Marauder

Why it earns its tonnage

Most heavies in this bracket are built to trade damage inside medium range. The Marauder is not, and you can see it the moment you get the panels off. The two Hellstars and the Whirlwind all reach about the same distance. That is not an accident, it is the whole design: three weapons that work as one set at long range, so you are doing damage through the entire approach rather than waiting to get somewhere.

The gauntlets are the clever part. A Warhammer carries its PPCs the same way, but the Marauder's arms run on ball-and-socket joints, so it swings its guns onto a target faster and covers more of the field without moving its feet. The Hellstars are also built tough enough to survive being used as clubs, and there are enough accounts of Marauders beating something to scrap with them that I believe it.

Now the parts I actually swear about.

The Whirlwind was an afterthought. You can tell by how it is attached: the linkage between the autocannon and the chassis is thin, and one good hit in the right place takes the gun out of the fight without touching anything else. It is temperamental at the best of times. It is on the official quirk list as an exposed weapon linkage, which is the polite way of saying what every tech who has worked one already knows.

The rotation rings where the torso meets the leg assemblies are the other weak point, and enough pilots have welded improvised plate around them over the years that you stop being surprised when one comes in with a home-made collar on it.

And the HiRez tracking gear sits forward in the chassis where it blocks part of the pilot's own view, which is a strange thing to do to a machine built around seeing people a long way off.

One more, and it is a sad one. The original armour was Valiant Lamellor, eleven and a half tons of it, better than standard plate at spreading both kinetic and thermal energy and lighter with it. Nobody remembers how to make it. Every Marauder that has taken damage since has had sections replaced with whatever was going, so the older ones are patchwork now. You can read a machine's whole service history off its plating if you know what you are looking at.

Is it better than a Warhammer?

This is the comparison that actually matters in a 3025 game, because both are twin-PPC platforms in the same bracket. There is a full Warhammer write-up if you want the other side of it. Straight off the data: the Warhammer WHM-6R is 70 tons at BV 1299 with 18 single heat sinks. The Marauder MAD-3R is 75 tons at BV 1363 with 16 single heat sinks.

So the Warhammer is cheaper, runs cooler, and carries an SRM 6 for close work. The Marauder is better armoured (6 against 5 on the Alpha Strike card) and hits harder at long range. That is the trade. If you want a twin-PPC mech that can keep shooting, take the Warhammer. If you want one that can absorb the return fire and reach further out, take the Marauder.

Worth naming the third option too. The Black Knight BL-6-KNT is the same 75 tons at BV 1551 with 20 single heat sinks and no ammunition anywhere on the chassis. It is the better sustained energy platform. It just cannot match the Marauder's reach.

Six hundred years of not quite arriving

In the Star League years it was a Gunslinger Program favourite, because of the firepower, and battalion and regimental commanders liked it for its electronics. It was never common. Massed Marauders broke enemy lines properly when anyone could gather enough of them, and almost nobody could. House Liao fielded several hundred in total in 2828. That is the whole Confederation, all of them, a few hundred machines. So they got paired out with Warhammers and Thunderbolts to make up the numbers, which is why those three keep turning up together in accounts of the Succession Wars.

Then the decline, and this is the part the variant list tells better than any history book. The MAD-2R from 2760 had ER PPCs and 16 double heat sinks. It fires both main guns every turn, forever, and never notices. 59 years later they built the MAD-3R with single sinks, standard cannons and less armour, and that is the one on the box art. It took another 287 years before anyone put double heat sinks back into a production Marauder.

When the Helm Memory Core turned up, the Marauder was an obvious thing to modernise. House Davion got there first and then made the most Davion mistake available: House Kurita took Quentin and the Marauder factory on it during the War of 3039, which handed the Combine the new variant. The Federated Commonwealth had to go away and design a second one with a different loadout because the enemy owned the first.

The Capellans came to it late and sideways. They had never built a Marauder in their lives. Sun-Tzu Liao negotiated with General Motors personally for the rights, and what he traded was permission for HildCo Interplanetary to start exporting to the Federated Suns again. It worked. And not long after, reports started coming out of the Periphery about backwater realms fielding upgraded Marauders that nobody could account for.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Marauders available in the same era, not against the rest of the game. Whether a Marauder beats a Warhammer is a real question and it has its own section above.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 3 of the 36 Marauder variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 36 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change how you play.

On the table

Piloting one. The Marauder wants a long firing lane and a reason for the enemy to come to it. Pick your ground first, because at 4/6 you are not repositioning out of a bad decision. Keep one PPC in reserve on hot turns rather than alphaing and then spending two turns useless. Partial cover suits it well given the armour already on the chassis.

Fighting one. Close the distance and make it move. Every hex it walks is heat it cannot spend on guns, and inside short range the twin PPC fit is doing less work than almost anything it is facing. The arms are the target: both main guns are mounted there, so an arm hit takes half the mech's output off the field. Against XL-engined fits from the Clan Invasion onward, the side torso is the kill.

Common mistakes. Running it forward with the rest of the lance, treating the autocannon as a real weapon rather than incidental damage, and alphaing on turn one. The 3R in particular punishes all three.

Against OpFor Command

Worth knowing if you run solo games with our AI opponent: the Marauder does not have one behaviour, it has several, because the engine reads each variant's role tag rather than the chassis name.

• The MAD-3R and the other Sniper fits are weighted toward long range and given a negative aggression modifier. They hold distance, favour clean shots, and will not walk into a brawl to take one.
• The MAD-3D, MAD-7D and the other Brawler fits are weighted the opposite way and get a strong positive aggression modifier. Same chassis, and they will come at you.
• Skirmisher fits like the MAD-5D sit in the middle and prioritise targets that are already damaged or cut off from support.

The practical upshot is that swapping a 3R for a 3D in an enemy lance changes the whole shape of the game, not just the damage numbers. If a scenario is feeling static, that is the dial to turn.

All 36 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. BV is Battle Value 2.0.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the MAD-3R by era, straight off the Master Unit List. Other variants differ, and the Lance Builder filters this properly if you are building to a specific year.

The rest of the family

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.