List-Building in 30k 2e: The Ultramarines

 I have amassed a large collection of Ultramarines for the 30k mileau.  How does the new edition affect my army list? Substantially.

Aggressively Ultramarine.

The cardinal limitation of list-building for 30k remains the same: a standard (Crusade) force must include one HQ choice and two Troop choices.  Since I have been tinkering with 500 point lists, this becomes a major limitation as Troop choices for Legiones Astartes start at 100 points for a single squad of ten.  A Legion Centurion, the go-to no-frills HQ choice, starts at 60 points.

Starting with the Legion Centurion we can see that right away that you get more for 60 points in the new edition than you did before.  The new Legion Centurion comes with artificer armor and a refractor field baked into its point cost, where as you would be paying a 20 point premium for that on top of the base 50 points in the previous edition for that.  Already we can see that things are cheaper in this edition.  For Ultramarines, I wanted to keep the centurion fairly uncomplicated as the smurfs like their masses of infantry in 30k.  While I did end up giving him a pair of lightning claws and a combi-flamer, this was decided on after everything else, solely because there were not enough points left to add more models.  The decision was also influenced by the fact that I do have a metal Ultramarine captain with lighting claws, but I'll talk about what happened to that model later.  Total point cost of the centurion ends up being 75 points.

A finished squad? I'm as shocked as you.

The tricky part of a 500 point list is making the legion-specific traits work for you.  For some legions this is easier because there's really obvious choices, such as assigning all your units to the appropriate Hexagrammaton wing if you're playing Dark Angels.  With Ultramarines it's easier than considering 500 points of Thousand Sons, but there's a few gotchas I encountered. Most of these gotchas were deciding what was worth spending points on at 500 points.  Nuncio-voxes are not particularly useful except as I don't anticipate utilizing anything that would scatter in a 500 point game.  A night-fighting scenario would screw me over anyway at this point total  A Legion Vexilla, however, is always useful for the bump in combat resolution, so they're in.

Similarly, is it worth the Sergeant having artificer armor and a power fist in the new edition?  For Ultramarines the answer is yes, because any melee weapon that consistently has AP 2 is going to go at the same initiative as the sergeant and forcing an invulnerable save or die scenario on any Toughness 4 Space Marine with two or more wounds is always useful.  In this edition, that includes Terminators in addition to the usual independent characters running around.  The meta of challenges has not changed greatly for Characters without an invulnerable save or damage mitigation.  Power swords have the potential to bust out AP 2 wounds at standard initiative, but they're not consistent and are better for models with a lot of attacks in that regard.  The sergeants got plasma pistols too, mostly so I don't have to build more models.

They're mostly painted.

Ultimately I selected two Legion Tactical Squads for my 500 point Ultramarines list. The big draw here is the bonus to hit when something else has shot at an enemy unit in the same turn and the fact that Fury of the Legion's only drawback is not moving in this edition.  So those ten man Ultramarine Legion Tactical Squads can just unload a massive volume of fire at infantry units that are too close, getting a bonus if somebody else in the army has taken pot-shots at their target.  Total point cost for each ten-man squad is 145 points, even with the Sergeant kitted out.

Having 135 points left, I felt I needed some heavier weapons to capitalize on the improved shooting that the Ultramarines can get.  A veteran squad was too expensive to really do anything like that with and the Legion Support Squad didn't really have the kind of oomph I was looking for.  A Legion Heavy Support Squad worked for what I had in mind.  Their default weapon did not, however.  Autocannons in any edition of 40k (or its relatives) have a good balance of range, AP, and power.  They also happen to be cheap enough that I could outfit the five-man squad with them, shove artificer armor on the sergeant, and call the army done.  In fact the only thing I had to purchase for the army were the autocannons.

Do they look like they were built yesterday?

So about that centurion model... The metal model I had intended to be the Centurion exploded when I dropped him and I really do not feel like pinning everything on him any time soon.  Not when I can build a similar model from resin and plastic (the advantage of accumulating Space Marines for fifteen years).

To compare.  The Legion Centurion would have cost 95 points last edition, being 50 points base and then 45 points for the equivalent wargear.  A similarly equipped Legion Tactical Squad would run you 185 points because they have to all take chainswords or combat blades in order for the sergeant to have a power fist and plasma pistol.  True, they're more capable in the Assault phase.  Already I'm only left with 35 points that only really buys a Rhino for one of the Legion Tactical Squads.  If I build out the Heavy Support Squad under the old edition, its 170 points; they start at 135 points, the autocannons and artificer armor stayed the same point costs between editions.

While you may assume that everything got cheaper because there's 26 models in this list, that's not the case at all.  This Ultramarine list deliberately kept upgrades to a minimum in order to feature the legion's special rules and those rules favor infantry and dreadnoughts.  As a consequence it has the most models out of the three lists I wrote up in the new edition. The other two lists, one for the Emperor's Children and another for the Thousand Sons, only contain 21 models.  This isn't to say that those two lists are similar to each other; the Thousand Sons list has a higher per model cost but is well-rounded, while the Emperor's Children list features everybody in jump packs to take advantage of high initiative hitting power.  Zone Mortalis games should look a lot more varied in this edition.

In essence, the question I asked myself at these low point totals was how could I capitalize on each legion's unique rules?  Thousand Sons and Ultramarines were always going to be the two legions I'd build lists for, as I have models for them already.  I tried to figure out how to best use the Death Guard at 500 points before writing out one for the Emperor's Children.  It just seems to me that different legions work out better at different point totals due to needing more 'room' to work within.

I think list-building is not as onerous as it was.  Most of my time was spent checking on what the various rules meant under the new edition.  It seemed the prior edition had me checking and re-checking on the availability of various options instead of grokking what role and purpose a unit had.  Your mileage may vary, however.

2022-07-01 Update: I write these articles in advance, so there'll be times that they get outdated by events that happen before they're even published.  Case in point: this article speculated about the missing units and Games Workshop released a PDF today bringing many of them in line with the new ruleset.  Check it out here.