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Hi Dakka, so I was wondering what thoughts any of you guys had on what new army I should start if I want to have a lot of fun playing.

I don't know much about SM armies, so ideally a good balance of these would be great:
1) varied viable play styles
2) more than just one effective unit
3) good character buffs
4) competitiveness
5) army aesthetic
6) and last but not least - good fluff!

I have only listed a few armies that I'd be interested in, but if you have other suggestions that you'd like to share then please do! (I've put other as an option for this case)

I'd love as detailed a reason as you can give me as to why I should start the army. Any stories surrounding your army choice would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Blood Angels aren't the most competitive army out there, but they can definitely hold their own.
Amazing lore, great aesthetics, imagery and conversion opportunities, and good selection of their own models.
They certainly have no shortage of awesome character buffs.

Now, I may be only slightly biased as a Blood Angels player, but there you go.

Entirely biased it looks like as Blood Angels do horribly at games.

The best method is "Other", and paint as you like and have several different HQ'S so that you can pick chapters at will.

Yeah, you should only ever play Blood Angels if you don't mind losing. BA are by far the worst codex currently.

Go with vanilla Space Marines for points 1-4, and Space Wolves for points 4-6. Altough point 6 is of course a lot of personal opinion.

Dark Angels all the way! They have great fluff, a very cool color scheme (three schemes in one, actually!), they are pretty competitive these days (for once ), and there are multiple ways to play them. Character buffs are there, but mainly only on some of the less popular characters (looking at you Ezekiel and Azrael!).

I personally find the standard codex marines to offer the widest variety of playstyles. Its also important to note that Space Marines are the posterboys of Warhammer 40k so you can count on them always being in a good spot and to be heavily supported.

Codex Space Marines are the most reliable and safe bet of your options.

I use Blood Angels models, because I bought them, and like the kits. I play Vanilla Marines. I like Ultras and Salamanders. They're fun to play.

The nice part about Vanillas, is that with a little conversion, you can play any MEQ list. Give a Dreadnought a Shield and now he's a Space Puppy Dread. Run Vulkan as the HQ, and now you're Sallys. They're flexible, and you can play many different types of list.

I've got Ultramarines, Astral Claws and Blood Angels. Might have another but I forget... The Claws are so far my most fun. They have the edge with Bikes, barely a second to White Scars not including Relics, and the characters are full of fluff. Not to mention to amount of ways to build an army. They have their own special list for fluff games, the competitive modern armies and can run a Badab War list using Formations all over the place from different Chapters. It's an awesome way to play the game.

I play Drop Pod Salamanders and wouldn't play anything else. So many of the special rules are passive (which makes them easier to remember), the build is competitive, the fluff is great, and the scheme is one of the easiest color schemes in 40k to paint.

Chaos for life man, specifically KDK as they are one of the most diverse and interesting marine armies in all of 40k.

Raven guard and white scars are definitely the coolest now with damocles being a thing.

Slaanesh csm here we are quite fast (I5 marines ) have some quite nasty ranged units (sonic dreadnoughts and noise marines) and our psychic powers are not bad either

make your own chapter

If i could start again id make my own chapter but ive got a fair amount of cash into a dark angels army which is nice but id like to gowith my own chapter from here on out.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
make your own chapter

I am leaning slightly towards this at the moment, but more as a 'warband' of renegades.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions so far, it's nice to know that it's not just a one-sided debate here. I reckon that if I don't use any weaponry/vehicles that a normal vanilla army wouldn't have such as the axe&shield dread or something like the Blood Angel hand flamers then I can in theory have loads of different colour schemes in the army and just tie them all together with one particular shoulder pad/symbol. Would this generally be acceptable among other players?

For instance, just a random example: a squad of 5 White Scar bikers could have lost 2 of their squad, joined the renegades and picked up a Dark Angel & a Blood Angel.

13045273 wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
make your own chapter

I am leaning slightly towards this at the moment, but more as a 'warband' of renegades.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions so far, it's nice to know that it's not just a one-sided debate here. I reckon that if I don't use any weaponry/vehicles that a normal vanilla army wouldn't have such as the axe&shield dread or something like the Blood Angel hand flamers then I can in theory have loads of different colour schemes in the army and just tie them all together with one particular shoulder pad/symbol. Would this generally be acceptable among other players?

For instance, just a random example: a squad of 5 White Scar bikers could have lost 2 of their squad, joined the renegades and picked up a Dark Angel & a Blood Angel.

You can paint your army however you want. But you should pick one codex to use for the rules, and if you go with the Space Marine codex, try to stick to one chapter for the chapter tactics.
So you could paint them all up differently, and say that are dark angels and blood angels, but you would consider them all white scars for rules purposes and chapter tactics. And make sure to be very clear with your opponent before hand on what is what.

 Icculus wrote:

13045273 wrote:

HoundsofDemos wrote:
make your own chapter

I am leaning slightly towards this at the moment, but more as a 'warband' of renegades.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions so far, it's nice to know that it's not just a one-sided debate here. I reckon that if I don't use any weaponry/vehicles that a normal vanilla army wouldn't have such as the axe&shield dread or something like the Blood Angel hand flamers then I can in theory have loads of different colour schemes in the army and just tie them all together with one particular shoulder pad/symbol. Would this generally be acceptable among other players?

For instance, just a random example: a squad of 5 White Scar bikers could have lost 2 of their squad, joined the renegades and picked up a Dark Angel & a Blood Angel.

You can paint your army however you want. But you should pick one codex to use for the rules, and if you go with the Space Marine codex, try to stick to one chapter for the chapter tactics.
So you could paint them all up differently, and say that are dark angels and blood angels, but you would consider them all white scars for rules purposes and chapter tactics. And make sure to be very clear with your opponent before hand on what is what.

Thanks for the tip!

What I'm going to do is make up a symbol/particular colour for an army-wide marking and paint them in all different schemes. That means that from battle to battle, I can switch what kind of rules I want to use.

Like you and a few others mentioned, I'll get different characters and run them as different armies depending on the character I use!

 BoomWolf wrote:
Raven guard and white scars are definitely the coolest now with damocles being a thing.

Agree with this, I've been playing Ravenguad lately and it's so much fun. So many cool little rules and perks, nothing hugely OP, but a characterful and fun way to make varied builds.

 SharkoutofWata wrote:
I've got Ultramarines, Astral Claws and Blood Angels. Might have another but I forget... The Claws are so far my most fun. They have the edge with Bikes, barely a second to White Scars not including Relics, and the characters are full of fluff. Not to mention to amount of ways to build an army. They have their own special list for fluff games, the competitive modern armies and can run a Badab War list using Formations all over the place from different Chapters. It's an awesome way to play the game.

If they are second to the White Scars, wouldn't that make them third overall behind the Ravenwing?

Salamanders all the way. Easy chapter tactics to understand, drop pods work great with them, and easy color scheme.

Blood Angels are by far the worst
However they are one of two armies that allow you to field a 100% Dreadnought army (Excluding Drop pods)(the other being Space Wolves with their formation)
Make of this what you will

Maybe try starting with generic space marines, expand what you enjoy playing and go for the army that works well with that. E.g. if you find that bikes work for you, expand into White Scars.

Otherwise: what's your favorite colour?

Custom chapter and try out all the different chapter tactics.

Iron Hands are super badass though. They are tough as f*** and hard to kill. They get FNP for all infantry, and your command squad with an apothecary is even tougher with +1 to it's FNP. Their characters and dreadnoughts have IWND. They embrace technology and are bros with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

 MeanAss_Demasoni wrote:
Custom chapter and try out all the different chapter tactics.

Iron Hands are super badass though. They are tough as f*** and hard to kill. They get FNP for all infantry, and your command squad with an apothecary is even tougher with +1 to it's FNP. Their characters and dreadnoughts have IWND. They embrace technology and are bros with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

This sounds insane!! After doing a little background reading on the Iron Hands, it sounds like the fluff really gets reflected in how they play on the tabletop which is just great to see. Definitely going to try and use some sort of conversion or two so that Iron Hands are represented in my army.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 DarkBlack wrote:
Maybe try starting with generic space marines, expand what you enjoy playing and go for the army that works well with that. E.g. if you find that bikes work for you, expand into White Scars.

Otherwise: what's your favorite colour?

This is the road I'm going down most probably, I'll just have to play through every army and pick what I enjoy most because at the moment I have really no idea what I like or what to expect. I do like red, but Blood Angels sound like they get their asses kicked fairly often. I've just purchased a Shadow Force Solaq box set from ebay because I love how they've done the captain and veterans have a great aesthetic too. Raven Guard will feature pretty heavily I think, as well as Ultramarines (being the ultimate GW poster boys and all..)

I'm gonna have to get myself familiar with a lot of paint schemes for this project! I'll have a look on YouTube, but does anyone have any websites for painting tutorial stuff? That would really help me.

I chose Space Wolves as my first army and I have not regretted the decision. They have a wide variety of builds, great looking models including the best looking flyer in the game, and possibly the most powerful melee unit the thunderwolf cavalry.

13045273 wrote:

 MeanAss_Demasoni wrote:
Custom chapter and try out all the different chapter tactics.

Iron Hands are super badass though. They are tough as f*** and hard to kill. They get FNP for all infantry, and your command squad with an apothecary is even tougher with +1 to it's FNP. Their characters and dreadnoughts have IWND. They embrace technology and are bros with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

This sounds insane!! After doing a little background reading on the Iron Hands, it sounds like the fluff really gets reflected in how they play on the tabletop which is just great to see. Definitely going to try and use some sort of conversion or two so that Iron Hands are represented in my army.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 DarkBlack wrote:
Maybe try starting with generic space marines, expand what you enjoy playing and go for the army that works well with that. E.g. if you find that bikes work for you, expand into White Scars.

Otherwise: what's your favorite colour?

This is the road I'm going down most probably, I'll just have to play through every army and pick what I enjoy most because at the moment I have really no idea what I like or what to expect. I do like red, but Blood Angels sound like they get their asses kicked fairly often. I've just purchased a Shadow Force Solaq box set from ebay because I love how they've done the captain and veterans have a great aesthetic too. Raven Guard will feature pretty heavily I think, as well as Ultramarines (being the ultimate GW poster boys and all..)

I'm gonna have to get myself familiar with a lot of paint schemes for this project! I'll have a look on YouTube, but does anyone have any websites for painting tutorial stuff? That would really help me.

Miniwargaming.com you can get a trial membership and check out loads of painting tutorials. I believe they have a power armor tutorial for every major chapter.

There's also YouTube, but you gotta sift through a lot of crap to find the gold.

White Scars.

Wow, Blood Angels beat out Grey Knights

Iron Hands, Dark Angels and Grey Knights for me.

Really cool, really fluffy armies.

Also, just randomly, bar GK, you would list the 3 chapters I hate the most xD

Making your own chapter is best for strategic options, in that you can very reasonably treat them as any of the C:SM chapters, or even DA, BA, or SW. It's worst for resale value though, if that's a concern.