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Just a pretty curious and harmless question because I have started to notice a pattern of many CSM players and R&H(?) on this sub always quoting 3rd or 3.5 as a mythical time for the chaos faction and wanting GW to emulate what happened then.

I started playing earnestly in 6th so I was wondering if someone could give me a comprehensive guide on whether it's just nostalgia coloured glasses, an oppressive meta or GW really did something amazing with CSM to be held in such high regard till this day.

The 3.5 codex had a wealth of character and options that just haven't been seen since. Units were very customizeable, and aligning a unit to a Chaos Power was more meaningful.

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Just a pretty curious and harmless question because I have started to notice a pattern of many CSM players and R&H(?) on this sub always quoting 3rd or 3.5 as a mythical time for the chaos faction and wanting GW to emulate what happened then.

I started playing earnestly in 6th so I was wondering if someone could give me a comprehensive guide on whether it's just nostalgia coloured glasses, an oppressive meta or GW really did something amazing with CSM to be held in such high regard till this day.

Simply put, it made your dudes, your dudes.
to an extreme degree you could customize everything, from daemonic powers, to equipment, to marking (even unaligned) to sorcerery etc.
The issue with it was,, whilest it allowed for such an extreme customization there were some that were massively OP at the same time depending upon certain combinations and options.


For R&H you have a similar experience, because IA13, which allowed for the first time a non Vraks renegade list to be made, was in a way quite similar. Granted it was a lot more balanced then what 3.5 CSM had, but it also showed to a degree to be an issue mostly because GW couldn't keep it's gak in in 7th edition and formations showed up ruining everything.

Both armies also share a history of bad rules support.
F.e. the next dex for csm, was a dumpster fire, units just vanished, specialisation was non existent, customisation also.

Basically for csm 3.5 it boils down to : The best csm dex to represent CSM at the same time one of the most annoyingly broken OP written dex ever.

For R&H it boils down to a faction with a history of such lack luster rulessupport that the first propper non specific dex they had, after the eye of terror booklet for lost and the damned, is the one that has the most lasting impact, because it existed in the first place, that bar was and is that low.

 Insectum7 wrote:
The 3.5 codex had a wealth of character and options that just haven't been seen since. Units were very customizeable, and aligning a unit to a Chaos Power was more meaningful.

How was this character integrated into the codex? Was it through legion traits and doctrine-esque special rules?

As for marks irc they used to give a bonus to the unit rather than unlocking a stratagem as they do now but was this balanced with points? Was it possible to even a relatively well balanced Codex if that's the case?

Sorry for the bombardment of questions, I'm just really curious what this Codex was like and how it performed during that edition.

Edit: Not Online answered a most of these questions.

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Just a pretty curious and harmless question because I have started to notice a pattern of many CSM players and R&H(?) on this sub always quoting 3rd or 3.5 as a mythical time for the chaos faction and wanting GW to emulate what happened then.

I started playing earnestly in 6th so I was wondering if someone could give me a comprehensive guide on whether it's just nostalgia coloured glasses, an oppressive meta or GW really did something amazing with CSM to be held in such high regard till this day.

It had a lot of options. Like a lot of them.
Some of them were extremely powerful and tend to get glossed over by the rose colored glasses crowd.

One of the big things that was such a draw were things like the variant FOCs. Iron Warriors for example could trade Fast Attack slots for Heavy Support...while also being able to take artillery units from Codex: Imperial Guard.

How was this character integrated into the codex? Was it through legion traits and doctrine-esque special rules?

Mostly special rules. Each Legion could make certain trade-offs in order to get certain buffs. Like IW gave up some Fast Attack slots (keeping in mind there was only ONE available force org chart back then, so being able to manipulate it was huge) in order to take additional heavy slots, etc.

It was definitely OP for it's time, but it was a master class in creating a codex that rewarded the player for "playing to the fluff". You could build a truly fluffy list that could legitimately kick serious arse if you wanted it to. All books should be that well written IMO.

Yeah, it's not so much about the power level (though to be clear, some of the options were OP), it's about the way it made you feel like you were actually playing chaos, not just marines with some spikey bits tacked on.

Also, to be clear I'm not advocating piracy, but it is readily available online to read; it will come straight up on a google search if you want to read it for yourself and see. GW doesn't seem to care much about the availability of older edition codexes.

Put simply: it was insanely customizable. Legions didn't actually get more options in those days than they do now, but your decisions felt far more meaningful in the days of smaller armies, no detachments, etc. It had its balance issues but was still easily the best codex CSM have ever received. The art & the lore was also fantastic. Doing things like being able to layer daemonic upgrades on your Lord/Lieutenant to represent them progressing down the path to glory was so damn cool.

Basically what Not Online!! said. 3.5 offered extreme levels of customization, which made it possible to make each legion feel and play like it should. Unfortunately it could also be abused in order to create some seriously OP stuff. Most csm players want the customization and feel back, not the OP stuff (or at least that's what I want).

IA 13 was similar. It offered ways to build the army you wanted, with tons of options. It was also more balanced thanks to the awesome Forge World rules team of 7th. Unfortunately gw ruined that with formations.

I never played Chaos in 3rd, but I had a friend who did and I was genuinely envious of the options available to him.

Just through the codex rules, you could choose to build a force that was:
-Just-turned Marine renegades with no real connection to Chaos daemons yet
-10,000 year old veterans of the Horus Heresy
-Devotees of a particular god, vying for its favor
-Members of a specific legion

...And whichever way you wanted to build the army, there were rules to support it.

Balance was so-so. Some options were OP. Some were crap. But you had options.

As a Guard player, I'll throw out that a lot of us fondly look back to the 4th Ed codex for much the same reason- you could pick five 'doctrines' from a list, which dictated what units you had available and modified core stats to your units. You could make drop troops, or grenadiers (letting you take stormtroopers as basic infantry), or feral low-tech fighters, or high-tech elites, or fearless die-hards, or stealthy light infantry.

For people who are invested in Your Dudes moreso than the tournament side of the game, these editions that allowed players the freedom to customize are regarded more fondly than ones that stripped out those options in the name of general game balance.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Just a pretty curious and harmless question because I have started to notice a pattern of many CSM players and R&H(?) on this sub always quoting 3rd or 3.5 as a mythical time for the chaos faction and wanting GW to emulate what happened then.

I started playing earnestly in 6th so I was wondering if someone could give me a comprehensive guide on whether it's just nostalgia coloured glasses, an oppressive meta or GW really did something amazing with CSM to be held in such high regard till this day.

It had a lot of options. Like a lot of them.
Some of them were extremely powerful and tend to get glossed over by the rose colored glasses crowd.

One of the big things that was such a draw were things like the variant FOCs. Iron Warriors for example could trade Fast Attack slots for Heavy Support...while also being able to take artillery units from Codex: Imperial Guard.

IW could get one extra Heavy Support, and they could take one Basilisk that remained at BS3. They could also take one Vindicator, which wan't in the Chaos army yet. It wasn't really that powerful.

Art, customization options, power level, nostalgia, best edition of 40k gameplay wise, "SOUL", and "Your dudes" style of codex

It's the best codex to ever have been released still to this day

 Mixzremixzd wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
The 3.5 codex had a wealth of character and options that just haven't been seen since. Units were very customizeable, and aligning a unit to a Chaos Power was more meaningful.

How was this character integrated into the codex? Was it through legion traits and doctrine-esque special rules?

As for marks irc they used to give a bonus to the unit rather than unlocking a stratagem as they do now but was this balanced with points? Was it possible to even a relatively well balanced Codex if that's the case?

There were a lot of opportunities to stack bonuses, but you did have to pay for most of them. The ones you didn't pay for were generally Legion traits, which instead removed options. If you wanted to play Alpha Legions, Iron Warriors, etc, you couldn't include any model with a Mark devoted to a god anymore, for example. But if you remained unaligned to a legion, you could make a Tank Hunters, Nurgle Havoc Squad if you wanted. Giving them extra toughness and an extra bonus to Penetrate vehicle armor. With the World Eaters Legion, everything had to have the Mark of Khorne, which meant you missed out on some things, but you gained things like Berzerker Terminators with Feel No Pain, which were just cool. There was a lot of exciting stuff to do with the book.

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Why exactly is CSM 3.5 Codex held in such high regard?

Depends on the player.
On the one hand it did have lots of character. On the other hand the last time this came up (a couple of weeks back) things like freebies were considered to be 'character'.

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
I'm just really curious what this Codex was like and how it performed during that edition.

At its core you had a relatively modest number of units covering both the chaos marines and chaos daemons lists, most of which were not inherently any more powerful than comparable units elsewhere.

On top of that though you had the most extreme example of wargear charts and other bonuses ever to grace a 40k book. You could hand out all of the games various special rules to units on a case by case basis, stat upgrades for characters (all the way down to squad leaders), relic weapons, and so on. There were more pages of add-on rules and wargear than there were pages of units.

Now chaos weren't the only codex to have a huge set of wargear - the inquisition for instance had a pile - and most of the options weren't taken. However amongst the pile were the various things that made the codex infamous including the options to field significantly heavier firepower than everyone else (when the game tried to limit gunlines through FoC restrictions) and of course siren - a psychic power that required the chaos player to roll 10 or less on 2d6 to make their unit completely untargetable for an entire round (usually while they were summoning daemons directly into combat).

I didn't play chaos at the time, but I did play the near-simultaneous IG codex. I think the issue was severalfold:

1) The lore wasn't quite so strictly defined, so there was more space in the galaxy to feel special playing Your Dudes and writing your own narrative.

2) The rules actually supported "real life" army narratives - to use an example from Codex, Imperial Guard, you could take Xeno Hunters, which cost points but gave you Preferred Enemy against a certain Xenos codex. If your best friend IRL played, say, Tyranids, then you could fluff your army to specialize in their ongoing struggle. GW was very clever with this, though, and at the time Preferred Enemy only worked in Close Combat, so it wasn't a super powerful buff to guard but rather came off as a flavorful touching of your army - and it encouraged using Tyranid bits to convert trophies for your dudes, bases, etc. Essentially, it didn't overbuff you against Tyranids, but still made it feel like Your Dudes were more experienced at fighting against them, and allowed for the "heroic, epic moments" that people loved playing for to occur slightly more often against your preferred foe.

3) Narrativeness and conversions were much more encouraged than they were today, meaning not only were Your Dudes reflected well in the rules and setting, but also in modeling. Any given Chaos Lord (or Imperial Guard officer) could look totally different from any other, and still be WYSIWYG because of the vast array of options and narrative suggestions from the Armory section. For example, I know a Guard player who took the "Trademark Item" on their officer (which represented Patton's swagger stick or the like, something that would lionize the officer to the men - in game it provided a morale reroll just like a commissar did) and modelled his Company Commander with a cigar. When he got upgraded to Carapace Armor, he made a new model - but that new model STILL had the same damn cigar. It was glorious.

4) Competition, at least in my personal experience, was a lower priority than the above. Your Dudes could fight Your Friend's Dudes outside of a tournament and have loads of fun. 'Ard Boyz still existed, of course, but the game wasn't totally obsessed with competitive play.

Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Just a pretty curious and harmless question because I have started to notice a pattern of many CSM players and R&H(?) on this sub always quoting 3rd or 3.5 as a mythical time for the chaos faction and wanting GW to emulate what happened then.

I started playing earnestly in 6th so I was wondering if someone could give me a comprehensive guide on whether it's just nostalgia coloured glasses, an oppressive meta or GW really did something amazing with CSM to be held in such high regard till this day.

It had a lot of options. Like a lot of them.
Some of them were extremely powerful and tend to get glossed over by the rose colored glasses crowd.

One of the big things that was such a draw were things like the variant FOCs. Iron Warriors for example could trade Fast Attack slots for Heavy Support...while also being able to take artillery units from Codex: Imperial Guard.

IW could get one extra Heavy Support, and they could take one Basilisk that remained at BS3. They could also take one Vindicator, which wan't in the Chaos army yet. It wasn't really that powerful.

That Vindicator was pretty much untouchable though, if you gave it Daemonic Possession and the rest of the package so it was hard to crack, didn't care about little hindrances like Shaken and regenerated broken weapon systems faster than most could blow them off

I'll join the choir in saying it's among the best books GW has ever made for any army, because it exemplifies the idea of Your Dudes.

Where nowadays you mostly see a handful of weapon options on select few models, pretty much everything in that book had access to a smorgasbord of choices that could range from armaments to obscure defense systems to terrifying daemonic visages to bound greater daemons to extra skills to bolted on equipment upgrades. You could play a fresh renegade or an age old legion force. Marks and god-specific weapons were meaningfully different from the regular and it wasn't all distilled down to mortal wounds or better invulnerable saves. A choice of legion brought both advantages and restrictions, like Death Guard not using heavy weapons on their infantrymen. The art and presentation of various short snippets were on the ball with conjuring the idea that these were terrible, horrifying monsters and not just spiky marines on an edgy bender.

From the modeling side of things it was also a lot more welcoming in the crazy inventor fair style, because most of the options weren't just weapon swaps. This guy has bionics, this guy has daemonic strength, this guy is an expert infiltrator, this guy a dueling champion from a daemon world, this Rhino has something killy and horrible attached to it... None of this was handed out and the whole package said "go nuts, start converting!" and it was glorious. Codex: Eye of Terror carried on in the same spirit a while later, as did some 4th edition codexes (mmmh, Tyranids with the 20+ option Carnifex~). In 5th edition, the trend changed dramatically for the stymied style we now know.

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

A lot of us who were thusly mangled though wished we were twelves, rather than wishing it was an 8. Having our armies be equally fun and customizable would've balanced the game while preserving options. But GW didn't know how to do that, so instead they made everything crap.

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

I'm sure some people liked it because of the power of certain combinations, but as a general statement, this is simply wrong. The reason most people look back on it fondly isn't that it was powerful, it's the enormous amount of options it gave that really made you feel like you were playing chaos.

You're welcome to your own opinion, but saying people are lying and talking "rubbish" when they give a different reason than you do is, well, kinda rubbish itself.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Having our armies be equally fun and customizable would've balanced the game while preserving options. But GW didn't know how to do that, so instead they made everything crap.

Other factions did have aspects of that though. The inquisition for instance had a huge wargear list and personalisable retinues, marines and guard had veteran skills and doctrines, tyranid creatures were literally built from the ground up.

The problem with 3.5 wasn't that it had a lot of options, it was a problem with some of the options that it had.

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Having our armies be equally fun and customizable would've balanced the game while preserving options. But GW didn't know how to do that, so instead they made everything crap.

Other factions did have aspects of that though. The inquisition for instance had a huge wargear list and personalisable retinues, marines and guard had veteran skills and doctrines, tyranid creatures were literally built from the ground up.

The problem with 3.5 wasn't that it had a lot of options, it was a problem with some of the options that it had.

Right, you'll see even in my post that I played Guard, not CSM. But I also didn't feel that CSM was oppressive, though some of the posters here claim it was absolutely filthy (despite having an EC player, a TS player, and a WE player that I regularly played against, I never saw it). The dominion of Lash Princes was much much worse and I think that was 4th or 5th, I forget.

1) The lore wasn't quite so strictly defined, so there was more space in the galaxy to feel special playing Your Dudes and writing your own narrative.

Honestly, this doesn't really have a bearing on the 3.5 CSM dex. If you played with that codex right now, TODAY, all these years later, you would still be able to present a more true-to-life version of CSM than anything out of the last 4 CSM books combined. It was just that good. IW, EC, Word Bearers etc etc really haven't changed that much since then.

On top of that, one of the things that always gets brought up when players are unhappy w/a CSM book is that people will say "Well you CAN'T have a book that represents Legions, AND renegade warbands at the same time. It just isn't possible", and yet, the 3.5 book allowed you to play Legions, small piratical raiding forces, CSM with a smattering of "renegade IG" (in some cases) etc, etc, and it wasn't even that big of a book. It was just that well written and thought out.

Personally I think with Traitor Legions and all the other supplements and stuff at the end of 7th CSM reached a similar state as with the 3.5 Codex. The 8th Edition codex with Vigilus and Psychic Awakening also is similar. What made the 3.5 codex special were its very flavorful rules, which were also very restrictive though. Compared to today there were actually very few units in the codex, but each of these units could be upgraded with legion specific marks and equipment.
On few pages 3.5 basically had 9 Codizes with Legions that were nearly as different as DG and TS are today.

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

Shhh. You're aren't supposed to allude to the fact that it was Pete Haines' personal power codex for his Iron Warriors.
Get those nostalgia goggles back on. Free sergeant upgrades based on god numbers = character.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Right, you'll see even in my post that I played Guard, not CSM. But I also didn't feel that CSM was oppressive, though some of the posters here claim it was absolutely filthy (despite having an EC player, a TS player, and a WE player that I regularly played against, I never saw it). The dominion of Lash Princes was much much worse and I think that was 4th or 5th, I forget.

4e codex and all through 5e. A nice trick but effectively a novelty by the latter part of 5th and fairly powerless against early 5e builds like leafblower as well as 4e power builds like falcon abuse and DE lance spam.

On the other hand what do you do as a 3e guard player if you opponent declares their HQ untargetable and starts spawning daemons into sweeping combat with all of you key units? As arguably not even the strongest of their options.

But it was a big codex, lots of ways to play it that weren't abusive. A bit like the 6e taudar I suppose - you could pick weaker options if you wanted.

A.T. wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Right, you'll see even in my post that I played Guard, not CSM. But I also didn't feel that CSM was oppressive, though some of the posters here claim it was absolutely filthy (despite having an EC player, a TS player, and a WE player that I regularly played against, I never saw it). The dominion of Lash Princes was much much worse and I think that was 4th or 5th, I forget.

4e codex and all through 5e. A nice trick but effectively a novelty by the latter part of 5th and fairly powerless against early 5e builds like leafblower as well as 4e power builds like falcon abuse and DE lance spam.

On the other hand what do you do as a 3e guard player if you opponent declares their HQ untargetable and starts spawning daemons into sweeping combat with all of you key units? As arguably not even the strongest of their options.

But it was a big codex, lots of ways to play it that weren't abusive. A bit like the 6e taudar I suppose - you could pick weaker options if you wanted.

Shoot them with tanks? I played Armored Company at the time (the 3.5ed list is still available on the internet) so being swept in combat wasn't a problem typically. Front 14 Side 13 (with the right doctrines) LRBTs were mostly immune to daemons in combat, unless they got behind me (my rear was in trouble) or had some other shenanigan ( 'nettes with Rending). So my opponents looked elsewhere in their book for options.

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

Nailed it. A disastrously powerful Codex that broke its edition.

To parrot what others have said already - the customization and character of the book. Quite a few of the books back then were like that.

Guard had the option of going vanilla, picking a regiment, or building your own regiment. The costs were a shrinking of available units (I believe most auxilia were locked away unless you spent a regiment point to unlock it again), and in exchange you could buy certain abilities.

Daemonhunters had a toned down version of allies - you could either take a small selection of Space Marines or Imperial Guard, depending on what units you used.

Chaos had options for picking gods, legions, and so on. You could build your force as one of the Legions, or be a band of Chaos Marines dedicated to a specific god, or could build as more recent renegades, etc. Also if memory serves you didn't so much take a Daemon Prince as its own unit, instead you built up your chaos lord and if you spent more than 50 or 60 points on wargear, you can just say "this here is a Daemon Prince."

Basically all of the codices from the time had huge wargear charts that were fairly open to everything. There would be an entire page of wargear and with a few exceptions, you could mix and match things as you wanted. Looking at my old Daemonhunters book and with Stormtroopers, their basic (non Grey Knight) troop unit, you could upgrade one member of the squad into a veteran and then give it any wargear on the table that doesn't explicitly state you cannot take it. So you could deck out your even the jobbers of your army in artificer armor, thunderhammer, and stormshield if you wanted (not saying it would be any good, but that you could customize to that extent). And the Chaos codex offered even more customization options than that, letting you go full ham with Your Guys.

The one big problem with all this customization is that you just as you could make a custom unit of Your Guys, that end up being only so-so at best, you could also just min max yourself to hell and back and end up breaking the game if you aren't careful. Most anything from those books would be laughable by today's standards, but from what I understand, it caused some problems back in the day.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

Nailed it. A disastrously powerful Codex that broke its edition.

Exactly. Everyone wants 1000% customization until it gets too over the top.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
Short version? Power gamer's nirvana.

Chaos v3.5 broke 3rd edition, and mangled the start of 4th.

There are a lot of revisionists on here who claim it was all about the "character of the Legions", or some such rubbish, but it was a book tuned to 12 when everyone else was operating at best on an 8.

Nailed it. A disastrously powerful Codex that broke its edition.

Exactly. Everyone wants 1000% customization until it gets too over the top.

Everyone that's not competitive still wants it then too (exhibit A: this thread).