Let the beats drop ... New Marine Codex

Warhammer 40,000 – The new marine book is out. I can still use my lists for the most part. Happy day.

The first thing I did with the new marine book was check the points and entries to be sure that the existing lists I've been working on still worked and didn't need massive overhauls. I was thrilled to see that for the most part I could still build most of the lists Ive been messing around with and with some of them I even had some points to spare. Of course others need to shave a few points but nothing to traumatic.

The second thing I did was to check the chapter tactics. For the most part they stayed the same or pretty similar. I think the Iron Hands ones is semi-ambiguous. The way it's written implies that all vehicles in the army get "It will not die" however as my friend likes to point out the vehicles don't have chapter tactics listed in their unit description. So I can see this being argued in many games stores and local clubs. I had hoped this would be more clear this time around. Raven Guard seem to have been shafted with the weakest of the tactics, but even the weakest of the tactics has a use in some situation.

Third I flipped through the formations. This is the part of seventh edition that still causes me a fair amount of confusion. I think that's primarily because I'm so used to the FOC. So being able to just grab formations and slap them together to make a detachment still feels foreign to me. The benefits of doing so are pretty amazing. If you take a full company then all the vehicles are free and you have objective securred with everything. It's still going to take me a while to get my head around not needing to use an HQ and two troops but the benefits of using the special formations are very worthwhile. I like being able to run a first company strikeforce with terminators, sternguard and vanguard vets; that will be a nice looking force that could be very effective and tossed into several lists to fill weaknesses.

It seems to be the direction the Imperial Books are going with each group able to provide a niche role that can be cobbled together using various formations. This gives a good basis for doing some narrative style games following a formation through the various warzones they might see action in.