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I dont know mutch about SM and waht GW wants with them so my question is basicly this:
- why are there 5 seperate SM armys on the gw shop? (sm, blood, dark, death, wolves)

GK i understand why is seperate as they are anti daemons(if that is actualy a thing or not on the table is a different discussion) and i understand why custodes is a seperate codex, but what are the gaming differences between the 5 SM armys that meant that they had to be induvidual armies? (and why did they need their own index entry/codex when many other chapters presented in the generic SM codex does not have their own index entry/codex?)

Because Space Marines make up something like 50% or more of GW's total company sales. As a result they've gained more and more support over the years which means GW wanted to find ways to continue to tap into that market interest which resulted in them fleshing out the further chapters of the Marines. This didn't happen overnight and in the past many of the sub-groups had very few choices outside of one or two hero units; but its grown in popularity and GW has fed that with an increased model reach for each group.


This is different to the sub-factions in the codex for many other factions in the game, which are more just focusing on a few unit within each complete army as a means of giving specific army types an increased viability through special rules loosely tied to the lore of the game.


Basically Marines sell really well and you can only invest so much in diversity within a single army before you add too much. So GW fed the popularity by going sideways and releasing new models for ever more marin subfactions.


Of course its also somewhat self feeding - the more marines they release the more marines become a major seller for them.

They are the different chapters, space marines are generally the same but the different chapters have different traits as it were

Look through the fluff and you will see, for example codex chapters are in the SM Codex while blood Angels, dark angels, space wolves and black Templars have their own codices

Deathwatch is similar to GK as they have their own wargear and some of their units operate in a different manner than how Codex Marines work.

Space Wolves tend to organize and operate their army in a different way than what you see with Codex Marine armies. Wolf Guard operate differently than Sternguard, Vanguard Vets, Honor Guard, etc. Grey Hunters have different loadouts than Tactical Marines. Blood Claws are different than Assault Marines/Scouts with larger unit sizes, gear options, special rules, etc. Some Space Wolf units are similar like most of their vehicles but I would say roughly half or more of the Space Wolves army is different than their Codex compliant counterparts.

Dark Angels and Blood Angels do have some different units than their Codex counterparts such as Death Company, Ravenwing Knights, Darkshroud, Furioso Dreadnought, etc but they are probably the closest to codex marines of the group and could possibly be rolled into a codex marine book but it would still require a lot of entries unique to their chapters and I don't know how much their units like Terminators or Tactical Marines differ from their codex counterparts.

For the same reason there are Eldar and Dark Eldar armies, they are not identical.

The true answer is money.

Marines sell. So making up chapters with comically exaggerated themes will sell more than say, a new Ork faction.

Despite the fact that the variances of other races between factions, they're all in one book, but Marines, who for the most part follow the exact same organization and fight with the same equipment in roughly similar manners have half a dozen books. Because they sell.

There are thousand different Chapters each different.

A couple of Chapters had some minor idoscynacries that became more and more focussed on and in the end became extremely flanderised making them almost unrecognisable from the original.

There are plenty of Chapters in the fluff which are as or more divergent than the Angels that have to have their own Codex and the Wolves actual differences are mostly cosmetic apart from WOLFY WOLF Wolves riding Wolves.

This was a product of continual and unrelenting focus on the same Chapters which meant they had to keep inventing new units for them to sell and also try and make them distinctive with snowflake rules for those units which of course means the normal versions of those units have to be lesser......

In my opinion this has been highly negative not just for other Marine in terms of units and rules but even worse for other factions.

It also resulted in a almost total focus on selling marines in terms of publicity, rules etc which oddly enough meant that they sold the most and so the circle continued - faster and faster.

Where there are different codexes there are significantly different rules. Apart from some chapter-specific units, chapter tactics, warlord traits, chapter relics and stratagems, all the SM chapters in the main SM codex share the same rules.