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Is that why xenos armies completely dominated 6th edition and only two Imperial armies are top-tier competitive now?

Chouru wrote:
Slaanesh Terminators would be cool, give them each a doom siren and power weapons. If the sirens didnt destroy their target unit outright, then the assault will, especially with the boosted initiative. Or maybe im just wishful thinking.

Back in 3.5 codex, slannesh terminators could trade their combi bolters in for sonic blasters (which totally rocked) and trade a reaper autocannon in for blastmasters. They also gained fearless, and made all enemies in BTB contact with them -1 initiative

So yeah, cult terminators, bikers, havoks, etc. were possible back when GW actually cared about Chaos.

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Why? Because Phil Kelly is one of the worst codex writers there is.

Or because not everyone plays the legions.

Wanna just play renegades? Get C:SM and glue some spikes on it. Leave the CSM codex for the actual CSM.

So I should have to go use the loyalist codex for my Nurgle worshipping Iron Hands successor.

Yes, pretty much. CSM dex should support Legions over an irrelevant handful of home-brew warbands.

Or ya know legion players should let go of the legions and they should never come back

Girls, you're both pretty.
There's no reason that you couldn't accommodate both recent renegades and Heresy Legionaries within the same list, beyond the talents and freedom of the game designer in charge. You could include both as a Troops choice, where the Renegade is the current cheap iteration and the Legionary a Veteran-Skill possessing, morale-resistant version. Different upgrades to show the difference between 30k and 40k armouries, and perhaps a block of Veteran Skills and Daemonic upgrades.
As an example, look at Forge World's 30k rules, particularly for World Eaters. Between a single page of rules, a Rite of War, and the presence of Butchers as a unit, we have every tool to reflect the Legion from the earliest days of the Warhounds right on through to fully-corrupted Berserkers. There is no reason I can see that this would not work equally well in a 40k Codex other than the need for space to write them in.

But frankly if there is a real need to choose between the 2, the Legionary should have priority. The Renegades are 'close enough' to Loyalists that an allied contingent is a workable made-do, but a Legionary needs more work and so is less viable to recreate from a generic profile.

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Why? Because Phil Kelly is one of the worst codex writers there is.

Or because not everyone plays the legions.

Wanna just play renegades? Get C:SM and glue some spikes on it. Leave the CSM codex for the actual CSM.

So I should have to go use the loyalist codex for my Nurgle worshipping Iron Hands successor.

Yes, pretty much. CSM dex should support Legions over an irrelevant handful of home-brew warbands.

Or ya know legion players should let go of the legions and they should never come back

Why? The Legions are what makes CSM's what they are, and are what form the core of the faction's fluff, even as watered down as it is.

Post Heresy Renegades largely might as well just be Codex marines with access to Chaos Marks. Reaper Autocannons, Havoc Launchers, Defiler Daemon Engines, etc are all either pre-heresy weapons no longer in the armories of post-heresy Space Marines or are creations of the Legions, and the "cult" units are the result of actions and/or events unique to specific Legions.

Vakathi aside from the Rubric marines NONE of the cult units are unique to one of the legions for example it's true plague marines first came from the death guard Legion but now they are not death guard only

So Space Marines are flavorful enough that each chapter has unique abilities and play styles

But Chaos Space Marines are just one giant bland mess and all of the soldiers from different legions abandon unique tactics and all work together to fight in the exact same fashions so they they are completely indistinguishable from each other.

I'd like to point out that IoM players are able to make fluffy lists full of allies based on fluff about how they work alongside IG, Sob, Inq, or the Imperial Knight houses.
But no, I guess Chaos Space Marines need to stick to one massively unflavored band of bland baddies beating on the Emperor's buddies.
It feels like G.I. Joe to me. The good guys have enough flavor that they have an entire army of special snowflakes while the bad guys are common goons in face concealing masks and completely interchangeable.

When I play Marine players, I ask what Chapter they are using.
When I play Chaos Marines, I don't care what legion they are.
Does anybody really think that is a good thing?

 Savageconvoy wrote:


When I play Marine players, I ask what Chapter they are using.
When I play Chaos Marines, I don't care what legion they are.
Does anybody really think that is a good thing?

Preach it

 Savageconvoy wrote:
So Space Marines are flavorful enough that each chapter has unique abilities and play styles

But Chaos Space Marines are just one giant bland mess and all of the soldiers from different legions abandon unique tactics and all work together to fight in the exact same fashions so they they are completely indistinguishable from each other.

I'd like to point out that IoM players are able to make fluffy lists full of allies based on fluff about how they work alongside IG, Sob, Inq, or the Imperial Knight houses.
But no, I guess Chaos Space Marines need to stick to one massively unflavored band of bland baddies beating on the Emperor's buddies.
It feels like G.I. Joe to me. The good guys have enough flavor that they have an entire army of special snowflakes while the bad guys are common goons in face concealing masks and completely interchangeable.

A big part of this inequality I feel is that GW wants Chaos Marines to suck because of 'Little Timmy's speehsh mhureens!' We know full well that GW cares much more about the 8-16 year old boys than they do the mid 20's-40+ somethings with disposable income to burn... Thus it only makes sense to pour potential CSM resources into Loyalists instead, since Little Timmy himself not only almost always identifies with the supposed "good guys", but his/her parents especially are much more likely to spend $500+ on the 'shining defenders of all humanity', than they are to support the spiky bad guys who sells their souls to freaking daemons!

 Savageconvoy wrote:
When I play Marine players, I ask what Chapter they are using.
When I play Chaos Marines, I don't care what legion they are.
Does anybody really think that is a good thing?

It would help immensely if we were to get a form of 'Traitor Traits' for the major non-aligned Legions and a couple of the big Traitor Chapters such as the Red Corsairs...

Give us similar Chapter Tactics for the Black Legion, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion, Word Bearers, Night Lords, Red Corsairs, Crimson Slaughter and perhaps one 'new' Traitor Chapter and we're good.
The Cult Legions really don't need anything beyond a formation each, and the option to upgrade the basic cult unit to Terminator armour. A World Eaters force for example is nothing more than MoK HQ's, Berserkers, Possessed and vehicles.

It's the non-Cult Legions that really need to be focused on in order to give Chaos Marines back their flavour.

I'm not sure that an army-wide application of 'Legion Tactics' is appropriate. While it seems that most players are on board with Legions, there must be some respect for the newer fluff direction where Renegades and Warbands are king. While the majority of players may want to spin their entire force out of iron and chevrons, the list should also cater to the player who wants a squad of Night Lord infiltrators supporting Death Guard Terminators and Red Corsair Raptors.
I'd be completely on-board with a purchased upgrade per-squad however to represent each Legion, roughly in-line with the complexity seen in 30k's Legiones Astartes rules. Coupled with the Mark system, you can then represent the entire scope of Chaos from Renegades to Veterans, and the faithless to the Marked to the Cults.

As an aside, the list could do with more options that extend beyond loyalty and geneseed. More daemonic kit, more exotic warp-based weaponry or proscribed kit from the old Destroyer formations. A few tainted melee weapons, maybe a unique tank chassis...

It's worth remembering that we currently live in an era where we have rules for individual Companies within a Chapter, where apparently the Chapter Tactics: Iron Hands and Imperial Fists were insufficient to represent an entire Chapter's war disposition. I don't think it's much to ask that a Legionary fight differently based on their heritage, or even that a World Eater Berzerker should be identical to a Black Legion Berzerker.

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Why? Because Phil Kelly is one of the worst codex writers there is.

Or because not everyone plays the legions.

Wanna just play renegades? Get C:SM and glue some spikes on it. Leave the CSM codex for the actual CSM.

So I should have to go use the loyalist codex for my Nurgle worshipping Iron Hands successor.

Yes, pretty much. CSM dex should support Legions over an irrelevant handful of home-brew warbands.

Or ya know legion players should let go of the legions and they should never come back

The day SM players let go of Chapter tactics and their stinky Chapters and special codexes, because one is hairy, one is bloody and one is moody...

We have all of those at the same time, and they have temper too!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mozzamanx wrote:
I'm not sure that an army-wide application of 'Legion Tactics' is appropriate. While it seems that most players are on board with Legions, there must be some respect for the newer fluff direction where Renegades and Warbands are king. While the majority of players may want to spin their entire force out of iron and chevrons, the list should also cater to the player who wants a squad of Night Lord infiltrators supporting Death Guard Terminators and Red Corsair Raptors.

Renegades and Warbands where introduced for those that would do DIY CSM armies.

Juste do i like SM, your DIY Chapter has the Ultrasmurfs CHapter tacs/IH chapter tacs, because they are a successor chapter.

Your Warband use XX Legion trait because the leader is a former member of this Legion, or those recently Renegade Marines inspired themselfs by observing Legion YY do it , and though that it was effective, there is dozens of ways to go around this, but just saying that we should'nt have any Legion related containt, because of those Warbands is silly, More options can never be Bad, no options at all is bad.

Could they fix a lot of the issues by combining the warlord trait with chapter tactics? Like you purchase your HQ, pick his trait, and the benefits are as follows. Do it game wide. Want to run Alpha legion, buy the warlord trait. Want to play Eldar and run a certain craftworld? Farsight list? So on?

But maybe it's just because I hate Warlord traits still.

 Slayer le boucher wrote:

Your Warband use XX Legion trait because the leader is a former member of this Legion, or those recently Renegade Marines inspired themselfs by observing Legion YY do it , and though that it was effective, there is dozens of ways to go around this, but just saying that we should'nt have any Legion related containt, because of those Warbands is silly, More options can never be Bad, no options at all is bad.

Oh I completely agree, I just think that they should be purchased per-squad rather than applied at the army level.

The Loyalist: Chapters fight and deploy together. So everything in my army is an Ultramarine with no mixing. It is inflexible but it's also free.
The Chaos Marine: Warbands are formed of a much more random mix and some may not be from the Legions at all. You can mix them all together, but you pay a small fee per-squad for the privelege.

I completely agree that Legions need representation, I just don't think that army-wide application should be the norm. You can still have an army entirely devoted to one Legion, it's as simple as paying for the upgrade on all relevant units.

I get what you mean, but that would be the VotLW problem all over again, why pay extra for our rules?

i don't see marines paying extra points for their Chapter tactics, Combat Tactics and Combat Doctrines and ATSKNF.

We are the only ones that has to pay for one of its essential rule.

So doing it again is kinda, dunno...

I really like the idea of tactics per squad, CSM has always been about choice and customization in my eyes, and at the squad level that could work really well and open the army up to a variety of playstyles. I love the idea of mixing tactics with Marks and then with Banners, could really give the dex the buff it needs.

But I do have some resentment toward making us pay for what should be free. If it was free to choose per squad however, some would inevitably end up better than others and others would never get played because of it. Could be solved by making everything cheaper though I'm sure that would be just as prone to imbalance. (But really, is anything balanced?) Could also be a flat rate for either the tactic or the mark per squad?

The followers of chaos chose to be what they are (for the most part), why not give them the choice of how to go about it

I don't really see why we couldn't just use the current system; A Chaos Marine is cheaper than a Tactical, but inferior for lacking Chapter Tactics and ATSKNF. Say ~2pts cheaper per model.
But then you can bolt on a variety of Marks and Legions that are all worth ~3pts each. So an upgraded CSM is now more expensive, but better than the Tactical.
Or go full-hog and buy a Mark, a Legion *and* a CCW and end up Grey Knight levels, but something that absolutely reflects what a Legionary should be capable of.

I should be clear that I think the whole book needs a redo and bolting on an extra mechanic is not enough to balance the faction. But it's certainly the way I would go about it; Make them cheaper to represent Corsairs as the baseline, and then bolt on a tremendously wide range of upgrades to push them into Legion turf.

Plus an army-wide rule that we Hate Loyalists, and Loyalists hate us, baked into the base cost. But because CSM tend to favour melee more than Loyalists, it's a stealth buff and some way towards rebalancing from lacking ATSKNF.

I would have no problem with legion rules coming back AS LONG AS there is also a option for us renegade/non legion players to take the tactics of their parent chapter. For example my Blight Angels are a Iron Hands successor si take the OH chapter tactics. It would give both sides what they want

 Slayer le boucher wrote:
I get what you mean, but that would be the VotLW problem all over again, why pay extra for our rules?

i don't see marines paying extra points for their Chapter tactics, Combat Tactics and Combat Doctrines and ATSKNF.

Aye, at this point, I think this is the core of it. Likewise, there are still very much groups certainly large enough to comprise tabletop sized armies composed entirely of Legion forces, and many, like the Word Bearers, Iron Warriors, etc still operate in very large groups with a shared homeworld, and various sub-groups like Iron Warriors Grand Companies or Word Bearer's Hosts and the like often chapter sized or larger.

Having army-wide special rules on that basis shouldn't be an issue.

At the risk of hijacking this thread, I've put up a thread of how I'd redo Chaos Marines. It's over in Proposed Rules.

Mozzamanx wrote:
At the risk of hijacking this thread, I've put up a thread of how I'd redo Chaos Marines. It's over in Proposed Rules.

Hah, go for it. It's kind of taken a turn in a different direction. I shall post my thoughts upon your thread!

GWs neglect of cult & legion marines has been an incredible, unanswerable mystery for more than a decade. No one knows why. Hundreds, maybe thousands of blog pages have been dedicated to this inexplicable crime. GW has tried for years to get chaos players to like IoM traitor marines. And they've been horribly unsuccessful. How do I know? Forgeworld. FW has been selling tens of thousands of dollars in cult & legion models (look at 30k for gods sake!) for years. There are no answers. Only questions. And home-brewed rules.

I think the problem is that nobody in the studio has a real passion for the army. Imagine what we would see if somebody like ADB were to write it.
It worked in 3.5 and then (perhaps justifiably) had a huge amount of content gutted in the 4th Edition 'squeeze' phase. Unfortunately nobody in the studio seemed to have the drive to properly restore it afterwards and it's languished on in this out-of-date, bizarrely limited zombie that just looks like the 4th Edition with some new units crudely bolted onto the edge.

It needs a total overhaul with clear overarching objectives detailing exactly what the faction should be. As it stands, they don't have an identity.
Eldar are brutally fast, shooty and aggressive regardless of build.
Orks are always going to be using massive quanitites of crude-but-strong weight.
Imperial Guard are always going to be slow, massed volumes of firepower to grind out.
But Chaos Marines don't have any identity of their own. At best they just seem to be 'Like Space Marines, but this unit has a twist...

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:
I would have no problem with legion rules coming back AS LONG AS there is also a option for us renegade/non legion players to take the tactics of their parent chapter. For example my Blight Angels are a Iron Hands successor si take the OH chapter tactics. It would give both sides what they want

You want IH tactics in the CSM book? And you want the Legions out of the book to make way for your IH renegades if we can't have both. Why not just use C:SM like I initially said?

MarsNZ wrote:

Champion of Slaanesh wrote:
I would have no problem with legion rules coming back AS LONG AS there is also a option for us renegade/non legion players to take the tactics of their parent chapter. For example my Blight Angels are a Iron Hands successor si take the OH chapter tactics. It would give both sides what they want

You want IH tactics in the CSM book? And you want the Legions out of the book to make way for your IH renegades if we can't have both. Why not just use C:SM like I initially said?

Well, I'm not him but guessing...
1) Wanting SOME Chaos stuff at least
2) Wanting to be Battle Brothers with Chaos armies instead of Imperial ones.
3) Not wanting to have to buy another 'dex.

SirSweetroll wrote:
I really like the idea of tactics per squad, CSM has always been about choice and customization in my eyes, and at the squad level that could work really well and open the army up to a variety of playstyles. I love the idea of mixing tactics with Marks and then with Banners, could really give the dex the buff it needs.

But I do have some resentment toward making us pay for what should be free. If it was free to choose per squad however, some would inevitably end up better than others and others would never get played because of it. Could be solved by making everything cheaper though I'm sure that would be just as prone to imbalance. (But really, is anything balanced?) Could also be a flat rate for either the tactic or the mark per squad?

The followers of chaos chose to be what they are (for the most part), why not give them the choice of how to go about it

At one point a year or two ago there was rumors about a VotLW supplement, that worked that way, that each squads of the codex would have acces to customized USR for differents costs depending on the models, but it was an hoax or someone wishlisting unfortunatly.

The problem this kind of system poses is that it could be a heck of a mess to micro-manage your army during a game, i know people, including myself that forgets sometimes that, that particular unit has this rule or something, so imagine if each of your units had another set of different USRs grafted on top of it.

And i don't even speak about those that would blmatanlty cheat their way out by confusing their adversary, something i've been witness a few times during the 3.5 Era with all the mutations and gifts avaiable.

What we need first is some kind of global overhaul, something to unit the codex as a whole, even if you have all sorts of units, and then maybe given the "Trait" you follow, be it a Legion or Warband, have some units/stuff that has a different take of the same principle.

CSM are like an All-you-can-eat Buffet, the problem is that not all the components of the buffet works or compels the customer, even though it give a nice look for the better looking pieces.

In short and clear somethings are here simply to make other things look good compared to it, and that in itself is lazy and problematic.