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I want to expand my little Death Guard allied detachment into a bigger allied detachment. I'm planning on expanding my tactical squad to 20 men and then either getting 2 support squads (flamer, plasma, melta or heavy bolter and a missile launcher squad) or a squad of tartaros termies. I'm also considering turning them into an army on their own.

Support squad wise:

Plasma has plenty of use for shredding elite units and tacs.
Also good for lighter AV.
Great against mechanicum for piling wounds on automata.

Melta is your typical armour killer as always.
Due to ceramite, it's slightly less useful at times though.
It is good for doubling out characters however.

Flamers have limited use IMO.
While you can pile wounds on units, they aren't all that great to be fair.
S4 means wounding on 4s most of the time.
Iron hands and mechanicum will laugh it off however.





If your looking into heavy support squads, there's a couple of good ones.


Missiles are tried and tested as always.
Providing it's not got a flare shield, it can atleast glance everything to death.

Heavy bolters are middle of the road.
Not bad range, not bad strength and decent amount of shots.
It really doesn't excell at anything however unless your shooting AV10 all the time.


If you don't mind forgeworld packs:

Volkite culverins are simply amazing.
Higher strength, range and shots than a heavy bolter with the added bonus of deflagate to boot.
A unit of 10 will delete most units in the game.
While it can't hurt heavy armour, it destroys infantry with ease.





Support squads: plasma then melta, ignore flamers.
Heavy squads: missiles then volkite, ignore bolters.


That's just my opinions though from what I find works best.

Volkite caliver squads are brutal ten guys generate 20 high strength shots and every failed save generates another hit, used mine in a game Tuesday they shreaded power armoured guys.

You can essentially run volkite through most of your army.

Packing out support squads with calivers and heavy squads with culverins generates a scary amount of fire power.

A friend generally runs a 10 man calivers squad and 2, 10 man culverin squads.

That's 30 marines putting out 100 shots all with deflagate.
80 of which are S6, 20 are S5.


Anything not in a heavily armoured transport gets torn apart pretty rapidly.

I was thinking about flamers because of chem munitions (pretty nasty in ZM. Rend and S5. But they do have gets hot). Another option is a basilisk instead of the 10 extra men and the support squads for now.

 NivlacSupreme wrote:
I was thinking about flamers because of chem munitions (pretty nasty in ZM. Rend and S5. But they do have gets hot). Another option is a basilisk instead of the 10 extra men and the support squads for now.

From memory (and as a DG player) chem munitions only give you shred and 'gets hot'. I say only but thats still really good for flamers and a nice killy unit right there, provided they can get up to the enemy, for 100pts (no upgrades for the sergeant).
However I don't have the burning of prospero book so if they've updated it there then my bad

He's referring to the Zone Mortalis rules that give templates Shred, and templates that already have Shred +1S, so in ZM they're S5 with Shred. Honest keyword-confusion mistake.

Flamers are cheap and destructive but you have to be able to get them up close (Morturg, Drop Pods, Rhinos, that sort of thing). They're certainly useable but I'd suggest something with more range and flexibility as a first add for a new army; volkite calivers make for a solid Tactical Support squad that can threaten most things you want to point them at.

One other thing to pay attention to with Death Guard is that The Reaping unlocks heavy weapon squads as non-compulsory Troops so you can skip over the Tactical Support squad entirely and go straight for scoring missile launchers or volkite culverin. And as for Terminators it's almost always worth asking why you're taking a generic Terminator squad over one of the unique ones; Deathshrouds aren't particularly flexible but they're hilariously inexpensive and will mangle most melee units you point them at (avoid picking fights with Primarchs, melee Cortex-bots, or Dreadnaughts, and don't get charged by Custodes or the Emperor's Children, and you should come out ahead), Grave Wardens swap a twin-linked bolter for a hilariously destructive rapid-fire grenade launcher and an Overwatch trick almost for free.

you can also think about veteran squads with drop pod and combi weapon. Sniper vets with 2 flamers and 8 x combi flamer are very nice as are Machine Killer vets with melta.

I just realized that at 500 points (the size of my friends EC) I can be a real jerk and bring 20 marines, a basilisk and a captain.