Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: What Do We Do About Crappy Marines?
Goatboy back on the soapbox to talk about 40K’s crappy Space Marines. What are we gonna do about them?
What the heck are we going to do with them? From their lack of overall offensive power mixed with everyone else’s army getting more brutal it has become a bad time to be a power armored jerk for the Emperor. The question I have is what should we do about them? Or how can we make them better?
Houston, We Have a Problem
First let’s start with the basic ideas on making an army better. GW falls into the following categories in glowing up an army. They will make them tougher, more offensive, or a mixture of both to create some kind of monster. Initially Marines were this monster when they came out with a ton of powerful damage capability (at the time) and mixed with some tough abilities.
I think the issue really right now is GW swerved to bring Space Marines in line with 9th Edition. Then they moved a lot of the other armies past that line. The easiest way to see this is to compare the new Gargoyle gun versus the feared bolter. Remember when having all their bolter options in Deathwatch was a problem? Do you think this would even be an issue now when Tau can shoot you from behind a wall?
Solution – Offense or Defense?
Instead of waxing poetic let’s think what should we do to make the Marine a feared and iconic monster again. What simple methods should we use to somehow fix the Marine army? I want to start with the offensive part of it. While making an army tougher is one way to go it is usually not the most exciting way to go. Throwing your damage at a wall that doesn’t care makes for a rather frustrating game. You also mix this with the issues of failing saves on top means a lot of the time making it exiting for one side severely eliminates the enjoyment for the other.
The Holy Bolter
This is why making damage just better ends up working more as your army can still die – it just punches well enough to at least make you feel like your units are doing something. This means we need to start at the beginning with the bolter and whatever weird name you want to add in front of the Primaris bolter. I think starting there is where we need to go and I have a few thoughts on how to glam them up.
First – let’s talk about the basic stats. Most likely we need to just go ahead and bite the bullet and give the bolter an extra point of strength. This means all the bigger versions need to go up a point of strength as well. This is a pretty simple option and one that will help push the damage into the direction we want it to go. Heck we could just leave it on the Primarus guys and write up some Cawl fluff saying he found a way to make better bullets.
I would also at the same time try to figure out a way to increase the firepower. I remember the old Heresy days had a method to unleash the rage of chapter to double shoot. I know there are some Stratagems but what if they just had a once a battle rule for all the troop units to “unleash” hell. Oh and it isn’t limited to one unit during a turn. Yes the amount of shooting could be high but when you compare it to some of the other armies right now would it be any worse? Would it feel fluffy to see them hit the super auto button on their bolter?
Power Armor
Next let’s just make the Marine Power Armor tougher. I know we could think of ways to limit damage done to them but let’s instead just figure out a way to make them tougher. All of the -1 damage rules just feel tacked on to too many armies right now. Instead lets just make Power Armor more powerful.
What if instead of a chapter having a rule of ignoring Ap-1 they instead just ignore one AP of any ranged weapon? This way it wouldn’t be to insane if you think how so many armies stack AP modifiers on top of them. This way it would be like a weird cover rule that goes around all those ignore light cover rules that have infiltrated too many armies. This bulk keyword rule could just be attached to Astartes keyword themselves. Make it specifically a rule that full Marine armies get so other units with Power Armor don’t get it like those pesky Inquisitors.
I think those two rule ideas wouldn’t be too far out of line with what we see on the table top. I want Marines to be good again because it is one of the easier armies to collect and they have a lot of fluff behind them. They just need a small bit of help and finding ways to bulk help them means the army and all its chapters get a nice boost that would be helpful for the game. Plus throwing out waves of Bullet hell would be a very Marine thing to do.
How would you help the mighty Space Marine survive in today’s 40K?
