QUOTE (Karoline @ Aug 4 2010, 11:46 AM)
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Oh, just remembered. From extensive use of scouts in Warhammer 40k VG, I wonder how effective having several teams of them is in the board game. Slap sniper rifles on all of them and take out entire units at a time with sniper fire, or at the very least pin them.
It used to be a pretty viable tactic, really. Scout Squads have always been some of my favorites, and their old line of metal models were among my favorite in the game (even the Shotgun guy looked badass!), with very dynamic poses, cool gear, you name it. I dug 'em. They had the same statline as full Marines, all across the board, except for a weaker armor save and a lower points cost. What wasn't to love? And Sniper rifles were the bees knees. Great range, always damaged on a 4+ (still do), and
always hit on a 2+.
Then the latest Dark Angels Codex hit. A Codex that, for the most part, I really very much enjoyed, don't get me wrong...but that bumped Scouts into the Elite category. Elites? The new kids suddenly took up the same force organization slot as Dreadnaughts, Terminators, TechMarines, and Veteran squads? Huh. Well, that's kind of too bad...oh, and the latest edition made Sniper rifles hit on a normal to-hit roll, based on BS? Well, no biggy. They just went from a 2+ to a 3+, right?
And then the new Space Marine Codex came out, which the DA Codex was in many ways a sort of "dry run" for. It, too, is a very well made book, well laid out, gorgeous artwork, etc, etc...but now Scouts are WS/BS 3.
So if you keep playing with the Dark Angels rules (which I sometimes do), your Scouts are still pretty cool, but they take up an Elites choice. If you play with the vanilla Marine codex, your Scouts are back to being Troops, but they're just not nearly as awesome any more. They've got the basic WS/BS of Imperial Guardsmen, not Space Marines, and while their extra gear is very affordable (Sniper Rifles are free, in fact), comparing them to the previous edition of Space Marine Scouts make them look like bumbling idiots.
A unit that used to be able to hit on a 2+ now hits on a 4+, and that's just a huge, insurmountably huge, loss, to me. Sniper rifles wound half the time, and invariably allow an armor save...making them only hit half the time, too, just makes them not terribly useful. A full unit of 10 Scout/Snipers will only hit with five shots, will wound two or three times, and will likely, at most, inflict a single casualty once armor is taken into consideration (against most armies, sometimes it'll be two). It just doesn't have as big a payoff as it used to, in my book, when compared to a full-on team of Tactical Marines.
Add on that the Scouts now only have WS 3 for the inevitable melee that will ensue later in the game (at least that invariably ensued for me, since I played against Orks), and they're sadly just not terribly worth it in a Vanilla Marine list.