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So I am embarking on a project to rebalance Warhammer 40k, using 3rd/4th Edition as a baseline. The thing is, while I love the 3.5t Chaos Codex, I keep hearing that 3.5th edition CSM were overpowered, but I can't figure out exactly why. Can someone please explain?

4 Heavy Support slots (instead of 3) full of Basilisks, if I remember right.

Of course nowadays it's something everyone can do... But back in the days it was OP.

It wasn't.

It had a ton of options, and some might say that it had poor internal balance. But others would day that was part of the richness in options, since you could do so much stuff.

The only problem I ever really had with it wad that a number of players I knew suddenly began playing Iron Warriors, for the mutiple Obliterator squads and 4 Heavy Support options. Which looked like a push button army on paper, but still wasn't all that great.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nym wrote:
4 Heavy Support slots (instead of 3) full of Basilisks, if I remember right.

Pretty sure they could only take one Basilisk.

 Nym wrote:
4 Heavy Support slots (instead of 3) full of Basilisks, if I remember right.

Of course nowadays it's something everyone can do... But back in the days it was OP.

Basilisk was 0-1 and only for Iron warriors along with 0-1 vindicator. Obliterators were good and no 0-1 with the IW but the IW legion had big limits in many other units like demons and cults (only cult allowed was 0-1 berserkers used to assault a breached position).

Also, it was a fantastic codex with few OP stuff. The memes surrounding it barred the CSM to have flavorful or just decent options for years.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Pretty sure they could only take one Basilisk.

Yeah my bad.

I just remember being tabled every time I faced my friend Chaos army who "just happened" to be Iron Warriors... ~~

Basically you had entire armies made up of:


Daemon Prince with a 2+/5++ that could scout move, fly and ignore armour saves AND invulnerable saves with the right build

Troops were just 2 units of 5 Marines

Elite: 3 units of 3 Obliterators

Heavy Support: Vindicator, Basilisk, 2 Defilers.

or

Infiltrating Cultist armies that could summon Bloodletters that had 3+/5++ and could charge out of summoning.

or

Daemon Prince with lesser psychic powers that allowed him not to be able to be targeted by anything and also you couldn't stop the psychic power.

or

Units of Khorne Chosen on Bikes that could scout, had 2+/5++, 2 wounds, Axes of Khorne and Powerfists.

But even through all that, the codex was the greatest thing imaginable for someone who played Chaos Marines. You could build pretty much any army your heart desired, it was the most customizable codex ever written by GW.

IRRC Noise Marines could be on bikes also.

I started late and didnt see it in play but i read it a few times, there where just a large amount of options, making a good uit great was easy to do.

It wasnt, it just had some legions that were able to exploit the rules more than others, and certain powers that were bonkers (psiren).

You could take that codex almost verbatim and drop it into 7th/8th and it would be underpowered, the game has moved on and gotten a lot worse balance wise, for example, infiltrating units that could assault after moving up (like now), would not be able to do so in 7th.

The veteran skills, mutations and wargear list gave us still unprecedented levels of customisation, it was glorious, and the main reason a lot of long time chaos players are still salty, 4th ed onwards has led to the decline of interesting chaos and cartoonish models, and worst of all, a pathetic attempt at making an interesting faction that works.

I have said it before and will say it again, I know more about the background and how to make rules than the GW dev team seems to, and I am willing to bet that most players on Dakka do too.

 Formosa wrote:
It wasnt, it just had some legions that were able to exploit the rules more than others, and certain powers that were bonkers (psiren).

You could take that codex almost verbatim and drop it into 7th/8th and it would be underpowered, the game has moved on and gotten a lot worse balance wise, for example, infiltrating units that could assault after moving up (like now), would not be able to do so in 7th.

The veteran skills, mutations and wargear list gave us still unprecedented levels of customisation, it was glorious, and the main reason a lot of long time chaos players are still salty, 4th ed onwards has led to the decline of interesting chaos and cartoonish models, and worst of all, a pathetic attempt at making an interesting faction that works.

I have said it before and will say it again, I know more about the background and how to make rules than the GW dev team seems to, and I am willing to bet that most players on Dakka do too.

They could in other editions besides 6-7th tho, some units could even run after infiltrate and charge.
So i dont understand why this is imbalanced? Everyone can now instead of "some armies can do it alot while others do it 0 to little"

 Amishprn86 wrote:

 Formosa wrote:
It wasnt, it just had some legions that were able to exploit the rules more than others, and certain powers that were bonkers (psiren).

You could take that codex almost verbatim and drop it into 7th/8th and it would be underpowered, the game has moved on and gotten a lot worse balance wise, for example, infiltrating units that could assault after moving up (like now), would not be able to do so in 7th.

The veteran skills, mutations and wargear list gave us still unprecedented levels of customisation, it was glorious, and the main reason a lot of long time chaos players are still salty, 4th ed onwards has led to the decline of interesting chaos and cartoonish models, and worst of all, a pathetic attempt at making an interesting faction that works.

I have said it before and will say it again, I know more about the background and how to make rules than the GW dev team seems to, and I am willing to bet that most players on Dakka do too.

They could in other editions besides 6-7th tho, some units could even run after infiltrate and charge.
So i dont understand why this is imbalanced? Everyone can now instead of "some armies can do it alot while others do it 0 to little"

The issue was most things that could were restricted to infantry, but the chaos dex didnt have this distinction, for example my Khorne prince with the Glaive could easily be in combat turn 1 with its cav move and fleet. it was sick.

FYI: Bikes could not infiltrate, neither could models with a mark of khorne.

Troop marines being able to take 2 special weapons in a 5 man squad was pretty nice though.

What I liked about that dex you could only field one demon prince but it was one of if not THE scariest model in all of 40k at that time. It could even eat c'tan for breakfast without breaking a sweat. And back then toughness 8 of those c'tan meant something.

 combatcotton wrote:
FYI: Bikes could not infiltrate, neither could models with a mark of khorne.

Troop marines being able to take 2 special weapons in a 5 man squad was pretty nice though.

What I liked about that dex you could only field one demon prince but it was one of if not THE scariest model in all of 40k at that time. It could even eat c'tan for breakfast without breaking a sweat. And back then toughness 8 of those c'tan meant something.

My mistake its been a while, the infiltrating DP was still a thing though, speaking of which I really liked the gift system that made a chaos lord a DP, the more gifts the closer you got.

Bikes could not infiltrate, neither could models with a mark of khorne

Was this in the original release of the codex? If I remember correctly there were multiple releases for the codex that changed some stuff didn't it?

Just checked, Deamonic stature, bikes, steeds, followers mark of khorne and termy armour stopped it, god knows why I thought you could infiltrate a DP then, im sure I did it and saw it done quite often lol.

I started collecting books and models during the 3.5 period, but never actually played till end of 5th.

People hated Lash of Submission for letting you pick up opponents models and move them. That and doom axe on a monsterous Daemon Prince would deny armor and invuls.

Other than that it was overpriced units. Lots of great art though.

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
I started collecting books and models during the 3.5 period, but never actually played till end of 5th.

People hated Lash of Submission for letting you pick up opponents models and move them. That and doom axe on a monsterous Daemon Prince would deny armor and invuls.

Other than that it was overpriced units. Lots of great art though.

Lash of Torment, the other one was 4th ed, and yep it was bloody awful to play against :/, and the Black Axe denied invuns, on a DP it ignored everything, but we also had things like the Kai gun, Black sword, Bedlam staff etc.

oh how I miss thee 3.5 dex, you ooozed so much character right down to your bones, the models may be dated by todays standards, but they are still great.

The two common broken 3.5 builds were iron warriors to get the four heavy support slots and the slaanesh build with the lash princes. The rest of the codex had some power but wasn't too over the top.

A number of factors, although the most popular ones are to gripe about the Obliterators, Daemon prince, and Iron Warriors.

Here's the gist of it:

1.) Daemon Princes had WAAAAAY too many options. While you only get one per army, that one Daemon Prince can either get ludicrous attacks, a powerful gun, ignore all saves (with the dread axe), and depending on the Daemonic Gifts can also become a mini-greater Daemon with none of the GD's drawbacks. This is because of all the freaking Daemon Weapons it can wield and having essentially one upgrade for every point in it's stat (small wonder why they still rarely get Daemon Weapon access now). Oh and Psychic Powers, because they can do that too. Essentially while cost was suppose to keep Princes in check, in practice due to how powerful the upgrades were they just ended up allowing you to pay to negate the prince's weaknesses.

2.) Speaking of paying to negate weaknesses, this was one of the other issues with CSM in general; Veteran Skills. It was a nice concept, but Veteran Skills made CSM ungodly in terms of troop choices; You know how people complain CSM are worthless because other units do their job better and we have FoCs now that lets you bypass that tax entirely? Well back then all shmucks had to pay the Troop Tax, regardless of faction, but CSM could use Veteran Skills to essentially turn them into Elite choices from other armies. So in essence, you got an army already with good choices, that can mimic the cream of the crop of other armies in their worst slot, while other armies still had to pay the tax. It got worse with legion rules, which either discounted the costs for certain skills, unlocked skills you otherwise wouldn't have (Alpha Legion and Infiltrate was HEINOUS), or just flat out gave you free skills (admittedly, the free ones weren't game breaking, but were still pretty damn powerful).

3.) Remember Troop Choices and how they were a tax? Well Daemons pretty much laughed at that. A Bloodletter was a 20 point Space Marine with +1 strength (they had a 3+ Armor Save!) and a Power Weapon. That could assault out of deepstrike. While they lacked grenades, this edition everyone had to pay for grenades, so it was not that much of a hinderance. Another thing Daemons brought was that they had Invul Saves; in this edition an invul save was pretty hard to come by, and Cover Saves weren't that plentiful (you instead had Target Priority rules that most people's leadership completely ignored).

4.) Legion Rules. Ho boy. These were the Decurions before Decurions were a thing. While in theory they came with some hefty drawbacks (like losing out on certain units, skills or choices), in practice it only enabled people to spam something they gravitated to. If you chose Iron Warriors, you were never going to use fast units in the first place. If you went with one of the books of Chaos, you won't even miss the Raptor or Obliterator Cults. In essence, you got the bonuses for free. The most infamous is the Iron Warriors, as people have lined out.

5.) Cult Units were upgrades. This was big because Marks turned units into cult units. While they lacked some of the better buffs we have now (Berserkers didn't have WS5, Plague Marines didn't have FnP, etc) it did end up opening another can of worms entirely; Cult Chosen. Each Chosen was essentially a mini-chaos lord with almost no restrictions on what they could take, and you could kit them out for bear to eat face. Hell, Thousand Sons Chosen were literally a whole unit of Sorcerors (and if I read it right, they could all individually cast spells) while you also got Rubric Terminators. And the Sorcerors that accompanied the Rubrics were only a 10 point upgrade. Also, all mono-god marks came with a complimentary serving of Fearless, and Morale has been an issue for CSM for a long time since their removal.

6.) The infamous Obliterator. To understand the power of this thing is to understand the time it was in. For one, it's a lot cheaper than it is now. Two, it originally came out with a BASE toughness of 5, meaning only S10 weapons can ID them, and weapons with the Instant Death rule weren't as common back then. They had slow and purposeful, but their weapons more than made up for it. Basically, they could tank hilarious amounts of damage, could dish out hilarious amounts of damage, and were also very hard to avoid as well. Iron Warriors only made it worse, as not only are you facing 9 of them now, but they're also backed by some of the most annoying and terrifying artillery in the game at the time. There's a reason why a second edition of the 3.5 codex was printed and errated their Strength and Toughness to S4(5); it was THAT bad.

7.) And possibly the final thing. This came during the last days of 3rd edition, which only a few codexes saw actual variety (and even fewer saw actual good things, like the Nids). Necrons had one build during this era and would not see an update until the twilight hours of 5th edition; Eldar *lost* a ton of variations in their 4th edition codex, and IG were the butt of all jokes. This codex basically had it's cake, ate it, and then shat it back out into gold bricks while others could only look on. It wouldn't be till the 5th edition Grey Knight Codex that another army would have this many variations that were all viable and incredibly deadly.

And before anyone accuses me of being a hater. Note that I ran three different Chaos Armies at this time: World Eaters, Death Guard and the infamous Iron Warrior Build (the textbook one no less).

 auticus wrote:
The two common broken 3.5 builds were iron warriors to get the four heavy support slots and the slaanesh build with the lash princes. The rest of the codex had some power but wasn't too over the top.

No it wasnt, the post directly above yours, very clearly stated that Lash of Submission (the one that moves enemy units), was 4th Ed, please dont confuse the poor people

For clarity: THE ONLY LASH IN THE BOOK IS THE FOLLOWING: The Lash is a one-handed power weapon which may be used at full effect in close combat even if the model wielding it is not in base to base contact but is within 2" of enemy in close combat with the unit he is with. A unit in close combat with the bearer of the lash of torment that loses one or more wounds to it that turn will be at -1 leadership if they lose the combat and have to make a morale check.

Hardly Broken haha

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
A number of factors, although the most popular ones are to gripe about the Obliterators, Daemon prince, and Iron Warriors.

Here's the gist of it:

1.) Daemon Princes had WAAAAAY too many options. While you only get one per army, that one Daemon Prince can either get ludicrous attacks, a powerful gun, ignore all saves (with the dread axe), and depending on the Daemonic Gifts can also become a mini-greater Daemon with none of the GD's drawbacks. This is because of all the freaking Daemon Weapons it can wield and having essentially one upgrade for every point in it's stat (small wonder why they still rarely get Daemon Weapon access now). Oh and Psychic Powers, because they can do that too. Essentially while cost was suppose to keep Princes in check, in practice due to how powerful the upgrades were they just ended up allowing you to pay to negate the prince's weaknesses.

2.) Speaking of paying to negate weaknesses, this was one of the other issues with CSM in general; Veteran Skills. It was a nice concept, but Veteran Skills made CSM ungodly in terms of troop choices; You know how people complain CSM are worthless because other units do their job better and we have FoCs now that lets you bypass that tax entirely? Well back then all shmucks had to pay the Troop Tax, regardless of faction, but CSM could use Veteran Skills to essentially turn them into Elite choices from other armies. So in essence, you got an army already with good choices, that can mimic the cream of the crop of other armies in their worst slot, while other armies still had to pay the tax. It got worse with legion rules, which either discounted the costs for certain skills, unlocked skills you otherwise wouldn't have (Alpha Legion and Infiltrate was HEINOUS), or just flat out gave you free skills (admittedly, the free ones weren't game breaking, but were still pretty damn powerful).

3.) Remember Troop Choices and how they were a tax? Well Daemons pretty much laughed at that. A Bloodletter was a 20 point Space Marine with +1 strength (they had a 3+ Armor Save!) and a Power Weapon. That could assault out of deepstrike. While they lacked grenades, this edition everyone had to pay for grenades, so it was not that much of a hinderance. Another thing Daemons brought was that they had Invul Saves; in this edition an invul save was pretty hard to come by, and Cover Saves weren't that plentiful (you instead had Target Priority rules that most people's leadership completely ignored).

4.) Legion Rules. Ho boy. These were the Decurions before Decurions were a thing. While in theory they came with some hefty drawbacks (like losing out on certain units, skills or choices), in practice it only enabled people to spam something they gravitated to. If you chose Iron Warriors, you were never going to use fast units in the first place. If you went with one of the books of Chaos, you won't even miss the Raptor or Obliterator Cults. In essence, you got the bonuses for free. The most infamous is the Iron Warriors, as people have lined out.

5.) Cult Units were upgrades. This was big because Marks turned units into cult units. While they lacked some of the better buffs we have now (Berserkers didn't have WS5, Plague Marines didn't have FnP, etc) it did end up opening another can of worms entirely; Cult Chosen. Each Chosen was essentially a mini-chaos lord with almost no restrictions on what they could take, and you could kit them out for bear to eat face. Hell, Thousand Sons Chosen were literally a whole unit of Sorcerors (and if I read it right, they could all individually cast spells) while you also got Rubric Terminators. And the Sorcerors that accompanied the Rubrics were only a 10 point upgrade. Also, all mono-god marks came with a complimentary serving of Fearless, and Morale has been an issue for CSM for a long time since their removal.

6.) The infamous Obliterator. To understand the power of this thing is to understand the time it was in. For one, it's a lot cheaper than it is now. Two, it originally came out with a BASE toughness of 5, meaning only S10 weapons can ID them, and weapons with the Instant Death rule weren't as common back then. They had slow and purposeful, but their weapons more than made up for it. Basically, they could tank hilarious amounts of damage, could dish out hilarious amounts of damage, and were also very hard to avoid as well. Iron Warriors only made it worse, as not only are you facing 9 of them now, but they're also backed by some of the most annoying and terrifying artillery in the game at the time. There's a reason why a second edition of the 3.5 codex was printed and errated their Strength and Toughness to S4(5); it was THAT bad.

7.) And possibly the final thing. This came during the last days of 3rd edition, which only a few codexes saw actual variety (and even fewer saw actual good things, like the Nids). Necrons had one build during this era and would not see an update until the twilight hours of 5th edition; Eldar *lost* a ton of variations in their 4th edition codex, and IG were the butt of all jokes. This codex basically had it's cake, ate it, and then shat it back out into gold bricks while others could only look on. It wouldn't be till the 5th edition Grey Knight Codex that another army would have this many variations that were all viable and incredibly deadly.

And before anyone accuses me of being a hater. Note that I ran three different Chaos Armies at this time: World Eaters, Death Guard and the infamous Iron Warrior Build (the textbook one no less).

Good write up, but not all true per se.

Deamon princes did not have too many options, chaos lords did, they had the options they deserved for the representatives of Chaos, not the pale shadow of crap we get now, the conversion options were amazing and the variation in builds was like wise great, yes they were a BIG issue when people power gamed them, but that has never changed, most people did not, they built THERE deamon prince or chaos lord, myself and others would go out of our way to just make a good chaos lord, and ignore the deamon prince to fit out fluff, something that simply cannot be done anymore sadly, chaos lords now are so bland and cookie cutter, I am not saying your wrong here to be clear, just saying that not everyone ran them like that.

2: This I simply cannot agree with, as above when some people gamed the system it got crazy, but these are supposed to represent the stupidly battle hardened veterans of 10k years of constant war, not marines -1, veteran skills or something akin to it should never have been removed from the chaos line up, neatened up, balanced whatever, but they should still be a big factor of the legions.

3: Cant argue with that!

4:The legion skills like now were pretty good but like now, all over the place, some were good, others were naff, Iron warriors were OP because of obits not because of Iron Warriors, Black legion were ok and word bearers were pure flavour, so all over the place.

5: Chosen were crap, I really dont know where you are getting that they were OP, if you wanted that sorcerer unit you suggest it would cost you more than half your points, easily killed for little gain, Cult units getting fearless was a bit much I have to admit, but thats a personal thing, I dont like rules that bypass whole sets of mechanics.

6: Yep!

7: Yep mostly agree.

Dont think your a hater, just dont agree with everything you have said. The book had its issues, but its GW, who is surprised by that

From what I remember, it was generally due to Siren Princes and Iron Warriors.

Outside of those, you had some really genuinely fluffy army builds. The free champion for having the sacred number of troops was awesome.

World Eaters had the nasty habit of being herdable (have a Land Speeder just outside move+charge range and you could lead the Berserkers around by the nose).

Word Bearers could field a lot of demons (they could have up to 9 troops choices).

Black Legion wasn't bad if you wanted to grab-bag from different Chaos forces.

Death Guard were a solid close range shooty army.

Emperor's Children were really really shooty (aside from the Siren Prince) and were backed up by some seriously dangerous CC daemons.

Thousand Sons were super expensive, and I don't remember anybody fielding them seriously in tournaments.

I don't remember ever seeing Alpha Legion or Night Lords on the table top back then.

1.) For me Chaos lords basically didn't exist, at least not in my meta; if you wanted a cheap Chaos HQ, there was the Lieutenant. If you wanted an expensive HQ, it was either a Daemonic Statured Lord (i.e: Daemon Prince) or a GD.

(Also, a minor nitpick but it deserves mentioning. Most people when refering to a "daemon prince" in this era specifically means a Chaos Lord with the Daemonic Stature upgrade. However the rules themselves state that a Daemon Prince is a Chaos Lord with over 50 pts of Daemonic Gifts, which could or could not include Daemonic Stature. So you could technically have a lord on a juggernaut with a bunch of upgrades other than Stature and call that a prince, or have a Statured Lord that still goes under the 50 points limit so he technically is still a "Chaos Lord").

2.) I agree that veteran skills should have remained (rather than the poor excuse of a rule that was Veterans of the Long War that we got stuck with) but my point was that those skills made something that should have been mundane ridiculously good. Again it was a nice concept, and later iterations did prove that we could have specialists in the Troop Slot without totally destroying the balance, but for this codex that simply wasn't the case.

4.) I'd argue that Iron Warriors would still be OP even if they didn't have the 0-1 limit removed. One of the best sections of the Chaos Codex was the Heavy Support section, having access to the vindicator and basilisk was just icing on the cake. Chaos Vehicles (almost exclusively in the HS section) had three upgrades that made them insanely hard to put down: Daemonic Possession, Parasitic Possession and Mutated Hull. I've used predators with these upgrades that just won't die. As for other legions, they had some duds (especially since the baseline codex was basically the Black Legion's "Legion rules"), but the majority of them were pretty powerful. I'm also counting the books of chaos into this as they were essentially the four mono-god legion's "Legion rules" (and those were Da gak).

(Also as a note here: I misread the codex on the first go and gave those vehicle upgrades to a defiler once. Holy crap the defiler was not meant to have that. It turned what is essentially an upgunned Dreadnought into an unholy bastion of hate. Small wonder why only Daemonic Possession remained as an upgrade in later editions)

5.) Chosen were pretty good for me simply due to the customization; you could come with something completely out of left field if you got creative. Points was really the only drawback to them but they really were mini-chaos lords (or rather, the 1-wound counterpart to the 2 wound lieutenant and 3 wound chaos lord). Also, one thing people tend to forget from this time was that Chosen Terminators could take 1 heavy weapon per 3 MODELS. I once trimmed the fat so hard on my army just to get a unit of 9 Khorne Chosen to walk around with Reapers and power weapons in some unholy blob of death (it was hella fun).

Also one other thing I didn't really focus on was that you could have Cult Havocs. Specifically Nurgle and Slaanesh (the other two couldn't get it for obvious reasons). The most obvious of this is that they got far more special weapons than the cult troops we have now. The other benefit was that if you didn't run a lord with the same mark, they became elites. And Slaaneshi Havocs didn't have to upgrade their weapons to sonic weapons. (You could also run them as a squad of 5 armed all with Doom Sirens in the elites slot. They were far less fragile than it seemed due to Rhinos letting you assault out of cover)

At the end of the day, it was really the options that the Chaos Codex had that made it so powerful. Again, during that time, very few others had that much customization (most people don't remember that back then your army was considered lucky to have more than 2 choices per non-HQ slot, and some armies only had 1 HQ choice). The Chaos Armoury alone was responsible for this, as other people's armies could be neatly summarized in a few paragraphs. Chaos? We had to divide our armoury up into three sections (Normal Wargear, Daemonic Gifts and Veteran Skills), and two of them essentially had subsections for the relevant gods. And then there were the upgrades that really should have never been made (Dread Axe, Parasitic Possession, etc...)

Finally, a small but funny observation. The fact that the 3.5 dex existed is almost perfect for the narrative of Chaos; we old veterans were given a taste of power and has craved it ever since while new renegades flock to it not knowing why we fell to chaos in the first place.

Deamon princes did not have too many options, chaos lords did, they had the options they deserved for the representatives of Chaos

Despite a lot of people arguing the point, the book was quite clear that any chaos lord with >50 points of daemonic gifts was a daemon prince, whether it had daemonic stature or not, and as such was susceptible to grey knight 'anti-daemon' shenanigans.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:

7.) And possibly the final thing. This came during the last days of 3rd edition, which only a few codexes saw actual variety (and even fewer saw actual good things, like the Nids). Necrons had one build during this era and would not see an update until the twilight hours of 5th edition; Eldar *lost* a ton of variations in their 4th edition codex, and IG were the butt of all jokes. This codex basically had it's cake, ate it, and then shat it back out into gold bricks while others could only look on. It wouldn't be till the 5th edition Grey Knight Codex that another army would have this many variations that were all viable and incredibly deadly.

I would point out that 4th edition saw SM Chapter Traits, IG Regimental Doctrines, Tyranid mutations, Vehicle Design Rules, plus numerous Chapter Approved list options. Those were the days of options. Eldar shrank back to just a Codex, after Codex Craftworlds, true. But there was a ton of options for many armies, Chaos didn;t have a monopoly on that. Personally I ran Elite Devastators with Tank Hunters via the 4th ed Marine book.

SM Chapter Traits, Regimental Doctrines and most Chapter Approved List options came roughly at the same time or after the 3.5 Codex, only the Nids came before. I think it's due to that time being one of experimentation. However, as we saw it, it also resulted in a few duds. Regimental Doctrines, while it did gave IG options, weren't nearly as good as the Legion Rules Chaos Marines had (which was compounded by the fact that the codex was weaker in general due to the rules of the time). Plus a large part lies in the Chaos Armory, where you could essentially customize the stats of your units. The only other army to do this, the Nids, were also regarded as being very powerful at the time, with only Tau being the ones to be powerful due to the use of a rule quirk (fish of fury) rather than just having inherently powerful options. Hell, Nids were powerful in 4th edition specifically because of stuff like the Carnifex being able to upgrade just about anything on it's statline or be taken enmasse for pennies.

When compared to it's contemporaries, you could maybe make an argument that Space Marines and Nids could compare in terms of the options. But as someone who's first army was this, going to any other faction at the time felt extremely claustrophobic and restrictive when it came to army building.

ITT: "it wasn't but you could build anything any way you wanted because no matter what you built you were still winning"

At the time I was playing Fantasy, but I was watching chaos roflstomp everything, so how people can claim it wssn't op in its meta is beyond me.

Honestly it wasn't particularly broken.

Siren was annoying as hell, but that was quite specific to Slaanesh Daemon Princes and you had to buy about 70 points on the Minor Psychic Power Table to reliably have it.

Iron Warriors were hardly different at all from just taking an Ultramarine gunline.

A few more context points that are missing:

0. Wounds were allocated in the round: all the shooting/melee was stacked up and then the owning player distributed it around the unit so that every model took a wound before another model took its second and so forth.

Consequently a 200 point character could happily wade into combat secure in the knowledge that he'd only be lightly tapped by any chainswords or lasguns whilst his potentially 20 model entourage was pasted around him from all the actual dangerous stuff. It cannot be overstated how powerful this was ; dumping points into characters was perfectly sensible because they would survive, and in Chaos' case usually make the points of the unit back on their own.

1. Codex SM had to pay out the nose for power weapons; The cheapest you could get, with 2 attacks on a sgt was in the region of 35; compared to the 20 pt blood letter who came in squads and did not need a transport or ablative wounds. Chaos Champions on the other hand did not need to be upgraded to access the armory.

2. Melee in general was very very expensive even for armies that relied on it. C:SM had a trump card in the form of Furious Charge potentially in every slot; 3~ points for +1 str +1 Initiative, which combined with their plethora of options meant equivalent points of CC experts against them would die before they got a chance to strike back.

3. Master crafted Spikey bits. From what I remember, these two upgrades together costed 5 points for a single wound model. This gave two rerolls to hit, and could apply to power weapons. Rerolls existed *only* for chaplains at that point, and were a pretty big deal just for one squad. An entire army of characters that could do this with ablative wounds could define a game.

4. Power weapons just flat out ignored armour saves.

All of the above meant that :

An alpha legion master crafted spikey bit cultist champion ( for example) which would cost about 50 for the champion and 30~ for 9 ablative wounds could take on a 240 pt terminator unit from infiltrate and expect to win. This was very emblematic of the codex; hard counters to everything for cheap, and you could feasibly fit one of everything in.

5. Predators specifically and vehicles in general were somewhat relevant with the various upgrades they could take, ignoring 1/3rd of the vehicle damage results.

6. Objectives were defined by table quarters instead of specific points on the table. As such the quality of shooting was a big deal as you had to focus on all the units in the area instead of just the ones camping. This more than anything else is why the iron warriors shennanigans was such a big deal : they were perfectly optimised to score, and no-one could get the same guns for the same price.

7. Base CSM marines were flat out cheaper

They were 'Better Space Marines'. They had better characters when characters were a big deal, better options when choosing drawback <->advantage, and a wider variety of drawback <-> advantage to adapt to the regional meta.

Consequently when I started in early 4th, some 2/3rds of my meta were CSM players.

I forgot about the Master crafted stuff. Those were also da gak.

locarno24 wrote:

Deamon princes did not have too many options, chaos lords did, they had the options they deserved for the representatives of Chaos

Despite a lot of people arguing the point, the book was quite clear that any chaos lord with >50 points of daemonic gifts was a daemon prince, whether it had daemonic stature or not, and as such was susceptible to grey knight 'anti-daemon' shenanigans.

There was no DP option, it was a chaos lord that took over 50pts of gear like you said, that then become a DP, this is a Chaos lord option, since the DP did not have any profile, without the Chaos lords entry, there would be no DP.

I really liked being able to do this, as it gave you a unique DP, yeah some people min maxed it, but you will never stop that.