What is it about the Ultramarines that makes them canonically the best chapter? Is it their genes? The Codex...

They're not the best. They're the best overall, and the most versatile. They're not the best at armoured combat, nor sieges, nor stealth, nor close combat, nor religion, nor a slew of other things.Their codex makes them versatile, but traditionalist, and unable to adapt to change, being outclassed by new, unconventional tactics, fairly similar to their inspiration.

Off the table top, they're an easy to paint faction in an army marketed mostly to young teens. Playing the 'good guys' who are the 'best' is a great way to get kids interested.

Recently (alongside other surprisingly good marketing decisions) the focus has moved away from the Ultras, focusing instead on Dark Angels and some other chapters.

They're the romans. The romans were the best. If something made the romans the best it also makes the ultramarines the best,

Think of the 2nd ed comparisons

>Blood Angels- go insane
>Dark Angles- traitors once in their ranks, they will sell you out to keep the secret
>Space Wolves- disorganised vikings who sorta become wolves

No other loyalist are really that relevant at the time

In comparison the ultramarines at that time were loyal, blameless, organised and the progenitor of most of the chapters.

So Ultras were the best casue everyone else was a mutant or a fuckup.

If only they were more roman. And not called Ultramarines, and didn't have a toilet seat as a symbol.

Some of it is Cato Sicarius
Most of it is Cato Sicarius
All of it is Cato Sicarius

They're just the most competent.

let's all be honest the competition is pretty much all the Emperor's fuck ups.
The Ultramarines were the only ones that turned out ok and with a leader who didn't turn traitor or become some annoying sad sack.

The ultramarines aren't even that amazing. but compared to all the rest they probably come across fucking geniuses.

>Recently the focus has moved away from the Ultras
Ultramarines have never really been the focus. Closest would be 5th edition thanks to the special character overload, but that's about it.

2nd edition space wolves got the very first codex in the game.
2nd edition blood angels were on the cover of the starter box.
2nd edition dark angels had an entire narrative campaign pack devoted to them.

All three had unique model lines and were marketed as darker, edgier alternatives to the "basic" space marine formula, for the kiddos who wanted to play space marines but also be hipsters about it. Remember that teenagers are going to be the first people to latch onto vikings/vampires/DARK SECRETS at first opportunity.

>If only they were more roman.
Play 30k. Also it would be hard to without it becoming obnoxious like the Space Wolves. Although power pilums I like the idea of.
>And not called Ultramarines
No! It's really funny to Canadians!
>and didn't have a toilet seat as a symbol
The Greek omega symbol upside down? I don't know what to say.

The most specific word on it if I recall was "thanks to the heritage of Guilliman and their myriad heroic deeds".

Thanks Mat!

They're flexible

I know how they are in 30k. Their name and symbol just seem shit to me. (Weirdly I wouldn't mind it if it was an Omega) Other than that they are pretty cool.

There are few chapters with non-silly names. It's 40k.

The symbol... can look good, it depends. I think it's just supposed to be easy.

>Not Marneus Calgar, your spiritual liege

I never bothered delving deeper into their fluff since i don't Like them, but could somebody quote some of the thinfs Ward made with them that trigger People so much?

>Ultramarines
>coloured ultramarine
C'mon. Their name is literally a shitty pun.

They aren't usually depicted in ultramarine.

It's actually a pun about ULTRA MARINES.

Do you know what a pun means? Its a wordplay about both meanings of the homonym, both dumb in context.

What you Said is wrong and the other user is right,but i Always believed that they wrote the ultras into being best chapter just to justify the pun. (maybe it was the other way around,but i Like it more Like this)

Do you type or faceroll on the keyboard?

I, Cato Sicarius, approve of this post

Do you think of other anons' feelings before posting or do you go just break their hearts?

Is this your first day outside of Reddit or was it a Christmas break thing?

Same reason Leonardo is the leader of the TMNT, or Cyclops for X-men.

That's how they were written. Notice the Blue color scheme in common? They made blue good guy leaders, and red edgy rebels.

They have the largest pool of potential recruits to draw from, mostly from civilised worlds where they get good nutrition in childhood, etc. Many chapters have only one planet of half-starved inbred cavemen.

Their gene-seed is of notably high quality.

They have excellent relationships with other chapters and imperial organisations, ensuring they have access to a huge variety of training and expertise as well as first rate wargear. They also receive more support on the battlefield than most marines, so they tend to win more and die less, meaning they have more combat experience than average.

They have more successors than any other chapter, meaning that they have probably absorbed the remains of more destroyed chapters than any other. This means they have probably been reinforced by seriously experienced veterans from time to time and have inherited a great deal of war-lore.

The codex astartes was written for them. Every other codex compliant chapter has to adapt it to suit their tactics, resources and lifestyle making it an imperfect guide for them. But for the ultramarines it's the ideal system.

Quads for truth.

Also Guilliman was arguably the best primarch.

They had their own mini empire and didn't turn up to the HH so they had a huge pimp hand going in the reconstruction process.

As has been alluded to in a few posts there's a number of factors, both in universe and metatextually, that resulted in the Ultramarines becoming posterboys for Space Marines and in some ways the entire setting. From a meta standpoint their role as hyper organized space Romans left them as slightly less than a one note cliche than other chapters, as did their lack of a specific battlefield calling. They could be shoehorned into any situation, their name pun was silly but largely benign, and they had an attractive color scheme

>Inb4 why not the dark Angels

Because the dark Angels are literally a joke about closet homosexuality

In universe it's because Guillimans autism for logistics and empire building and how relatively unaffected both he and his legion were by the Heresy meant he could have, if he had wanted, finished the job Horus started. The other primarchs and political figures were in no place to challenge his "suggestions" for a new Imperium. Thankfully due to his aforementioned autism, his only goals were logistical efficiency and reform to prevent future revolution, as well as streamline the whole space marine concept. This in addition to the fact that his Legion was the most populous now AND fit, organizationally, into the strictures of the codex Astartes, meant ultramarines were quickly all over the galaxy in one form or another, proving the effectiveness of the model since Gulliman had always been training them for his "Marian Reforms". When people saw space Marines in the wake of the Heresy, they usually saw ultramarines, or space Marines who acted like Ultramarines - often enacting that famous Guilliman organization and building effort to fix what the Heresy had destroyed.

Could you fuck off to a Horus heresy thread were talking about a chapter not a primarch to wank over

>Musters reinforcements at Ultramar
>Wasn't at Terra
>Broke up the Legions
>Wasn't a fabulous fucking HAWKBOY

...

They did have the greatest Primarch too.

I mean come on, even the Khan was at Terra. Who misses the final show down.

Better than Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands.

I actually dont know what your talking about I havent read HH in fucking forever since it went to shit

i dunno. the Ultramarines were on the other side of the galaxy trapped behind warp storms and the belief that Terra had already fallen.

What are the salamanders, raven guard space wolfs and dark angels excuses?

This

I dont understand how anyone here can still read that series

i stopped reading around Deliverance lost.
did i miss anything good?
or hilariously stupid?

The Blood Angels were willing to rush through the storms to get back, The White Scars went through the Webway. The Raven Guard ran hit and run tactics in space to delay the traitors. There wasn't many Salamanders or Iron Hands left. I think the Alpha Legion delayed the Wolves and the Dark Angels.

>and the Dark Angels.
So the Dark Angels claim, they were actually delayed by the insurrection on Caliban when half their own legion turned on them.

I thought Caliban happened during the scouring.

so 2 ex machina to account for poor writing

and if the ultramarines excuses don't count than neither do any of the others. except probably the salamanders and iron hands.

i believe it did.

everyone knows the lion was sitting on his hands waiting to see who won at terra before he picked a side.

Horus purposefully arranged so that the Ultramarines would not be able to arrive in time, along with all the other legions not present. It was the arrival of the wolves as well as the Ultramarines close behind them that prompted his gambit to duel the Emperor because he knew he couldn't win once fresh forces showed up

the story made much more sense when the heresy took place in under like a year and horus's move to terra was meant to be a lightning strike at the heart of the Imperium before any other legion could react. not a decade long campagin. now the BL writers are scrambling to figure out how to make the old long established fluff jive with the new timeline.

Actually the White Scars stuff was well written, its the Ultramarines who've really been stuck with consistently poor fluff. If you'd told me five years ago we'd get good fluff for the White Scars I would not have believed you.

That's because Horus heresy was a mistake. It was always nothing more than a starkly cynical cash grab with no regard for the settings internal consistency

The old fluff wasn't Shakespeare by any means but the Horus heresy is Star Wars prequels tier disaster, aweful I'll advised fan fiction tacked onto a decades old IP

They are the poster child of the entire series
/thread.

1. You can't thread yourself
2. Ops premise is to ask WHY, as they acknowledge that in OP

the first 3 books were pretty solid.
then they decided to pad that shit out forever.

This would explain why supposedly there actually aren't a lot of UM armies, 40k ones at least.

Anything he quoted is probably influenced by the 2ED codex.

Khan being on Terra is old lore.

I don't think there was a reason ever given for why the UM weren't there other than so that they along with the DA and SW would provide enough of an excuse for Horus to try and personally fight the Emperor.

Do you have a source for the Horus Heresy originally taking place in a year?

Bad fanfiction-tier writing is what makes Ultramarines the best chapter.

Fuck the Codex

Do you know how wars are fought? Not all the Emperor's forces could be on Terra, some would be fighting on other fronts much like how the Allies attacked the Germans in Italy and North Africa despite having the UK threatened by the Germans. Legions like the Space Wolves and Raven Guard who excel in attacking were far more valuable to the imperial war effort than sitting on Terra waiting for the hammer to fall

this guy gets it.

Arguably, the main reason is because their own Primarch was the one who decided what constitutes a "good" or "bad" Marine Chapter in the first place. After he set the standards, he bullied all the other Space Marines until they all (well, almost all of them) fell in line. The UMs naturally followed him, as they'd been doing already.

They do have other strengths though, as said here: , although they're not the only Legion/Chapter who can claim to have super-pure gene-seed (Dark Angels can too, although the High Lords are very reluctant to use their gene-stock to make new Chapters).

Except for the part where they got borderline-curbstomped by Hive Fleet Behemoth because of their rigid inflexibility.

Their main colour is pretty close to ultramarine these days. It used to be more of a pale royal blue though, back in 2nd and 3rd edition, when their name was just there to make them puntastic.

Resource economics. Other chapters have the resources of maybe a planet, maybe even a well-run planet in the case of the Salamanders, or possibly "voluntary donations" from those saved by the crusade, but the Ultramarines have the full backing of not only a full region of space, but a resource-rich, relative peaceful, close-enough-that-warp-travel-between-planets-is-reliable, region of space. The region is internally stable and defensible enough that Roboute Guilliman thought it could work as a beta-site for an Imperium 2.0 when he thought Terra had already fallen. A similar lucky pick of the resource-economics-draw allowed an inconsequencial Xenos race to become the thorn-in-the-side that is the Tau, and allowed.... you know.... European cultural domination to happen in real history.

No it is explicitly canon the Dark Angels weren't there because they were busy with the insurrection on Caliban, this is why they're so paranoid about their dark secret you mong, because they're afraid they'll be turned on as traitors for the actions of the part of the chapter they put down

I wasn't talking about the Dark Angels you idiot. I was talking about the Space Wolves/Raven Guard/Iron Hands who were out taking the fight to Horus' armies. Literally everyone knows that the Dark Angels were being heretics during the HH

they're the hardest working marines in show-business

Let me take you back anons

Its 1997, the GW writers have recently stopped listening to Bolt-Thrower and have "Prodigy: Fat of the Land" on continuous loop. 3rd edition is about to come out. One Marine chapter needs to be the headline act, the one to feature most often in White Dwarf

So who's it to be?

"Well these guys are called Ultra and that means bestest, ha they're also blue, god that's a joke that never gets old!"

"You know Dave, we also have loads of decent painted examples because... well they're blue"

When I was a 12 year old turd by the time 5th Space Marine codex released, not a single person in our games workshop store liked the Ultramarines.

No new players ever painted their first space marine blue, no veterans owned any Ultras and most of us though they looked unbelievably lame. No one liked them and that was way before any of us knew what the Internet was.

I was actually super surprised when I got onto the internet years later and found out that Matt Ward was global hate symbol/phenomenon. I always thought he was an inside joke that only the people at my store knew about.

/Thread

>Do you have a source for the Horus Heresy originally taking place in a year?

He doesn't because it was never stated in early fluff.

Jared Diamond has as much scientific legitimacy as the Flat Earth theories.

Wardian power plot armor

>Except for the part where they got borderline-curbstomped by Hive Fleet Behemoth
They won, against a new foe entirely.
Then they rewrote the Codex to fit in tactics on the Tyranids (the Tyrannic War Veterans were not a Codex-supported formation)
Then they assraped Hive Fleet Kraken on Ichar IV and Papa Calgar got revenge on the Swarmlord.

Codex Ultramarines is 2nd though.