Thread 96746799

Should Space Marines be made more common? These mythical warriors of only 1 million or so total spread thin throughout the Imperium does NOT match up with what we actually see, which is the Astartes showing up in large numbers to even minor conflicts and dying in large numbers as well.

>>96746799 (OP)
>minor conflicts

>>96746799 (OP)
>Should Space Marines be made more common?
No.

>>96746864
Ah yes, the Taros Campaign involving a minor periphery mining desert world with only 12 million people on it definitely required 300 Space Marines to handle it (or rather, fail to handle it).

>>96746799 (OP)
Nice raid thread
>>>/k/64393368

>>96746799 (OP)
Space Marines look so fucking goofy without their helmets on. How the fuck do people think that tiny ass head poking out of a gigantic body looks cool?

>>96746799 (OP)
It's one per planet bro, what's the problem?

>>96746983
The problem is you'll get 300 Space Marines deployed to the middle of bumfuck nowhere for a fight against some nobody aliens nobody's ever heard of before who have a population of like 50 people.

>>96746935
The shoulder pads make their bodies look wider, but they are normal without them.

>>96746799 (OP)
>only 1 million or so total
It's worth noting that would only be the case if all the chapters followed the Codex Astartes to the letter, which they definitely don't do. For example, the Black Templars ignore the 1,000 marines limit, and just keep on raising more troops as they continue crusading, likely numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

>>96747163
But for every space marine chapter that's raising more soldiers than they need, there's another space marine chapter that's been reduced down to like 50 marines and will take ages to recover.

>>96747163
>likely numbering in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
The Black Templars have around 7,500 marines spread across their various crusader fleets.
Space Wolves have between 2,000-3,000 marines.
These are the only 2 (loyalist) chapters who notably deviate in chapter size.

>>96747246
>The Black Templars have around 7,500 marines spread across their various crusader fleets.
I understand they currently have about 13 different crusades, and each one has at least 1,000 marines.

So they have at least more than 10,000 marines.

>>96746799 (OP)
You want warhammer lore to care about accurate scales? LOL

>>96746799 (OP)
No, because I want their rareness to be a focal point.
I want GW to not do a single space marine release in the entire next edition, and I want the lore to explicitly state that many guardsmen believe the space marines virtually extinct. I want Eldar and Tau to be surprised when they see them.
I want them to feel like the shell of their former selves that they are, I want their brief arrivals to feel like the Archangel Michael pouring his fury upon the earth in 1000 avatars, but I will never get that.

>>96747417
That really doesn't work though when Space Marines are the equivalent of much, much more common enemies.

>>96747246
>>96747374
Sources on the number of Black Templars changes between editions (and authors) and is also dependant on the time period.
The 4th ed codex says they have 5k - 6k marines, while one of the new Black library books says they have 25k.

They already are. Take every canon chapter and add them together you'll get wayyyyyy more than a million marines. Not to mention since cawl somehow hid entire legions worth of marines underneath mars even the cannon now statea there's around 3 million marines.

>>96746935
Do you think the armour is meant to be form fitting anon?

>>96747542
That's still way too few, that's only 3 marines per planet, there needs to be closer to 50 or 100.

>>96747548
I think it's supposed to make the scifi soldier look cool. It doesn't, it looks fucking retarded.

>>96747548
>Do you think the armour is meant to be form fitting anon?
I understand that power armor must be adjusted manually, but it depends on the marine and sometimes dreadnought parts have to be added.

>>96747557
I used to think the same thing but you have to keep in mind even if a single company can take over a planet there's still a fuckton of planets in the imperium and the space marines are reserved for only the most important worlds, there's a reasontl the call the guard the backbone of the imperium. You also have to keep in mind this isn't the great crusade, they can't produce space marines like they used too. My head Canon was that there were about 20-30 million marines at the height of the great crusade but after the horus heresy there's only about 3-5 million left on each side, showing just how horrifically devastating that war was on the imperium. After all if every planet had its oeb company of spaces marines it exactly be the grim dark future.

>>96747592
>the space marines are reserved for only the most important worlds
lol
lmao even
Taros was not the 'most important world' by a longshot and it still got 300 marines dedicated to it.

>>96747592
>wouldn't exactly be the grimdark future*
Sorry, I had a brain aneurism.

>>96747601
Yea it wasn't but they were fighting the first tau expansion. The battle wasn't for the world itself but to stop an new enemy from the imperium from taking anymore of their territory. It was the first time the imperium faced the tau in full on war, which, even though it was on an unimportant world, made the battle itself important.

>>96746799 (OP)
This is the same setting where Vraks, the purported bloodiest war in imperium history had less than half the casualties of WW2. The writers just fucking suck at scale and don't give enough of a shit to get any better at it so it's best not thought about too hard.

>>96747548
show us on the op image how the armor fits the man's body. either he looks like a regular man with a tiny head, or he's a freak with exceptionally long thighs and biceps attached to regular length calves and forearms or something. the joints and points of articulation tell us things about how his body must necessarily be shaped

>>96746799 (OP)
>made more common
No. If anything they should be less common.
But also keep in mind model sales and frequency of appearance in gameplay or secondary/fiction isn't representative of their in-universe presence. We see a lot of marines because they look cool and sell, not because there's a lot of them in-universe.

>>96747626
>It was the first time the imperium faced the tau in full on war
The Taros campaign was well after the Damocles Crusade

You missed the general.

>>96746799 (OP)
There stopped being only 1 million of them after the Primaris Founding. There were about 1 million of them prior to that, now there's at least 2-3 million, perhaps more. Chapters are no longer limited to just 1k active marines thanks to Primaris reinforcements doubling or tripling their numbers, and the Primaris Founding chapters are all bonus marines past the 1 million mark.

>>96746799 (OP)
thats more of a numbers problem which other 40k factions (or just any scif fi franchise) suffers from since writers don't seem to really grasp how even a very small elite force would need to be fuck huge when applied on a galatic scale

>>96747670
Marines must have slightly under-sized heads. They're 7-8 feet tall outside armour and built like brick shithouses and have the black carapace under their skin. If their heads were proportional it would be freaky.

OP's pic is probably a bit off but not too much. The head is also too high I'd say. It's always been ridiculous to me that models and books have marines wearing no helmets. Why bother going to all the effort of making a superhuman and fitting him out in a tank then having the weakest part of them showing. Don't even get me started on the fucking dreadknights which have the marine draped on the front, usually helmetless

40k writers should be less afraid of claiming that this war or another one caused hundreds of million casualties or more, especially when dealing with Hives and wars involving multiple planets.

Someone has yet to explain me how a chapter (1.000 warriors) can conquer a planet with a population of 10 billion.
I would increase each chapter size to 10.000 marines, 1.000 per company.

>>96746799 (OP)
If you wanted to change 40k to make any sort of sense, then yes.
You shouldn't want that.

>>96748943
Depending on the planet, it's relatively easy. There are three types of planets: primitive, medieval, and technological (the latter varying between industrial age and advanced technology).
These planets have two options: peacefully join the Imperium, since most don't have the resources to face a nearly infinite army, nor would they be foolish enough to do so.
Or resist, in which case the entire Chapter will conquer the planet. This army includes Space Marines (super soldiers in power armor), Chapter servitors and serfs (the number varies, but let's say there are at least 5 for each Space Marine), an Astra Militarum legion, and a group of Inquisitors (who stay to protect and organize the planet if the Space Marines decide to leave to conquer another world).
And let's not forget all the advanced ships and weapons they have.

>how a chapter (1.000 warriors) can conquer a planet with a population of 10 billion.
Not all people are soldiers, 10 billion inhabitants are not 10 billion soldiers, at best for every 100,000 inhabitants 500 could be soldiers.

>>96746799 (OP)
No.

Marine-Spread needs to be dampened, not encouraged. Space Marines need to be consolidated back down into a single comprehensive codex that allows you to play any cannon Space Marine formation. 'Marines+' Armies like Grey Knights and Custodes need to be reduced to single attachable squads or else dropped all together.

>>96747628
Keep in mind that Vraks was fought for one location on a mudball of a planet.

>>96746799 (OP)
I dunno ask /hhg/

>>96746799 (OP)
>Should Space Marines be made more common?
No.
Space marines are super elite shock troops directly fired into position by drop pods, their purpose is to turn battles around by capturing key locations or kill certain targets, its the job of the imperial guard to do the more conventional warfare.
In the first place the imperium leaders would never allow another horus heresy situation by removing the marine limit of a chapter.
There is also the problem of logistics and resources, each piece of space marine gear is expensive to manufacture and is therefore treated like a heirloom and passed on, rather is not even mentioning relics and other more obscure technology that cant be replicated anymore.
>but what about primaris
I dont care about dogshit

You missed the general little buddy!

>>96746799 (OP)
no, they should have been made extinct with the heresy

>>96746799 (OP)
By focusing on where astartes show up you are ignoring the millions of conflicts where no astartes are involved. This information bias paints them as more common than they are.

>>96747511
Necrons are a rare enemy. The purpose of powerful enemies is to show the necessity of marines and how the heavy fist of the guard is a fair measure. Humanity isn't noble if it's punching down.

>>96748943
That's not their job. Marines don't hold territory. They perform decapitation strikes and raids on enemy production facilities while the guard moves in and holds.

>>96750174
But the Imperium still fights the Eldar and Tau sometimes.

>>96750207
And sometimes a thousand of them board a craftworld and kill hundreds of millions of eldar by themselves.

>>96750174
>Necrons are a rare enemy.
Necrons outnumber all other sapient beings in the 40k Milky Way, except for maybe orks. They're just not yet all awake. When they went to sleep eons ago, they had literally cleansed 99.9% of the galaxy at that point and were its undisputed masters after the Old Ones fled. Necrons are yet another ("existential threat that practically already won") aspect of how fucked 40k's humanity is.

>>96750303
They're robots, they'll just pull a "uh turns out there was like a central computer and if you blow it up they all shut down!" thing if they ever feel the need. "we reversed the polarity on their regeneration matrices, and now they're deconstructing themselves!". There's literally nothing you can't write your way back out of if you feel like it.

>>96749937
Canon not cannon, you mongoloid.

>>96750023
>imadethis.jpg
Fun process to see.

>>96747628
>vraks
>bloodiest war in imperial history
lol who tf claims that. Vraks was barely above a backwater tier conflict. The Horus heresy was the bloodiest war in imperial history and it had trillions dead

>>96748943
Space marine strike cruisers are incredibly strong for their size. A chapter would bring between 15-20 and unless you have capital ships you aren't stopping them dominating orbit. Teleport and boarding strikes would cripple or turn any orbital defences against you. Then the fun begins as this unstoppable army bombards from orbit and teleports under any shields to strike command centres hitting any points on the planet, simultaneously with soldiers who are suicidally committed to their goals and wearing tank armour. This enemy barely sleeps, so the strikes will be constant, and if you assault any beachhead they choose to make they'll bring out the tanks and mechs as well as the speeders and assault squads to pick apart your advance. Meanwhile if pushed back they can just retreat into space again. Even if you somehow trap them on the ground the kill ratio will be something along the lines of 5000:1 by the time you've reduced them to half strength. At this point their ammo will run out so you'll have some better odds but they'll save the big stuff for the worst moment to try and turn the tides. You better have some brainwashed citizens because your populace will be begging to surrender within a week.

>>96747628
>the purported bloodiest war in imperium history
Every time 40k lore is discussed it becomes immediately apparent that basically nobody reads the actual published material.

>>96747542
theres 1000 loyalist chapters with roughly 1000 marines each. 1 million.
>”but muh templars!”
geneseed is finite. but lets be generous and say there are 6 million more marines than estimated. the guard still outnumbers them literally a million to one at 7 trillion strong. Space marines realistically are a non factor in the grand scheme of imperial warfare. The guard even has their own shocktrooper divisions so they’re not even needed for that role.

>>96747628
the writers of this game don’t know how war works and think a thousand space marines could take over even the most backwater of backwater planets when they wouldn’t even break a medium sized country in the current modern day world on numbers alone. Warhammer writers only know how to asspull a giant number or miniscule number and throw it at the reader for sheer shock value, regardless of it falling apart under a moment of scrutiny.

>>96752015
>The guard
Those losers? They're just a wall of flesh, holding out until a Space Marine rescues or kills them.
Remember when the Space Wolves had to save them?

>>96746799 (OP)
Don't care gib big booba female space marines

Even completely codex compliant chapters have more than 1000 "marines" as the 10th company can be as large as they feel they need (and some chapters have a second 10th company).

>>96751818
>15 - 20 cruisers for one chapter
That's as many as a fucking battlefleet. What the hell is the navy even for at this point?

>>96752778
You already have them, give big booba bloodthirsters

>>96748943
not as hard as you think considering
1. air superiority
2. they may just not have weapons and training that can effectively fight a marine. sure you can eventually wear them down but if your troop quality doesn't measure up that means they get to cut through any force that engages them for however long until that happens. they can go where they want, they can destroy what they want and then probably just leave afterwards.
3. how much control do you meaningfully have over 10 billion people? china has issues making its regional governors do what it wants. russia can't make its commanders apply a doctrine other than "send the least favorites in first" and these are still states with fairly coherent national ideas. maybe they are attacking a planet with well established space age governance that can meaningfully leverage resources at this scale but most planets, especially rogue ones are not that. it's not gonna be "they went through every soldier, vehicle and then the millions that can theoretically be mobilized". it's gonna be "they landed in DC, took out the government and then routed the army's attempt to take it back. the air force was mostly destroyed before it could take off. texas has decided to try diplomacy".
4. also logistics are fucking shit when you're trying to get something out of a force that's qualitatively inferior. ten times the troops might win the battle but you have to get them all to be there at the same time and then carry up ten times the supplies for them to make it to that battle. levies can hold territory but their offensive capabilities are ASS.

>>96753142
Yes but they are small :(

>>96752823
And the thousand marines per chapter limit also explicitly *does not* include all auxiliary and command positions, including pilots, drivers and initiates, etc. It only includes the standard ten fighting companies of the chapter. Which is possibly how the chapters that absolutely aren't compliant (e.g. Dark Angels, Black Templars or Space Wolves, etc.) try to bullshit the fact they're absolutely not compliant away when scrutinized by the Imperium.

>>96746881
>a minor periphery mining desert world with only 12 million people
Weren't those minerals & ores they mined vital for a Forgeworld which in turn made a lot of shit for Guard regiments?
>>96746935
You've obviously never encountered someone who is 6'7" (or 2 meters) and does any type of serious weight training. Because even though they put on muscle they're still quite lanky in most cases. Kind of makes sense that Astartes would be out of proportion because of the augments and that their head would be smaller in relation to their bodies than baseline humans.

>>96750067
>Space marines are super elite shock troops
nah, they are a slightly better guardsmen with higher quality equipment and that's it. They die like flies and en masse against any enemy
>>96746799 (OP)
yes, actual limit should be 1 000 000 000 marines per chapter
retcon 1 000 to be a propaganda or pretend it was never a thing

>>96750303
Necrons don't outnumber others, they just reanimate making it seem like there are more of them than they actually are.

>>96746935
The amount of variance in space marine artwork is just enormous. There has never been an actual standardized way of portraying their proportions, armor thickness, weapon sizes.... Some images seem very workable, others not so much.

>>96757164
>Weren't those minerals & ores they mined vital for a Forgeworld
They can't have been that important, the Imperium has a million worlds and forge worlds are listed as being in the 'hundreds', meaning there's 999,000 other planetary candidates that could've been supplying them, there's no way a planet of only 12 million people on the edge of the Imperium was that important to a forge world

There's defending a local and convenient source of supplies instead of wasting time and resources to ship from more distant locations. There's literally nothing wrong with the premise.

>>96759462
They're*, jesus I type like shit

>>96759462
Surely there's a more important sector for those marines and titans to be fighting in though. 300 space marines might not seem like much, but there's only about 1 space marine for every planet the Imperium has, so if the Imperium is dedicating 300 planets worth of resources into defending 1 planet (actually much more in this case given the existence of titan legions present) it better be a very fucking important world.

>>96750067
>its the job of the imperial guard to do the more conventional warfare
>Job in every story they're in and need Marines to save them

>>96765589
>let me point to this badly written literature
No

>>96746799 (OP)
The route I would take is reduce their lore capabilities to get closer to the tabletop feeling, and increase chapter numbers to allow more narrative room for losses. A supersoldier rather than a demigod, and 10,000+ a chapter so 10-50 deaths isn't a remarkable loss.

>>96752015
Even though the Marines' ground performance gets propagandized to hell, their real strength is the fact they are a combined arms space force which is somewhat of a rarity in the IOM: that chapter of 50 supersoldiers has access to multiple battle barges comparable to a battleship in ability plus supporting craft.

They're mascots to their space navies, which are the actual muscle in their offensive ability.

>>96759691
>but there's only about 1 space marine for every planet the Imperium has
and that is more than enough.

>>96757536
According to one of the old necron codices, there are millions of tomb worlds. Multiple times as many tomb worlds as there are worlds claimed by the Imperium. Every other faction out there is a complete and utter joke next to necrons.

>>96766751
How come GW didn't send hit squads to the devs for not making the player a Primaris?

>>96746799 (OP)
100,000 Chapters, each 100,000 strong for a total of 10 billion Space Marines. That way they would still be rare in an Imperium that numbers in the Quintillions without feeling like they are laughably small in number.

>>96747417 this is how they should be handled but because they never will be because GW needs their poster boys I vote for >>96767239

No. It's already bad enough that Primaris turned post-Heresy Marines into Legiones Lite

>>96746799 (OP)
Should the currency be devalued?

>>96752140
what could POSSIBLY be the context of ts image bro

>>96768210
>The imperial guard saw something they had nothing to do with.
>The Inquisition and the Gray Knights want to eliminate them.
>The Space Wolves disagree.
>The Space Wolves kick the Inquisition's and the Gray Knights' asses.

>>96768421
This event is called "months of shame"

>>96768421
thx 4 the clarification

>>96746799 (OP)
Yes because the fact that space marines aren’t legion size makes the imperiums continued survival especially now lie past suspension of disbelief and in you gotta be fucking kidding me lmao territory. Taking GW at face value with the claims they’ve made about the state of the imperium it should’ve died already

>>96746799 (OP)
Big dudes pumped up with roads and extra organs isn’t that big of a deal
It’s the training, and armor they have that is expensive for the imperium
Also the risk of them going traitor and that threats to the imperium pop up faster than they can make marines

>>96747246
Space wolves have slightly more because they don’t have successor chapters aside from the mutated one

>>96769623
Don't they have Primaris ones now?

>>96769637
I don’t think that makes a difference

>>96769740
If they have Successor Chapters of Primaris Marines, that's very different to before when they only had the one mutated successor chapter.

>>96747534
The scarcity of marines make their use in battle lines such as this picture kinda nonsensical. There are canonically a shitton more basilisk artillery pieces than marines and you could just shell their battle line to oblivion. The whole point of space marines should be that they are ultra elite infiltration and key objective securing forces rather than used in massive field combat. I dont care how strong marines are, if a company is just 500 or so, they arent doing shit against a billion enemies.

>>96769915
that makes sense. if they really didn't have successors that would actually mean they would have less space wolves than there are even of custodies
and as the rule of fiction goes, the less common something is, the more powerful they are

>>96746799 (OP)
>>96770203
Have you considered it looks cool and that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of the scene you've recently entered?

Five space marines can stand in a line and shoot enough aliens to end a planetary invasion. You don't have to like it, but you have to accept it. It's how it works.

>>96766920
the fact the game is pretty much a soft spin off of the first space marine game makes it fairly easy simply because timeline wise it was before the primaris were revealed, that and they can do the typical make him primaris later treatment

>>96746799 (OP)
Marine chapters should honestly be around 100k strong each because the US marine corp is 150k the PLA marines are 45k and Russian naval infantry are 12K. So thats 200k strong from 3 nations marine corps out of over 100 with just 8 billion people compared to 40k planet populations.

>>96771779
40k isn't really sure how big they want their scale to be
i don't think they realize how small 1k people is, especially when billions are dying on the regular in 40k
they probably want to keep it small because there's so many stories where a handful of marines are taking on entire planets on their own. doesn't help with how popular the faction is
Marines are clearly supposed to be angelic figures in 40k

>>96771898
it would help if they expanded more on the intricacies of factions that are supposed to be in the millions
they sorta do already, but not in the same way they do for marines

>>96771898
I don't really think most would have an issue with them stating marine numbers are slightly bigger, if anything most woudl approve even if it means there oc marine chapters can get even bigger

>>96772337
Yeah there would be nothing wrong with saying there’s 100k marines per chapter even if there are hundreds of chapters
The galaxy is huge, planets can have multi-billion people on it and marines live for centuries
It really does have to do with how overpowered marines are. I mean if there are millions of space marines people will ask how there are still xenos and daemons left.
But if anything, if there are 1k marines per chapter, how are there even marines left

>>96766779
Yeah I'm thinking they could be defeated by 3, maybe 4 chapters working together.

>>96748943
1000 is a regiment, not a company
you should still have 1 captain per 100 marines