It will depend a bit on your local meta and there are different prevailing wisdoms in different areas (e.g. in the UK you would tend to fly terminators in and out – making 2 thawk the norm –, I think in north America people are more inclined to teleport them in). I am assuming for this post that you are not in the UK, so have refrained from just parroting a UK air-marine-meta list here (that would be minimum 2 thawks and a strike cruiser)!
In terms of use: marines are a surgical force, they lack numbers, so try to destroy the parts of the enemy army that can really hurt you. What this means well depend on your specific list: often for air list marines there is a focus on killing enemy AA and reducing enemy activations early game, so they can dominate via air from turn 2. Your force is more ground heavy, so the specifics threats will vary, but you would for example want to be carefully of anything with macro barrage. The other thing marines are good at doing/need to do, is to avoid threats that they cannot sensibly commit to destroying. Good use of scouts, speeders, and terrain, might mean the MW Barrage ork gargant is best avoided, unless you know you will kill it (either commit, or ignore it all together).
So one big question is: what's in the thunderhawk? terminators, tacticals, or assaults?
Landspeeders are a great formation, but regular space marine scouts are also an absolutely amazing formation and worth considering. Landspeeders might seem more fragile than preds, but they fill a different role: speeders are there to be fast, and to have scout, scout has real value on a fast unit like speeders, as you can control table area. Your speeders will more often be spread out, or behind terrain, so while each one is more vulnerable than a predator as a light vehicle, you are a bit less likely to take hits on all of them at once. The typhoon upgrade is rarely taken.
Preds can be fragile, but the popular pick would be predator annihilators not destructors, which add significant AT shooting to your army, as 12 AT shots is hard to ignore, especially if you can get crossfire (although double warhounds does pack MW for your current army). That said, I took destructors (by mistake …) to a tournament a couple of weeks ago and got lucky facing orks as two of my opponents.
If you can split the warhounds into two singles you will get an extra activation. However, single warhounds will be one of the easier formations to break in your army. Depends a bit on if you want titans or tacticals as your BTS. In general i find tacticals with hunters a bit hit and miss … but still tend to take it as a BTS: tacticals as BTS can be binary: either the enemy ignores them as they are hard to shoot to death, or makes a priority of them if they have aggressive assault formations with good reach, as tacticals on their own wont beat other lists' top tier assault formations . (Im too chicken to run terminators as a BTS to use in aggressive assaults, but others do well with that!) Might want to consider how common deathstrikes are in your local meta …
Double tacticals is fluffy but possibly not optimal. I woudn't say it is a bad choice, but that there are stronger choices. Tacticals take a lot of effort to break and wipe out, but do not excell at much aside from staying power. So you might do better having something with more specific utility, then 1 tacticals as a supreme commander host, rather than two tacticals.
_________________ AFK with real life, still checking PMs
|