Flashback Pic + a precursor to Space Marines Impressions

Well, well, marines have a new book, and its chock full of goodies per usual.  The whinings of Chaos marine players have been louder on the grimdarks as of late, with a pretty good editorial about what happened and how good things could have been here.

Background on me, I started playing at the age of 16 when 4th edition first hit.  Being wrapped up in PC gaming, I played the excellent Dawn of War, and remembering attending a gamestore with a friend when we were annoying 11-year-olds and seeing this stuff led me to re-investigate.  I picked up the Maccrage box with my brother who grabbed the Nids and within a couple years I had assembled a formidable space marine army.

With how good the vanilla marine book of 4th was, I played them as just marines, but they were painted like Dark Angels - why? Pretty simple really, Dark Angels were by far the easiest color for me to paint that didn't look terrible and I liked the way their heroes looked.  Here's a picture I took before I sold them off for a criminally low price (having been out of the game for about 4 years I had forgotten mini resale value):

It was 4th edition and assault cannons were in vogue - I still have fond memories of leading hidden powerfists against Nidzilla and attempting to assault Tau crisis suits with my chappy-led assault marines.... Sigh, those days are long gone now.  It was a good time.

Fast forward, skip an edition entirely (I got Black Reach, played it once and that was the last time I played) and here we are in 6th with marines finally getting their update that they had been hurting for for a while.

Apart from the "Thunderstorm" (3 Thunderfire Cannons, 3 StormTalons, fill in the rest with shooty stuff) list I had heard about being thrown around on the 11th company podcast around the release of the Demons/Tau books, there weren't really any competitive builds out there that I was aware of for marines.

I'll be posting some thoughts about it over the next couple of days.  Mostly predictions, maybe a few builds or possibly rants, lol who knows.  As of right now, the only thing I can say is from some glancing through, is that White Scars seem good - like really, really good, with Imperial Fists following them.

I'm not familiar at all with the 5th edition marine codex, so I won't be doing any direct comparisons to older stuff, rather I'll look at it from the standpoint of someone who's come in during 6th edition and seeing what it looks like, and how effective stuff seems based on its costs, etc.