Detachment Focus: Gladius Task Force

In this series of articles we take a deep dive into a specific detachment for a faction, covering the faction’s rules and upgrades and talking about how to build around that faction for competitive play. In this article, we’re covering the Gladius Task Force Detachment in Codex: Space Marines.

The core Codex: Space Marines includes seven detachments, one of which represents the First Company and the other six of which are thematically linked to one of the First Founding Chapters which doesn’t have a supplement. The Gladius Task Force draws from the lore of the Ultramarines, promoting tactical flexibility and adherence to the doctrines of the Codex Astartes. As the detachment featured in Index: Space Marines at the start of the edition, it’s the detachment you are most likely to have played with or against, and it hasn’t changed much in the transition to the Codex.

Detachment Overview

As mentioned above, the Gladius Task Force is the Ultramarines-themed detachment and so it was always going to be the choice for the index. The lore basis is not the only reason for its selection in that position, though – it’s also a very broad approach to playing Space Marines, giving you a little bit of everything to utilise the Marines’ vast arsenal of options and lots of flexibility and choices to make on the table. I’ve heard it described as a good beginner detachment, since its detachment rule and Stratagems give you lots of options to get out of trouble, and I think that is true – but that undersells its depth which allows a stronger player to get the best out of it, which is reflected in tournament results where it continues to show up regularly as the detachment of choice for competitive play.

Detachment Rule: Combat Doctrines

The Detachment rule is Combat Doctrines, a familiar rule for Space Marines. The 10th edition version takes a radical new form – along with picking an Oaths target at the start of your Command phase, you can (but don’t have to) pick a Combat Doctrine to apply to your army. Its effects are active for all of your ADEPTUS ASTARTES units until the start of your next Command phase.

The reason it’s important to flag that you don’t have to pick a Doctrine is because there’s only three of them – the classic Devastator, Tactical, and Assault – and you can only use each one once per battle, so if you don’t need a specific Doctrine right now, you shouldn’t blow one just because. There are ways around this, as we’ll see in the Stratagems and Enhancements sections, but they’re much more limited in scope.

Each Doctrine unlocks a different capability for your units. In Devastator, your units can Advance and shoot, while in Assault they can Advance and charge. Tactical allows you to shoot and charge after you Fall Back. These are powerful effects which can significantly change what your army can do – either by putting you on the front foot for aggressive forward play in Assault or Devastator Doctrine, or by letting you rescue your units from a tight situation in Tactical – and applying them at the right time when they’ll have maximum impact for your army will play a significant role in playing this detachment well. Several of the Enhancements and Stratagems available to you are linked to the doctrines in some way too, so pay attention to those.

Stratagems

As well as the universal Armour of Contempt Stratagem, there are five others in this detachment:

• Only in Death Does Duty End – 2CP, Epic Deed: Use in the Fight phase, just after an enemy unit selects its targets. Models in one of your units targeted by that enemy unit can fight on death. It’s expensive and not a Battle Tactic so you may struggle to line it up, but if you can do it then it’s potentially a better idea than trying to preserve the unit with Armour of Contempt – sometimes passing 16% more saves just isn’t going to change the outcome, so you may as well get a final fuck-you swing with the unit on its way out.
• Honour the Chapter – 1CP, Battle Tactic: Use in the Fight phase. Until the end of the phase, the melee weapons on one unit in your army gain the LANCE ability, and if they are under the effects of the Assault Doctrine they also improve their AP by 1 as well. If you have a more melee-focused plan, then geting better Wound rolls and AP on a key unit when it charges is an obviously strong choice.
• Adaptive Strategy – 1CP, Strategic Ploy: Use in your Command phase; you can choose one unit from your army to have the Devastator, Tactical, or Assault Doctrine active until the start of your next Command phase, instead of any other Combat Doctrine that is active for your army. This also allows you to re-use doctrines for a single unit at a time. The obvious use cases are to keep a single unit in Assault or Devastator doctrine to combine with Honour the Chapter or Storm of Fire respectively, but it can also be handy for if you have just one unit that you could really use advance and charge or fall back and shoot or whatever other effect on this turn without wanting to potentially waste the whole doctrine on it.
• Storm of Fire – 1CP, Battle Tactic: Use in your Shooting phase. One unit in your army gets IGNORE COVER on its ranged weapons, and if you’re in Devastator Doctrine they also improve their AP by 1 as well. Stacking this with the Fire Discipline enhancement (see below) is how you get one of the most powerful combos in the detachment, and since it’s a Battle Tactic you can use a Captain to guarantee you get the full effect every turn even if you only have the single start of turn CP to work with.
• Squad Tactics – 1CP, Strategic Ploy: Use in your opponent’s Movement phase, just after an enemy unit ends a Normal, Advance, or Fall Back move within 9″ of an INFANTRY or MOUNTED unit in your army. Unless it’s in Engagement Range, your unit can make a Normal Move of up to D6″, or 6″ if it is under the effects of the Tactical Doctrine. One of those stratagems that is deceptively powerful – use it to extend an opponent’s charge range or get out of it altogether, or to move a unit out of range or line of sight of a shooting unit they’ve just lined up, or even more aggressively as a way to push onto an objective they thought they had just secured with something weak. The D6″ makes this a bit riskier than other versions unless you’re in Tactical Doctrine, but there’s always likely to be a time in your games when being able to make an out of phase move will have an impact.

The overall Stratagem suite is very toolboxy – you shouldn’t ever look at the board and think there’s nothing any of your Stratagems can do to help you out. Only in Death Does Duty End is an odd one out, being both very specific in its use and also expensive, but it’s not the worst option to have available to you in the instances where it matters.

Enhancements

The enhancements available to the Gladius Task Force are:

• Artificer Armour is a straightforward upgrade for any character, giving them a 2+ save and a 5+ Feel No Pain – a significant defensive upgrade, particularly since many models which would have had a 2+ save in 9th edition (or trivially gotten one from a storm shield) now only have a 3+.
• The Honour Vehement buffs your model’s melee ability, adding 1 to the Attacks and Strength characteristics of their melee weapons, or 2 if they are under the effects of the Assault Doctrine. You aren’t necessarily building punchy melee characters in Marines, but if you do want to then dropping this on them is a relatively cheap way to get that little bit extra.
• Adept of the Codex is only for a CAPTAIN model, but it represents one of the ways to play with Doctrines – effectively what it allows you to do is to always select the Tactical Doctrine to be active for the bearer’s unit, even if you’ve already used it this game (though importantly you pick this instead of picking a Doctrine to be active generally – so you can’t e.g. pick Assault for everyone else and then Tactical for your Captain’s unit, it’s one or the other, which makes it a much weaker effect and probably not worth its cost).
• Fire Discipline is again for any character; while leading a unit the bearer gives SUSTAINED HITS 1 to ranged weapons in their unit. In addition, while the unit is under the effects of the Devastator Doctrine, they score Critical Hits with ranged weapons on a 5+ instead of a 6+. A powerful enhancement in general, and combines really well with Storm of Fire to bolster a unit’s output in Devastator Doctrine. This on an Apothecary Biologis is the core of arguably the strongest combo the Detachment can make, as we’ll cover momentarily.

Of these four, Fire Discipline is clearly the outstanding one. The Honour Vehement and Artificer Armour both have a place and are relatively inexpensive for their effects, while Adept of the Codex is a bit of a dog, since really all it does is save you a CP on a single unit if they want one specific doctrine and you can live with the rest of your army not getting a doctrine for the turn.

Playing This Detachment

In general, your playstyle is a flexible one. You can do a bit of everything and have a fighting chance with it, and Tactical Doctrine means that you have a get out of jail card if your units get tagged.

The most notable combo available to you is to stack boltstorm gauntlet Aggressors with the Apothecary Biologis with the Fire Discipline enhancement. Dropping these into Devastator Doctrine with Storm of Fire can unleash a truly horrendous weight of fire – 18+6d6 shots stacking Lethal Hits, Sustained Hits 1, AP-2 and Ignores Cover. Popular ways to get these guys into position include the Land Raider Redeemer, itself with some strong weight of fire, or to take Uriel Ventris and use his ability to grant DEEP STRIKE to an infantry unit in the army.

If you don’t want to use the Aggressor brick, another nice place to add Fire Discipline to a unit is Hellblasters, who have similarly strong output and also love Sustained Hits, ignoring cover, and increasing AP.

Beyond that, you can use a wide variety of different options – even some of your melee units like Bladeguard, which love Honour the Chapter. Inceptors are very popular in all Marine armies at the moment, but they can get an extra boost out of Storm of Fire if you aren’t using it elsewhere (or are doubling up on it with Rites of Battle).

We’ve focused largely on the main Codex in this article, but one other thing to consider is that a number of Black Templars players have been utilising the Gladius Task Force as well. The detachment gives you some better shooting support than Righteous Crusaders and combination of Assault Doctrine and Honour the Chapter is a strong one for Crusader Squads and Sword Brethren.

To close, let’s look at two different lists that have recently done well with this detachment.

Howard Watts’ Ultramarines – New Years Knockout 2024 (January 2024) –  4th Place

++ Howard's List - Click to Expand ++

Howard’s list demonstrates the all-around flexibility of the Gladius Task Force, mixing in a wide variety of units including both flavours of Inceptor Squad. Key to the list is the combintion of Marneus Calgar, the Apothecary Biologis, and the Aggressors – Uriel Ventris can make the whole thing deep strike, so your opponent has to worry about a brutal shooting threat which can also fight pretty well landing with its eyes on whatever target it most wants to kill. Marneus is particularly helpful for Aggressors as he allows them to advance and charge while also utilising Devastator Doctrine to maximise their shooting, helping them to overcome the possible limitations of their 5″ Movement characteristic. Meanwhile the Redeemer is a great vehicle on its own, and you have the flexibility of deploying both the Assault Intercessors and Company Heroes (and their attached Captains in it), just one of them, or neither of them if you don’t want to.

Mark Hertel’s Ultramarines – Unified Tournament Circuit Finals (January 2024) – 4th place

++ Mark's List - Click to Expand ++

Mark asks the question “if one Land Raider is good, are three Land Raiders better?” The answer seems to be yes, as this list carried him to 4th place at the UTC finals and the only game he dropped was against the Canoptek Court with pre-nerf Immortals which are uniquely horrendous for Land Raiders to face down.

It looks at first glance like Mark is doing the same stack with Calgar in the Biologis/Aggressors, but he also has the big squad of Bladeguard in there which potentially get a lot of value out of being able to advance and charge. I suspect Mark has options in how he deploys these, with the Aggressor/Biologis and Calgar/Bladeguard units able to deploy into the Redeemers, or the choice to run the maxed-out Aggressor blob on foot if he wants to, while the Centurion Devastators can jump out of the regular Land Raider to give themselves some extra options on angles and threat ranges. The important thing is that his footprint on the board is going to be three Land Raiders and two Lone Operatives, which means that the threat of indirect fire is substantially mitigated – it’s very unlikely that going second means you suffer a turn 1 alpha strike that removes the core of your army. That said, a word of caution – if you’re playing on some terrain sets (UKTC being the biggest offender here) moving three Land Raiders around the table can be challenging if not impossible, so make sure you know you can move them around before picking up this list to run with.

Final Thoughts

The raw power of the Ironstorm Spearhead or the board manipulation of the Vanguard Spearhead may be the strongest ways to run a Space Marine army, but the Gladius Task Force still has a lot to offer Marine players. If you have a broad collection and would like to use all its constituent parts, you’re likely to find a role for most parts of it in the Gladius Task Force.

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