Bladeguard, what's their place in the TOE?

[Arkhanist]

I understand the core Marine fighting formation to be the Battle Company (2nd through 5th). You have the Captain, his command echelon which includes his officers, veteran advisors & bodyguard, dreadnoughts, transports, and company squads. The company or primaris ancient bears the company banner. When preparing for deployment, the Captain draws from the reserve companies to replace losses. He may also be assigned squads from the 10th and 1st companies, along with additional Chapter resources (tanks, aircraft, chapter specialists etc) for mission requirements and as availability allows. Squads from reserve companies may also be assigned to a strike force to allow for losses/additional fexibility, and multiple companies may deploy together for a particularly large campaign.

 

So the Bladeguard in a given force could be the Captain's personal company veterans, or 1st company veterans assigned to his task force as a Primaris alternative to terminators/sternguard/vanguard vets. So far, the painting schemes have implied the former, but the whole thing of veterans is they're Marines who've been around for potentially centuries and are highly skilled in all sorts of equipment. Traditionally, only 1st company veterans are trained in the use of terminator armour (and thus gain the crux terminatus) but there's usually not enough to equip the whole company - and obviously Primaris 1st company vets are going to wear something else.

 

So there's ample justification to paint them either way, depending upon your personal army makeup. The bladeguard ancient is effectively an alternative equipment loadout for a company primaris ancient.

 

For Blood Angels, the Sanguinary Guard are a chapter-level force, Dante's personal veterans, not assigned to any specific company on a permanent basis,

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

 

 

I get the impression that GW cares a lot less about chapter and company structure nowadays. Aren't Primaris marines supposed to be trained to use any of the equipment, as required? Of course, that can't really be true of bladeguard, who must have some sort of different status as veterans, but it does mean that there's less need for a structure where an individual marine is permanently a member of a particular kind of squad.  That then means you don't need to have particular kinds of companies, though they may keep the 1st and 10th, I guess.

 

Crimson Fists don't seem to mark their veterans out particularly, so this isn't a tough one for me, at least in terms of the painting. They'll be blue, with red hands.

 

 

 

Every Marine is trained to use everything. Primaris don't do anything new in that regard.

 

They do, though. The Primaris marines of the Ultima Founding stepped onto the battlefield for the first time having already trained extensively via simulation with all the weapons their chapter carried. This is very unlike firstborn Marines, who spend their entire time in 10th Company just preparing for being able to wear a full suit of power armor. THEN they go on to the reserve companies and get acquainted with heavier weapons and jump packs and learning how to drive Land Raiders and such.

 

Ever since the chapters became a thing 10,000 years ago, firstborn marines have had the advantage of being able to field a First company full of actual combat veterans and four battle companies of marines who'd at least made it through reserve service after their time in the Scout company. Yes, their ranks will sometimes get depleted, but the very nature of the carapace implantation means they were beholden to the process of taking years to train from neophyte to scout to actual competent marine to veteran.

 

Meanwhile, new Primaris chapters from the Ultima Founding had to field all of those companies full of soldiers who'd had exactly zero practical experience. Not all Ultima Founding chapters of course, since most Primaris marines seemed to have served for decades as Greyshields if they weren't sent out as reinforcements to existing chapters in the Torchbearer fleets. But at least some of them came right out of cold storage into brand-new Ultima Founding chapters. So of course they had to do something new.

 

Physically, there's no difference between a "veteran" in a Primaris First Company and a lowly Eliminator in the Vanguard Company. Nor did the former have any combat experience that the latter had yet to acquire. The Eliminator could put on a suit of Aggressor armor and vice versa if required. For those initial Ultima Founding chapters, we don't even know if they assigned individual soldiers to the "veteran" company based on higher simulation scores or if they simply assigned them in the order they were listed when the overall chapter roster was compiled, with the first hundred battle brothers to First Company and the last hundred to Vanguard Company.

 

I'd contend that there shouldn't even have been a veteran company in those first Ultima Founding chapters. Maybe their First Companies should have just been all-Gravis shock troops or something. With GW returning to the early days of the Indomitus Crusade, this would be the perfect time to get answers on that, but it seems like they're once again focusing on pre-existing chapters like Ultramarines or Greyshields who have yet to join or form a chapter. That also seems to inform most or all of the information they provide on how Primaris soldiers progress through the ranks - it makes complete sense within the framework of Primaris joining a Firstborn chapter or newly-made post-Crusade Primaris joining an Ultima Founding chapter, but wouldn't work at all for an all-Primaris chapter coming directly out of Cawl's lab. Nor would the Scout phase even be possible for that first generation of Primaris, who'd have already been fully-grown before they joined a chapter.

Epic post.

[Trevak Dal]

They are so fast, loose and inconsistent with what their lore is.

 

I think all they want you to do is to buy three copies of them and then buy more of their models and all of their Sigmar stuff too.