40K: Blood Angel Bike Army… Viable?
Hey Folks, Jawaballs here!
I have been bouncing the idea of a Blood Angels bike army around for a while now and I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you.
First of all, is it viable at all? Well, I believe that in Codex Space Marines if you take a captain on a bike, then you can have your troops take bikes too right? I don’t have the codex and it does not matter much one way or the other in regards to this article, except for the fact that this is NOT the case with the Blood Angels while Dark Angels do have biker troops. So, not being able to take Biker troops already answers the viable question. No, you can’t have an all biker BA army. But that does not mean you can’t try!
Building the List
So lets begin with HQ. We can start with my favorite HQ combo, a Libby and Reclusiarch. The potent standard for BA libbies as far as powers are concerned is turning out to be Shield and Sword. That is the combo I play. But this may change a bit if you give your libby a bike! Wings of Sanguinius allows the libby on a bike to be treated as if he is on a Jetbike. Not too shabby. Definitely a potent option, especially when combined with Fear of the Darkness. To take a page out of Fritz’s Necron book, turbo boost your libby 24″, hide him for a turn, then pop out and Fear people. Is that a good way to use your libby? Probably not. Just saying! I prefer to keep him with my Chaplain just to get the extra PW attacks and the sword to deal with dreads, since I am light on hard punching assault troops.
So yes, Rec and Lib on bikes to begin with. But yikes, we are already starting to get into trouble with points. 315 gets you the pair on bikes, with the chap having an infernus pistol. (you can never discount the extra chance to pop a transport before you assault)
Now lets slip in troops before we get all bikey. As I said, no biker troops. The next best thing? Jump packs of course! Sticking with the theme of the army we can throw in a couple of assault squads. So we will do a 10 man squad with Jump Packs, melta, flamer and a fist. That brings us up to 775 total so far.
Ok time for Bikes! Lets go with priests first. x3 Sanguinary priests. x2 bikes and x1 jump pack. Give each a power weapon and we are looking at a total of 1065. But we just amped up our power level quite a lot.
Here is where the first issue I have with the BA codex appears. (I have found nothing to complain about thus far.) Scout bikers, attack bikers and SM bikers are all Fast attack. For the odd player wishing to play a BA biker army, a simple solution is to make Scout Bikers troops! Alas… The three units that I am trying to base an army around all compete for the same spot in my army. So lets do this. Attack Bikes are not really necessary since I can load up my biker squads with melta guns, so I will go with x2 biker squads and x1 scout biker squad equipped as follows:
x2 Bike squad:
x8 bikes plus attack bike
x2 melta
fist
attack bike with multi melta
x1 scout biker squad:
x10 scout bikers
fist
That is 1900 on the dot.
What else? I suppose a third troops choice would be ok. Another assault squad with no upgrades, just coming on late in the game to hold an objective.
Will this army win tournaments? Doubtful. But I can guarantee I would have a lot of fun playing it. Instead of that last assault squad I could also upgrade the scout bikers to the more potent SM bikers. So lets talk tactics!
Tactics
First of all, I like to put all my eggs in one basket. So I would put a priest, chaplain and libby all with one of the bike squads. They are my hammer. Second I would throw in the other biker priest with the other bike squad, and attach the JP priest with one of the assault squads to give them more punch as well.
As the army stands now I have 58 pissed off, very fast moving space marines on the table packing lots of tank killing punch and assaulty teeth. But not only are they fast, they are survivable! They are harder to kill with the bikes adding +1 toughness, and having over half of them protected by a priest in the squad, plus the rest probably staying within range, they should all have Feel No Pain. Tough to kill!
How would I play them? In your face of course… This army is screaming for the chance to get up in your goods and lay the smack down. But not so fast! This is a small army, relatively, with little in the way of survivability vs hard hitting guns. Nowadays even space marine armies are sporting double digit las cannons. (I have 9 in my BA army)
So naturally 1st turn is necessary. But more important, you have to keep them together. You want to keep your boys bunched. (not stupidly of course inviting blast temps) and attack the enemy in focused overwhelming waves. You need to single out one of his flanks then work your way through him! How to do this? You deploy across the table. Presumably your opponent will do likewise, planning on countering your army with the best things he has in his. So he will probably line up his death unit across from yours, etc. Of course there are always exceptions. I am talking in generality. The advantage here is another page from the Fritz book. By encouraging him to spread out his slow moving forces across his long edge, you can now isolate him by turbo boosting your army all to one corner. This will give them all cover saves, and leave half of his army out of the fight for a couple of turns. I say give them all cover saves because you can hide your assault pack guys behind the bikers, who are picking up a 3+ save off their bike!
Failing 1st turn, let him deploy and make a choice. Reserve or suffer a round of shooting. You should be able to get cover saves no matter what. Large squads are easy to hide behind each other. Reserving puts you in the danger of piecemeal deployment where he can concentrate his army on one or two of your squads. But it allows you to Turbo Boost off the table edge right into where you need them the most.
Now you simply zoom up the chosen flank and engage. As you wipe out his forces and kill his tanks, you will be creating hulks of burning armor that hopefully block LOS from across the table, limiting his return fire. There you go! Since this list is purely a “what if” sort of thing, it is difficult to talk much more about tactics. With a little luck, you should do ok, and more importantly, have fun playing a very different style Blood Angels army. I don’t think I could win tournaments with it, but I’m pretty sure I would strike fear into the majority of my opponents locally! But I will have a good laugh doing it either way.
My next article will be about a more serious, and more competitive topic… A Storm Raven list and how to use it in a tournament. Can it be done? Is the Storm Raven the game changer every one was screaming about 6 months ago? Or is it’s fate the same as it’s model… dead on arrival. In the meantime start scrunching points and lets come up with some great lists together!
More to come…
Jawaballs
