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Hi guys,

Been away from the hobby for quite some time and trying to get back into it now (playing space marines). Was never a serious player so ended up with a pile of models from all over the place trying to make an army list and seriously learn the rules for the first time. Models I have include

Marneus Calgnar
Chapter Master
Dark vengeance librarian

About 40-45 assorted bolter, flamer, missile launcher, melta and plasma marines (plus a few chainsword sergeants)

2 dreadnoughts
7 terminators, different weapon set ups
6 assault marines

3 ravenwing bikes
Land speeder (multimelta)
Devestator squad (2 lascannons, 3 plasma cannons, sergeant)
Command squad

Basically looking for any advice people could give on turning all that into a fun and reasonably competitive list, tips on getting going and general advice on properly playing marines?
Cheers!!

Organize your bolter and special weapon guys into coherent tactical squads. You could possibly have the core of a nice drop pod army.

First, welcome to Dakka.

What kind of army do you want to play? What drew you to marines? There are a lot of different ways to build a marine list, finding the right one for you is the tricky bit.

Some generic army building advice:

You need some mobility. Rhinos or drop pods are the easy choices. Both have their pros and cons. 40k is an objective based game. You need a way to get units to where they need to be and keep them alive there for as long as necessary. In maelstrom games, that might be for the turn, other games you need to have a boot there when the final turn ends.

You need a plan for horde armies. Green tide of orcs, swarms of tyranid bugs, or blobs of guard troopers. Templates, large blasts, or just high volumes of small arms fire are the generic answers.

Smaller, elite troops. Like marine and terminators and their equivalents (often referred to as MEQ and TEQ) Your basic T4, 3+ or 2+ save footsloger. Marines, or guys who take fire just like them, are very common. Have a plan on how to kill them. In general, the better the armor save, the fewer you need to kill.

How are you going to kill hard targets? AV14 can show up in a few places, and can be rough to deal with. Your MM speeder should serve you well here

Medium and light vehicles. These might get spammed, so you should have a larger number of guns that can deal with them. Reasonable volume of mid-weight (S6-8) fire is a popular way to take them down. Depending what your dreads are packing, this might be their job. Also, MLs and LCs on tac/dev squads.

Monstrous creatures can be dealt with in a similar fashion, but there are differences. There are a number of non-vehicle, high toughness things out there. What’s you plan when you find one?

Flyers. These don’t show up all the time, but they are out there. Luckily they tend to arrive late, and can have a hard time pointing in the right direction due to movement restrictions. Still, they tend to pack a lot of guns and have some nasty tricks.

Sort the normal marines into tactical squads with sergeants, one special weapon (Flamer, melta, plasma etc), one heavy weapon (missile launcher, plasma cannon etc), and paint the DV librarian in ultramarine colors (and do that to the other minis if they already aren't). Get transports of either the drop-pod or rhino flavor for the tacticals. That's like the 500 point army that everyone starts out with.

Now, If you get a couple more bikes, you can convert the DV bikers to 'normal' Space Marine bikes, and field your command squad and librarian on bikes.

Or, if you enjoy the dreadnoughts, take the librarian/ double- tactical- squad build, shoehorn the librarian into the command squad, and field your devastators as they are. That should work out to something like 1000 points. Then, you can convert the DV bikes to 'normal' space marine bikes, buy another box and convert the chapter master to a Chapter Master On a Bike. So, you have two tacticals in transports, lead by a librarian and command squad (that may or may not be in a transport), with a small white scars allied detachment (the Bike Chapter Master and his bikes, which count as troops in units of 5+).

With a little creativity and daft conversions, you could salvage your collection into a fieldable force worth ~1500 point depending on how you take your upgrades. Problem is that your collection in the OP kind of requires you to buy more models to fill gaps, which I hate to tell you. Another problem is the odd numbers of models you have. Most of the time, space marines field units in fives and tens. I've never seen someone field seven terminators or six assault marines unless they were trying some cheesy one-timer. You could always see if friends or veteran players around your area are willing to let go of their terminator models, but you run into a similar problem where no one is going to want to sell/ give away three terminators.

Anyways, good luck! hope this helps!

Grab yourself two Rhinos and two Razorbacks and then you have enough to build a list prolly up to 1250 before you start getting trounced. Moving forward you should be getting Sternguard and a flyer, I like the Stormtalon personally, but building out of what you have is going to be easy enough to get you on the table at 1000 points and still have decent games. Once you get atleast two Rhinos I mean. The Tactical Squads need their boxes of mobility

For your HQ, I personally would say go with thee librarian and simply use him as any chapter you wish (calgar is far too expensive and going with the liby gives you a cheap, powerful HQ).

As for the army, I would say tac squads with meltas, dreadnoughts with melta, melt a speeder, and put em all in drop pods.