40K: In Defense of Space Marine Captains

When you play a game of 40K, do you normally take a special character? What about your opponents? For simplicity, and to avoid writing a small novel, I’m going to focus purely on Space Marines, ignoring the ‘single chapter’ codices as well (BA, DA, SW and BT).

This article is in two sections – Firstly a few very brief thoughts, secondly some tactics.

The way I see it is this, Vulkan He’Stan, Pedro Kantor and Captain Lysander can each only be in one place at once! The vast majority of Space Marine attacks are led by less well known commanders. In fact, despite having 4000pt+ of Raven Guard, I don’t even own the Shrike model. In all of my 40K forces, I only have one special character, Kharn the Betrayer (although I am thinking of adding Seth into my Pre-Heresy World Eaters). While they often add some fun and powerful special rules, I just don’t really like having the same commander as a dozen people in the same tournament (I lost count of the number of He’Stan lists at the last one!). I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, really I’m not, I just like having a list that is different to everyone else’s, and allows me to come up with a bit of a different narrative as well.

With all this in mind, I want to look at the ‘vanilla’ Captain and Chapter Master in the Space Marine codex.

The captain’s high WS, I and A mean he is more at home in a fight than at range. I’ve found that it’s a waste to give him a power fist or thunder hammer, as this negates his higher initiative, these are more efficient on Veteran Sergeants. This leaves you with three solid options. Pistol and power weapon/ lightning claw, twin lightning claws or a relic blade. With option 1, by math hammer, the rerolls from a single lighting claw are almost always better than a power weapon with an extra attack. The next two options hit harder, but are more expensive, and forego the use of a pistol. I usually recommend the relic blade over the other options for four reasons:

He has the option for a jump pack or bike, and this largely depends on your army style and selection. Mounting the Captain (but not Chapter Master) on a bike gives you the option of taking 5+ strong bike squads as troops. This can be a fantastic late-game winning unit, akin to Eldar jetbikes, but that is a whole article in itself! I personally have a Captain with a jump pack who leads one of my two Raven Guard assault squads (the other is led by a chaplain). I think the Chaplain is a more reliable option, but I like having the variety within the list.

The Chapter Master upgrade is 25pts extra and changes three things. Firstly, it allows a one-shot orbital bombardment, secondly it removes the option of a command squad and instead allows the drafting of an honour guard unit, finally it removes the option of bike squads as troops, as noted above. I’m going to ignore the second point, honour guard are fragile and rarely worth their hefty price tag. The orbital bombardment seems tempting, but since you have to remain static to use it, I find it is a waste of one of your best combat units!  It is also uncharacteristically inaccurate for space marines, and will rarely work when you really need it to! So, to be honest, the Captain is the better option.

The big loss is, of course, the lack of Chapter Tactics. Combat tactics is very flexible, but is overshadowed by the twin-linked weapons of Vulkan in particular. It’s a shame that these options are tied to characters rather than the chapters as a whole, but that’s life I suppose.