Nope, you still place BM back to front and don't start doubling up until you have a number of BM greater than the number of units in the formation.

2 BM on a formation with 2 or more units means nothing is suppressed.

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Dave

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Squats 2019-10-17

Er... Blast markers aren't "assigned" to units in any way... they "belong" to the the formation.

Normal formation: 1 Blast marker = 1 Unit suppressed.

Marine formation: 1 Blast marker = 0 Units suppressed.
                 2 Blast markers = 1 Unit suppressed.
                 3 Blast markers = 1 Unit suppressed.
                 4 Blast markers = 2 Units suppressed.

And so on.  There's no "assigning one Blast marker" or "doubling up" involved at all.

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You still suppress units back to front though. I'll wait for eP or Mosc to chime in, they're the ones that pointed it out to me.

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Dave

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Squats 2019-10-17

Yes, but the placement of the Blast markers is irrelevant, they aren't "assigned", except as, potentially, a reminder; you count the number the formation has, and that tells you the number of units that are suppressed.

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I've always played ATSKNF like Chroma..... Dave, if your reading is correct Marine fire-power is increased massively and the Tac + 6 razorbacks looks awesome, needing 13 BM's to suppress one unit!

This list has a few key flaws which make it sub-optimal.

Marines are not a "one-trick pony", it's just that they've got one fairly easy trick and a lot of really tough ones to pull off!  *laugh*

If you want an "armour heavy" list, check out the Scions of Iron, the winner of the GW's Epic Army Design Contest.

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Created a new thread about Suppression and Marines in the general forum.

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How one-good-air-trick-pony-ish the Marine list is if you want it to be competitive is really my biggest bugbear in Epic. Yes Marines should be good at air assaults, but an all-ground marine army should still be okayish, rather than rubbish as it is now.

IMO tanks really should be improved and/or have their points dropped to better represent that – not that radically, but a few small changes would help. Yes we could play the Scions variant list, but the basic marine list should be more flexibly playable than it is. In any of the various W40k lists marines for any edition they have always had a variety of tactical options and not had to rely on air assault to win. Fixing and better representing this this would encourage more variety in Marine lists and make for more interesting gaming overall.

Edited to add: anecdotally too, the reason a friend of mine gave for why he’d stopped playing EpicA, was that he was dejected he couldn’t get his dark angels to win (he used to use a balanced and not overly air-heavy list).

The basic Marine list was supposed to provide for both styles of play, however it only does one style optimally.

Nither the NetERC or EpicUK have fixed this problem with their army list mods.
I'm not sure what the FrenchERC have done, other than giving RA 5+ armour to Predators.



I quite liked the proposal of dropping all ground based infantry formations by 25pts, and upping the cost of Thunderhawks & Spacecraft by 50pts. Meaning that most Air Assault lists would stay the same, but ground based lists would be cheaper.

Some formations like Vindicators require a heftier discount, such as changing them to be 200pts for a formation of 4 (or upgrading them significantly). Predators with Autocannons also need a hefty boost, such as Firefight 3+, in order to compare well with their Lascannon-toting equivilients.


But both the NetERC and EpicUK have been conservative with their rules mods, so the lists remain unfixed by any group.

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It's been a long time since I played SM v Tyranids, but I found I had success with lots of fast ground marine formations and clipping assaults.  Support fire against their modest armor will cause a lot of Nid casualties and the core of my "mud marine" forces were fast enough to deploy so the Nids had a hard time counter-attacking - hit a flank, force the close swarm to withdraw after losing assault and stay far away.  It was usually only Harridans and Biotitans that stood any chance at all of counter-attacking.

I usually did it with a single air assault setup.  My typical "mud marine" force is 3-4 formations of Bikes and Speeders, a couple Tacs for fire support and holding ground, one formation of Termies, one Thawk with Assault marines and some TBolts.

Of course, as I said, I haven't played in a while.  It's possible the 1/2 gaunt assault rules would cause the number of Nids lost in assault to drop enough that such a tactic wouldn't work over the long haul any longer.

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Neal

Well, Blast marker laying AP fire can be used to clear Gaunts before an attack; lowers the numbers of the swarm, places Blast markers, etc.

Also, many of the "Big Ones" aren't fearless, so they're going to get hacked down... or completely dispersed if a broken swarm is clipped.

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I agree obviously that you can do it, but the unit/list balance as a whole is skewed to make it too much harder.

Tactical Marines should, by all the background, be the most commonly seen unit and surely they are pretty all-round and not specialist? They're elite and not a horde army but why should marines not fight in the manner of a line force at times? There are plenty of examples in the background where they fight in such a manner.

At the moment too many armies need to rely on air assaults, bikes, speeders and terminators. I like the direction of some of E&Cs ideas myself, though testing would be needed. Maybe this discussion should be moved to a thread of its own? Who is in charge of the Marines around these parts anyway?