the points reductions given to marine armies in chapter approved and think it did alot to make them more playable, (other than the lack of change in basic tac marine/chaos marine cost but we know the non-gaming reasons behind that decision).

Playing a game against an eldar/dark eldar opponent yesterday I found his units to be much more survivable than your average space marine and alot of that was down to the plethora of abilities/powers/stratagems the various eldar have that improve there staying power far beyond their mediocre saves and toughness.

This got me to thinking about marine stratagems, certinaly with the earlier books (vanilla marines, chaos marines, grey knights) and to a lesser extent with the later arrivals the usefulness and power of their strats is serverly lacking in comparison to many other codexs.

Hows about the following stratagems to beef up the survivability of the various marine units, they would be available to all of the various codexs that use space marines.

2CP - Transhuman Physiology - Play when one of your INFANTRY units is hit by an attack, for the rest of the phase all wound rolls against this unit suffer a -1 penalty.
(I'm not sure how to exactly word it but this should only be able to target full space marines not cultists, scouts, etc...)

1CP - Crux Terminatus - Play when one of your TERMINATOR units is hit by an attack, for the rest of the phase you may re-roll all saving throw rolls of '1' made for that unit.

and as a bonus for a couple of underused tanks...

1CP - Assault Tank - Play at the start of your movement phase, choose one of your LANDRAIDER or VINDICATOR units, that unit may fallback and still shoot as normal this turn and may move through enemy INFANTRY units but may not end its movement within 1" of them.


I think it is more likely that GW will introduce strats to fix problems with units than changing dataslates so these seem more realistic than a unit redesign. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for changes to the working of these or how well costed they are.

You realise that you just incentivised cheap methods for generating cp via a marine fix with stratagems right?

Getting CPs in the current game really isn't a challenge, giving marines something useful to spend them on that makes them feel a little more like super soldiers is the aim :-)

 WisdomLS wrote:
Getting CPs in the current game really isn't a challenge, giving marines something useful to spend them on that makes them feel a little more like super soldiers is the aim :-)

Even more cp batteries don't fix their problem.

By that logic no Imperium army can ever have access to good stratagems?

You realise orks and Eldar have access to both super cheap battalions and also super good stratagems?

Not Online!!! wrote:
You realise that you just incentivised cheap methods for generating cp via a marine fix with stratagems right?

There is some truth to this. Units and armies should be able to function without Strategems in the first place.

The issue with marine strategems is that they cost too much for what they do, and many of them are underwhelming when compared to other similar strategems from other codecies that came later because power creep. I like those ideas, but at the same time, the units themselves need help.

Orbital Bombardment is like a slap in the face, seriously.

Well to the person using it, anyway.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Orbital Bombardment is like a slap in the face, seriously.

Well to the person using it, anyway.

Alot of the space marine Strats are.

There are the standard "do D3 mortal MW" ones which are ok.

None of the Chapter specific ones are particularly inspiring.

The fight twice strat are very good but in a codex that isn't melee focused on a whole.

All the vehicle ones that require you to have three of the unit are just rubbish.

There are none that improve the survivability of the units which just seems silly as that is supposed to be one of the halmarks of the faction.

I disagree on the fighting twice one. It's THREE.

I like Transhuman Physiology, though it needs to be ASTARTES INFANTRY keyworded, so that you can't apply it to your non-Space Marine forces.

Terminator Honours should also be something different, like "Use this stratagem when an enemy unit shoots a TERMINATORS unit. For the rest of that unit's attacks, ignore the AP of that unit's weapons." This would make them work well against sudden big attacks by AP -1 or AP-2 attacks.

 Yarium wrote:
I like Transhuman Physiology, though it needs to be ASTARTES INFANTRY keyworded, so that you can't apply it to your non-Space Marine forces.

Terminator Honours should also be something different, like "Use this stratagem when an enemy unit shoots a TERMINATORS unit. For the rest of that unit's attacks, ignore the AP of that unit's weapons." This would make them work well against sudden big attacks by AP -1 or AP-2 attacks.

I agree with these, your version of transhuman physiology is really good and a nice inverse to VotLW. Yarium's version of crux is much better for balance imo (2+rerollable is too good even in this world of fishing for 6s and 1s).

I can remember the first few months of 8th and being salty at all the free stuff (strats, WL, chapter, relics) that only marines got. And now those things are called weak. I still think there are some nice ones, like auspex.