7th edition marines pt. 2

Been a while since I wrote the first part of this series in the wash up of the bay area open. The NOVA open had a drop pod list quite highly placed (13th), so I thought I'd go back and write a bit about pod lists.

Space marines in 7th edition is mostly about objective secured (OS) spam and grav-guns. Grav-guns kill just about all the game's nasties at the moment (besides maybe Knights) and removing power armour bodies from objectives has always been difficult. Now that Rhinos (which are actually quite tough and dirt cheap) and drop pods (which are AV12 all round and drop on top of objectives) are scoring it's especially tough to stop a marine player from scoring all the points. It seems to me like space marines will be dominating the OS-spam style, vying with wave serpents.

There was a drop pod ultramarines list in the BAO top eight. From memory, the list looked like this:

Marneus Calgar
Tigurius
Sternguard (7) w/ pod, fist, heavy flamer
Tactical (10) w/pod, meltagun, combi-melta, multi-melta
Tactical (10) w/pod, meltagun, combi-melta, multi-melta
Tactical (10) w/pod, flamer, combi-flamer
Tactical (10) w/pod, plasmagun, combi-plasma
Tactical (10) w/pod, heavy bolter
Assault (10) w/pod, flamer x2, close combat weapons


The Sternguard death squad stomp face about the place with psychic buffs and Marneus' tank abilities. The melta squads kill priority targets for first blood. Everyone stays alive because they're space marines while redeploying thanks to Calgar until the game ends. You have a 12/12/12 unit with 3 hull points on every objective on the board. The plasma gun team and heavy bolter hold objectives more to the backfield while everyone else gets up close and personal, especially the assault squad. You can use tactical doctrine on the first two turns (thanks to Marneus) to make your drop-fire devastating (them tanks are poppin, even the wave serpents) and then assault doctrine later to get into far away assaults. Sometimes you even want to use assault doctrine on turn 2 (to take out those annoying Tau for example, though I imagine this list relies on not facing Tau to some extent).

Pods are wonderful because they are reliable deep strike units. Half your pods come down turn 1 and the other half come down turn 2. They have inertial guidance system so it's very hard to have a deep strike mishap. Once you're down you have almost no maneuverability (Calgar helps a little, but now that ATSKNF doesn't provide free movement, he's only helping you move backwards), but you're hopefully standing exactly where you want to be. You can drop pods on all the objectives in a Maelstrom mission and then go walk off with all your guys to kill stuff and be scoring 'Secure Objective x's' as they turn up without even trying.

Then the space wolf codex hit and you can now ally in fast attack slot drop pods, which means your grav centurions can pod in. That is so brutal. The NOVA list was (Sentinals of Terra tactics to get two Centurion squads):

Rune Priest ML2
Grey hunters in pod
Grey hunters in pod
Grey Hunters in pod
Grey Hunters in pod

Librarian ML2
Centurions (3) in drop pod
Centurions (3) in drop pod
Tactical in pod
Tactical in pod

Meltaguns and combi-meltas everywhere. Centurions trash anything they fire at, especially if they are rocking prescience (I imagine that's what the rune priest is for; Sentinals librarian is probably re-rolling for storm of fire on the Warlord traits table), and with the pods they don't have any trouble getting into range. I was running a land raider full of centurions for a large part of 6th edition because I hated bikes so much, and they were brutal. The problem there was that you didn't get to shoot anything for a turn or two and you had to sink a lot of points into that land raider. Now you can just take a second squad instead. Once you're in the middle of the board it's hard to hide from all the carnage. Even light infantry can't survive when you bring those hurricane bolters to bear. A second weakness is that once Centurions are tied up in assault they have a hard time getting away to shoot again because of slow and purposeful (no sweeps), a low number of attacks and AP -. But all the bodies dropping down around you mean you have plenty of support, and those grey hunters pack a wallop in assault against most units. You also have the spare points for the second squad, so you've got a much better chance of being able to delete one enemy squad each turn. The meltaguns (3 in each wolf squad) take care of the rest and you've also got a tonne of bodies to clog objectives and kill hordes. I love this list. I wonder what it lost too. All the lists were crazy power-game style.