Whilst Varistat makes his mind up...

Well clearly a new edition of 40K is justification for the start of a new army. That coupled with the imminent arrival of a new codex for the Emperor’s finest, I was obviously left with but one choice…..

Marines it is!

Already having an excessive, if somewhat dusty, number of Ultramarines knocking about, I decided that I really couldn’t bring myself to paint a whole army the same colour again. Thinking of my options, I found myself considering different ideas such as different colour shoulder pads, patterning or shapes on the armour, I even considered the heretical idea of camouflage! As I wanted a force that would be striking on the table top, I was left with only one option….

Howling Griffons!

Their heraldry is bold, bright and should be relatively easy to do as a paint scheme…. ….I’ll let you know if I still feel that way in about 1750pts time.

So now we have strawberry and custard flavour marines but what to do with them? What sort of army am I going for? The oh so short list of my wargaming victories stands as testament to my complete inability to design killy-uber-mean armies. They tend to be more like the Monty-Pythonesque suicide squad from ‘The Life of Brian’. This might be why I am more interested in them looking pretty.

I decided that I wanted to see just how mean a marine infantry could be under the new rules. Running, rapid firing and holding objectives is what I want them to keep themselves busy with. With this in mind, I’m planning (obviously just a rough plan prior to the appearance of the new codex) to go with five or six tactical squads. Now this clearly isn’t a particularly glamorous design for an army but having had a new hole torn into me by horribly unbalanced marine armies in past, I have a moral objection to marine lists in which landspeeders outnumber guys in power armour. Believe me its very possible and one particular game was so one-sided that I actually came third as the difficult terrain scored more kills than I did.

Two other factors have led to my decision. Firstly, having read the designers notes for the new codex in White Dwarf I realised that they seem to be making an effort to make to bring the marines back to their original incarnation as an Infantry Elite supported by a few flashy bits and bobs. I like that original view of them. It’s the one that first fired up my love of 40K in the Rogue Trader days and I love that the new edition is moving back in that direction. Secondly, as we are going to be playing games at paired 250pts, 500pts and every multiple of 250 thereafter, I thought that the good old marine tactical squad would be a great building block as we move through the different points thresholds. Their resilience coupled with mass bolter fire and a “miss”ile launcher should hopefully give me strength and flexibility. Well that’s the plan…….

As for the rest of the army, I’m probably going to include two dreadnoughts, especially as I have two sets of the marine contingent from the Black Reach boxset. After chucking in a commander (but before squad upgrades) I should still have 700 odd points left to play with. What to have?? Not to sound like I’m designing my army by what is in the AoBR boxset but Terminators deep striking under the new rules should be fun! I never liked having to put deep striking units somewhere ‘safe’. Now at least you don’t automatically throw away hundreds of points if Lady Luck shakes her head. I’ll feel much more inclined to have a crack at putting deep strikers right in the thick of it. It is what they are meant to be about after all.

So whats next after Troops, HQ, Dreadies and an Elite? Make the Termie unit bigger? Two terminator units? This is where I’ve ground to a halt. I’m just going to have to wait to see what new goodies they are going to treat us to in the new codex.

I can’t wait!

God this actually sounds like I vaguely know what I'm doing...............a momentary lapse I'm sure.