Marauder

Why it earns its tonnage

Most heavies in this bracket are built to trade damage somewhere in the middle of the field. The Marauder isn't, and you can see it the moment the panels come off. The two Hellstars and the Whirlwind are built to work together at long range, which is the entire point of the machine: you're doing damage through the whole approach instead of waiting for someone to arrive within arm's reach. The autocannon actually outranges the particle cannons, so it opens the account and the Hellstars join once the gap closes.

The two medium lasers are a different animal entirely. Close-in weapons, sitting there for the exact situation the rest of the design exists to prevent. If you're firing them, something has already gone wrong upstream of that decision.

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 its feet ever moving. The Hellstars are also built tough enough to survive being swung as clubs, and there are enough accounts of Marauders finishing a fight by beating something to scrap that I've stopped assuming they're exaggerated.

Now the part I actually swear about.

The Whirlwind was an afterthought, and you can tell by how it's bolted on. The linkage between the autocannon and the chassis is thin enough that one good hit in the right place takes the gun out of the fight without so much as scratching anything else. It's temperamental on a good day. Officially it's on the quirk list as an exposed weapon linkage, which is the polite version of something every tech who's ever worked one already knew before they read the manual.

The rotation rings where the torso meets the leg assemblies are the other soft spot, and I've lost count of the Marauders that have come through the bay wearing a home-welded collar around that joint, added by some tech in the field who'd clearly had the same argument with the same part one too many times.

And the HiRez tracking gear sits forward in the chassis, right where it blocks part of the pilot's own sightline, which is a genuinely strange thing to do to a machine whose entire reason for existing is seeing people a long way off before they see you.

One more, and it's the sad one. The original armour was Valiant Lamellor, eleven and a half tons of it, better than standard plate at spreading kinetic and thermal energy and lighter carrying it. Nobody alive remembers how to make it anymore. Walk down a line of old Marauders in a mercenary bay and you'll see it straight away: one torso panel a shade darker than the rest, a leg that doesn't quite match the arm, wherever the original plate finally gave out and somebody bolted on whatever was actually available that week. You can read a machine's whole service record off its skin if you know where to look, and on a Marauder that record is usually written in mismatched armour.

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.

Five centuries of not quite arriving

In the Star League years it was a Gunslinger Program favourite for the firepower alone, and battalion and regimental commanders liked it for the electronics on top. It was never common, though. Massed Marauders could break an enemy line properly whenever anyone could actually gather enough of them together, and almost nobody could. House Liao fielded several hundred in total by 2828. That's the whole Confederation's holding, every last one of them, a few hundred machines spread across an entire nation's military. So they got parcelled out alongside Warhammers and Thunderbolts to pad the numbers, which is why those three keep turning up together in every account of the Succession Wars you'll read.

Then came the decline, and the variant list tells that story better than any history book bothers to. The MAD-2R from 2760 carried ER PPCs and 16 double heat sinks. It fires both main guns every single turn, forever, and never so much as notices the heat. 59 years later they built the MAD-3R with single sinks, standard cannons and less armour to carry, and that's the one that ended up on the box art. It took another 287 years before anyone put double heat sinks back into a production Marauder at all. The better part of three centuries is a long time to spend rediscovering something you'd already built once.

When the Helm Memory Core turned up, the Marauder was an obvious candidate for modernising. House Davion got there first, and then made the single most Davion mistake available to them: House Kurita took Quentin, and the Marauder factory sitting on it, during the War of 3039, and simply inherited the new variant along with the planet. The Federated Commonwealth had to go away and design an entirely second modern Marauder with a different loadout, because the enemy now owned the first one outright.

The Capellans came to it late, and sideways, and never quite by the front door. They'd never built a Marauder in their lives. Sun-Tzu Liao negotiated with General Motors personally for the rights, and what he actually paid with was permission for HildCo Interplanetary to start exporting to the Federated Suns again. It worked. And not long after, reports started drifting in from the Periphery about backwater realms fielding upgraded Marauders that nobody in any of the Great Houses could account for. Once a design's out in the world long enough, it stops belonging to whoever built it.

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 Marauder family

Other machines that do the same job

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.