There’s a photocopied page taped inside the lid of my army case. It’s the Imperial Fists order of battle out of Codex Supplement: Angels of Death, and I put it there because I kept painting the wrong company numeral on knee pads and needed something to check against without getting the book out. 1st Company, “The Fists of Dorn”, Captain Darnath Lysander. 8th Company, “Dorn’s Huscarls”, reserve assault company, assault squads and nothing else. 9th Company, “The Wardens”, reserve devastator company, same deal the other way round. It’s also where I learned that combat doctrines in 40K are written down somewhere, with page numbers and company names attached to them.
Every squad I own is numbered off that sheet, including the two Devastators I finished last winter.
What Combat Doctrines Used to Mean in the Lore
Index Astartes Apocrypha, in the section called Tactical Organisation, is about as plain as GW has ever been on this. “For any given battle, squads are equipped and organised according to operational requirements, and this results in three basic types of squad; Tactical, Assault and Devastator.” Tactical squads are all-purpose. Assault and Devastator squads are the close-combat and heavy-weapon specialists. That’s the whole system, and it’s presented as an extract from the actual Codex Imperialis, the order of battle every Chapter is meant to keep.
Imperial Armour Volume 2 (Second Edition)’s Rites of Battle chapter says roughly the same thing from the operational end. Strike forces get built “around a core of Tactical squads, supported by specialist Assault or Devastator troops,” pulled from whichever companies are available, with the heavy armour requested separately from the Chapter Armoury. There’s a line in there I’ve always liked, about how the crews for a Chapter’s tanks are usually drawn from the Tactical squads of the 6th and 7th Companies, because those are the two reserve companies that are all Tactical and nothing else. Somebody has to drive the Rhino, and per the book it’s usually a 6th Company generalist rather than a specialist pulled off a heavy bolter.
So the three words describe a structure. A Chapter that follows the Codex Astartes keeps an 8th Company full of jump packs and a 9th Company full of heavy bolters, and the numerals on my knee pads are pointing at which of those a given squad walked out of.
Oath of Moment Got Deleted on the 10th
Games Workshop put the Space Marines army rules up on 10 September and led with “Oath is dead, long live Combat Doctrines.” Not my phrasing, theirs.
Three doctrines. Assault Doctrine means an advance move doesn’t stop the unit declaring a charge. Devastator Doctrine gives the unit’s ranged attacks the [ASSAULT] keyword. Tactical Doctrine lets a unit fall back and still be eligible to shoot and charge. Each one is once per battle, only one can be active on a unit at a time, and turning a new one on turns the old one off.
GW flagged in the article that veterans might remember Combat Doctrines from older codexes, and they’re right, it’s the 8th edition army rule with the numbers filed off. The 2019 version started you in Devastator Doctrine and let you walk down the chain to Tactical and then Assault at the top of each battle round, handing out an extra pip of AP to a different weapon category each time. Heavy and grenade first, rapid fire and assault second, melee last. The 10th edition Gladius Task Force detachment kept a stripped-back version of it alive while Oath of Moment did the actual work.
Now read the detachment list from the day after. Assault Brethren, Tactical Brethren, Devastator Brethren, three detachments whose entire detachment ability is an extra use of their namesake doctrine. And then go and look at what happened to Tactical Squads, Assault Squads and Devastator Squads in the same codex. Tactical Squads count as Intercessors. Devastator Squads count as Desolation Squads. They went out with the sixteen units that got Legends’d in August, and I genuinely don’t know what state they’ll be in by the time the book lands, because GW said proxy datasheets on the 24th and then said proper Legends datasheets “a few weeks or months” later in the Q&A on the 8th. Two different answers in a fortnight.
Guilliman Has All Three Active, Always
The bit of the article that actually made me sit up is called Codex Adept, and it’s four words long in effect: the assault doctrine, devastator doctrine and tactical doctrine are active for this unit. No once-per-battle. No swapping. Roboute Guilliman just has them. GW’s own copy points out that he literally wrote the book on Space Marine warfare. Their words, sat directly under the rule box.
Captains get a decent version of the same idea. A Space Marine Captain can activate a doctrine of his choice for his own unit even if it’s different from what the rest of the army is doing, and he comes with Transhuman Strategist, an extra Command Point every battle round. A Captain in the Tactical Brethren detachment can take an enhancement that parks him in Tactical doctrine permanently on top of whatever else he’s running.
The whole point of the Codex Astartes, in the fluff, is that it puts Guilliman’s judgement into a form any Captain can follow. Giving the author of that document permanent access to all three doctrines while everyone else rations them one each is a funny way to model it. That’s the standardisation project that took twenty Legions and cut them into Chapters fighting off one template, written so a Captain on some backwater who’d never meet a primarch could run a combined-arms war without asking anybody’s permission first.
Although, alright, I can hear the counterargument while I’m typing it. He’s a primarch, he costs about four hundred points, and the design team needs him to feel like a primarch on a datasheet, and “you get the army rule for free and forever” is a clean, elegant way to do that without inventing a new mechanic. I’ve talked myself most of the way round to that position and then noticed the rule is called Codex Adept, which is GW pointing at the lore themselves. So I’m back where I started.
Every Chapter Write-Up Has a Combat Doctrine Heading
This is the bit that’s been niggling at me since the rules article went up. Go and pull almost any Chapter feature out of White Dwarf and there’ll be a section with that exact heading, and the contents are never a once-per-battle toggle.
White Dwarf #446 on the Dark Angels: “With the exception of the Deathwing and Ravenwing, the Dark Angels follow standard Space Marine combat doctrine as written in the Codex Astartes. Tactical flexibility, rapid deployment, and combined arms are key components of their strategies.” White Dwarf #462 does the Exorcists, whose combat doctrine turns out to mean working neophyte Scouts into positions where they look vulnerable, revealing them on purpose, and crushing whatever comes out to eat them. Both of those sit under the same two-word heading, a couple of hundred issues apart.
It’s the “working style” paragraph on a CV. Every Chapter has one, most of them say some version of “we do what the book says, but faster,” and the interesting ones tell you where a Chapter has quietly stopped doing what the book says. The word’s been doing that job in the background for decades, and as of Thursday it’s also the label on three buttons in an army rule box.
I don’t think that’s a problem, particularly. Words get reused. Chapter Tactics used to mean something specific too. It just reads oddly to me that the army rule for the faction defined by a rulebook is now three generic movement permissions shared by all of them, at the exact moment the detachments went the other way and got locked down per Chapter.
Some characters get more out of specific doctrines, which softens it a bit. Adrax Agatone’s Unto the Anvil normally re-rolls wound rolls of 1 for his unit, and in Assault doctrine those become full wound re-rolls. Caanok Var, the Iron Father from the March of Iron release, normally has to pick between two abilities and gets to stop picking under the right doctrine.
I Ran the Old Ones Wrong for Two Years
So, confession. Ninth edition. I had the doctrines completely backwards in my head for about two years, which is roughly as long as my kid has been able to walk, and nobody caught it because nobody in my garage group was reading the army rule closely either.
I thought Devastator Doctrine meant “the shooting one.” Obviously it did not. Devastator Doctrine gave the extra AP to heavy and grenade weapons only, and my big yellow boys were carrying bolt rifles, which are rapid fire, which meant they got precisely nothing in turn one and I’d been announcing the AP bonus out loud every game like an idiot. Pete never pulled me on it. He plays Salamanders, he was busy setting things on fire.
Found out on a Saturday at my local store, teaching a lad who’d bought a Combat Patrol box and was working through the rules properly, the way new players do before the habits set in. He asked why my Intercessors were AP-2 on turn one. I started explaining. Got about six words in. Went and got the book.
Anyway. The sheet’s staying in the lid of the case. My 9th Company markings are on eleven models with heavy bolters and missile launchers that are currently on their way to being a Legends entry in an app, and I’m not stripping a decade of transfers off to renumber them into something the new book recognises. Them’s the numerals I painted.
Codex lands in October with points in the Munitorum Field Manual, and going by the Intercessor statline bumps that have already been shown, the army I turn up with is going to be smaller and considerably more annoying to shift. I need to buy more Imperial Fists transfers either way, because the 9th Company sheet on my last squad went on crooked and I’ve been pretending I can’t see it since about March.
