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Recently watched a battle report in which Blood Angel fight against a Chaos soup army, resulting in the Blood Angels basically got annihilated. It recalled my memory of my defeat in local tournament against similar lists. I think about how to deal with this kind of list for many times, and find that it might be painful or even almost impossible for marine armies to handle.

Many people might have already known what this list looks like. For easy reference, I brief what generally this army would composes as backbones:

Nurgle detachments:
2-3 units of ~30 plague bearers
a few small Nurglings units to camp on objectives afar.
a few Heralds of Nurgle and / or a Daemon Prince with all kind of bells and whistles.
Nurgle tree
Thousand Sons Detachments:
2-3 Daemon Princes
Ahriman

The rest of the points can be filled by whatever the player pleased, like maybe some cheap patrol to include Bloodletter Bomb or Pink Horror Bomb.

At an first glance. It looks like it is just a horde list, centred around flooding the table with Plague Bearers, and dish out mortal wounds with Tsons character. And Marine can have many high RoF low to mid strength weapons that can eat through this horde like eating through Orks. However, this is not that easy, since this is the toughest and strongest horde army that ever exist in 8th edition, and actually it leaves you no feasible targets to make your attacks efficient.

The PB are natural -1 to hit, have a 5++, 5+++. With psychic buff and stratgem, the one unit that likely get focused by the one who resisting the Chaos can be buffed to -2 to hit, 4++, 5+++. Making this unit almost unkillable. To be more clear in quantative sense, to kill a single such unit will need to fire 405 Heavy Bolter / Assault Cannon equivalent shots with BS3+. Remember this is probably the best kind of weapon to kill hordes in Space Marine asset,an or comparison purposes, if you shoot this kind of "bad at killing IK" weapon against the unfavorable target - IK, you will see that a unit of Plague Bearer is actually tougher than a Castellan Knight since to kill a Castellan with 3++ (assume before the FAQ nerf) would "only" requires ~378 such shots. Even if you aim at an completely un-buffed unit, it still requires ~203 shots of Str5~7 BS3+ to remove one unit, that is 3 units of Devasators armed with 4 Heavy Bolters firing for 6 turns, or 6 Razorbacks firing for 3 turns, to clear a single unit.

Autocannon equivalent may fair better due to their multiple damage feature, but still killing an un buffed PB horde unit will need to fire 113 such shots from BS2+ platforms (Ven Dread, Leviathan Dread, etc.) to deal with. For SM army, it means 3 Leviathan Dreads firing at that unit for 2 turns. If that unit is being buffed, it will then need ~203 BS2+ Autocannon equivalent shots to kill them, compare to shooting this weapon against the "too OP" Castellan, which require only ~150 such shots to take down. So I think we can conclude that even an un-buffed PB unit is more than 75% in toughness to a Castellan Knight even before the IK got nerfed.

If you failed to kill them, they could either flood the board and grind you down or tie you down in melee, or just sit on all of the objectives and never go away. Marines just cannot contest objectives against these kind of hordes. Regarding them as slow moving is also huge mis-interpretation, since the buff on them would add 2" of move and advance, so the plague tide can be surprisingly fast.

Having Guilliman supporting all those "mini-guns" could be an option. However, Guilliman coated a lot it means you are talking much fewer guns and guys. Besides, even with Guilliman buffing their offensive output, it still require114 HB equivalent shots to dealt out one of the unbuffed PB unit, or 73 autocannon equivalent weapons on BS2+ platforms, indicating that 2 Levithan Dreads near Gman need to shoot for 2 rounds to kill a single unit. For the buffed unit, it need 228 shots of HB equivalent, or 114 shots from Autocannon equivalent weapons mounted on BS2+ platforms.

Snipe the characters behind the PB hordes might be many people's choice against this list. However, so long as you can't one shot them. The Thousand Sons and Nurgle have many ways to get back their lost wounds, reducing your effort to dust. It means if you decide to snipe those characters, you need to play sniper focused list, thus losing out a huge portion of horde killing units, making the PB horde even more untouchable.

Aside from the hard to kill plague bearers and characters, the psychic might of this army is also a pain in the ass. It throws out tons of smite and other kind of mortal wounds. As we all know, mortal wound spam is also one of the bane of marine's existence, as marine's unit paid high price for their so called toughness and defensive stats, which simply got totally bypassed by mortal wound mechanics. This feature also exposed another vulnerability of Gman castle mentioned above. When facing Infernal Gateway casted from Ahriman, it is likely that everyone composing that firebase will suffer D6 mortal wounds......

So, I found that the Chaos soup list are almost unbeatable. Is there any advice how Space Marines could ever deal with this kind of soup list?

Looking forward for suggestions.

Well first i would ask what chapter your playing as? The chapter really can dictate the stratagy.

Generically speaking for that force i would start with snipers. Aim for the speed buff units on nurgles side, if you can slow those pox walkers down to 4" no advance and charge they become much easier to deal with.

Deal with the threats as they come at you. A force like that is trying to dictate the flow of battle, your options are to let them and focus on the goals of the mission or make them over extend and counter that flow. Again your chapter tactic will dictate the direction. White scars can do some serious counter work with units that like cc and can fly (vanguard vets with jump packs for example, a squad of 10 with melta bombs and half storm shield / chainsword and half double chain sword would be very nasty vs that list with the ability to assault, then jump out of combat, fire (drop da bomb), then charge again. Salamanders would go the other direction, looking at min size squads with a heavy weapon to just plink them away.

Rhinos could be incredibly useful here. Screen block the pox walkers, if they are stuck in cc with a rhino they they cant be shot at but they also cant fall back and assault you. A few empty rhinos could really stop that blob from engaging anything of value.

Marine forces have to be specialized and have a plan going in now days. Every unit needs to be put in with at least 2 jobs to be able to do without wasting any points on unnecessary stuff.

For example a 5 man salamander squad with a missile launcher can do 3 jobs well. Hold back field objectives. Support anti tank. Support anti air w/ command point used. The vanguard squad i mentioned can grab forward objectives, kill chaff, block for chrs, and bully enemy tanks like basilisks or low wound tanks like vypers / starweavers.

Thats about all i can say on the matter. Marines are not top teir because they are so unforgiving for a mistake. They are not like they were back in the day.

Quick note on dealing with plaguebearers, the -1 only comes from having 20+ models but it lasts for the entire phase. The other -1 comes from the psychic power, and the +1 invuln comes from a strategem.

All three of these things can be played around The invuln strat needs to be played around like one would a RIS knight

If he is stacking the to hit penalties, shoot the other unit, force him to spend CP. If you drill a unit down below 20 stop shooting them, and focus another target down to below 20. Then consider assaulting these units with standard marines or primaris.

This causes two things, the first is reducing the -1 to hit for the assault phase, meaning that primaris will actually do more damage in CC then they did in shooting that phase, and the second is that (especially if your doing it to multiple squads) He's already lost ten models per squad, Daemons have LD10, so every kill after this point (as long as he doesn't roll 1's for leadership :/) counts as two.

Carry either a librarian OR black templar scouts in your back pocket. Black templar scouts serve as excellent first turn buff deniers. Just a 50% (or 75% chance with that reroll) to say no can throw off a lot of psychic power plan.

Also, linebreakers are nasty because A) they can use the strategem after advancing, smoking, and being tied up in CC. Sure it only hits characters on 5+, but these sort of hordes always have the buff characters bunched in the back. Also doing 3d3 MWs on 3 squads of plaguebearers on 4+ isn't bad in its own right either.

Daemons are Ld 7, not 10.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Daemons are Ld 7, not 10.

I'll need to have a chat with someone then..

That being said it makes trying to force moral losses even better, it negates the natural durability of plaguebearers. If you have snipers you really do have to kill the sloppity bilepiper though.

Since the chaos player has to declar the invul save at the beginning of the shooting phase - have you considered just not shooting the plague bearer squad that is -2 to hit and with a 4++? This is the weakness of bringing 3 plaguebearer squads - just shoot the one unit that is -1. If you can't deal with a single -1 unit you have bigger problems than chaos soup - considering every army has a -1 to hit trait (practically).

My son, you need a hearty Imperial broth to deal with that traitorous slop!

Thank you guys for all your recommendation, so based on the suggestions I see so far, the strategy counter Chaos soup could be summarized as below:

Bring lots of snipers, like 3 Eliminatior squads, a few Scout snipers, and maybe allied the Vindicare Assassins. Kill the Nurgle herald who gives the fearless bubble first. Then proceed to target the PB hordes. Aim at killing 8 of them in each unit, and hope the LD test would further reduce them down to below 20 strong which take away their buffs.
I will try post a tailored list. Looking forward to more ideas and comments.

Neophyte2012 wrote:
Thank you guys for all your recommendation, so based on the suggestions I see so far, the strategy counter Chaos soup could be summarized as below:

Bring lots of snipers, like 3 Eliminatior squads, a few Scout snipers, and maybe allied the Vindicare Assassins. Kill the Nurgle herald who gives the fearless bubble first. Then proceed to target the PB hordes. Aim at killing 8 of them in each unit, and hope the LD test would further reduce them down to below 20 strong which take away their buffs.
I will try post a tailored list. Looking forward to more ideas and comments.

There's no Herald that gives Fearless.

 JNAProductions wrote:

Neophyte2012 wrote:
Thank you guys for all your recommendation, so based on the suggestions I see so far, the strategy counter Chaos soup could be summarized as below:

Bring lots of snipers, like 3 Eliminatior squads, a few Scout snipers, and maybe allied the Vindicare Assassins. Kill the Nurgle herald who gives the fearless bubble first. Then proceed to target the PB hordes. Aim at killing 8 of them in each unit, and hope the LD test would further reduce them down to below 20 strong which take away their buffs.
I will try post a tailored list. Looking forward to more ideas and comments.

There's no Herald that gives Fearless.

There is the Sloppity Bilepiper, which allows Nurgle units to roll 2d6 for morale and take the lowest. Combined with an Icon, this gives you better odds than 1 in 3 of rolling a 1 on your morale check, which causes you to lose no models to morale (and, instead, add d6 slain models back to the unit).

But yes, no Herald (nor warlord trait, nor relic) gives true immunity to morale.

11/36, actually-so not quite 1/3.

Space Marines versus literally any army besides space marines is going to be a slaughter.

 Marmatag wrote:
Space Marines versus literally any army besides space marines is going to be a slaughter.

chaos and loyalist marines are close eneugh that it'll come down to tactics used and luck, as well as the individuals lists more then anything