Suffer not the xenos to live.

[Tiberius Cato]

Hail, brothers!

This is my first venture out of the Liber Astartes forum, and I was looking for some assistance in building my first army. I'm looking to create a physical manifestation of my newest DIY, The Knights of Castilya. They hate all xenos, but possess an even greater hatred for orks.

So in other words, I would like to know what I need to have a decent offensive against the entirety of xenos, but to specialise in decimating the greenskins.

My initial thoughts are that I may want template weapons, possibly heavy bolters aswell. And a squad or two of devs with Multi-melta, Lascannon, and two missile launchers. To my knowledge this should help my combat orks and their vehicles first and foremost, and with hordes of Tyranids and their MC's. I was then thinking about using bikes or assault squads with jump packs to counter Tau and Eldar forces, as far as I know they're shooty armies that don't do close combat too well. I have no idea what to do against Necrons, i've yet to see anyone discuss tactics about them; and I assume that tactics I use against Eldar could fair decently against their dark brethren too.

I think I covered all the filthy xenos, so here are my thoughts on the list:

Two 10-man Dev squads, multi-melta,lascannon and two missle launchers

10-man Assault squad with two flamers and melta bombs.

Two 10-man Tactical squads one with a melta and missile launcher, and the other with flamer and heavy bolter

Captain with the Primarch's Wrath and artificer armour

5-man bike squad with veteran sergeant

Land Raider

Thunderfire Cannon

 

Any criticism and advice will be deeply appreciated, brothers. I eagerly await your responses! :)

For the Emperor!

[Teetengee]

Grain of salt, this is somewhat theoryhammer as I do not personally play regular marines often.

Firstly, if you want the battle forged bonus you will need one fewer heavy support. With 7th edition, missile launchers took a huge hit (they can no longer explode vehicles) so I would drop them. Also you generally don't want to mix your dev squads antitank vs antiinfantry (although with combat squading that may be less important as you can split them between two sides. I would drop the land raider as it is the only armour in your list. That means that all the enemy's antitank will be aimed at it and will fairly easily take it out. That is why it is good to take lots of similarly defended units, it presents a target saturation problem to the enemy.

 

For your fast attack, I would suggest moving melta weaponry from assault squads to bike squads as they will get to the vehicles first and then the other units can charge in behind.

 

Troops, I would drop the missile launcher for a plasma cannon and the melta for plasma, as you don't really have a good way to get rid of TEQs (terminator equivalents) right now.

The other squad is fine for now as you want a heavily anti xenos force.

 

I would try to add in some sniper scouts (5 man unit) or some Thunderhammer/Stormshield Terminators to deal with monstrous creatures.

 

As for necrons, they tend to run lots of flyers, so you may need to shift things around to bring some flyerpower, a stormraven could be a good choice, especially since it could take a unit of assault marines/vanguard vets but you will have to then free up the heavy support slot.

 

So Here would be my suggestion (don't have the codex with me so I cannot tell you if the points are way off)

HQ

Captain as above or perhaps switch to a librarian for the psychic phase

 

Troops

10 Man Plasma Unit

10 man flamer/heavy bolter unit

5-10 man sniper scouts

 

Fast attack

Assault squad with flamers

Bike with melta

Stormtalon?

 

Heavy

Devs with 4x lascannons

Devs with 4x mm

Thunderfire cannon

 

For deployment put the lascannons further back on high ground and preferably in cover so they can threaten a large portion of the field combat squad them

Combat squad the other devs and keep them in areas that are well protected from line of sight except for  where you expect vehicles are going to be moving through,

Deploy the tacticals as combat squads to for multi purpose. Keep the captain/librarian with one of these unless you kit him out to move fast enough to work with the bikes or assault marines

Find somewhere for the scouts to threaten and keep them out of too much trouble

Run the bikes and assault squad up alongside the tacticals so that you have local target saturation. The bikes in particular will want to be doing a flank move against the enemy's armour.

Make sure the thundefire has good sight lines.

The storm talon is for taking out enemy flyers if possible, although it may not be quite up to the task, my meta is fairly minimal flyers.

[Rogue]

You might want to think about upgrading your captain to Pedro Kantor - he has a real thing about Orks too...

 

If you do go with Pedro, you're tied to Imperial Fist chapter tactics, which improve your bolters and tank hunting abilities, which should suit your devastator squads. That said, heavy bolters work really well with IF tactics, becoming borderline twin-linked at heavy 3, so you might want to squeeze some in.

 

Finally, a couple of transports wouldn't hurt for a bit of mobility - you're not massively short here, with the bikers and jump packs, but having mobile tactical squads late in the game is handy.

 

Perhaps consider dropping the raider - you aren't using it to deliver assault troops (assuming your assault marines have jump packs), and its weapons aren't really anti-horde. The spare points could then upgrade the captain, add a pair of rhinos and maybe even stretch to a small squad of sternguard (always handy, and with Pedro, also scoring).

[GreyCrow]

I beg to differ regarding the missile launchers as being bad in 7th edition. They can't get an "Explodes !" result on the vehicle damage chart table anymore unless the vehicle is open topped, but a squad of Devastators with 4 Missile Launchers is nothing to laugh at. Two of them is a very capable formation that covers all bases.

 

@Paladin, first of all, you have to think about how you want your army to act on the table top. Right now, it seems more like a gunline army, which is totally fine :)

 

Each unit must have a clearly defined role and be geared for that. By role, I don't mean anti-infantry or anti-tank, but how they will operate on the board.

Your tactical squads have loadouts that don't work together. You have short ranged special weapons and heavy weapons. I would rather replace you melta/flamer by either a plasmagun or a Grav Gun (I'd opt for plasmagun personally). Especially because you will have many flamers with your Assault Marines ! The Melta bombs are interesting to keep just in case you find an abundance of high AV vehicles indeed.

 

For the Devastators, I would avoid such a mixed weapon loadout to be fair. ML/Lascannon can work because they synergize well, but ML/Multi Melta don't really work together. For Devastators, we have 1 generalistic option (Missile Launcher) and 3 specialized options (Multi Melta, Lascannon, Heavy Bolter). If you don't need any specialized options, then I'd go for the Missile Launchers. If your force is lacking in a specific area, then specialize them for maximum effectiveness !

 

Based on the your planned force, I beleive you have anti-infantry more than covered, so I suggest going for the Anti-Tank Devastators. I would go for the Lascannon Devastators in your list, but you could also go for missile launchers as well. With a full force of 4 per squad. You can have 1 Lascannon squad and 1 ML squad and that could work very nicely too !

 

As the others said, you'd gain a lot for removing the Land Raider. It's a very expensive tank that really make its points back when delivering a close combat unit. On its own, though, he won't do much.

With the points you've freed, you are now able to get 3 Typhoon Missile Landspeeders, and although they are squishy, they bring the pain. You can move them up AND shoot both the Heavy Bolter and the Missile Launcher, which is great for repositionning and getting line of sight on the enemies that will be too shy to get to your gunline :)

[Tiberius Cato]

Thank you for the suggestions so far, brothers! I was thinking of putting a tac squad in the LR but I see your points, so it's gone. Also, the dev squads shall become 1 lascannon squad and 1 ML squad. Also, are you saying drop both melta and flamer in favor of plasma guns, brother GreyCrow? And also, i'm a super newb to the game and I have 5th ed my pal generously donated to me. So for the time being i'm 2 editions behind. But I will be upgrading to the new edition soon, within 4 weeks (hopefully :l)

[GreyCrow]

That would be my suggestion, yes ;)

 

The Flamer and Meltagun really want to be up close an personal (within 6 to 8" of their target), while the plasma works from 24" :) You can still move and shoot the plasma to its full extent, but that way you'll be able to move slowly while still keeping unit coherency, effectiveness and NOT move your Heavy Weapons model so you can shoot it ;)

 

With Flamer or Melta, you have to push nastily in your enemy's territory and lines to be effective !

[Tiberius Cato]

That is a good point brother, The switch shall be made. I must admit, it was a bit ambitious to want to field melta/flamer without drop pods!