Friday 23 March 2012

No Shenanigans

Last night I finally started on a project I have been talking about for a couple of years - a "no shenanigans" Space Marine army for Epic:Armageddon. A productive afternoon's painting has finished a Tactical Detachment...

 



It's probably worth explaining what I mean when I say no shenanigans. In Epic the Space Marine army has a couple of ways they can place troops unexpectedly on the board - Terminators can teleport, Thunderhawks or Landing Craft can conduct an air assault, infantry can use Planetfall. There are counter-tactics to all of these "shenanigans" (so named by a local player after just having lost to a Marine army) but they are potentially very powerful options. But I wanted to do my army without these - a pure ground-pounder marine army.

Incidentally the basing on these guys is the same as I use on my FoW Hungarians, and I think I'll be using this as my default basing scheme from now on. It looks good, is easy to do, and goes well with the Woodland Scenics surface ("Summer Grass") on my gaming table.

7 comments:

  1. Hi John - good luck with those ground-pounder marines. I found mine lacked numbers (ie shooting dice to whittle down Orks) so I am going to give another list a go.

    The 2012 Compendium has 'Red Corsairs', a chaos list so no ATSKNF premium, but it still has a skimmer unit to be my Ornithopters. Chch events seem to allow whatever lists are in those EA compendiums so I hope it manages better than the Codex Marins did for me!

    Cheers

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  2. The dominant TacCom forum view is that ground-pounder Marine lists can work… but advice on how to do it and battle reports of successful examples are very thin on the ground. The list I’ve written up relies on a Warlord Titan as a central “heavy” unit (i.e. reinforced armour and TK weapons) for extra punch.

    IME, the local Epic circle is happy to run Developmental/Experimental lists, and an army made up of 3rd party models gets a lot of leeway regarding what list it uses. Which unit from the Red Corsairs were you going to count ornithopters as?

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  3. Yes that's half my issue - Titans aren't really attractive for me, being insufficiently Duney. Now a Greater Demon as a Sandworm.... that has potential.

    The Red Corsairs have a skimmer called a 'blight drone'.

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  4. Sandworms are hard to represent using the existing Epic army lists. Greater demons work for juveniles. But an adult worm is big and tough enough to have the DC/armour save of a Reaver or Warlord titan, but without shields or significant ranged weapons. There isn't really a unit that fits.

    Another approach - Marine lists can be very effective using Thunderhawks for air assault. A "Carryall landing" seems suitably duney...

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  5. Yeah been there, done that. I just don't want to play them that way - centered around some big hitters.

    The Demons are alright - my Dune is the video-game Dune (which explains the tanks etc) and in that Dune, Sandworms get driven off by concentrated fire. So the Summoning pool mechanic (deploy Thumpers!) is actually not that bad an analogue.

    The main thing is to get a list of relatively tough infantry (Atriedes were neatly equal to the Sardaukar, just in much smaller numbers) with a couple of units of Fremen and a range of support and the Chaos list is pretty good for that. Now I've found one that does Ornithopters. The Marine list is ok too but no really ground-pounder enough.

    You have that annoying captcha on btw.

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  6. Thanks Jamie, that captcha is much more effort than it should be to disable. Hopefully it's gone now.

    A fellow non-shenaniganer (if that isn't a word, I now declare it one) - good stuff! Although I think summoning sandworms/demons might fit into some peoples' definition of shenanigans.

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  7. Hi Than - no I am no 'non-shenaniganer', I still have the capacity to load up a heavy carryall with Fedaykin or have them appear suddenly out of the sand. It is just that I want a list that is more interesting than basically being an air-assualt delivery vehicle.

    Deploying thumpers to call Shai-Halud is far to cool to NOT do :)

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