This time I have more time to spare, so it's an overview of the Force Commander; a Space Marine Captain and his attendant Command Squad.
The Captain is the first HQ Choice for the Army and is accompanied by his free Command Squad.
He comes in at 170 points and counts as 1 Kill Point in Annihilation Missions. He is kitted out with a Combi-Bolter/Flamer with Hellfire Rounds and an Auxiliary Grenade Launcher, a Relic Blade, Melta-bombs and the standard grenades. On the armour front he has Power Armour and an Iron Halo giving him a 3+ Armour Save and a 4+ Invulnerable Save against the bigger guns.
Originally he was fitted out with a Combi-Meltagun and a Thunder Hammer, but the introduction of the Relic Blade in the new Codex was too tempting, and I can't remember why I swapped the Combi-melta for a Combi-flamer....
With his Ballistic Skill of 5, he shooting is hitting a 2+ and thanks to the Hellfire Rounds the Bolter shots always wound on a 2+ regardless of the targets Toughness. On a good day this means an almost guaranteed 2 wounds per turn. Should he choose to fire the Flamer he may only do so once per game and that uses the Template marker and hits anything under it on a 2+ and ignores Cover Saves. If he fires the Flamer he can then still choose to charge the target unit in the Assault Phase, which should finish them off!
On top of this he gets to fire the Grenade Launcher every turn against the same target, dropping a Small Blast template on a unit with significant scatter on happening on a 2D6 roll of 8+. The Frag Grenades are fairly weak with little armour-piercing capability but may mop up a few survivors; the Krak Grenades allow him to get an extra wound on large, Tough opponents or to potentially get a Penetrating hit on AV10 vehicles and Glance AV12 if needs be - but there are other units for anti-vehicle attacks.
In Assault he can raise a decent amount of Strength 6 attacks that ignore Armour Saves; good against most opponents, while his Melta-bombs give him a decent defence against being Tank Shocked by enemy vehicles.
He has the standard And They Shall Know No Fear rule which allows him to automatically regroup if Falling Back (even if under 50% unit strength), and Combat Tactics which allows him to voluntarily fail a Morale test in order to Fall Back.
Being an Independent Character I can move him from the Command Squad (when it is dead, although this is a point of debate thanks to typical GW wording of rules) and join him to another unit.
Enough about him. Onto the Command Squad.
218 points worth of Command Squad.
From left to right - Company Champion, Standard Bearer, Marine, Sergeant, Apothecary.
The Company Champion has slightly better stats and is armed with a Power Sword so his attacks ignore Armour Saves. Originally a bad-ass model with twin Lightning Claws, due to the total dumbing-down the Champion got in the 5th Ed Codex I had to remove them. I was not impressed.
The Standard Bearer carries the Company Standard (amazingly!) which allows any unit within 12" to re-roll failed Morale and Pinning tests. He is armed with a Storm Bolter allowing him to move and fire two shots. He should really have a chainsword but there's not enough room on the model for it (and since it doesn't really have any in-game bonus effects I chose to not model it at all. I may include it impaled in the floor - I've not decided yet). He has a custom converted bionic leg which you can't really see in the picture. I needed to do something to put him in a running pose to match the rest of the squad, and in the previous Codex he had bionics so I converted up a running pose and made a custom bionic leg from spare Necron parts I had laying around.
The Marine with the Plasma Gun had the arm positions tweaked with Green Stuff to get a more natural 'sighting down the barrel while running' type pose. He has been included to give the squad some high Strength ranged firepower should it need it.
The Sergeant has a Plasma Pistol for hard-hitting shooting before the charge, and is modelled with his Power Fist raised to strike. This gives the squad something powerful enough to threaten high Toughness opponents and small vehicles.
Finally, the Apothecary allows the squad to potentially shrug off several otherwise fatal wounds every turn, before any Armour Saves are taken. (Although in the few games he has had a part in so far he hasn't helped much!)
They all get the Space Marine standard ATSKNF and Combat Tactics, as normal of course.
To wrap up - if you combine this squad with the Captain, and the Chaplain you get an assault unit that won't back down and can take some serious pain while dishing out a large amount of attacks, several of which ignore the opponent's armour.
The down-side is they have to actually reach combat and not get shot to hell like they did last time I used them!
