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Hey all, I'm fairly new to the hobby in general and very new to big 40k. I have the new Chaos battleforce box which includes a Chaos Lord, 10 Chaos Space Marines, 5 Havocs, 5 Chaos Terminators, and a Forgefiend. I also have the Chaos Start Collecting box which includes a Master of Possession, a Venomcrawler, 2 Obliterators, 2 Greater Possessed, and 10 more Chaos Space Marines. I have a set of 5 Noise Marines, and a Daemon Prince model with an axe, and I also have access to the models from Blackstone Fortress and it's expansions. I made a list on BattleScribe which I'll attach to this post (if I can figure out how).

My questions; are these models enough to actually compete with, and is my list legal, and what else could I get for less than $100 that would really help me out? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you all for your time.

P.S. If you think there would be a better Legion for my list, then I'm all ears. I just went with EC because I happened to have the 5 Noise Marines from my time playing Kill Team.

Welcome to the hobby and welcome to the Emperor's Children!

First things first, you'll want to field your army in detachments - in 9th you'll want a patrol, a battalion or a brigade for larger games. You have everything you need here to make a battalion - just in battlescribe it's showing up as an unbound army.

As a general observation, all of your units have pretty mixed loadouts, which will reduce their effectiveness a bit. Perfectly fine for casual games, but for more competitive games you may struggle. Put all your close combat marines in one squad, and all your bolter marines in another. Not a lot you can do about the termies and havoc's without getting more, or without fishing for more bits online.

Otherwise, if you're new to the game this is a good learning list. Best not to worry about being competitive atm, and just focus on learning the basics of the game.

To help, I'd suggest sticking with one relic to begin with. Less rules to remember. I'd recommend dropping Blissgiver - it's rubbish, and maybe drop the Black Mace so you keep the Elixir on the Daemon Prince. Also it doesn't look like you've given your lord a warlord trait - in general you'd get more bang for your buck by making the Daemon prince the warlord, as most of them improve his killing power.

Also, do you have access to Psychic Awakening: Faith & Fury? It gives you a few more rules (warlord traits, relics and stratagems) for Emperor's Children which is worth picking up. Something to consider once you've run the army using the CSM codex and are comfortable that you've got the hang of it.

Thank you Drakeslayer. I appreciate the quick response. I haven't built the majority of the two box sets yet, so I'll be sure to put the melee guys with the melee group and etc. I have really only played Kill Team with the 40k stuff, so I'm just used to mixing the units up.
Do you recommend having all of the Havocs with the same weapon loadout? And would the Terminators be better off with ranged weapons or being melee focused? I suppose that I have the Obliterators and Havocs for the long range Dakka, so maybe it would be better to use the Terrmies as more of an assault squad?
I have all of the Psychic Awakening books on the way, so I'll take a look at Faith & Fury when they arrive. Thank you again.

Ah excellent, you haven't built them yet.
With the havocs, you can't go too far wrong with 2 missile launchers and 2 lascannon combo - both good anti-tank and both the same range, which fills a particular niche in your army, along with the obliterators.

I'd suggest doing up the forgefiend as a maulerfiend instead, and you can use it as a shock-assault battering ram along with the venom crawler - the master of possession buffs both Daemon engines with his psychic powers

With the termies, I'd recommend giving them combi-bolters and then whatever melee weapons you've got. They can deep-strike in, put out a lot of anti-infantry fire, and then charge (and EC specifically have a stratagem in Faith & Fury that makes charging from deep-strike very reliable).

As mentioned, welcomed to the Dark Side of the GrimDark future and welcome to the pink and black. I am just getting back into 40K as well and play Emperor's Children.

Like Drake suggested, just focus on playing the models you have and getting used to the feel of the game. But, as a rule, keep like minded things together in one unit (i.e. all CCW together, all shooty together). Well rounded units may work in real life, but on the table top things are a little different. For the Havocs, mixing the ML and LC are fine. Just try to keep them similar ranges, so everyone can reach out and touch someone (i.e. don't mix/match chaincannons with ML -- either the ML's will have to get too close, or the chaincannons sit around doing nothing)

Otherwise, just have fun setting fire to the galaxy and toppling the false emperor from his throne of lies!

Thanks guys, the sweet embrace of Slannesh is quite welcoming (how could I be surprised by that?).

I've worked up another roster using (hopefully) the correct rules. I added the Marines into separate melee and ranged squads, and I made sure all of the Havocs have the same range on their weapons, I couldn't do this with the Cultists because they have their weapons set from the BSF game. I also dropped the extra relics and made the Daemon Prince my Warlord.

I couldn't include the Venomcrawler, as I had too many Heavy Support options, should I dump something else to include it?

I would recommend the venomcrawler if you're also running the maulerfiend - one daemon engine alone often gets focus-fired, and then you have buffing characters left standing in the wind. Building in redundancy is good - it allows you to overcome such set backs.

Bit difficult to know what to take out though. I suppose you could drop the havocs, and sprinkle some of those heavy weapons in amidst your chaos marine squads (1 per 5 man squad; 2 if you have a 10+ squad). You could also disband the noise marine squad to bulk out your other marines - NMs are only really useful if you have blastmasters, or if you have a larger squad all with sonic blasters. As they are, they don't offer much over and above a chaos marine squad with a heavy or special weapon.