Marines may have a lot of units, but they still need more, lets take a look at a few.
Some people 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 have 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.
Marines are after all an army with endless potential, and being the perfect children of the Emperor, no real weaknesses. With that being the cases, I’ve taken a deep look at the existing line up and noticed a few gaps that still linger. 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. Maybe its not even the Marine, but the armor that comes back, with its machine spirt fighting on. 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
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, let’s call them Aspirants. To make the unit affordable maybe its a Marine with, gasp, only one wound. You could give the unit maybe some inferior armor and weapons, like say a knife and a bolt pistol, 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 train and there aren’t that many of them. With all that taken into consideration you’d think that the Imperium would 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 Aspirants. I think you could get a couple great Marine units out of robots. Maybe each Marine could have some kind of personal servitor-drone that follows them around and protects, with a refactor field or something. All Guard officers get a refactor field, and there are probably way 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. What could go wrong?
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. Super Elite Marines
Marines might be an elite army, but I think we can all agree that they just aren’t elite enough. Sure you’ve got gravis units, and Terminators and Blade Guard, but these guys are kind of run of the mill at this point. When was the last time you looked at a Terminator and were like “ohh thats a scary elite unit”? No, Marines need something even above these guys. A super elite unit that can’t be stopped. Maybe it could be just some extra engineered Marines, with really awesome weapons, like a spear, or halberd, or something? Or maybe it should be like, some Marines that are possessed with the Spirit of the Emperor or Martyrs. This could give them a lot of powers, but make them a little weird. I think probably the answer is to give them both, just so that we make sure they get a really elite unit.
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.
Let us know which units you think Marines really need next, down in the comments!
Source: Bell of Lost Souls
