Pandora's box?

[Marshal_Loss]

Because the vast majority of CSM players wish for a return to a 3.5 system where we have a near infinite amount of options and customisation, both in terms of play style and sheer fluffiness if we wished to depict a specific Legion. As broken as some of the possible combos were, I miss that book so much! I doubt GW will ever return to anything quite like it, which is one of the main reasons why I moved to 30k.

[Corvus-Master-of-The-4th]

this is correct.

The old legions are dead Horus killed them. In 40K Chaos Space Marines are warbands and have a limited number of marines left. The two largest are Abbadon and Huron. The biggest flaws in the chaos codex
1.) Should have titled it "Chaos Marines - Warbands"
2.) Should have allowed allied space marines with no chapter tactics.
3.) Should have made the opening quote to the book. "The Legions are dead."

I don't think that is entirely true.

The Iron Warriors still maintain a very strong central structure and still operate within Grand Companies, of course this is still nothing like the legions of old, but shares many familiar traits, and so they still have specializations ingrained from their training and experience that affect their courses of action even as warbands.

[DarkLink]

There's no reason that CSM shouldn't have a Chapter Tactics equivalent. The current system of marks and icons is very clumsy and limited.

[rpricew]

I get the idea that people hate the CSM book because you can't really play in a competitive environment with the titled unit of the Codex, the "Chaos Space Marines". They are just not on the same level as other marines...

Having a unit of 10-20 get swept in combat because the Champion has to accept/issue a challenge and then loses said challenge takes the fun out of using the unit.

I've always believed that if CSMs lose combat, and then break from combat, they should be immune to sweeping advances. They would just fall back out of combat, because that's pretty fluffy. I also think that they shouldn't "Auto Rally" like loyalist marines and would have to roll to rally for it like any other unit. A modified version of ATSKNF which is just different enough, but still makes the standard CSM able to survive close combat and doesn't punish you for having to give/accept challenges. This would go a long way to putting them back on the board. But that's not the rule and this isn't really the place for wishlisting.

[DarkLink]

That is a part of the reason. The codex is so poorly balanced that it's basically Heldrake and friends. There are some fun units, like maulerfiends, but yes, the actual Marines are pretty sadfaced compared to basicallt any other Marine in the game. I mean, what was Phil Kelly thinking? 'Let's not change any of the cult Marine rules in any significant way and see if people stop complaining about how terrible the cult rules are'?

[mysterex]

I get the idea that people hate the CSM book because you can't really play in a competitive environment with the titled unit of the Codex, the "Chaos Space Marines".

Very much this. If the codex title reflected how it was predominately played competitively it would be called "Codex Helldrakes, Cultists & Spawn".

I'm a big fan of all the Night Lords stuff released so far by the Black Library and for me the background is a big part of what inspires me to build an army. Overall I tend to find the stories about the "bad guys" that much more interesting. I'd have thought that GW would want to leverage off this to build sales.

Fluff wise CSM are more divergent than SM (no Index Astartes for them) so I would have liked to have seen something like the chapter tactics built into the CSM codex.

I think that CSM suffer in two ways. Firstly the codex doesn't really work for people who want to play large numbers of CSM in power armour. And secondly I think that power armour (at least without bikes) regardless or whether it's traitor or loyalist, isn't really that strong in the current meta anyway.

[Eldar_Atog]

I mean, what was Phil Kelly thinking? 'Let's not change any of the cult Marine rules in any significant way and see if people stop complaining about how terrible the cult rules are'?

Did any of the cult units get new models when the new codex came out? It seemed to me that GW was really trying to push people away from the cult armies. When I was picking up my tzeentch themed army early this year, the GW staff was really pushing for me to ignore the cult units and pick several boxes of cultists.

[DarkLink]

Pretty much. It should have been blatantly obvious, 'hey, most cult units are pretty bad, and you can't make a real cult army out of them, let's fix that'. But they didn't.

[firestorm]

*sigh* I‘ve played Chaos Marines in various forms since the year 2000, when we had the 3rd Ed Codex. I then made an Iron Warriors army at the time the Index Astartes articles in WD were coming out, and used it a littlemore when the 3.5 Codex came out. Although I didn‘t play a lot of Chaos Marines with the 3.5 ‘dex, I would literally spend hours writing lists, the potential to make characterful (I‘m not a competative gamer, I play 40k for the setting and narrative potential first and foremost) but also EFFECTIVE armies felt almost limitless.

I didn‘t play 40k a lot during 4th Ed (as I discovered EPIC which is a far better game than 40k), but I had an idea for a Chaos Marine army brewing in my head for a few years so came back at the release of the 4th Ed Codex. I could see why so many of the 3.5 veterans loathed this Codex - if I‘d have spent all that time collecting and painting an impressive themed, powerful army (e.g. Nurgle or Khorne warband etc), to be restriced in the use of certain units, AND lose my aligned daemons, would have been a really bitter pill. But I persisted with the 4th Ed Codex. My biggest problem was that, although I wanted to go in a specific direction with the army, the Codex MADE you take certain units if you wanted the army to still be effective on the table top. As a result I had to accodate units like Obliterators and Daemon Princes in my army, despite the fact I didn‘t initially want to use them.

However, I persisted, spending a lot of time and effort to assemble and paint an army I could be proud to field, and then eventually settling on a list which focussed on a number of units I found effective - a mix of Chosen, Berzerkers, Plauge Marines and Obliterators. However I still felt irked that the Codex didn‘t allow me to field the Chaos Marine army I REALLY wanted to; also I found there was certain armies I couldn‘t do anything about, e.g. Space Wolves with Rune Priest, Long Fang Spam and Razorback Spam. So when rumours emerged that there would be a new Codex released with the new Edition of 40k, like many Chaos Marine players I was hopeful that this Codex would bring back the variety of effective choices we had in 3.5, as well as the feel and character of a proper Chaos Marine army.

So what went wrong, why do so many Chaos Players (like myself) feel so let down by our current Codex? Well, it‘s been said before, but it boils down to the fact that, like the previous edition, we‘re completely forced to go in a certain direction because a few units are emphatically better than many of the over-costed (Chosen!), bland (Raptors) and basically pointless (Mutilators) units in the Codex.

Personally, I just feel that GW are missing the point when it comes to Chaos. In the background (e.g. Black Library fiction, of which there is plenty) there are varying degrees - you‘ve got your barely funcitoning warband, getting by on piracy and avoiding a fight until the odds are overwhelmingly in their favour (e.g. A D-B‘s Night Lords Trilogy); the alliance of convenience of various warbands from differing Legions and Chapters, set on a common goal (e.g. invasion of Ultramar in Graham McNeill‘s The Chapter‘s Due); finally you‘ve got your full on apocalyptic invasion - thens of thousands of Chaos Marines, and/or an inumerable tide of Cultists, suppoerted by companies of armour and war engines (Word Bearers Trilogy, Gaunt‘s Ghosts saga). I‘d argue that the rules we get are a better reflection of the second of these, but don‘t adequately capture the first or last. In fact, I‘m sure they don‘t completely capture the second of the three either!

I wish they‘d paid more attention to the wealth of fiction and background material when developing the Codex - we could have had Cultists that are back-stabbing saboteurs (rather than just blobs of expendable infantry), Chosen which are truly reflective of millennia of fighting, and a terrifying array of vehicles and daemon engines. For starters, why do we only get one Land Raider variant? The former Mechanicum priests that maintain the Chaos Marines vehicles are no longer bound by oath and religion to Mars, they‘d be free to do whatever they want to the tanks - one thing I‘d really love to see in the Chaos Marine Codex is a more heavily armoured Transport with a capacity of 15-20 and an assault ramp. If we‘ve the ability to take 20-strong units of Chaos Marines, then shouldn‘t we have something we can transport them in???

Without going in to the level of customisation of the 3.5 codex, there could have been some characterful but effective rules to keep the ‘Legion‘ feel, and add more variety to the choices in the Codex. There could have been a ‘Chapter Traits‘ style system, focused on the Four major powers (e.g. Khorne could get FNP against Overwatch shots, or Tzeentch could get a bonus to Deny The Witch rolls (Tzeentch knows all the tricks and scemes of mortals, so will know most ‘spells‘ they try to use! )) or a fighting style (e.g. Terror, giving a large number of units Infiltration, and get a ‘disruptive‘ affect on a set number of the opponent‘s units (e.g. start the game Pinned) to represent the use of sabotage and general back-stabbing sneakiness :P ).

I think it comes down the the fact that GW currently dont have anyone on the design team who really GETS Chaos in the way that Andy Chambers, Pete Haines etc did, or A D-B currrently does. I wish they had someone who realised that there is more to Chaos than Lol-randomness, and Champions being so power-hungry they‘ll pick a fight they have no chance of winning (how does any Chaos Lord think they‘re going to ascend to the head of their warband by throwing themselves on Draigo‘s Force Sword? )

Because I still love the potential of Chaos, the narrative I have for my army, and above all I enjoy converting and painting Chaos Marine miniatures (for the most part!), I will stick to playing Chaos Marines. However, I still wait for the day when I can field my Chaos Marine army the way I have always wanted to - without havin to rely on a small number of over-powered units which I don‘t really feel fit the backgound I want to follow.

[bob sprocket]

But even the typical style of GW making the new models great rules wise didn't work. Apart from the Drake, how many fiends, raptor, warpsmith, apostle or mutilator kits do you think they sold? All of those units are rubbish.