Nearly two months since the Space Marines Codex v2.0 first released, we’re finally getting the last parts of Marinetember, with the Imperial Fists and Salamanders supplements releasing (and a few key units that people expected to release months ago). Was the book worth the wait for Salamanders players? Well, it depends on what you were looking for. If you wanted a codex with the game-breaking power of the Iron Hands, then no. If you wanted a very solid book with a lot of great options that will give you a competitive army, then yes! Read on, dear reader.

Army Rules

In addition to the faction rules laid out in Codex: Space Marines, Salamanders get some additional rules of their own. But before we dive into those, let’s cover what you need to do to get access to them. We’ve covered this before in our Ultramarines, White Scars, Raven Guard, and Iron Hands reviews, so if you already know this part, feel free to skip ahead.

Accessing These Rules

For most of 8th edition, you’ve only technically gotten access to the full suite of subfaction (i.e. “Salamanders”) specific rules if your army has literally used the SALAMANDERS keyword. Homebrew chapters could choose a trait, but wouldn’t get stratagem, trait or relic access (meaning that in tournaments people just used the main keywords).

That’s changed, and you can now get access to 95% of what’s in this book if you are a Salamanders successor chapter. We broke those rules down in part 1 of our main book review, and importantly “successor chapters” in this case includes those using the “build your own” traits. If you’re going down-the-line Salamanders, this is the tactic you get:

The Salamanders already had an incredibly powerful trait in the original Marine codex and they got to keep that when the new Codex rolled around. They also got a massive upgrade to their tactic with the new book, tacking on a clause that has them reducing the AP of AP-1 weapons to 0 on attacks against them. This is a powerful combination and it puts Salamanders on equal footing with any of the other chapters besides Iron Hands, though taking half of it with a Successor Chapter to get Master Artisans and Stealthy may still be a more powerful pairing. The overall smoothing effect this gives the army means that you can save CP for more important stratagems and rolls, and generally expect that your army will perform close to average in most games. It also encourages you to work with minimum-sized squads, to increase the number of free re-rolls you can take with the Tactic.

If you want to instead pick your own trait we’ll go through what we think the best successor combos are a bit later on. For now, we just need to establish that Successor chapters can get most (or in fact with CP expenditure, all) of what’s here, and keep that in mind until we cover them in detail. We’ve already covered these in prior supplement reviews, so if you’re familiar with them already, feel free to skip ahead. The breakdown of how to get these abilities is as follows: