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Originally Posted by Ulgrim  The Chaos taint spreads... 
Meh, now I'm back to being torn between more armies, though I do like the Eldar the most now, I"m reading the Horus Heresy series and liking SM and CSM more again.
So, what are the big differences between that way SM and CSM play? (I already know about the lore differences.  ) |
The short-and-sweet difference is that the chaos armies tend to use a lot more "unique" abilities, as opposed to the marines, which rely on generic units that you can make into focused, "specialist" units, such as the Space Marine tacitical squad.
You can do this with "generic" Chaos Space Marines units, and often you'll find that core "Troops" choices will be made up of at least one squad of these. In this case, aside from points costs and some wargear options, they are similar.
In addition, however, Chaos armies often use "signature" units, such as the Bezerkers, Plague Marines, Noise Marines or Thousand Sons as "special" units which each have all sorts of unique attributes that make them play VERY differently than "ordinary" Space Marines or Chaos Space Marines. Arguably, if you aren't using at least one of these units, you're missing out on a lot of the "flavor" of a Chaos army.
In addition, some "identical" units to the Space Marine units (such as the Chaos Dreadnoughts) have rules variants that change the way you'll want to field them. Also, Chaos armies allow the use of Chaos-borne things like Daemons, and though I don't know enough to do a point-by-point comparison, I'd swear Chaos has more (and more interesting) psychic abilities available.
Really, to answer your overall question, there are maybe one or two armies (Dark Eldar come to mind) which are decidedly bad for a player to begin playing 40k with. Beyond that, it's more about what you LIKE. Check out the models, read the fluff. I'm sure something will catch your eye.