Space Marine 2 Horde Control: Space and Armour

The armour loop

Armour is restored by executions and by a few class abilities. That means the horde is not only a damage source — it is also your armour supply, and the correct play against a swarm is often to keep one enemy alive to execute rather than clearing everything. Killing everything as fast as possible denies you the resource the fight runs on. That inversion is the single most useful thing to understand about this game.

Chokepoints

A horde spreads. A doorway, a bridge, or a corridor does not. Fighting a swarm in the open means being surrounded on all sides, and being surrounded means no executions and no recovery. So the horde fight is a positioning fight: find the narrow ground, hold it, and let the swarm come to you one at a time.

What to spend

Grenades are for clusters, not for single targets. A Frag into a packed group clears an approach; a Frag at one Gaunt is a wasted slot. Area abilities — the Chapter Banner, Orbital-style effects, Heavy weapon suppression — buy the space you need to reposition. Melee is not a last resort. Executions and Gun Strikes are the armour economy, so a squad that avoids melee entirely is a squad that cannot recover.

The escalation problem

Hordes escalate: what starts as Gaunts becomes Warriors, then Extremis. If you are still fighting the first wave when the third arrives, the mission is already lost — which is why clearing fast matters, and why the horde’s own units are the ones that block you. The enemy list covers which units are the escalation, and the difficulty page explains where the escalation outpaces a squad that is not holding ground.

The squad version

Two players hold the chokepoint, one covers the flank. The flank is the job nobody wants and the one that loses missions, because a horde that gets behind a squad ends the armour loop entirely. The class overview covers which classes anchor a line, and the Siege mode page is a whole game built on this discipline.