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Warhammer 40K: Five Marine Units We Still Really “Need”

5 Minute Read
Sep 22 2020
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With all the new Marine units coming out let’s look at some ones we still really need to get.

Warhammer 40,000 is about to see an unprecedented amount of releases, with something like 40 units announced. Marines, of course, are getting their fair share of the new units with a ton of great new kits adding to an already extensive lineup. Some in fact think that Marines have too many units. Of course you and I, dear reader know that’s not the case. In fact Space Marines can never had too many units, there could be more Marine units than stars in the sky and GW would still make more, and we would buy them. With that being the cases, I’ve taken a deep look at the existing line up and noticed a few gaps that are still lingering. These are places were Marines really should have a unit that does X, but don’t, and boy do they need that fixed ASAP. Let’s take a look.

5. Reanimating Marines 

Marines have a number of cool units and cool abilities, but they don’t have any units that regularly come back to life. This is a neat ability that exists in the game, so obviously Marines need a unit that can do it. Maybe there is some kind of Cawl protocol (proto-cawl?) built into Primaris Marines that can reanimate them on death, or at least this particular strand of Marines. The unit could have some kind of rule where at the end, or start of a turn, or maybe after each time they get shot, you roll to have models come back to life. Marines after all are pretty hard to kill.

4. Cheap Horde Marines

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It’s a fact that Marines don’t really have any kind of cheap horde unit in their army. This is a pretty big gap in the unit choice. To fix this its clear that Marines need some kinda mass horde, probably an assault unit. I suggest maybe making some kind of younger Primaris Marine, like a Scout, but not quite a Scout. To make the unit affordable maybe its a Marine with, gasp, only one wound. You could give the unit maybe some worse armor and weapons, but let you take it in a large size of 20-30. Maybe it’s not great at shooting, so has like, BS 5+ since they are untrained, but are really good in assault. I dunno, I’m just spit balling here.

3. Robots!

Space Marines are a technologically advanced faction with a ton of resources at their disposal. They are also a faction that has a low living body count, Marines are hard to make and there aren’t that many of them. With all that taken into consideration you’d think that they’d lean into robots and drones more than they do in order to bolster their numbers, and make use of all those servitor ready brains they get from failed applicants. I think you could get a couple great Marine units out of robots. Maybe each Marine could have some kind of personal servo-drone that follows them around and protects, with a refactor field or something. All Guard officers get a refactor feild, and there are probably more of them then Space Marines so its not a stretch. You could maybe even mount guns on some. This seems like it would be a fun and fair mechanic that everyone would like.  

You could also give Marines some bigger robots to stomp around and carry guns and stuff. Now sure, they do have Dreadnoughts, but those aren’t really robots, they are a kind of piloted craft. Moreover they can’t be taken in units of more than one, so we need to fix that.

2. Teleporting Gunslingers 

Marines might have jumppacks, but they don’t (well aside from Grey Knights) have a unit that can teleport around. I think that clearly needs to be fixed. Indeed people have been wanting Primaris to get their version of a jumppack, thats not the Inceptors, or Suppressors, or Shrike. And how would Cawl improve on the old jumppack? By making it a teleport device of course. I can just see some awesome Primaris Blood Angels in their red armor blinking around the feild guns blazing and then launching pin-point assaults.  And sure, you could say that unit belongs to the Craftworld Eldar, but well, they’ve already had everything else taken from them, why not this too?

1. Codex Super Heavies! 

Somewhat strangely Marines don’t have any non-Forgeworld super heavies. In fact Marines are one of the somewhat rare factions that doesn’t actually have a generic in-the-codex Lord of War at all, with Guilliman being their only option. This is a MASSIVE oversight. Obviously it needs to be fixed, so that Marines no-longer need to soup up to get a big honking unit. One obviously option is the long awaited plastic Thunderhwak, though I fear history, and the game, may have moved past that. Another option is one such as we suggest the other week, some sort of giant modified Primaris Marine. I’m not picky on the specifics, I just know the army NEEDs a big old Lord of War to really be complete.

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Let us know which units you think Marines really need next, down in the comments! 

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Author: Abe Apfel
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