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I suppose you guys are right. It just generally seems that whatever version the regular codex gets, another codex gets it better. And I like the way the other models look, but for example I like storm ravens, cant used them with vanilla. I like the new landspeeder vengeance, probably wont get to use that. The new special characters from DV and the new Dark Angels release are pretty cool, but i don't think I can even sand off all the swords on them to convert them.

Admittedly, this isn't a huge problem, and I like codex marines for their versatility... It;s just that whatever unit you pick, they seem to be better in another codex.

Hopefully this stuff will get added in some for to my codex later, in which case I don't mind not having space-werewolves and space-vampires.

EDITED

Indeed it was to harsh....I didn't notice the 2nd page >.>

A little bit too harsh, especially when he already conceded.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I understand how you feel though. Imagine how it is to play xenos. SM get every other update and always get the shiniest new toys. So many people get to run their marines as the flavor of the month marines to run those neat new rules and new units.

There is no harm in trying to start a new army.

 Savageconvoy wrote:
A little bit too harsh, especially when he already conceded.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I understand how you feel though. Imagine how it is to play xenos. SM get every other update and always get the shiniest new toys. So many people get to run their marines as the flavor of the month marines to run those neat new rules and new units.

There is no harm in trying to start a new army.

At least Xenos get new models and an actual Codex with their Codex updates. : P

P.S. That was meant in humor.

 AtariAssasin wrote:
It;s just that whatever unit you pick, they seem to be better in another codex.

That could be true, ofc. But none of the others can do quite as many FOC slot changes or manage to affect quite as large a part of their army by selecting the right HQ.

Sure, a GK Grand Master can make some units scoring. Sure, Commander Dante can make Sanguinary Guards Troops. SW can get Wolf Guard as Troops with the right guy, Logan was it? SW also have a HQ that makes his unit Relentless, a perfect thing for some SW choices....

Codex Marines can still do that game better IMO - their individual units might not all be as impressive (though not far from) but they can do more of it. They simply have more HQs that affect larger parts of the army.

Codex: SM is probably the most versatile dex available. Will the new DA Dex be? That remains to be seen as we've only been shown shiny models and not a single rule or stat line. I figure Standard Vanilla Marines will always, and I mean always be the middle of the pack dex with huge variety and will be missing some of the flasher units that other dex's might get but will always get the bulk access to most things.

And if you really want to try a dex with a handicap try 'Nids. They can not get any allies and they are primarily an assault army and shooting got better in 6th. (Now I know there are some very nice things about 6th for 'Nids but in this case... ) They also have a lot of expensive non-adjustable units, and a few choice units fighting for FOC slots where others can take allies and bring in similiar units without that worry.

So, long story short. GW rewards you for using the Vanilla Marine Dex because it lets you build almost any force you want with access to a huge variety of models to choose from that all have their merits on the tabletop. I don't know if there really is a true stinker in the Vanilla Dex (looking at you Pyrovore and Lictor in the 'Nid dex...)

The standard marine codex is fine. Sure its suffers abit from codex creep and falls down the scale with every release but it's versatile enough and gets little updates (storm talon) although i would like to see Flak missiles as an option for squads

Besides when they finally get round to updating it balance shall be restored (hopefully)

Lastly, victory is all the sweeter if you can achieve it with vanilla marines without all those newfangled special rules and units....

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
[
You also miss out on Combat Tactics, all the Special Characters, Thunderfire Cannons, cheap TH/SS Terminators and Masters of the Forge.

They lose Combat Tactics and gain army-wide FNP and Furious Charge - a clear gain.

The SM charectors are alright, but Blood Angels get a MC (Strength 10 and jump pack) with an infantry profile. Not so bad in 6th but in 5th was a major headache for many armies.

Thunderfire cannons - yeah, BA lose out on them. Meh.

Cheap TH/SS Terminators - vanilla marines get these? BA terminators get Feel No Pain, Furious Charge and a 1/6 chance of +1 attack.

Master of the Forge - man if I had a penny for every time I heard a BA player say "I wish I could take a master of the forge"...


BA aren't particularly over-powered in 6th, in fact they will blow away like a fart in the wind. But they are definitely Space Marines++

Blood Angels don't "gain" army wide FNP and Furious Charge instead of Combat Taactics, they have to pay for it.

Given how long the Dark Angrls players have suffered from a crappy codex while standard marines got not one but two relatively OP army books.. I don't feel much sympathy.

BlackSanguinor wrote:
Blood Angels don't "gain" army wide FNP and Furious Charge instead of Combat Taactics, they have to pay for it.

And Grey Knights have to pay for pysbolt ammo. Imperial Guard have to pay for vendettas.

The advantages to C:SM over the specialist books are in versatility; the other Space Marine books get some fancy toys, yes, but the fancy toys lock them into some very specific playstyles since everyone uses the specialist book just to unlock their Death Company/Wolf Guard/who knows what; C:SM is and has always been the book that can do absolutely everything, just not as well as any of the specialist books. You can outshoot Blood Angels, outnumber Dark Angels, outmove Space Wolves, and probably out-everything Black Templars with the vanilla Codex at this point; and best of all, you can switch off or combine playstyles instead of having a force that requires you to play them a certain way.

C:SM may not have all the fancy toys that the other books get, but they're solid, reliable, dependable, easily customizable, and can fill more roles and more situations than the 'specialist' books; Chapter Tactics and Special Characters can give you a broad variety of different lists built from just the one Codex.

So no, you don't have a top-tier competitive list and you can't keep pace with the munchkins. If you're trying to keep pace with the munchkins, play a different army; C:SM is for people who are more interested in varying play style, varying paint jobs, more customizability, and in the long run a more interesting (if less powerful) army.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BryllCream wrote:

BlackSanguinor wrote:
Blood Angels don't "gain" army wide FNP and Furious Charge instead of Combat Taactics, they have to pay for it.

And Grey Knights have to pay for pysbolt ammo. Imperial Guard have to pay for vendettas.

Psybolt Ammo isn't honestly the nastiest thing about the GK book; when applied to Psyflemen Dreads consider that they're about the only thing with a gun with longer than 24" range in the goddamn book, when applied to infantry squads it tends to be cripplingly overpriced. Guard do pay for Vendettas, just not enough since the prices were written before the Flyer rules and a price change is apparently too much of a patch to stick in an FAQ.

 BryllCream wrote:

They lose Combat Tactics and gain army-wide FNP and Furious Charge - a clear gain.

As has already been said, they pay for army-wide FNP and have a 1/6 chance to get Furious Charge. Not a "clear gain", especially with the new regroup rules making Combat Tactics pretty good.

 BryllCream wrote:

The SM charectors are alright, but Blood Angels get a MC (Strength 10 and jump pack) with an infantry profile. Not so bad in 6th but in 5th was a major headache for many armies.

A 250-point beatstick Character who doesn't add anything other than pure brawn to the army and yet has to rely on psychic powers (he isn't S10 or Jump Infantry base, remember?) in an edition where Farseers and Rune Priests are everywhere. To top it off, he's not even AP2 anymore.

As for the Vanilla SCs we've got Vulkan, Pedro, Khan and Shrike who can change how the army works, as well as Calgar and Lysander who beat face better than Mephiston for either less or slightly more points than Mephiston and don't have to bother about eating every plasma gun in the enemy arsenal because they aren't independent characters.

 BryllCream wrote:

Thunderfire cannons - yeah, BA lose out on them. Meh.

Thunderfire Cannons were OK units in 5th; with the new artillery rules they're actually pretty good. Meh back at you.

 BryllCream wrote:

Cheap TH/SS Terminators - vanilla marines get these? BA terminators get Feel No Pain, Furious Charge and a 1/6 chance of +1 attack.

BA pay more for theirs, don't get FNP or Furious Charge baseline and certainly don't have a 1/6 chance of +1 attack. The Red Thirst gives you a 1/6 chance to get Furious Charge last I looked.

 BryllCream wrote:
Master of the Forge - man if I had a penny for every time I heard a BA player say "I wish I could take a master of the forge"...

So what if you personally don't like the option? It's still there and being used by people to build armies.

It's generally accepted that Blood Angels are marines that are simply more powerful in general. Ignore it if you like.

A Space Marine is a Space Marines. Even without changing paint, you can go between codexes at your will. I think of C:SM as a core structure , with some unit's that aren't in others codexes and some units it is lacking. It's similar to all the other codexes in the way it's formed, tbh.

I really like the new DA flyer (at least the variant without a shrine on it's back). I could easily see myself getting it to field with allies rules and painting it in the same paint scheme as my existing Ultramarines army. The same thing people have done with Storm Ravens.

On the other hand, I think I could also have a lot of fun with a fresh army by using a Deathwing force (using DA codex) painted appropriately to represent the Ultramarines 1st Company. Especially as basic Terminator squads can be done cheaply by converting Dark Vengeance models, at about 15 dollars for a 5-man squad. It would make for an interesting force, although it'd earn the wrath of Kaldor, by using DA rules for an army painted in non-DA colors (lol).

Really any SM can be interchanged between vanilla, DA, BA, and BT. SW is a little bit harder and GK is harder than that, but those four are perfectly interchangeable

I don't know why you're complaining, I play Codex Marines often, in tourneys against the nercon, GK and daemon scum of the earth and do very well.

Just because you don't have the new hotness doesn't mean your book is crap. Understand your codex and it will bring you victory.

 TheAngrySquig wrote:
Really any SM can be interchanged between vanilla, DA, BA, and BT. SW is a little bit harder and GK is harder than that, but those four are perfectly interchangeable

I agree, though that statement will start the endless argument with crazy analogies to support either side.

I really only rule out Grey Knights because they are so visually different. Other than certain special pieces that are for looks only (like the wrist chains on the weapons, etc), Black Templars are simply black Space marines/Scouts with special rules, just like Salamanders are. BA has specialty units with unique wargear as well as Space Wolves to a lesser extent, but basic tactical Space Marines from DA, BA, and Space Wolves all can be made from the exact same model.

If you are building a very simple army of any Marine Codex (for example, one with Tactical, Devastator and Assault marines, but no Sanguinary guard or Thunderwolves), there is nothing to stop you from having a green army and using them as Blood Angels, as long as you are clear with your opponent about the fact that you are absolutely following that Codexes rules, and follow all WYSIWYG rules on the models.

Hell, I could make legal Wolf Claws from the Assault Marine box set, if I wanted a Great Company that follows a Lord that prefers his troops to have very little armor embellishment.

Who cares what color they are. SM are SM when it boils down to it. A bike is a bike, a pred is a pred, a rhino is a rhino. They all look the same.

You could always use the argument, its my own chapter.

There is not a single "good" spacemarine chapter, including the Grey Knights. All of them are perfectly willing to throw away whatever morals they have if their superiors demand it, all in the name of some rotten corpse and his decadent lackeys on Terra.

 AtariAssasin wrote:
If you want to paint your own scheme, or choose from one of the very cool chapters that just doesn't have it's own codex, you'll be missing out on some very powerful units

I disagree. If you have painted your own colors, then why don't you just take the new DA models you like and use the DA rules. Say your playing a 'succession chapter'.

You don't even need to neccessarly do that! I used these guys as a 'counts as' space wolves army. When people asked me about it, I said I liked the playstyle of the wolves but the color scheme of the ultramarines. Noone ever gave me grief for it. Everything was WYSIWYG, even wolf banners.


Thats the best thing about loyalist marines over any other army. You can swap army books and not have to pay a stupidly pretty penny for a new army.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
What if his Marines are purple? Then does he just get to play using none of the Codex books? Poor bastard.

My Marines are purple... And I don't even like Slaanesh much, either.


Personally, I don't like how half the codices are Spess Mehreen derivatives. I would love to have one big Codex Omnibus: Space Marines, and would even go as far as to consolidate Sisters of Battle and Grey Knights into Codex: Inquisition. I find it unfair that there are at least six separate codices for Space Marines, but Chaos is all crammed into one book. (Oh how I would love an Alpha Legion or Iron Warriors codex...)

Edit: Was going to make a point but got sidetracked. The best thing about Space Marines is that they are simply suggestions. C:SM is just a catchall for if no other codices catch your eye. Remember that Space Marine Chapters can be founded and split up into different groups, and as they are derived from the same geneseed I see no reason why they wouldn't have the same rules or abilities.

Space Marines get more Codex books because they sell more models, lol. It's really just that simple. Games Workshop cranks out multiple codex books exactly because Space Marine armies are so interchangeable. When I set out to reconfigure my 31mm upscaled Space Marines, I did it in a manner so they could be played with C:SM, BA, and SW with minimal adjustments. I imagine they'll probably be compatible with the new DA codex too. If I were the type inclined to play more often, Games Workshop could theoretically sell me four different books, instead of just one. They can't price up an Omnibus, because then the single book becomes significantly more expensive, and turns off new players. And if they price it down, then they lose the revenue from selling multiple books.

4 x $40-50 books is more revenue than say 1 x $70-80 book, for example, and 1 x $150 book would probably not sell very well.

Another factor is that Games Workshop doesn't make most of its money from one time bulk purchases most likely. It makes it by slowly but surely eating up its players' spending money. They can get a bigger share of your wallet by offering a new $50 book every year or so, than by trying to get hundreds of dollars at once, because you're more likely to have that $50 to blow at any given time, than to have $400 to dump on hobby materials. Their release calendar is designed to give you new things to buy over time. And again, Space Marines are their biggest catalog item.

FW (ewwwwww ForgeWorld) can bring lots of new, nice options to your army. Want to kill marines? Boom, Minotaurs. Want to have furious charge, extra CCW and Rage? boom, Tyberos. Want to have an all infantry army? Boom, mantis warriors.

Just have some fun

 Kaldor wrote:

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
I guess we can consider that case closed. What if his Marines are purple?

Then he gets to play with the regular Space Marine codex.

Do try to keep up, darling.

Incorrect, if he wanted to play with the vanilla codex, it would have to be painted blue.

Otherwise, it's not generally advisable darling.

 AtariAssasin wrote:
So with the new Dark Angels coming out with some new really cool looking units, as well as a new codex, I feel like being a codex player is increasingly foolish. If you want to paint your own scheme, or choose from one of the very cool chapters that just doesn't have it's own codex, you'll be missing out on some very powerful units, and even if you don't care about how uber some units are, you're still missing out on some awesome looking models. Maybe its foolish to fell slighted every time a codex comes out, but I don't think my chapter will EVER get its own codex.

I am assuming that since GW encourages you to buy every model for everything ever, instead of filling out your own army, and most of the people at my FLGS tend to field whatever is new, this wont bother most people, but I don't have the cash to buy everything that comes out.

Sorry, guess I'm just venting, but am I the only one who feels this way?

No you aren't. These complaints have been constant since they started putting out full codex books for specific chapters. Why play vanilla marines when you can build a force that does it better AND cheaper than the vanilla codex can? Of course the marine books are the absolute easiest place for GW to bring some balance into things, but they don't. The Vanilla codex should be the baseline and all of the individual codexes should be balanced with respect to it. For example, given that Wolf Guard, Grey Hunters and Long Fangs are all better than Terminators & Veterans, Tacticals or Devastators in the vaniall codex, a space wolf army should be hard hitting, but much smaller than a vanilla marine force because their units should all be more expensive. Annoyingly they are pretty much cheaper across the board which is just dumb. Same with the other specific chapter books. Only two that really weren't too bad were Dark Angels and the Black Templars books. Now with a new Dark angels book appearing I am curious if that is going to change now or not. After buying the Dark Venganace box I suddenly got the urge to build a new Dark Angels force based on the old book. Hoping they don't become a dime a dozen with an overpowered book...

That said it is silly to feel slighted when a codex comes out. If you don't use it then forget about it. It really is that simple. I had an Imperial Fists force built off the vanilla codex and it was still fun to play regardless of the existence of the other chapter books out there and did just fine playing against them when I focused my mind on what my force could and couldn't do instead of worrying about the extra bonuses my opponent had in their book. I still enjoyed collecting, building and using the army. Of course when the new vanilla marines codex comes out you can be sure that it will most definitely come out with some new toys and units that will make you happy. Just a question of how long until it comes out. Hopefully by then your funding situation will improve enough to enable you to add some then.

Skriker



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 KingDeath wrote:
There is not a single "good" spacemarine chapter, including the Grey Knights. All of them are perfectly willing to throw away whatever morals they have if their superiors demand it, all in the name of some rotten corpse and his decadent lackeys on Terra.

Ummmm...they don't throw away their morals. They live by the morals that were bred and indoctrinated into them. Anything not the Emperor or Chapter is beneath notice. Anything that refuses or threatens the emperor or chapter is a target. *Those* are their morals and they live by them every day. They are pretty much a bunch of genetically enhanced thugs.

Skriker

 Kaldor wrote:


Otherwise, it's not generally advisable.

I advised it all the time when I worked at the FLGS. There's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to stretch your dollar's worth in this hobby.

davou wrote:

 Kaldor wrote:

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
I guess we can consider that case closed. What if his Marines are purple?

Then he gets to play with the regular Space Marine codex.

Do try to keep up, darling.

Incorrect, if he wanted to play with the vanilla codex, it would have to be painted blue.

Otherwise, it's not generally advisable darling.

I disagree, a space marine is no different to another space marine from a different codex. Just the color. As long as you have the correct codex, you can play your green and pink zebra striped space marines as any faction.

Ok well I think what your getting at is that with each new codex you get the C:SM+1 effect. Surely there is something that Codex marines should get that other non codex marines shouldn't have access to... in order to keep balance between the C:SM and the variants. (they do)

After all no single chapter is stronger than the others, codex astartes or not. And so should all balance out in terms strengths and weaknesses. But... they never do... the latest codex is always the strongest and I see DA as no different in that respect... from what I see its plasma-everything and new punishment-everything-weapons... (no surprises there)