Good day to all my friends on Hive. My name is Zak Ludick, writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa about my very invested Warhammer 40,000 hobby!
I recently started getting involved in playing, collecting and assembling the miniatures of the game, both old and new and even though so much has changed over the years, I probably have enough information about the lore and the game in my noggin, to talk daily about this hobby for... weeks? Months? Years? I really can't say.
If you sat me down and had me talk to you about just 40k for an entire evening, I will talk your ears off and overload you with information that only true fanatics would be able to handle! lol
So let's get into the topic of today's post:
Space Marine Captains and Command Squads!
Basically, I have spoken before about what a Chapter of Space Marines is. 1000 Space Marines, divided up into 10 Companies of 100 Space Marines.
To be a Space Marine Captain means that you lead into battle, up to 100 Space Marines... and some additional auxiliary military assets as well.
A Space Marine Captain is a hero that can bring death to many enemies, but even more importantly, he uses his leadership ability to lead his Company and improve their abilities.
Generally, this is done with the Rites of Battle ability, which allows friendly Core units re-roll all misses when rolling a 1.
The Captain is often joined by a Command Squad which then serves as a bodyguard and also help him to lead.
Nowadays the Command Squad is a Veteran Squad that may be turned into a command squad, should you already have a Captain in the army. Thus, they can often go hand in hand!
Usually, in a Squad like this, we have the following: An Apothecary (medic), a Standard Bearer, and a Champion. There is usually some sort of Sergeant character and usually, you can give one of the Space Marines in that unit a Special Weapon or a Heavy weapon to give them to give this squad a bit more of a ranged threat.
But the new rules seem to have even more combinations on how to field these warriors.
We will check that out in another post in the Future.
What is maybe really important for ME in this post is that we need to be able to illustrate what a "regular" Space Marine Chapter is all about and and that way we can see more easily the differences of divergeant Chapters who do not follow the dogma set out in the Codex Astartes.
Sidenote: After the Horus Heresy (which pitted Space Marine against Space Marine and half the sons of the Emperor fell to Chaos), the Primarch of the Ultramarines, wrote a book on HOW Space Marines should behave and how they should fight.
Some Chapters of Space Matine treat the Codex Astartes as...toilet paper, and have a plethora of options that the regular marines do not have in their army.
I hope you liked this post. I look foward to painting up a command squad SOON!
