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Hi y'all,

Coming back to 8th after a few editions off. I'm building a renegade space marines chapter of Iron-Hands defectors who, now that they are separated from the Imperium, have to salvage and scavenge for the parts to maintain their armour, dreads, and bionic enhancements. They will be modelled somewhere between loyal and chaos, focusing on a very armoured and mechanical style, with a lot of looted junk parts. This is where I'm having trouble.

I want the army as a whole to be made up of tactical marines with bulky armour, dreads that are heavily armour with extra parts, a rare few bionically enhanced terminators, made a few large tanks that they have doted over, and some large custom built machines and totally cyborg characters. I'm really not sure if I should run them as Space Marines or Chaos Space Marines. Space Marines allows me to differentiate between dreads with Vens, Ironclads, Redmptors and so on, has access to Aggressor and Centurion stat blocks for larger humanoid cyborgs, and a longer list of different HQ and Elite choices. Choas though has Daemon Princes, multiple different elite infantry unit stat blocks, daemons to represent tons of different creations, and a bigger freedom with how far the army can go into their bionics.

If you were to build this chapter/army, which list would you use? So far I have two tactical squads, a venerable dread kit, an ironclad dread kit, and two terminator captain kits(one loyalist, one chaos), all unassembled, so I'm not worried about wasting any of my models either way. I also have 3rd party helmets and shoulder pads for my marines.

Thanks so much, and looking forward to putting these guys together and showing them off!

Honestly you'd be better off using Death Guard rules more than vanilla Marines or CSM. You can play off the Disgustingly Resilient as Bionics and use Daemon Prince and Helbrute datasheet for your big robot toys.

Go chaos young heretic!

Maulerfiends are pretty gorgeous models and not half bad on the table (I like the tendrils). You can also keep the gatling guns from the forgefiend bits and use them to kitbash a sweet and sexy Renegade knight if you want to go the double gatling build. Knights are seriously fun to Chaos-fy, and are great centerpiece models, also surprisingly easy to paint and magnetize! As for Helbrutes, there are the forgworld varieties and you can easily convert your ven and ironclad to be like them. I haven't tried it myself but I hear double butcher cannon dreads are pretty good.

You also have access to the tried and true predators, but also the much loved obliterators (give them mark of slaanesh so you can shoot twice with strat). If you dislike the finecast model and price tag, you can easily convert terminators into them with a little ingenuity, or you can buy some ad mech bits and build yourself little super robots to fit your theme!

If you like the heavy weapons route you can back up your obliterators with some sweet autocannon havocs, give them a few extra wounds with bolter CSM and you can spam those dudes forever. Long range, relatively cheap, and great to spam vs fast and fragile units like dark eldar venoms and raiders, necron Quantum Shielding, the new ork buggies. Also good vs elite and normal infantry. If this route interests you, try throwing a chaos lord in the middle of a blob of 3 of these guys and giving them all fearless with a warlord trait.

For heavier infantry focus, try converting little robots or servitors to play the role of cultists. Don't knock the little guys, they are great at covering your backfield and nabbing objectives.

Chaos is just a great faction to kitbash stuff. The Chaos marine models are kinda old, so feel free to use newer normal space marines or even primaris marines if you want your dudes to look more intimidating.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Honestly you'd be better off using Death Guard rules more than vanilla Marines or CSM. You can play off the Disgustingly Resilient as Bionics and use Daemon Prince and Helbrute datasheet for your big robot toys.

I like this. I can see Iron Warrior-like Marines with count as T5 and DR using shields, too. Either "modern" shields similar to those of the Bullgryn, or Chaos Warrior shields.

Currently CSM have a better codex with more unit options, and some good allies. Loyal Space Marines have much better allies but a relative turd of a book. Both have excellent support via Forgeworld (adding 30% more datasheets to your book). Book for book? Chaos Space Marines all day.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Honestly you'd be better off using Death Guard rules more than vanilla Marines or CSM. You can play off the Disgustingly Resilient as Bionics and use Daemon Prince and Helbrute datasheet for your big robot toys.

I like this. I can see Iron Warrior-like Marines with count as T5 and DR using shields, too. Either "modern" shields similar to those of the Bullgryn, or Chaos Warrior shields.

I certainly like this idea too.
Given the right planning for wargear (using magnets) and the right paint scheme, you could easily have a WYSWIG chapter that can either be used as Iron-Hands successors using Death Guard rules.

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I did some fiddling on battlescribe and came out with a possible infantry heavy list.




It should play pretty easy, deep strike the obliterators into key points to take out important back field units. Use a wall of cultists to block your havocs, ball everything up around your warlord, it will take a LOT to kill all those bodies. Use warptime to throw your princes into key units if anyone gets too close. On turns you plan on using this though, you may want to drop a squad of obliterators in to help support so your DP doesn't get shot off the board. You will have a LOT of dakka so use your sorceror to remove pesky invuln saves and give your havocs or cultists +1 to hit with prescience. All your units ignore cover, so use it to your advantage!

Like I said in a previous post though, you can easily drop some points and put in more daemonforge stuff and helbrutes, This list is just an idea of how infantry heavy you can go.

Edit - Woops its supposed to be two spear head detachments lol

Chaos is the only true answer.

I mean, even considering Chaos makes you a heretic anyway, so...

I would say Iron hands but I am biased (have played/made them since Index Astartes 3 so go them even if not the best this edition because of fluff, rules will change but ...). I mean you could go a derivative of Chaos (which are good and tbh classic SM arn't that good atm). However, you can take it out of field and use the rules to compensate. For example, I am just finishing my Minotaur's chapter (based on the fact they are designed to kill SM). However, I am not using SM rules, I am using Deathwatch converted minatures (this is an extra army on top of my DW army. I just find their rules fit the theme better).