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Hear me out. I'm not actually looking to purposely build a spam army. Rather, I've collected a batch of RT marines and have just about enough to build an army from. Unfortunately it is mostly consisting of:
-Around 60 Tac marines armed with bolters
-most of the Sgts. are metal (that I don't want to convert) armed with power weapons or bolters.
-2 MK 1 rhinos.

Additionally I have:
-Enough heavy and special weapons for each tac squad and a devastator squad.
-Enough bits to make a few squads of Tac into assault marines, though only 5 of them would have jump packs.
-A squad of 5 metal chaplains that I'll be doing up as vanguard or honor guard.
-Enough metal bits to convert a rhino to a Vindicator, though I'm not sure this is wise.

I don't plan to add much to this army, both because I don't have much cash, and because I'm trying to keep it to just RT-era miniatures with a smattering of early 2nd edition stuff. Any advice on general army composition based on what I've got would be appreciated.

If you don't mind using it as an 'counts-as' army, run them as space wolves. Grey Hunter spam is very effective.

I had a bunch of RTT marines, and some marines/termies from the starter box, and I did just that. At the end of 5th edition they played well, and in 6th edition they would be even better.

The trick is making sure you have enough special weapons. You want either PGs or MGs, and you will need to do some converting to get them.

One thing I might add to the list of things you can field is sternguard. They are just a helmet stripe away from a standard RT bolter marine.

You might not be hyper-competitive, but a pure footslogging force can put up a good fight. There will be some bad match ups, but that's true for anyone. Massed bolter fire can be a powerful thing. The IG does similar things with their flashlights, and bolters are better then those, and if all you are putting on the table is basic marines, you get a lot of them.

I think if you gave about 30 of them a white helmet and called them Sernguard you might be ok. The Grey Hunter idea was my first thought as well so I think that has merit. The more I think about it, you can do sternguard as the base of an army, and either take Space Marine (for scoring or for twin-linked melta) or Blood Angels (for sanguinary priests) as the base.

I think probably a Pedro Cantor based army is your best bet. Take 2 tactical squads, 3 sternguard squads, and then 2-3 Devestator squads (use all those tactical missile launchers). You could put a couple squads in rhinos, make sure to leave room for Pedro, and maybe put together a home-made Aegis Defense line if you wanted some extra cover (good if you are taking devs). Should have plenty of resiliency, anti-infantry shooting, and some close-combat potential. Would have a pretty decent theme to it as well.

In answer to your question, Tactical Marines are not that killy. Resiliant maybe, but not killy. An army with that many of them won't do well in most cases. I think you need to look at what else they could represent based on their paint (Grey Hunters, Sternguard, Legion of the Damned, Chaos, etc...)

-Myst

 Nevelon wrote:
One thing I might add to the list of things you can field is sternguard. They are just a helmet stripe away from a standard RT bolter marine.

You might not be hyper-competitive, but a pure footslogging force can put up a good fight. There will be some bad match ups, but that's true for anyone. Massed bolter fire can be a powerful thing.

That's excellent advice on the sternguard.

Massive bolter infantry does have a number of advantages. It's really hard to shoot down 60+ MEQ in 5-7 turns for most armies. This playstyle is a 'weathering' approach where you will take a lot of losses over the game, but you will still have enough forces to claim objectives at the end of the game.

 labmouse42 wrote:

 Nevelon wrote:
One thing I might add to the list of things you can field is sternguard. They are just a helmet stripe away from a standard RT bolter marine.

You might not be hyper-competitive, but a pure footslogging force can put up a good fight. There will be some bad match ups, but that's true for anyone. Massed bolter fire can be a powerful thing.

That's excellent advice on the sternguard.

Massive bolter infantry does have a number of advantages. It's really hard to shoot down 60+ MEQ in 5-7 turns for most armies. This playstyle is a 'weathering' approach where you will take a lot of losses over the game, but you will still have enough forces to claim objectives at the end of the game.

I have two friends(one Imperial Fist and one Iron Warriors funny enough) who just spam basic marines. At 1999 points they are rocking nearly 100 marines. It's like greentide except you need AP3 blast weapons. Also any squad can stop and shoot a missile launcher and have a pretty good chance to hit.

I am not sure if they are devistatingly effective because it is a good strategy or because people dont know how to play against them, but either way they are tough to beat.

Well, devistatingly effective is all in the eye of the beholder right?

That kind of army will very rarely table the opponent, yet it will often win objective games due to the high number of durable scoring troops on the board.

In some tourney formats where you get max points for tabling, its not a great army to play. In book missions, or NOVA format, its a very effective army to play.

Thanks for the advice folks. I'm not a tourney player and have no interest in being "hyper-competative" but it would be nice if I put the time in on the army to have an army that's not going to get tabled every time.

I'm creating my own chapter for this army (I've already got BA and IG armies) and I don't necessarily want to run counts-as SW. The idea thus far is grey with dark blue accents and Imperial Fists decals/iconography for the "Shadow fists" or "Grey Fists" chapter.

As for Sternguard, that does sound good. I do have a fair number of odd/ornate metal marines with cool iconography and Terminator honors badges that stand out enough to be sternguard (maybe about 20-25 of these) They nearly all have bolters, but still...

As for plasma guns, that's no problem, I've got alot of experience converting plasma guns from plasma pistols and flamers like this:

Appologies for the paintjob, it's from almost a decade ago...

With the new overwatch rules, are Plasma still better than flamers?

Looking through my stuff, I also found:
-2+ squads of Termies, one basic, one with Hammers and Sheilds.
-Librarian in Terminator armor
-Special edition SM Vet Sgt/captain with storm bolter and power fist. the one with the chaimail cloak/dress.

These would be nice to have and paint, but it sounds like they might detract from the focus of the army.

There's also the option of running a Legion list from the Horus Heresy book. It's tactical squads can go up to 20 man, and they can double tap their bolters for up to 4 shots each.

With the new rapid-fire rules, PGs are awesome.

Mass bolters are amazing in the new Horus Heresy lists.

What is this Horus Heresy list/book you all are mentioning?

Eilif wrote:
What is this Horus Heresy list/book you all are mentioning?

HH: Betrayal.

New FW book released to give rules to the original Space Marine legions during the Horus Heresy.

Has rules for primarchs, SM jetbikes, stuff like that.

Up until recently, no. Now with basic CSM being so cheap you can indeed spam them on the field and force saves. However, it is difficult. Case and point: Dire Avengers. Even with bladestorm and doom it is not very effective at dealing with MEQ or TEQ. You need ~25 marines in rapid fire to put out similar fire to 10 dire avengers with exarch and doom on the target. Even then, its not incredibly effective, killing 2.5 terminators or 6 marines.

Mass bolters says one thing, run sternguard.

It can work if you just run tons of tacticals, but make sure you have anti-tank covered. A vindicator will help, as will a devestator team, I would suggest lascannons simply to help you take out elite units as well, since a 2+ save will haunt your list.

Of course its effective. You may lose some of the more funky things that more specialised armies can do, but your army will have a greater resilience. if you have 100 marines (for example) and you lose 10 in one turn, thats 10% of your force, whereas if you only have 40 guys, thats 25%. you may lack the specialist units to achieve something efficiently, but you will still certainly have the weapons in your force to achieve your objective.
You will also have more units to sacrifice to slow down, or stop that deathstarofdoom thats running at you. after all, their awesome specialist unit can kill, 20, 30 or even 40 marines, and you will STILL have the troops to contest and capture objectives. you will still have the firepower to clear enemy troops and so forth. You will also be much more resistant to alpha strikes from, lets say, a Drop pod assault, or a mass artillery barrage, so what they can nuke 2 or 3 units, you have plenty more where they came from

What you will lose is the tactical flexibility that comes from having a more specialised force. with so many points spent on having boots on the ground, you will have fewer vehicles, characters and specialist units like terminators and so forth.

Its certainly a viable army, and far more resilient than you might think, and far more effective than you might think on account of the fact it can take a few punishing turns of casualties, and still come out swinging

I ran a mostly bolter army in a mini tournament (1500 points) with my friends a couple of weeks back.

I had a libby, 5 tactical termies, 30 tactical marines, 5 scouts, 2 Storm talons and a TFC.

I had a rough time standing up to SW who came charging me, but gave TAU a good sound beating, even though they annihilated my TacTermies without them having time to do anything.

I really liked being able to get so many guys on the field and will certainly do this again! I had combat squads everywhere!

Indeed, the real strength is target saturation.

With 6 tactical squads on the field, you will have 12 Combat squads. Plus your HQ, Elites, and other stuff.

You could easily have 20+ units on the field.

Many armies will find killing even half that many units impossable.


It is only a disadvantage in Purge the Alien where each squad is a victory point. Thats the one mission you will likely lose. Every other mission will be heavily in your favor, or at worst a draw.


You will need special weapons. I'd do half your squads with Plasma guns and half with Meltaguns. For heavy weapons, missile launchers and lascannons are going to be good. again a 50/50 ratio would serve you well.

putting a lot of those in Pods will ruin most Guardsmen's day

As a Chaos player, I would actually dread having to fight an army of all tacticals. Forget about sternguard, get a generic FC and max out the number of units.

Here's why: 40k breaks when you have too many units. Because of the rules around shooting, you can only target one other unit per turn. There are probably not enough turns in a game to shoot at all your units, while you could easily overwhelm most other armies with numbers alone.

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?showtopic=260731

This is a link to an all spawn list I ran for 5th edition. I won about 8 slow, tedious, frustrating games with it, where opponents could not target most of my units long enough to make a dent. The reason they were winning was because no one could shoot enough to properly deal with them while they crossed the board.

I really love the idea of an all tactical superarmy and hope to see it played out at some point!