Usermail: Space Marine List building guide

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A ridiculously simple way to build a decent Space Marine List.

Most of what we face out there every week at our local clubs / gaming stores are not optimized lists. In fact, most of them flat out suck. It's the shallow end of the pool in terms of competitive play. When you see what people are posting on the forums, it's even worse.... facepalm worse. Many lists seem to be thrown together with absolutely no thought given to composition at all.

In looking at the different "how to build a list" articles, you find a lot of great advice that talks about redundancy and duality, and the other words that end in "y" - which is certainly great advice. But I think we can simplify the process a bit more for the newer player while the 'bigger' concepts sink in.

As a caveat, my main army is Space Wolves and it's only recently that I've been brought kicking and screaming into the fold of treating the game as a competitive exercise. Mostly thanks to this board and some clue delivered painfully by my buddy Kennedy's Eldar - who kept beating in my face every time we got a game. But, I did "find the faith" when it came to list building.... And even though I'm pretty new to a lot of the concepts, I think I may just have a very simplified way of looking at the problem that yields pretty good results for Space Wolf and Marine lists. That being said, please bear in mind that the advice here is really tailored to Marine lists and may not be suitable across the board.

One of the most useful concepts that I've picked up from YTTH is the importance of "torrent of fire". If you don't have the ability to pump out a gazillion shots every turn, then you better be awful darn tough because any good list you face will certainly be able to do that to you. I see a lot of guys on the forums post up list advice and all they have is 1 Dreadnought, 1 Predator, and 1 Vindicator which is, in my opinion, a surefire way to lose a game of 40K against a barely competent list my goal is to keep folks from thinking that's ever a good idea.

So, the simple advice is to do this: for 2000 points I think you need at least 8-9 things that will pose a medium to long range threat (24"-36") In addition, they all need to be Str 7 or higher. This lets you pop transports, the big Tyranid bugs, and side armor on pretty much anything. You will also need some melta to get rid of Land Raiders and other things that get too close for comfort. You will need that many items because most good lists will have at least that many facing your army. And once your opponent can overload you with his shooting you're pretty much done. So the goal is to have enough firepower to put a beating on your opponent's forces and so that the loss of any one or two things in a turn won't prevent you from hitting your opponent back. In other words, you gotta be able to give, as well as take, a punch to the face. If you have a glass jaw, then fight's over. Having only four or five units that can give a punch is setting you up to get KO'd.

Thankfully, you're not really all that rich in choices. So your decision matrix shouldn't be that taxing on the brain. By the very nature of this method, you're going to fill out some FoC slots. So, out of the Marine Codex at 2K, you're looking at Razorbacks, Speeders, Rifleman Dreads, AutocLas Predators. For Space Wolves, it's pretty much the same except that you add Long Fangs and Living Lightning Rune Priests.

As long as you have at least 8-9 (BTW I think more is better) then you should be OK. You may not have a GREAT list... but you won't get stomped for lack of firepower. To scale this for 1500, I would suggest you have at least 7-8 effective things.

Even with this method, it doesn't guarantee that you'll build "the perfect list" - but it should ensure that you'll put up a fight and not get punked.

To illustrate this, I'll put up a list I've been working on that I call "the best of the worst" - It's a single rock Codex Marine list I wrote because there are some guys at my local gaming store that just don't have models to drop a truly competitive list. Playing my competitive list against their sub-par list just isn't fun for either of us. I'm not challenged and they're not really in the fight. So I set out to make a list that would put us on a more level playing field but still be tough. So as an exercise in list building I took a bad idea (single rock army) and tried to minimize it's inherent weakness (400 points in ONE selection) -- Right off the bat, I know this will struggle to be competitive... but the idea is to minimize the suck by focusing on it's firepower output.

So here's the 2K list....

* Librarian in Terminator Armor
* Terminator Assault Squad – 4 w/ Thunder hammer, Sgt with LC – In a Land Raider Redeemer with Multi Melta
* Two10 man Tactical squads with ML and Flamer in Razorbacks (TL Las)
* Two Rifleman Dreads
* Three Typhoons
* Three Preds (Autocannon and Las sponsons)

It is not a great list. I make no argument that is. But between the Razorbacks, Dreads, Typhoons and Preds, I have 10 units on field that can spit out a decent amount of fire every turn. (11 if I count the two MLs that will be deployed when my Tacs combat squad and sit in cover) This should keep me in the game against most opponents even with the points sink albatross around my neck. I'm shorting myself by only having 4 rather weak scoring units, but that was the tradeoff for putting enough firepower into the list to hit my "9 units with firepower" threshold. You'll notice I don't really count the LR cause I don't think it'll be able to consistently do something useful every turn.

Point I'm trying to get at with the illustration is that even with a self imposed penalty, you can build a good list without too much effort. Just keep the idea in mind that Torrent of Fire = Good and you're half way there. Now to make yourself a great list, that's another story and one I'm still working on myself.


Hope this helps....

Chris W

http://clt40k.wordpress.com/

Reply:

An nteresting take indeed.

Anyone else care to deal with the other races too? :)