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Hi all,

Apologies for posting this here but I don't think anyone really looks at the other dedicated forum.

I'm new to Epic and my SM battle company arrived the other day. I'm still in the process of basing them but wondered if anyone could supply me with their army lists to help me decide how many Tactical and Devastator detatchments to use?

Any help would be great.

Craig

I look at the dedicated forum.

Really it depends on how you want your marine list to play and what you want it to look like. One of the (many) nice things about Epic is that you can play a marine list that looks like a marine list should look and it will perform well. It won't be the best list in the game, but it will be fun to play with and against. So really, decide which chapter you want to play, how you think that chapter would field itself and go with that.

My epic marines are salamanders, so I've gone the ground hogging route and my core composition is 2 tac detachments and 2 dev detachments. If I want to be able to deal with armour more effectively, then I add lots of razorbacks.

For example:

600 - Tac Detachment with Supreme Commander (100), Rhinos (free), 5 lascannon Razorbacks (125), hunter (75)
425 - Tac Detachment with Rhinos (free), 5 lascannon Razorbacks (125)
250 - Devestator Detachment with rhinos (free)
250 - Devestator Detachment
200 - Bike detachment
375 - Terminator detachment with chaplain (375)
300 - Vindicator detachment
300 - Predator detachment

The preds and vindies are for theme and to add weight - preds are poor and vindies truly truly terrible but salamanders should have lots of armour. If i want the list to perform better, i'll drop some armour and call in some AM warhound help.

You may want to play Blood Angels, in which case an assault based list, dropping tacs via pods and using thunderhawks to deliver assault and dev detachments, is probably more appropriate. Certainly it's a potent build.

Oh yeah, and congratulations on choosing the best wargame system GW have ever developed!

Cheers or the input pal, I think that will help me loads.

I'm basing my chapter on pre-heresy World Eaters so will do as you suggest with the Blood Angel setup and go more assault based. I'm looking forward to trying the game out now, hoping its as good as I'm expecting.

Craig

A fairly standard build is a thunderhawk packing an assault detachment and devvie detachment, both of which have character upgrades (inspiring chaplains are fairly standard, although the MW on the libby).

That comes in at a hefty 725 pts, but its absolutely brutal for anything on the recieving end. The three detachments fight as one for the turn they assault, so thats 8-10 3+ attacks (two of which may be MW) from the infantry and 2 firefight from the T-hawk as well. If you can get the entry right or supress enemy AA it probably won't have any blast markers when it arrives. And chaplains are inspiring, so thats at least an auto +1 (or 2 if you have 2 chaplains, as they stack) to combat resolution before you start.

However, if all of your group are new to the game, don't rush into using air assault. Its probably the most abstract part of the game, and the hard to defend against at first. Only use once your comfortable with the rest of the rules-set.

For the future the specialist-games forum is a good source of advice, although they are populated by some very seasoned vets. Warseer has a decent epic forum and the warseer magazine firebase has some good epic reports in it.

I generally go to Tactical Command for Epic advice. I've only played one game of Epic with the current rules (which are brilliant), so I can offer you this piece of advice: Something that uses template weapons like a Whirlwind will come in handy, as it forces your opponent to disperse his formations, which makes them vulnerable to your assaults. I tightly-packed IG company puts out a hell of a lot of Firefight! (Shudders.)

Yeah, that is a good point. That Sallie list was deliberately handicapped by not taking Whirlwinds... forgot to mention that.

If you're going to put Whirlies in, you better put a Hunter with them, plus a couple of other formations. As a primarily Ork player, my first target with my Fighta-Bommerz is Whirlwinds. And I carry two formations of 6 F-B's each.

If you carry ANY anti-air, I generally spend the first turn or two killing/suppressing the anti-air so I can bring my Landa in BM free. Then I roam free with the F-B's in turn three.

The 2700 point list I kick around and to great success is as follows:

Termi unit, supreme commander
Termi unit, chaplain
2x Thunderhawks
Strike Cruiser
Tactical Squad, Rhinos, Vindicator
2x Devastators, Librarian, Drop Pods, Dreadnaugt
warhound titan

The lists hits hard and fast. It capitalizes on larger armies. Being Marines you are most likely to go first and in that one turn, you can orbital bombard, planetstrike 2 thunderhawks carring termies, and 2 devestator squads, unleashing 2 DPs at AT5+/AP5+ to all units in 15cm each, then retain intiative and charge in with the 2 termi squads)hopefully your opponents best unit) with 2 thunderhawks and 2 dev squads to FF. This effectively cripples many armies, and all you did was really activate two termi units, and still have 2 devs and 2 Thawks in your opponents face forcing him to react.