Space Marine Bikes 1500

[Spamthulhu]

Has anyone competed successfully with an all bike force?

I was thinking

HQ
Captain on bike with Relic blade and Melta bombs 170pts

Command Squad with Company champ with combat shield and power weapon, apothecary, Veteran storm shield/thunder hammer/company banner, veteran with thunder hammer/storm shield, veteran with chainsword and storm shield. 340pts

Troops

Bike squad with Sgt with combi melta, 5 marines with 2 meltas, attack bike multi melta 245pts

Bike squad with Sgt with combi melta, 5 marines with 2 meltas, attack bike multi melta 245pts

Bike Squad with Sgt with Combi Flamer, 4 marines with 2 Flamers, attack bike with heavy bolter. 200pts

Fast Attack

Attack bike squad with 3 bikes multi meltas 150 pts.

Attack bike squad with 3 bikes multi meltas 150 pts.


I haven't played 6th yet and not experienced the effects of a flier army but the hammer unit in this can handle some serious assaults with FNP and storm shields. I am still unsure of what weapons the apothecary can have. I think it is just an apothecary and comes as equipped. In my 2k list the captain gets a few more items and I add a Librarian on a bike, another fast attack slot, and bigger bike squads.

[FlangeNabber]

Hi Spamthulhu,
I haven't had a great amount of experience with my white scars in 6th but I used to run a similar list but with Karn to give furoius charge and hit & run to the comand squad. It looks like a fairly solid build for an all biker list and should be great fun to play with and against. As far as being competitive at tournement level goes though I'd have my doubts. After a couple of bad tourniment results with my build I came to the conclusion the command squad is just too many points in too few models in a list that is already short on models to start.

I'd recomend adding artificer armour to your Captain for a starter as the 2+ save is so good in 6th. With the points you save on the comand squad I'd suggest adding a storm talon and/or a librarian on bike and put the rest into more bodies in the troops.
The storm talon will give you some way to deal with fliers and the librarian can help with that also if you take divination - rerolling to hit with meltas is pretty scary to most fliers! The librarian also gives some limited psychic defense which is vital in 6th ed.

I really haven't been able to build a tornement competative all biker army so far in 6th and the general concensus on the web seems to be that although bikes are better now you can't pack in all the tools you need to build a ballanced list in the all biker builds. I used to get around this in 5th with landspeeders but they are just too fragile for their points in 6th. I guess you could also try drop dopping dreadnoughts but I don't feel you get as much bang for your buck and they don't fit the fast all biker theme at all.

With Dark Angels on the way I guess we'll at least see what direction GW will take with the speeders, hopefully there will be points reductions or survivability improvements - maybe some Dark Angel allies will work well with a base of space marine bikes?

Either way your above army will be pretty fun to play from my experience and its always awesome to see your opponents jaw drop when you tell them what your fielding with this army.

[Wolfshade]

The lists (in general) suffer from 2 problems.
The first is a FlangeNabber highlighted, you don't get many models for your points.
The second is the lack of anti-aircraft.

Both of these are really situational however. If you don't play flyers then having no AA is no problem, though the storm tallons would help resovle this. Similiarly T5 is quite good, with the added manouerability.

Specifically with your list with all the Meltas it is going to hit hard against Mech, but may have trouble with the volume of shots for taking out hordes.

I can say that I do love running bike lists, I every so often run a Blood Angel one with land speeder support. The Typhoon missile launcher is very useful for things at very long range.

[ElectricPaladin]

I'll add that land speeder typhoons are surprisingly durable because of how far away they can stay from your opponent. This allows you to limit how much of your opponent's long-range weaponry can effectively see the land speeders and shoot at them.

Also, army-wide jink save. Awesome.