I say noob. I collected and played epic for years until all my stuff was stolen. Just coming back to it now and have been scouring ebay and alt manufacturers.

Have decided to get a small space marine force to tide me over. My question is when making my army the commander replaces a unit in a formation. If I take a whirlwind for example formation and I upgrade a commander, is the commander replacing a whirlwind or adding a infantry unit to the formation? Also would the commander upgrade come with a rhino?

Any help appreciated

The commander is added to a unit, in your example one of the whirlwinds would have the commander upgrade which would add whatever abilities you chose to that specific unit

If a character has no profile stats (marine characters, commissars) then it is an upgrade to an existing unit, if it has a profile (daemon prince, chaos champion) it is either added to the unit, or replaces a stand

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So say I add a commander upgrade to tactical formation I must replace a tac stand with captain stand or can I add a separate captain stand?

I've been looking at you tube vids also and some have a commander as a unit on its own with transport while others have replaced a infantry stand. Its somewhat confusing currently

Neither. The captain is a character type (CH) so he's added to the unit you select, in this case a tactical unit which stays a tactical unit. If you added him to a predator unit it would be q predator w/captain. A good descriptive Dave here on the site uses is that "characters are wargear added to a unit"

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There is no such thing as a captain stand, you add a captain *character* to an existing unit in the formation, this could be a tactical stand or a rhino

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You can add a captain to a rhino? Really? Is there any benefit to doing so?

In a similar point, has anyone actually had any great success with tank units upgraded with commanders? Other than vindicator so I suppose, I can see them working.

yeah pretty much anything can in theory get a character. In theory i could see it working with a captain in a FF orientated tank formation like predator destructors with the bike formation in a 1-2 combo. Problem is less it working versus for 50 points there's generally something else more needed (or a better character like a Chappy).

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Poor chaplains are over worked in every SM army. =-P

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So very much so. The commander ability needs a small boost in retrospect. I, subjectively, place the ability at probably 30-35 points but that going to make peoples ganglia twitch. Seems they work best in a list where they are an intrinsic formation boost

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If you assign a character to a vehicle, you'd want to give that vehicle a flag or a special paint scheme so we know it's paid for extra abilities. The commander (or whatever) is inside. For infantry you replace a normal stand with a captain stand which might have four normal marines plus a captain. It's common enough to give the captain stand extra things for flavor, like a banner bearer that has no bearing on the game.

Jimmy, your crusade for points values that aren't factors of 25 in the space marine list can still work, if there are enough of them. If the Land Speeder Tornado upgrade is literally the only +10 pt item in the list then yeah, it's effectively a 25 point upgrade. Come up with a whole package of little changes and I'd vote for it!