Chapter Tactics Review: Carcharodons

[Master Antaeus]

Chapter Tactics: Carcharodons

 

Formations: Storm Wing and Demi-Battle Company.

 

The tactics:

Reavers from Outer Darkness: Your marines gain fear and tactical marines can either exchange their bolters for a CCW (free!) or take an extra CCW (a single point per tacticals).

 

Blood Hunger: Your units gain rage if they destroy or break an infantry unit in CC.  This is subtly fluffy as it greatly incentivizes you whittling an enemy unit down and then charging it with several of your units, resulting in a feeding frenzy-esque beatdown.  If one of your units gains rage, they have to consolidate toward the nearest enemy unit they can hurt.  Heh.

 

Finally, your army can only ally with imperial armies and even then considers them desperate allies.  Don't put your devastators next to your Knight.

 

Assumptions:

I play a drop pod-heavy list.  In each of my games, I ran a battle demi-company, 3 tac squads, 1 dev squad, 1 assault squad, 1 ironclad dread, a storm wing formation and a captain with terminator armor, relic blade and primarch's wrath (just got the start collecting captain and I like the way he looks).  I did not build my army to ferociously murder everything in sight and my opponents ran the gamut from very skilled to avid beginner.  I ran an allied detachment with librarian and land speeder storm full of ninja-scouts.  In one large game, I added a sternguard squad.

 

What it all means

Let me make this perfectly clear: These chapter tactics are not game-breaking.  They actually hurt you in a lot of ways (rage moves) and make your already too-expensive tactical marines even more expensive, but they are flavorful and most importantly: fun.

 

A space marine army with Carcharodons chapter tactics feels different.  It feels aggressive and hungry, but not in a built-in way like Blood Angels.  It feels like your army is running hot.  The extra-nasty tactical squads mean you can be even more aggressive with your drop pods and expect your marines to survive long enough for help to arrive, if not push enemy units off objectives themselves.  Your tacticals can do actual work, rather than camping real estate from the safety of their metal bawkses.  Fear was unreliable, not useful and decided exactly zero conflicts, but I will tell you what it schwas: hilarious when I remembered it.  Double hysterically funny against a 30k army that isn't fearless (most of them are not fearless).

 

None of this helps your close shooting army with actual shooting in a shooting game where heavy emphasis is placed on shooting.  You can mitigate this to some degree with a battle demi-company which I also ran.  This gives you the tactical doctrine once per game, giving your frothing shark-men a turn of Ultramarines-esque precision before they go back to screaming and murdering their foes.  In the really real game, fear sucks, so you are basically losing 1/3 of your chapter tactics before you even get to start exploiting them.

 

Verdict: Highly enjoyable and fun.  Adds a fun functionality and appearance (if you commit fully to it) to an army that can get quite monotonous.  Your opponents will appreciate the change as fighting an endless string of founding chapters can get obnoxious.

 

 

 

 

[Jacques Corbin]

Actually, since we now have HH canon that all but spells out that Carcharodons are RG successors, can this be in the RG section now?

[Brother Casman]

A thorough review, Master Antaeus. I'm always pleased to see variations on "enjoyable and fun" appear in posts, as that's what I look for in my games. I might give the Carcharodon Astra a try, sometime.

 

As for bumping this over to the RG subforum, Jacques, I'm curious to see if you have proof. I'd accept a tiny "Yes, the Carcharodons are RG successors" text blurb, but as far as I know, it's all teases and hints, and nothing stated straight out. I think this post can stay here for now, the Space Sharks have long been considered part of the Index Astartes, after all.

[Master Antaeus]

I always assumed they were descended from loyalist World Eaters and told to patrol far, far from where any Imperial citizen might see them.  Much the same way the Blood Ravens are hinted to be Thousand Sons successors.

[shandwen]

The pre-corax Ravenguard were very similar to the post-angron World eaters--- that is why Corax banished a sizable portion of the former leaders and vets.

[Master Antaeus]

Ahh.  Classy.  I think the Carcharodons got the better end of the deal in the chapter tactics department.  Also, their chapter colors are much more challenging and rewarding with the gray scale and pacific islander markings. 

[Tyberos the Red Wake]

Desperate Allies is pretty crippling, but in terms of best assault based Chapter Tactics, they're definitely up there. It helps make up for the lack of things like Fast vehicles or Thunderwolves by improving giving vanilla units large offensive boosts once you get the ball rolling. The new formations that let you assault with jump infantry out of turn one Deep Strike are deadliest with Carcharodons, although not as mobile as White Scars.

[t4ct1c47]

I play Carcharodons as I like how the chapter tactics buff their core troops choices. Being able to spend 10 points to give a tactical squad an extra 10 attacks in close combat is pretty sweet, considering it costs 10 points to add 1 attack and 1 leadership to a seargant anyway. Fear is pretty useless though, as there's a lot of units that are immune to it. Units that become subject to rage aren't hindered too much with having to consolidate towards enemy provided you put a little forthought into placeing your models during pile-in.

Edited April 21, 2016 by t4ct1c47

[Lord Commander Vulkus Dorn]

What we need is the old true grit rule brought back for these guys. I actually considered using a SW codex for unit points and profiling just to gain this

[Ensis Ferrae]

Yeah, I've also begun my own project with these guys... My intention is to "base" the army around the Skyhammer Annihilation formation. Eventually I will have a large variety of stuff to choose from, but initial build, I'm gonna have a squad of devs with 4 Grav-cannons to deal with the biggest, meanest stuff in my local meta (namely, I just want to get rid of the Wraithknight, and I think, but could be wrong about grav being the best option for that goal)

 

Beyond the skyhammer though, I'm still debating what to take in the rest of the army... local "standard" is 2000 points, and of course I want as much of that in drop pods as possible... and because I'm trying to be a bit fluffy, I'm trying to avoid my go-to guys in Legion of the Damned. 

[Indefragable]

I've always imagined the Carcharadons as a hybrid of Raven Guard and Blood Angels. Super sneaky lurking in the dark HOLY CRAP WHAT ARE THESE THINGS TEARING US AP----ARRRRGHHHH!!!!!  kind of a force.

 

It is fun to think of them as World Eaters though. Makes a lot of sense. 

[AfroCampbell]

Has anyone has much success in using Tyberos? :) I could imagine him being a machine if used properly, goodbye dreadnoughts...

[NovemberIX]

Tyberos in 8th is an utter beast. I used him a few weeks ago in a 100PL game to great effect, Lord Reaper of the Void (re-roll all failed shark hits in 6") is a massive boon especially if you're using some of the bigger guns on a dreadnought or vehicle. Savagery Beyond Reason (6" +1S to sharks) is also a really nice buff when getting into combat. I can see myself running him again in the future. It's also nice not to have to deal with some of the downsides of running a Sharks Army, but I'm sure once FW gets around to doing chapter tactics they won't play nice with other marines again. I do miss being able to buy an extra CC weapons though.