What´s your experience using Bikes?

[Hannibal]

Hi all,

 

I´m in the process of painting a BA army (well, it´ll turn out to be a Knights of Blood army) and while I´m pretty sure what to field in 1k points, I´m actually thinking about further addons.

 

One thing I really like in 40k is the SM Bike. Don´t know why, but it just look so damn cool! In addition, it rather fits with a knight-theme.

 

This leads to the questions: Are Bikes viable in a BA army? What´s your experiences with them? Do you use them at all?

 

I´m thinking about the following setups:

 

1. A bikesquad up to 5 models with plasma guns as a shooty support unit.

 

2. A trikesquad with MM for tank hunting.

 

3. Some scoutbikers for movement shenanigans. Not sure about the size or equippment yet.

 

Do you see any of these units as having an notable impact on the battlefield?

 

HTG

[Chairman_woo]

I like motorbikes and guns and space marines............................ whats that Games workshop? a space marine on a bike that has guns in the fairing? Yes please I'll take 20! So yeh I love the marine bikes too :) if I suddenly came into alot of money one of the 1st things I'd do is get custom bodywork made up for something like a Rocket 3 and make a marine bike of my very own. It would be massivley out of scale naturally, marine bikes would be about the size of a car in scale, certainly as long as most cars I reckon. Those chunky tyres would probbably be necessary to counter the weight of the thing & get the power down but it wouldent work a normal "real world" bike on tarmac (a fluff marine bike would corner like a pig on tarmac but thats not what they are designed to do). I've always thaught of marine bikes more like armoured war horses than real motorbikes in the way they operate. Large, very heavy and very fast in a straight line & something the rider can use as a platform to "beat down" on their opponents from (In my head the throttle wouldent be a twist grip to allow the marine both hands free for ass kicking much like you might do on a warhorse.

 

....God I can waffle, anyway, I cant reccomend a large bike squad with preist highly enough, more if you add something like a libby; tho this I find can be a bit unecessary. I run mine with Multi-Melta, Plasmagun and meltagun +combi-plasmas on the sgt. and priest (tho the combi's might be overkill so I may be dropping them in future).

 

You can get a 3+ cover for the whole squad of you move over 12" which makes them very viable for being on the table on turn 1 in a Jumper/DOA based list

Can outshoot alot of units and certainly most things that move 12"+ and will make alot of heavy infantry cry if its out in the open

Can hunt down armour reasonably well if needed

Can launch a reasonably nasty assault already with the preist & a charachter makes them quite scary for alot of units.

Can redeploy a priest up to 24" (who can if needs be plonk himself in another unit if he finishes his move in the right place)

 

I think of them a bit like an honour guard/delivery system for my bike priest that has the added bonous of being pretty daingerous all by themselves, but if you dont want the extra redundancy/flexibility the meltas bring you can cram 4 Plasmaguns worth of shooting in there (2 combi's & 2 guns) with FNP to negate most of the overheating to make a squad that can almost outshoot plasma Devastators (but naturally costs more) and still keep the Multi-Melta for special occasions (vs the kind of targets you hunt with plasma a MM is likeley better then a Heavy bolter anyway).

 

MM attackbike squads are awsome too, and can do a suprisingly good job of hitting infantry if they run out of armour to melt which is always handy. Only downside really is the contention for Fast Attack slots.

 

Scout bikers I havent ever really used but could pair up nicely with Vanguard & Hammer Terminators and the like, they are basically Identical to vanilla scout bikes in that respect but they can also take a priest which increaces their chances of seeing turn 2 significantly if you park them closeish to the enemy for a turn 2 Deepstrike. Certainly I dont think they can compete with normal bikes for tank hunting, close combat and plasma spam so your going to want to find a way of using either the scout move or the beacon to make them worthwhile (the mines seem nice vs some armies tho).

 

 

There is a rather nasty "netlist" called Blood Rodeo that uses 2 maxed bike squads with Libbys, thats worth a look if your interested (google should drag something straight up)

[BigBaals]

Played a 500pt. Tournament yesterday with this list:

 

Assault Squad + PW, Razorback +AC

Priest

Devastator Squad 3x ML, HB

3x MM Attack Bikes

 

(Wonky rules, only one troop choice required and elect any model as your commander)

 

The Priest was the MVP, but those attack bikes at T5, 2 wounds, with a 24" threat range, a turbo boost for 3+ cover, and FNP from the priest inside the Razor... absolute death on trikes. I keep tweaking my 2k list, and now that I've all but dropped my Baals, I'm putting my Attack Bikes back in. I'm finding more and more that my current codex lists (non-DoA) that win have very similar elements to the lists that won using the AdobeDex of yesteryear.

[Makkeru]

I got the Dark Angels Ravenwing box, mostly to get some bits but I thought it would be a cool thing to run some bikes.

Put a priest on a bike, swoop around with 4-5 bikes + MM Attack Bike and blow things up.

[Corby]

Hi all,

 

I´m in the process of painting a BA army (well, it´ll turn out to be a Knights of Blood army) and while I´m pretty sure what to field in 1k points, I´m actually thinking about further addons.

 

One thing I really like in 40k is the SM Bike. Don´t know why, but it just look so damn cool! In addition, it rather fits with a knight-theme.

 

This leads to the questions: Are Bikes viable in a BA army? What´s your experiences with them? Do you use them at all?

 

I´m thinking about the following setups:

 

1. A bikesquad up to 5 models with plasma guns as a shooty support unit.

 

2. A trikesquad with MM for tank hunting.

 

3. Some scoutbikers for movement shenanigans. Not sure about the size or equippment yet.

 

Do you see any of these units as having an notable impact on the battlefield?

 

HTG

 

 

After seeing the performance of scout bikes in another Ba players army at a tournament ( he finished third) I went to , I'm quite tempted to try them out.

[Leardinal]

I love bikes. I played a 2000pt game a couple days ago against guard and I ran a 5 man bike squad with a multi melta attack bike, attached priest, reclusiarch, and captain, (for fun). The bikes turbo boosted in front of entrenched heavy weapons teams and a manticore. The IC's split off and engaged the heavy weapons teams while the bikes squad moved to shoot and wreck the manti core. The IC's rejoined the squad and turbo boosted to the middle of the board because that flank was gone, the next turn the IC's split off again and the captain rode off and killed a Leman Russ squadron, the preist finished off a blob squad (note: the 22 man blob squad was softened by his horrible plasma cannon scatter), and the Reclusiarch killed the command squad in a single turn.

 

The IC's on bikes were the only units I had left on the board, (he stole the initiative and I had set up to expecting to go first,) but the damage I inflicted to his army meant that we we both had 9 KP's