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 Ashiraya wrote:

The size difference is not as large, but he has armour, speed and skill to make up for that.

Even if we assume this, small groups of humans can and have quite frequently killed elephants with far more primitive weapons than automatic rifles with bayonets and hand grenades.

Do you have any non-game mechanic source on Orks being of similar strength and resilience?

Orks being able to have parts lopped off and re-attached to other orks, including heads? Orks taking multiple bolter shells, without armor, and still roving on? I know these have been portrayed multiple times. I don't have a whole lot of books on hand right here so can't go digging too much.

As in, a big truck full with soldiers is stuck in the mud, and a Marine can walk up behind it and just casually lift up the entire back of the truck, pulling it to safe ground.

Truck is pretty vague, that can be anything from a Tacoma to an 18 wheeler

not like it's going to make a difference at that point. He is still fast enough to dodge every strike you throw against him,

This is where we have an issue. We're just assuming he can dodge any number of attacks any number of times from any number of directions. That's where it gets into the realm of absurdity, and we very clearly have Space Marines being killed by blows from far more clumsy creatures than trained human soldiers.

The idea that a Space Marine can just dodge everything from everywhere is the problem here, and it's a patently false idea.

And how are you hitting those, exactly? Ganging up is not that big of an advantage

Ganging up is a huge advantage, which humans have used throughout history to kill far larger, stronger, tougher, and deadlier creatures than themselves, with exceedingly primitive weapons. It works. If we're just handwaving that way then nothing in the 40k setting is going to feel right on the table.

- the numbers we're talking here means they're getting in each other's way,

Four or five? Probably not a huge issue. Fifteen? Sure, it'd be an issue then.

and since they can't do gak to prevent him from dodging to wherever he pleases

Again, if we're just going to assume the Space Marine can always dodge every attack, no matter how simultaneous or multi-vector strikes may be, then there is no way to make a functional game involving space marines that will not break your immersion.

(or, if he decides to run off, he can do that and blocking his way won't impede him in the slighest).

Tthat's entirely true, the Space Marine can always withdraw, and that might be his best option, and short of dumping automatic fire after him, there's not much they could probably do about it, I'll grant that.

Outside IG protagonist fluff? Very rare,

Most anything where a Space Marine is killed in a melee combat that doesn't involve a power weapon? Space Marine armor is not proof against everything in every place. Orks can get Choppa's in, Tyranids can get claws and teeth in, Eldar can get blades in, other Space Marines can get knives in. What's so special about guardsmen that they can't possibly stick a knife in weak areas?

at best. Remember that this is armour that can take a grenade belt detonating at its feet without being pierced, or can walk through fire (or be set on fire, for that matter) without problems.

Basic grenades rely on shrapnel for effect, they're not particularly armor piercing. Likewise, fire kills through heat induction (though Space Marines obviously aren't completely immune to flamers obviously), and isn't having to penetrate armor. A space marine isn't immune to being doused in burning promethium and being cooked alive, just far more resistant to it than a naked unaugmented human.

Fire actually works quite well against a lot of armored things. Simple molotov cocktails have put large numbers of tanks out of action over the last 75 years. The armor doesn't get pierced, but the insides can be heated, crew get cooked alive or inhale smoke and suffer oxygen depletion, wires melt, engine parts overheat and break, ammunition cooks off, etc. Armor can protect for a time, especially if just passing through a wall of flame, but fire can and will kill even heavily armored things, particularly if covered in some sort of flammable material .

Orks are not only many like humans, they are also stronger and tougher. Even then, it's going to be a pretty damn tough prospect for normal boyz. You'd need their tech, Nobz...

Yes, they're stronger. They're also a lot clumsier and far more foolhardy. Yes, it's likely a daunting prospect for a single Ork. For a group of four or five acting together at close quarters, that doesn't sound like an auto-win for the Space Marine.

Most people wouldn't consider 5 Boyz against 1 basic tactical Space Marine an auto-win situation for the Space Marine, fluff realm or game realm.

It's not that illogical at all. Consider how much area you can actually cover with a hook, now consider their size, how packed the Guardsmen are, and the fact that they can't do anything at all to impede the trajectory of the blow.

find me some sort of realistic example and we'll talk. I can't even recall a fluff instance of a Space Marine hitting three guys with one punch.

My life is not without some training in this area. Having done some Boxing, several years of Wrestling, and currently doing twice a week Liechtenauer-based Longsword, I'd like to think I'm not completely inexperienced in such matters, even if I can't claim to be an MMA-class fighter or a military trainer hand-to-hand expert. The only situation in which I can envision this outside of the most absurd rarity of chances, is hitting one guy into a couple of others, assuming they're packing fairly tightly, but even that's really more of a Jackie-Chan movie-fu type thing.

Me thinks not.

Rippers have problems too, but that is mostly because of their size. Their teeth are still razor sharp. Scarabs have their entropic thingy that says feth you to armoured targets. Gaunts are extremely fast (Eldar-fast, though not as skilled) and lethal.

And a bayonet can't be sharp or have huge amounts of pressure put behind it? I've got knives that will slice better than any tooth ever evolved. A knife held in the hand will go through most soft-body armor of today, a knife propelled like a spear as a bayonet can pack an astounding amount of kinetic energy and will go through anything that isn't hard plate.

Scarabs have had a lot of different rules, the Entropic thing wasn't always there and there still wasn't the question that they could sometimes potentially kill Space Marines.

If teeth and claws and the like will do it, we must accept that blades and bayonets can do it too.

Yeah. Even if you somehow manage to bayonet a weak spot, you'll never get to fire in the same strike. SM also laugh off lasguns everywhere outside of the game.

We can probably assume it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone can pull a trigger when planting that bayonet. There's lots of examples of people being shot as they're being bayoneted (though it's often something of overkill in the case of a normal human).

It's also one thing for an SM to feel largely invulnerable to Lasguns in armor from a distance. It's another when a lasgun or autogun is attached to a bayonet that''s been planted into a weak spot and let off a burst of automatic fire through into the flesh. Even a Space Marine is going to feel that in a hard way. Lasguns have been described doing things bullets often do, severing limbs, exploding heads, etc.

Yeah, Space Marines are insanely tough. No, they're not invulnerable. If things like Genestealers, Tyranid Warriors, Daemons, Wracks, etc can be killed by Lasguns, Lasgun shots that get through armor certainly can kill Space Marines. .

Going back to the Elephant example, probably the biggest killer of Elephants in recent years has been the humble Kalashnikov. They're big, strong, tough, and they have thick hides, but automatic rifles will put them down real easily (and it's not like they need to dump multiple magazines worth of bullets in there either), much to the chagrin of conservationists and game wardens.

The most common situation I encounter where my bolters matter is when the Guardsmen are ~9" away, in open ground. There, it surely should not be so hard to hit and kill?

In a perfect reflection of the 40k universe, you're right, the guardsmen would be dead. You also wouldn't miss a Land Raider with a Meltagun at 2", and by the same token even a Space Marine would likely have a far lower chance than 1-in-12 (snapshot & jink save) chance to hit a blazing fast turbo-boosting jetbike jinking all over the place from a couple hundred meters away while on the move.

The game doesn't distinguish between all those insane long range shots you're making with regularity, and the embarrassing close range misses, it just lumps them all together.

But that's not an issue unique to the Imperial Guard or Space Marines, it's a facet of the game that affects *every* faction equally.

Where are those advanced descriptions explaining everything? In Forge World? Forge World's explanations make zero sense whatsoever - you have incredibly small bore Battle Cannons, every vehicle is slow, ground clearances do not match, and so on and so forth.

But FW is just as canon as anything else if we're assuming everything in BL is. That said, FW or no, ground clearances on most 40k Imperial vehicles are such that shopping mall speed bumps would stop many of them. Just looking at the Land Raider model I've got on my hobby desk here, it's got the ground clearance of a slightly lifted skateboard. A Leman Russ tank probably couldn't fit both the breach and the commander in the turret, much less a gunner and a loader.

Ultimately, we have to assume that Bolters, like many things in 40k, are not realistically functional weapons, and that the reasons they work is pretty much entirely "just because".

Why is it not tremendous? The strength difference, ability to absorb recoil and so on is.

Again, there might be a difference, but not enough of one to materially differentiate on any scale we care about.

Another example. Russian 7.62x54R is a powerful cartridge. That was the mainstay round from the 1890's to the 1950's of Russia and the Soviet Union. 7.62x39 is much less powerful, with much less recoil and kinetic energy (but far more controllable in automatic fire and you can carry a whole lot more of it).

That said, someone were shot with both, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference, they would just have two great big bleeding holes and a lot of pain. The differences that you'd see would be at longer ranges (where only 5% or less of most combat is occurring), or if wearing a Level III vs a Level IV armor plate vest, though even that could be dependent on the ammo used. You can get into minutiae like "well, the x54R will more likely go through, leaving an exit wound as well while the x39 has a higher likelyhood of not", but that kind of thing is largely irrelevant at the scale we're talking about.

We can use another in-game example. An Auto-pistol is S3 and an Autogun is S3, despite portraying a typical automatic pistol and automatic rifle, usually with something akin to a 300% difference in kinetic energy between the two, they're not sufficiently far apart for the game to really care and categorize them differently.

RPG's where anything more than a 5 person group is huge, and combats that are over in 20 or 30 seconds in narrative time take two or three hours of real time, can afford to get into that sort of detail, hence why in FFG's RPG's a Space Marine bolter is 1D10 +8 Pen 4 and a human bolter is 1D10+5 Pen 4, but even that is a relatively small distinction next to gulf between either and a Lasgun at 1D10 +3 Pen 0.

When we're talking platoon and company level engagements on a D6 or even a D10 scale, these sorts of distinctions between human bolter and Space Marine bolter are just too small to make a difference, particularly when HP count is usually 1, and you're looking at either "is he out of the fight nor not".

Are you sure it was one of those tiny portable mortars and not one of the many, many artillery mortars? Could have been a Colossus Siege Mortar, for example.

Pretty sure. It's been a while since I've read it. It was from Storm of Iron, which is currently packed away in a box in another building like 40 feet away unfortunately right now for me. They distinctly referred to it as a Mortar however, not as artillery from what I recall. Either way, point still stands, if Bolters can kill Space Marines, certainly a direct hit from a far large explosive projectile can do it.

As said, we disregard plot armour.

I am okay with having the 40K game as an arcade-style game that doesn't make any sense, really, but not when the point of it is to be a story-driven game.

The problem is that most of the stories are written from a "superman-whiz-pow-bang" perspective, especially with Space Marines. While all factions are subject to this, Space Marine stuff suffers the most from it, and it needs to be understood that that's what it is, and should generally be read and accepted in the vein, either as amusing propaganda, embellished stylization, or

I mean, Space Marines can be cool, don't get me wrong. I've play Chaos Space Marines, I'm almost done building a Grey Knights army, and somehow I've managed to acquire probably 2500-3000pts of loyalist Space Marines without ever actually playing them or attempting to collect them. All told, between all the CSM/GK/SM stuff I own, I probably have as much Space Marine stuff as I have Imperial Guard stuff. But I've always assumed most stories about SM's were overdone for style purposes or were exceedingly rare feats of exceptional deeds even for the Space Marines and thus worthy of being written about, not just your average "everybattle".

Many things would need to be adjusted, not only Marines, hence why I included Nobz as an example. No, I do not say that Marines should walk off plasma gun hits without impediment. But yes, standard Orks should not have very good chances.

You'd need to be talking about an entirely different scale of game here, much more a Necromunda scale, and even then, a lot of that would still be coming more from armor saves than innate toughness. Flesh, no matter how hard and resilient, is not hard to damage.

Horus Rising and its sister novels False Gods and Galaxy in Flames has lots of interesting information on Space Marines. Aside from providing additional data on their size, it also shows that Marines are so much more than their wargear (the Auretian Technocracy who also wear Astartes-like PA and bolters get absolutely dominated by Astartes infantry) and it also explains that SM had an odd effect on humans they were fighting. Soldiers so large and so bulky moving so fast triggered some odd kind of extreme shock in the poor humans who could not believe such a thing was physically possible, and while I do not recall what the syndrome was called, it was still quite interesting to see just how far from our own reality the nature of warfare in 40k is.

I'll have to re-read the books, but most of the "shock", at least that I recall at least from other books (that I've read somewhat more recently than almost a decade ago ), is something extremely temporary, and while impressive, is not something that is going to stun them a second time aside from simply being understood, respected, and planned around.

I mean, as a normal human, I know there's some things that might temporarily stun me with their impressive speed and power, but I find it difficult to stomach that simply the sight of a Space Marine doing his thing is going to utterly paralyze all that look upon it, especially if they've seen it before, and for anything more than a very short timeframe. Our brains get bored too fast and fight/flight reaction kicks in. If charging elephants, battle tanks moving at highway speeds and accurate hitting moving targets a thousand meters distant, and all sorts of other things don't paralyze all who see such things, I just don't see Space Marines inflicting immobilizing shock for long periods of time against experienced combat troops.

And in most cases, it's just gak for the humans. Yes, the DA took a beating from the CSM at Vraks. It's grimdark in another way for them, though. They fight on well, but ultimately there is nothing the SM can do to stop the Imperium from falling - they are too few, and the enemies and the warzones are too many.

The problem is that that's never really portrayed in a lot of the SM fluff we're talking about, the always pull through the victory no matter the odds. And that makes sense, most people don't want to read books where the protagonist gets butchered, they want to read about the protagonist from their favorite faction emerging victorious in amazing glory. And that's fine, but it must be acknowledged as to what is really is.

That was actually a big part of why I liked Dead Men Walking, my favorite kind of Grimdark. They did their best, sacrificed enormously, and they still lost, most people still died, the protagonist did not get the girl and lost everything including his human self, and "victory" was wrought only through Exterminatus, while the rich and pampered were evacuated to live another day.. It's the kind of thing that routinely happens in the 40k universe, and is exactly what that opening passage in the 40k rulebook refers to ("an eternity of slaughter and thirsting gods, a man amongst untold billions, you will not be missed, etc) but that often is avoided in many books. Inquisition War was another one, where neither the inquisitor, the Imperial Fist, nor the Assassin end well.

Indeed, such as getting rekt by Chaos Marines.

I wish that would happen more often. Too often CSM's are just there to get killed like mooks.

 kveldulf wrote:

To make it clear to you, I have issue with essentially the Tau being successful 'secular atheists' with no magical explanation - That's too artificial. Their belief does not carry any motivational substance (ultimate meaning) other than the shallow notion of 'just because'. Whenever a fiction makes this sort of culture effective in a grand scale, I tend to roll my eyes.

It doesn't work without magic. Tau 'space communism' (it's not really communism but let's call it that works mainly due to the omnipresence of Ethereals. Ethereals exert a level of influence on the other Tau castes that certainly looks magical. Their coming at Fio'taun simply has a couple of Ethereals walking in and convincing two armies that had beem fighting for years to become BFF overnight. There's also.another piece of fluff somewhere in the codex where a Tau commander defending a position against orks (?) sees his Fire Warriors become more brutal and aggressive, to which he concludes that all Ethereals on the planet have died. Even among the Ethereals consensus is not a given, hence the need for Honor Duels.

Regarding tech, as far as I know Tau have studied everything left behind by the Imperium after their evacuation from Da'lyth and have concluded most stuff except Warp engines to be inferior to their own

Secularism is not a religion. It is however a part of some belief systems that ate functionally indistinguishable from religion.

Also, I would remove no armies, but I would remove the allies system.

I would like to remove, space wolfes and imperial knights.

I wouldn't mind space wolfs to be just vikings in space, but wolf the amount of wolf theme is just way to much for me. Also why imperial knights are even a thing.

LordBlades wrote:
It doesn't work without magic. Tau 'space communism' (it's not really communism but let's call it that works mainly due to the omnipresence of Ethereals. Ethereals exert a level of influence on the other Tau castes that certainly looks magical. Their coming at Fio'taun simply has a couple of Ethereals walking in and convincing two armies that had beem fighting for years to become BFF overnight. There's also.another piece of fluff somewhere in the codex where a Tau commander defending a position against orks (?) sees his Fire Warriors become more brutal and aggressive, to which he concludes that all Ethereals on the planet have died. Even among the Ethereals consensus is not a given, hence the need for Honor Duels.

I have a feeling a lot of the problems people seemingly have with Tau would have been solved if they had simply...you know...read the fething fluff.

But alas that's expecting too much from people anymore I guess, and it's entirely valid and reasonable to judge an army based on how it looks or what it's "catchphrase" is.

Space Wolves for sure. It's the 41st millenium and your hover chariot is pulled by dogs? Seriously?!

Imperial Knights, not a worthwhile team/codex. Even though everyone loves bringing them in. Leave it in IA

 Whiskered wrote:
Also why imperial knights are even a thing.

Because GW wanted their posterchildren to buy more shiny models?

 Vaktathi wrote:
Even if we assume this, small groups of humans can and have quite frequently killed elephants with far more primitive weapons than automatic rifles with bayonets and hand grenades.

Not only are elephants slower and less skilled, they are also easier to wound (no armour) and you can bring larger numbers to bear against them.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Orks being able to have parts lopped off and re-attached to other orks, including heads? Orks taking multiple bolter shells, without armor, and still roving on? I know these have been portrayed multiple times. I don't have a whole lot of books on hand right here so can't go digging too much.

A starfish can survive if you cut off its limbs, it is still not more resilient than a Space Marine. Orks also die if you transplant their heads (though they live for a short time).

I mean, honestly, if all combatants are unarmed, the Marine could just lie down and take a nap and the Guardsmen can't do jack. They can punch and punch and it's like punching a metal plate - in fact, it is punching a metal plate! Or punching the soft armour, which is not going to go much better. Or try to jab their fingers into their eyesockets (try jabbing your index finger into the window next to you, glass is hard). Or try to rip off some cables on the backpack if you can reach it, which is going to be problematic for sure (assuming you actually can remove the tables without equipment), but won't actually kill him.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Truck is pretty vague, that can be anything from a Tacoma to an 18 wheeler

It was a pretty big truck. Let me find the citation.

page 196 Warriors of Ultramar wrote:“Did you see what that imbecile has done?” he snapped. “I did indeed, Mister van Gelder, and if you’ll just bear with us, we’ll get you on your way as soon as we can find some planks to put under the back wheels of this track and get it out of the mud.”
“I want that wretched driver’s name so that I can be properly compensated upon my return to Tarsis Ultra.”
“I assure you that I shall attend to the matter, sir,” soothed Satria. “Now, if you’ll just return to the lovely heated interior of your limousine, we’ll soon have you out of the city.”
Before van Gelder could reply, a groan of metal sounded from behind the major. Satria turned to see Sergeant Learchus effortlessly lifting the back end of the fully laden truck from the sucking mud and push it forwards to more solid ground. The sergeant dropped the truck to the road and almost immediately it sped off to the spaceport.
Satria had heard of the great strength of Space Marines, but had thought that most were overblown exaggerations. Now he knew better.

IIRC that truck contained several squads of Guardsmen.

 Vaktathi wrote:
This is where we have an issue. We're just assuming he can dodge any number of attacks any number of times from any number of directions. That's where it gets into the realm of absurdity, and we very clearly have Space Marines being killed by blows from far more clumsy creatures than trained human soldiers.

The idea that a Space Marine can just dodge everything from everywhere is the problem here, and it's a patently false idea.

He doesn't have to see each incoming strike and move out of the way from each. Consider the following: when dodging gunfire you just move away from where the enemy is aiming, not where he is firing. The Marine does this as well, as he sees faster, thinks faster and moves faster than his foes.

The second and more significant part is that he has no need to Matrix-style dodge each attack. He can just pick a direction and dodge in that direction, changing direction next time he dodges. Most strikes will miss as he is no longer where they aimed, and one or two (more if packed) enemies will get a dodging Marine crushing them! Ouch!

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ganging up is a huge advantage, which humans have used throughout history to kill far larger, stronger, tougher, and deadlier creatures than themselves, with exceedingly primitive weapons. It works. If we're just handwaving that way then nothing in the 40k setting is going to feel right on the table.

It's not a huge advantage because if you are many enough to take him on, you are many enough to get in each other's way.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Again, if we're just going to assume the Space Marine can always dodge every attack, no matter how simultaneous or multi-vector strikes may be, then there is no way to make a functional game involving space marines that will not break your immersion.

As said, they can't stop him from dodging (that is, attempting to impede the path of his dodge is folly). To be honest, he could just trample them and they could do little to stop that.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Basic grenades rely on shrapnel for effect, they're not particularly armor piercing. Likewise, fire kills through heat induction (though Space Marines obviously aren't completely immune to flamers obviously), and isn't having to penetrate armor. A space marine isn't immune to being doused in burning promethium and being cooked alive, just far more resistant to it than a naked unaugmented human.

Fire actually works quite well against a lot of armored things. Simple molotov cocktails have put large numbers of tanks out of action over the last 75 years. The armor doesn't get pierced, but the insides can be heated, crew get cooked alive or inhale smoke and suffer oxygen depletion, wires melt, engine parts overheat and break, ammunition cooks off, etc. Armor can protect for a time, especially if just passing through a wall of flame, but fire can and will kill even heavily armored things, particularly if covered in some sort of flammable material .

I have plenty of examples of Marines literally being set on fire and shrugging it off, or walking through a blazing inferno and shrugging that off too. Fire does not seem threatening to them (outside the Ultramarines movie...)

 Vaktathi wrote:
Yes, they're stronger. They're also a lot clumsier and far more foolhardy. Yes, it's likely a daunting prospect for a single Ork. For a group of four or five acting together at close quarters, that doesn't sound like an auto-win for the Space Marine.

As far as I know, Orks being 'clumsy' is mostly found in Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer and similar propaganda. Everywhere else I have seen, they are quite similar to humans in speed, and very vicious.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Most people wouldn't consider 5 Boyz against 1 basic tactical Space Marine an auto-win situation for the Space Marine, fluff realm or game realm.

Funny anecdote, last time I played solo Exterminatus in Space Marine, my Chaos Raptor killed over a thousand orks alone before going down to a couple of Nobz. I did not even play a named character, I played one of those goons you play in MP. Hell, it was even a Chaos Marine, so he is wearing negative plot armour!

I even have video evidence

 Vaktathi wrote:
find me some sort of realistic example and we'll talk. I can't even recall a fluff instance of a Space Marine hitting three guys with one punch.

My life is not without some training in this area. Having done some Boxing, several years of Wrestling, and currently doing twice a week Liechtenauer-based Longsword, I'd like to think I'm not completely inexperienced in such matters, even if I can't claim to be an MMA-class fighter or a military trainer hand-to-hand expert. The only situation in which I can envision this outside of the most absurd rarity of chances, is hitting one guy into a couple of others, assuming they're packing fairly tightly, but even that's really more of a Jackie-Chan movie-fu type thing.

I have quite some experience with martial arts myself, and I can safely say that none of us have experiences with superhuman giants in massive armour fighting in melee.

I do not have any real life examples to provide has I have never seen a Space Marine fight in real life, all I can say that as far as I am concerned it is not out of the realm of plausibility.

 Vaktathi wrote:
And a bayonet can't be sharp or have huge amounts of pressure put behind it? I've got knives that will slice better than any tooth ever evolved. A knife held in the hand will go through most soft-body armor of today, a knife propelled like a spear as a bayonet can pack an astounding amount of kinetic energy and will go through anything that isn't hard plate.

Evidently, natural weapons are superior to unpowered, undemonic, non-xenos melee weapons in 40k. Look at what Genestealer claws can do, and then show me a mundane melee weapon in 40k capable of doing the same.

 Vaktathi wrote:


It's also one thing for an SM to feel largely invulnerable to Lasguns in armor from a distance. It's another when a lasgun or autogun is attached to a bayonet that''s been planted into a weak spot and let off a burst of automatic fire through into the flesh. Even a Space Marine is going to feel that in a hard way. Lasguns have been described doing things bullets often do, severing limbs, exploding heads, etc.

But lasguns have no real penetration ability whatsoever. If someone is in armour, even if you shoot at the softish bits, you're going to scorch the armour, but the guy inside still won't be hit.

 Vaktathi wrote:
RPG's where anything more than a 5 person group is huge, and combats that are over in 20 or 30 seconds in narrative time take two or three hours of real time, can afford to get into that sort of detail, hence why in FFG's RPG's a Space Marine bolter is 1D10 +8 Pen 4 and a human bolter is 1D10+5 Pen 4, but even that is a relatively small distinction next to gulf between either and a Lasgun at 1D10 +3 Pen 0.

To my knowledge, a SM bolter is 2d10+5 pen 4-5ish and tearing? Before they nerfed it, anyway (I agree that RF became too powerful, but it was easier to just disable RF on the tearing dice...).

 Vaktathi wrote:
When we're talking platoon and company level engagements on a D6 or even a D10 scale, these sorts of distinctions between human bolter and Space Marine bolter are just too small to make a difference, particularly when HP count is usually 1, and you're looking at either "is he out of the fight nor not".

It does make a difference anyway, but it's not going to be a pleasant result either way as the game can't contain it.

 Vaktathi wrote:
The problem is that most of the stories are written from a "superman-whiz-pow-bang" perspective, especially with Space Marines. While all factions are subject to this, Space Marine stuff suffers the most from it, and it needs to be understood that that's what it is, and should generally be read and accepted in the vein, either as amusing propaganda, embellished stylization, or

I mean, Space Marines can be cool, don't get me wrong. I've play Chaos Space Marines, I'm almost done building a Grey Knights army, and somehow I've managed to acquire probably 2500-3000pts of loyalist Space Marines without ever actually playing them or attempting to collect them. All told, between all the CSM/GK/SM stuff I own, I probably have as much Space Marine stuff as I have Imperial Guard stuff. But I've always assumed most stories about SM's were overdone for style purposes or were exceedingly rare feats of exceptional deeds even for the Space Marines and thus worthy of being written about, not just your average "everybattle".

Well yeah, but some stories (UM books) are more long-term instead of one-offs, and thus feel like more reliable feats instead of special ones.

 Vaktathi wrote:
You'd need to be talking about an entirely different scale of game here, much more a Necromunda scale, and even then, a lot of that would still be coming more from armor saves than innate toughness. Flesh, no matter how hard and resilient, is not hard to damage.

Is that Tyranid bio-monstrosities I see waving frantically?

 Vaktathi wrote:
I wish that would happen more often. Too often CSM's are just there to get killed like mooks.

Everything I argue for loyalists also apply to traitors, often even more so due to the whole VOTLW thing!

 Ashiraya wrote:
I mean, honestly, if all combatants are unarmed, the Marine could just lie down and take a nap and the Guardsmen can't do jack. They can punch and punch and it's like punching a metal plate - in fact, it is punching a metal plate! Or punching the soft armour, which is not going to go much better. Or try to jab their fingers into their eyesockets (try jabbing your index finger into the window next to you, glass is hard). Or try to rip off some cables on the backpack if you can reach it, which is going to be problematic for sure (assuming you actually can remove the tables without equipment), but won't actually kill him.

I hack the armor. Now the marine is my puppet! I make him punch himself in the face! I put the thing that recycles the marine urine and feces into reverse mode! I expose his most shameful internet browsing history to the world! Yes, that one. No amount of purity seals is going to save you from that!


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 Ashiraya wrote:
Well yeah, but some stories (UM books) are more long-term instead of one-offs, and thus feel like more reliable feats instead of special ones.

Do you mean like the whole Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM series? Cannot beat the HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 Ashiraya wrote:
I mean, honestly, if all combatants are unarmed, the Marine could just lie down and take a nap and the Guardsmen can't do jack. They can punch and punch and it's like punching a metal plate - in fact, it is punching a metal plate! Or punching the soft armour, which is not going to go much better. Or try to jab their fingers into their eyesockets (try jabbing your index finger into the window next to you, glass is hard). Or try to rip off some cables on the backpack if you can reach it, which is going to be problematic for sure (assuming you actually can remove the tables without equipment), but won't actually kill him.

I hack the armor. Now the marine is my puppet! I make him punch himself in the face! I put the thing that recycles the marine urine and feces into reverse mode! I expose his most shameful internet browsing history to the world! Yes, that one. No amount of purity seals is going to save you from that!

Looks like somebody wants to play Infinity.

 Ashiraya wrote:
But lasguns have no real penetration ability whatsoever. If someone is in armour, even if you shoot at the softish bits, you're going to scorch the armour, but the guy inside still won't be hit.

Are we talking about that weapon that use the same technology as the laser canon ? That anti-tank weapon? Designed to pop tank open? Like, armor?
I am surprised that they have no penetration ability, then.


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 AnomanderRake wrote:
Looks like somebody wants to play Infinity.

I can do that in that game? For realz? What is the in-game effect of sharing the shameful browsing of someone? Do they get instantly evicted from their band and become an outcast ?

I would not advocate for the destruction of any team. In fact, I would be for new ones to appear and most to receive more developpement. Imperial Knights need little brother and sisters, Maybe they could be faulded in an Adpetus Mechanicus codex? I would like Tempestus Scions to become fully independant (codex wise) from the Imperial Guard. We could use with more development for the Chaos Space Marines who seems to lack their loyalist cousins versatility and choice range. We would need a little bit more from the Harlequins Codex to make them also independant. I would like a Lost and Damned Codex, not just a Forge World list (in fact I even made my own a few weeks back). I would like more Necrons, Tau and Sisters. There is so much stuff you can do with those armies both in fluff and models. I would like to see a Imperial Militia army for some rabble, gangsters, Frateris Militia and Arbites. I would like Tyranids to include the geenstealer cult completly. I want Gretchin stuff like tanks or snipers, a bit of communist joke. I want new Xenos armies with all sort of nice design. All in all, it seems idiotic to me to dump a faction especially for gameplay reason (that's a thing that can change or be modified very easily).

Have to agree with Ashiraya on this one. As much as I like my guardsmen they aren't going to do much in melee against an enemy that can just stand there and ignore them as their punches do more damage to their own fists than to his armor. The fact that guardsmen/fire warriors/etc in anything less than overwhelming numbers (sending a whole platoon against a single tactical marine, for example, and even then it's the grenades and lasguns that are probably doing most of the damage) is the result of the broken WS mechanic which limits to-hit rolls to a 3+ or 4+ and having a D6 system where a 1 always fails and a 6 always succeeds.

However, this isn't a very significant problem since guardsmen shouldn't be punching things to death anyway. A marine might be nearly invulnerable to bayonet stabs but an average war involving the IG has a few million melta/plasma gunners for every space marine. And that's not counting the tanks/artillery/air strikes/etc.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Is that Tyranid bio-monstrosities I see waving frantically?

Unfortunately, yes. It's best to just ignore them and pretend that bit of stupid fluff never existed.


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epronovost wrote:
In fact, I would be for new ones to appear and most to receive more developpement.

**** no. GW can't even manage to write a decent game with the armies they already have, the last thing they need to be doing is adding even more rules that they won't be able to keep up with.

 Peregrine wrote:
Unfortunately, yes. It's best to just ignore them and pretend that bit of stupid fluff never existed.

But Ogryns, then?

And things like this?

Ferrus dropped his guard and hammered his fist into Fulgrim's face, the force of the blow enough to crush the helmet of Tactical Dreadnought armour, but barely enough to bruise the flesh of a Primarch.
- Fulgrim, pg. 384

@Peregrine

I think they write a decent game right now else I wouldn't play it let alone discuss with a perfect stranger about it. It has it's flaws, loops and minor issues, but it's rather easy to tweak to your needs.The number of armies or tools is irrelevant to game balance at this point. The Space Marines alone have more unit choices than some game system entire roster of factions combined. We could add 50 new units and three new factions tomorrow and the game would be just fine. Most of the whine would still be their about the same things.

PS: about the Tyranid thing, comparing a mammal anathomy (the Space Marine) to some sort of unknown giant arthropode (the Tyranid Monstrous Creature) is a huge mistake in my opinion. Would you compare your capacity to hold your breath with a oak tree? Those kind of comparison are a bit dishonest in my opinion.

 Peregrine wrote:
Have to agree with Ashiraya on this one. As much as I like my guardsmen they aren't going to do much in melee against an enemy that can just stand there and ignore them as their punches do more damage to their own fists than to his armor. The fact that guardsmen/fire warriors/etc in anything less than overwhelming numbers (sending a whole platoon against a single tactical marine, for example, and even then it's the grenades and lasguns that are probably doing most of the damage) is the result of the broken WS mechanic which limits to-hit rolls to a 3+ or 4+ and having a D6 system where a 1 always fails and a 6 always succeeds.

Yeah. Melee being so common does not help. My own CSM army is built around it.

However, this isn't a very significant problem since guardsmen shouldn't be punching things to death anyway. A marine might be nearly invulnerable to bayonet stabs but an average war involving the IG has a few million melta/plasma gunners for every space marine. And that's not counting the tanks/artillery/air strikes/etc.

You know, I have always wondered how they can afford putting so much investment into each Marine yet can't afford a plasma gun for each guy.

I mean, if they can give it to a guardsman, surely it won't be too expensive for every Space Marine? A million plasma guns should not be too much of a bother to make.

And it would be a flat upgrade to the bolter.

 Sidstyler wrote:

LordBlades wrote:
It doesn't work without magic. Tau 'space communism' (it's not really communism but let's call it that works mainly due to the omnipresence of Ethereals. Ethereals exert a level of influence on the other Tau castes that certainly looks magical. Their coming at Fio'taun simply has a couple of Ethereals walking in and convincing two armies that had beem fighting for years to become BFF overnight. There's also.another piece of fluff somewhere in the codex where a Tau commander defending a position against orks (?) sees his Fire Warriors become more brutal and aggressive, to which he concludes that all Ethereals on the planet have died. Even among the Ethereals consensus is not a given, hence the need for Honor Duels.

I have a feeling a lot of the problems people seemingly have with Tau would have been solved if they had simply...you know...read the fething fluff.

But alas that's expecting too much from people anymore I guess, and it's entirely valid and reasonable to judge an army based on how it looks or what it's "catchphrase" is.

That's one half, the other half is reading the fething rules, because half the rules complaints I've had against tau are about things that do not exist, never existed or do not work remotely as the person complaining describes.


Seriously, tau somehow manages to be the most hated faction, despite the fact the haters seems to often know nothing about them in fluff or rules.


Well, except knights. but people only hate them because of the "ew, its big" reaction some people still get.

 Ashiraya wrote:

Not only are elephants slower and less skilled, they are also easier to wound (no armour) and you can bring larger numbers to bear against them.

Elephants can be pretty amazingly fast. That said, sure they're not as skilled and what not, but they're also probably able to exert a whole lot more force when they do connect through simple mass. Either way, ultimately the point is that numbers can overwhelm a powerful but singular opponent, often without needing to gigantically overwhelm them.

A starfish can survive if you cut off its limbs, it is still not more resilient than a Space Marine.

That's a factor of scale at that point. Orks are pretty much on the same scale as Space Marines.

I mean, honestly, if all combatants are unarmed, the Marine could just lie down and take a nap and the Guardsmen can't do jack. They can punch and punch and it's like punching a metal plate - in fact, it is punching a metal plate! Or punching the soft armour, which is not going to go much better.

This is where it's getting absolutely ridiculous again.

We're assuming that the soft areas are nearly as inviolate as the hard armor, which we know is not true, we have all sorts of art and fluff portraying this being defeated by relatively primitive weapons. LIkewise, if the SM is just lying down, how mentally deficient are we assuming these Guardsmen are if we're assuming they're just going to whack at the hard plate?

Or try to jab their fingers into their eyesockets (try jabbing your index finger into the window next to you, glass is hard)

I don't think anybody iis going to be shoving fingers to a Space Marine's helmet eye sockets. They might try a bayonet though, I can break a window with that.

. Or try to rip off some cables on the backpack if you can reach it which is going to be problematic for sure (assuming you actually can remove the tables without equipment), but won't actually kill him.

Assuming there's 4-5 of them? Someone getting to the backpack isn't a huge issue unless we're talking an enclosed space where they're all approaching from the fornt. The backpack also has other vulnerabilities, heat vents, access ports, etc that can all be exceedingly vulnerable. It's probably the most vulnerable aspect (and is basically never mentioned in most fluff), being the hardest place for an SM to defend on top of powering his armor and having gigantic vulnerabilities.

It was a pretty big truck. Let me find the citation.

page 196 Warriors of Ultramar wrote:“Did you see what that imbecile has done?” he snapped. “I did indeed, Mister van Gelder, and if you’ll just bear with us, we’ll get you on your way as soon as we can find some planks to put under the back wheels of this track and get it out of the mud.”
“I want that wretched driver’s name so that I can be properly compensated upon my return to Tarsis Ultra.”
“I assure you that I shall attend to the matter, sir,” soothed Satria. “Now, if you’ll just return to the lovely heated interior of your limousine, we’ll soon have you out of the city.”
Before van Gelder could reply, a groan of metal sounded from behind the major. Satria turned to see Sergeant Learchus effortlessly lifting the back end of the fully laden truck from the sucking mud and push it forwards to more solid ground. The sergeant dropped the truck to the road and almost immediately it sped off to the spaceport.
Satria had heard of the great strength of Space Marines, but had thought that most were overblown exaggerations. Now he knew better.

IIRC that truck contained several squads of Guardsmen.

And, while impressive, it's not beyond the strength of many creatures on earth today that humans have successfully killed in very close quarter engagements. A Gorilla or Elephant can probably do something like that.

He doesn't have to see each incoming strike and move out of the way from each.

He has to be aware of a strike coming somehow, we can't just assume he'll automatically know when and where every blow is going to come from.

Consider the following: when dodging gunfire you just move away from where the enemy is aiming, not where he is firing.

The concept of dodging gunfire is rather suspect, you don't really dodge bullets. Dodging a paintball at close ranges is beyond human capabilities (even if they're 50 feet away, when you see the shot fired, you've got 1/6th of a second to register that, react to it, and moved out of the way before it impacts), dodging a bullet moving 3-10x as fast is beyond superhuman capabilities. You don't really dodge bullets, you reduce the probability of a hit by minimizing your visibility.

If being shot at, in a combat situation, very often you can't tell exactly where the shooter is. Even when you can, you won't really be able to tell exactly where they're aiming as long as that barrel is point in your general direction. If you're any meaningful distance away (largely anything beyond a couple of meters or so), you won't be able to tell if they're leading you, trailing you, or dead on, the minute differences in angle are simply impossible to determine just from looking at their gun, and that's assuming you can accurately visually distinguish the gun barrel.

Unless they're leading with automatic fire and stitching a line in the dirt or have some sort of other visual identifier, you're relying on simply being hard to hit, which is something different altogether.

With regards to a melee blow, there are a ton of blows that can be thrown or blade moves that can be done that can be redirected or intentionally misguiding. With a Longsword, if I'm throwing a blow from the shoulder, typically that'll look like an overhead descending strike to the opposing shoulder, but by the time I'm halfway into it I can change that into a Zwerchhau blow to the head or neck from a horizontal plane, or rotate my wrists out and under and turn it into and ascending blow from below into the ribs or armpit. Trying to react to that without seeing it as its happening, or as several other guys are doing the same thing, would be impossible.

The Marine does this as well, as he sees faster, thinks faster and moves faster than his foes.

There's relatively little to prove that a Space Marine is mentally simply faster than others, particularly without additional augmentation. They get psycho-indoctrinated with tons of knowledge (though knowledge and ability to use that knowledge are two different things), but we've also had some pretty amazingly simple Space Marines. In some places *some* are portrayed as super geniuses, in others not so much. That's a very suspect and contradictory aspect.

The idea that he'd just know where to be and avoid multiple repeated simultaneous blows from several different vectors, particularly being 7 feet tall and probably four or five feet wide, without any sort of sensory input, is a bit silly even for Space Marines.

If such were the case, they wouldn't need armor. They also wouldn't get hit by things like Orks, yet they do.

The second and more significant part is that he has no need to Matrix-style dodge each attack. He can just pick a direction and dodge in that direction, changing direction next time he dodges. Most strikes will miss as he is no longer where they aimed, and one or two (more if packed) enemies will get a dodging Marine crushing them! Ouch!

How far is this marine dancing around? How does he always have a direction in which he can move without facing a bayonet, grenade, or lasgun muzzle? Why are we assuming that the Guardsmen cannot possibly compensate for movement either (likely not as well as the SM can, but they're not complete automatons either)? Again, it also must be kept in mind that their target is *huge* and by simple dint of that fact not exactly impossible to hit.

If Orks can do it, not seeing why Guardsmen can't.

It's not a huge advantage because if you are many enough to take him on, you are many enough to get in each other's way.

By what standard?

As said, they can't stop him from dodging (that is, attempting to impede the path of his dodge is folly). To be honest, he could just trample them and they could do little to stop that.

He could try all of those things, and there are openings and counters to each of them for trained soldiers. But again, it's missing the point in that if we're assuming that the Space Marine is just so incredibly powerful that he can overpower anything or dodge anything and whatnot, there is no game that will not break your immersion. There's no way around that.

I have plenty of examples of Marines literally being set on fire and shrugging it off, or walking through a blazing inferno and shrugging that off too. Fire does not seem threatening to them (outside the Ultramarines movie...)

Yeah, walking through fire is one thing, being on fire for an extended period of time is another, which is what I was getting at above. Is it *harder* to kill them with fire than ordinary humans? Sure, absolutely, much more so. But Space Marines die to flame weapons all the time. The Sisters bring cleansing fire to the Heretic traitor Marines, the Grey Knights bring Incincerators against Daemons and Traitors, the Salamanders will bring flamers to dreadful use against other power armored foes. Space Marines aren't immune to flame, just much more resistant to it.

I'd imagine a Space Marine taking a direct burst from a Burna or flamer won't end well for him. If it's just lightly washed over him or he's just within a couple feet that would ordinarily scorch an unarmored human badly, he's probably fine. In game terms, this largely means that only 1 marines dies to a flamer for every 4 guardsmen that do. and in that respect, that's mighty impressive and shouldn't be immersion breaking.

As far as I know, Orks being 'clumsy' is mostly found in Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer and similar propaganda. Everywhere else I have seen, they are quite similar to humans in speed, and very vicious.

Yes they are vicious, but that doesn't mean they can't be clumsy or hamfisted, in every depiction they throw big heavy "i can see that coming form a mile away" blows. If they connect, that's bad, but it means you have more chance to get your own attack or block in before that. Hence why Orks are I2 in game terms.

Funny anecdote, last time I played solo Exterminatus in Space Marine, my Chaos Raptor killed over a thousand orks alone before going down to a couple of Nobz. I did not even play a named character, I played one of those goons you play in MP. Hell, it was even a Chaos Marine, so he is wearing negative plot armour!

I even have video evidence

Well, yes, you kill a lot of stuff in Space Marine

Though, at the same time, the biggest, meanest, nastiest thing in the game was also probably the easiest and most trivial thing to defeat (seriously his body guards were way harder to kill than the orchestrated button mash that was the Nemeroth fight), and your single SM captain has probably killed a company's worth of Traitor marines or more over the course of the game.

I have quite some experience with martial arts myself, and I can safely say that none of us have experiences with superhuman giants in massive armour fighting in melee.

True, but again, even with a huge arm reach, a hook hitting three guys at once is more movie-fu than anything else.

I do not have any real life examples to provide has I have never seen a Space Marine fight in real life, all I can say that as far as I am concerned it is not out of the realm of plausibility.

I would say it is, even if you had the reach (assuming a much larger reach than any human), you'd need all three bunched up insanely tightly and standing *just so* in order to connect. Unless you're in a cramped hallway with everyone to the front all trying to do the exact same thing at the same time and squishing each other Oreo-style, I find that very difficult to see.

Even with a Longsword, sporting a 4 foot blade unless they're packed *very* tight and have zero ability to block or evade (not simply diminished due to superior speed, but practically zero), I don't really see hitting three enemies at once, especially not with meaningful blows.

Evidently, natural weapons are superior to unpowered, undemonic, non-xenos melee weapons in 40k. Look at what Genestealer claws can do, and then show me a mundane melee weapon in 40k capable of doing the same.

Genestealers are described as having immense strength which augments the power of their claws (their rules have also changed over time between ASM's in 2E, being straight power-weapons, to Rending on 6's to Hit, to Rending on 6's to Wound), but we don't need to look at Genestealers when much smaller creatures (who don't have any such specialties) have been portrayed as finding and exploiting weaknesses in Space Marine armor.

But lasguns have no real penetration ability whatsoever. If someone is in armour, even if you shoot at the softish bits, you're going to scorch the armour, but the guy inside still won't be hit.

Neither do bayonets, claws, teeth, Choppas, etc. If they can penetrate, we can probably assume Lasguns can. AP- doesn't mean "literally can never penetrate anything", it means that any meaningful armor at least has *some* chance, to protect, even if it's by deflection rather than absorption. If they can explode a skull, they can probably get through the soft areas of a Space Marines armor.

Lasguns are described as having an explosion effect upon hitting the target, if so, there's no reason they couldn't get through soft areas that likely can't even be considered armored. That said, here's where stuff starts to get silly again. Much like Bolters, lasguns basically don't operate in 40k by any realistic standard. They tend to operate on the Star Wars principle of laser weapons, with a visible beam that you can actually see travel (as if it's firing at bullet speeds) and has a seemingly kinetic effect. This is rather absurd, just as absurd as Bolters. More realistic laser weapons you'd never really see the beam, and any explosive effect you'd get would be from heat combustion of the material you're hitting and not the laser itself. You could also effectively keep a laser beam on target for several seconds and burn right through something. Either way, they're just as silly as Bolters.

That said, we have a more realistic standard to compare with here. Autoguns, which are identical to weapons we have today and share the Lasgun's statline in almost every iteration I can think of. As autoguns are pretty identical to modern assault rifles and battle rifles (in the Siege of Vraks book they particularly point out a caliber that would roughly equate to a battle rifle). You can put rounds from something like that through quite a lot of metal. Even non-AP ammo from something like a 5.56 or 5.45 can often penetrate a 7mm steel plate. Black tip 308 or 30-06 through a Battle Rifle can go through up to 25mm+ of steel plate, or 8mm of specially hardened ballistic armor.

I would not assume that all the soft areas on a Space Marine can be equated with even the 7mm steel plate, particularly not if things like Gaunt claws, Choppas, etc can get through.

Ergo, if we're assuming a lasgun is largely interchangable with a modern assault rifle, it shouldn't have any issues getting through the soft areas of a Space Marine's armor.

To my knowledge, a SM bolter is 2d10+5 pen 4-5ish and tearing? Before they nerfed it, anyway (I agree that RF became too powerful, but it was easier to just disable RF on the tearing dice...).

Yeah, they no longer have that statline. That statline also put them above even vehicle-mounted Heavy Bolters from something like Rogue Trader (2D10+2 Pen 5) and even without RF was roughly on par or better than most of the Plasma weapons from its own book (A Plasma Gun being 1D10+9 Pen8 with no Tearing).

It was just too over the top any way you sliced it, and nobody was bothering with the other guns

It does make a difference anyway, but it's not going to be a pleasant result either way as the game can't contain it.

It's not something that would matter at the scale we're concerned with. Even in a scale where you're only running a party of 3-5 guys, when we're talking Tearing weapons that get 2 dice for damage to pick from, and a grand total of 3 as the difference in damage, against stuff like 10 HP mook Guardsmen, that's only going to matter what, once out of every seven or so hits to put them into Critical HP (what I usually consider "dead" or not for W1 40k units)? That's enough to kinda notice at that scale. It's not enough to care about on a company level scale.

Well yeah, but some stories (UM books) are more long-term instead of one-offs, and thus feel like more reliable feats instead of special ones.

Haven't read all of those so can't comment, I've only read Dead Sky Black Sun.(which was mostly SM vs CSM or CSM vs CSM anyway).
d

Is that Tyranid bio-monstrosities I see waving frantically?

They're huge. That's what makes them hard to kill, not the innate toughness of their flesh aside from the chitonous armor.

Everything I argue for loyalists also apply to traitors, often even more so due to the whole VOTLW thing!

It'd be nice to see the CSM's get better treatment, though that said, at the rate at which they're usually defeated and killed, they should all have been dead looooong ago

However, having the patronage of gods from a literal dimension of unreality, and often inhabiting that realm, it does make it easier to accept some ridiculous things with them

I have a little point to bring up, pulse weapons have been known to pierce the eyepieces on TDA. I see no reason why a bayonet or lasgun couldn't pierce the eyepiece on PA.

 Vaktathi wrote:
This is where it's getting absolutely ridiculous again.

We're assuming that the soft areas are nearly as inviolate as the hard armor, which we know is not true, we have all sorts of art and fluff portraying this being defeated by relatively primitive weapons. LIkewise, if the SM is just lying down, how mentally deficient are we assuming these Guardsmen are if we're assuming they're just going to whack at the hard plate?

I don't think anybody iis going to be shoving fingers to a Space Marine's helmet eye sockets. They might try a bayonet though, I can break a window with that.

Assuming there's 4-5 of them? Someone getting to the backpack isn't a huge issue unless we're talking an enclosed space where they're all approaching from the fornt. The backpack also has other vulnerabilities, heat vents, access ports, etc that can all be exceedingly vulnerable. It's probably the most vulnerable aspect (and is basically never mentioned in most fluff), being the hardest place for an SM to defend on top of powering his armor and having gigantic vulnerabilities.

I did say 'assuming they are unarmed!'

I do not think you can actually fit the bayonet into the eyesocket anyway, but you could probably slice off a cable with a little work. Unfortunately, you're not going to have the time for 'a little work' in a swirling melee.

 Vaktathi wrote:
And, while impressive, it's not beyond the strength of many creatures on earth today that humans have successfully killed in very close quarter engagements. A Gorilla or Elephant can probably do something like that.

But can they do it with the superhuman speed, skill and control that the Astartes have?

 Vaktathi wrote:
He has to be aware of a strike coming somehow, we can't just assume he'll automatically know when and where every blow is going to come from.

No, he just has to stay in motion.

 Vaktathi wrote:
There's relatively little to prove that a Space Marine is mentally simply faster than others, particularly without additional augmentation. They get psycho-indoctrinated with tons of knowledge (though knowledge and ability to use that knowledge are two different things), but we've also had some pretty amazingly simple Space Marines. In some places *some* are portrayed as super geniuses, in others not so much. That's a very suspect and contradictory aspect.

Marines are explicitly 'superior in every aspect' to humans. This includes reaction speeds and intelligence. We have plenty of examples of both, especially reaction speeds (some of which go into nanosecond territory).

 Vaktathi wrote:
The idea that he'd just know where to be and avoid multiple repeated simultaneous blows from several different vectors, particularly being 7 feet tall and probably four or five feet wide, without any sort of sensory input, is a bit silly even for Space Marines.

7 feet being the low end. BL said eight, and it varies generally. I go with nine, although for the sake of the argument I am willing to assume seven. Anyway, autosenses exist, you know.

 Vaktathi wrote:
If such were the case, they wouldn't need armor. They also wouldn't get hit by things like Orks, yet they do.

Most of the cases, plot armour.

 Vaktathi wrote:
How far is this marine dancing around? How does he always have a direction in which he can move without facing a bayonet, grenade, or lasgun muzzle? Why are we assuming that the Guardsmen cannot possibly compensate for movement either (likely not as well as the SM can, but they're not complete automatons either)? Again, it also must be kept in mind that their target is *huge* and by simple dint of that fact not exactly impossible to hit.

Why does he care if it's a bayonette there? If he leaps in its direction, the force with which the Guardsman is holding it is going to be less than the force needed for it to penetrate his armour, so he will push away the bayonet. Grenades do nothing, as explained (and if they had a grenade ready to detonate, then they would blow up themselves if he decided to jump in another direction!), and the lasgun too is going to do little.

 Vaktathi wrote:
By what standard?

That of the lore.

 Vaktathi wrote:
He could try all of those things, and there are openings and counters to each of them for trained soldiers.

What are they going to do, exactly? Shoot him and die a second later as the shot inflicts minimal damage at best? Hold out your bayonet and hope that that will be enough to stop his charge? Try to dodge even though he is way faster than they could ever hope to be?

 Vaktathi wrote:
But again, it's missing the point in that if we're assuming that the Space Marine is just so incredibly powerful that he can overpower anything or dodge anything and whatnot, there is no game that will not break your immersion. There's no way around that.

I dunno, I play 40K RPGs with my friends almost every week and it's absolutely fine. Had to make a few changes (+2 AP to all SM armour, starting stats increased to 40+2d10, sprint is baseline, the tearing dice on bolters can't trigger RF, et cetera ad nauseam) but otherwise it is quite immersive.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Yes they are vicious, but that doesn't mean they can't be clumsy or hamfisted, in every depiction they throw big heavy "i can see that coming form a mile away" blows. If they connect, that's bad, but it means you have more chance to get your own attack or block in before that. Hence why Orks are I2 in game terms.

Game terms are irrelevant. From what I can see, their advantage comes from combining numbers with being very tough, strong and solid - something IG can't do.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Though, at the same time, the biggest, meanest, nastiest thing in the game was also probably the easiest and most trivial thing to defeat (seriously his body guards were way harder to kill than the orchestrated button mash that was the Nemeroth fight), and your single SM captain has probably killed a company's worth of Traitor marines or more over the course of the game.

Titus had plot armour, at least in the DP fight. The dog-standard Marines, arguably less so.

 Vaktathi wrote:
True, but again, even with a huge arm reach, a hook hitting three guys at once is more movie-fu than anything else.

I am not sure. Proper full-body swing, ensuring to swing with your hips and turn your body and not just throw your arm around, and being that large. Should work.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Even with a Longsword, sporting a 4 foot blade unless they're packed *very* tight and have zero ability to block or evade (not simply diminished due to superior speed, but practically zero), I don't really see hitting three enemies at once, especially not with meaningful blows.

The thing is that you don't have a fraction of the force behind your sword compared to what he has behind his fist. He can punch 'through' the enemy without it affecting its trajectory.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Genestealers are described as having immense strength which augments the power of their claws (their rules have also changed over time between ASM's in 2E, being straight power-weapons, to Rending on 6's to Hit, to Rending on 6's to Wound), but we don't need to look at Genestealers when much smaller creatures (who don't have any such specialties) have been portrayed as finding and exploiting weaknesses in Space Marine armor.

What genestealers do is to provide evidence of Tyranid melee weaponry being far sharper than any biologically produced weapon could be in real life, also explaining how they can slice armour so well.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Neither do bayonets, claws, teeth, Choppas, etc. If they can penetrate, we can probably assume Lasguns can. AP- doesn't mean "literally can never penetrate anything", it means that any meaningful armor at least has *some* chance, to protect, even if it's by deflection rather than absorption. If they can explode a skull, they can probably get through the soft areas of a Space Marines armor.

I disagree. Lasguns deal damage by burning/exploding (depending on source) the surface area of the target. It's going to be highly ineffective against any type of armour - remember that even 'soft' armour is very thick indeed.

 Vaktathi wrote:
I would not assume that all the soft areas on a Space Marine can be equated with even the 7mm steel plate, particularly not if things like Gaunt claws, Choppas, etc can get through.

I would, although not in the same way. I'd compare it to steel versus graphene - a relatively thin layer of graphene is easier to bend but also harder to penetrate than steel. PA seems to be designed by a similar material, although likely not specifically graphene!

Choppas are delivered by the arm of orks, stronger than any man, and even then they are not really that threatening to normal Marines outside of the tabletop game.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Yeah, they no longer have that statline. That statline also put them above even vehicle-mounted Heavy Bolters from something like Rogue Trader (2D10+2 Pen 5) and even without RF was roughly on par or better than most of the Plasma weapons from its own book (A Plasma Gun being 1D10+9 Pen8 with no Tearing).

It was just too over the top any way you sliced it, and nobody was bothering with the other guns

You could think that, until you take into account that plasma guns have Maximal Mode. When they deal 2d10+9 damage on pen 10, with Volatile to boot, they suddenly become very dangerous indeed!

The Rogue Trader HB is not vehicle-mounted (it is entirely man-portable) and even then, the reduced damage is easily explainable by reduced quality compared to Astartes weaponry, the latter which is also of greater power even than human-sized weapons of equivalent craft.

 Vaktathi wrote:
They're huge. That's what makes them hard to kill, not the innate toughness of their flesh aside from the chitonous armor.

Ogryns? They wear little armour and are still obscenely tough. Or even Primarchs, if we wanna go down that route...

Of course you'd buff marines in the RPG where they're already massively OP.

I also happen to play a 40k RPG, and I think its totally fine that our IG party would absolutely butcher 2-3 SMs with ease. Considering how well trained and well gear our party is.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Of course you'd buff marines in the RPG where they're already massively OP.

Are not!

 Bobthehero wrote:
I also happen to play a 40k RPG, and I think its totally fine that our IG party would absolutely butcher 2-3 SMs with ease. Considering how well trained and well gear our party is.

I would expect nothing else from our resident IGhammerist.

Hell, you and Vaktathi even have really similar avatars. Who is the real hivemind here?

Is it the IG clique that is out to get me?

Definetly ImpKnights. As a LOW selection for Imperials, they would be fine. But it is RIDICULUS to fight nothing but 4-5 Knights in a Battle Forged list

Fluffwise, it be too improbable for so many to be gathered in 1 place with no other units around.

Gameplay it invalidates half the units in an opposing all-comers list. If you have so much as 1 unit that cant somehow affect a Knight, you are now playing with a handicap.

No, you just have an extremely high view of space marines, exceeding most excepted norms. I like to think of you as the empnortell of space marines.

edit: ninjed

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:
Of course you'd buff marines in the RPG where

Is it the IG clique that is out to get me?

Aye, we're going to get our flashlight and light you up to death

Anyway, I don't why its unreasonable that a party with anti-SM weapon would be able to kill SM with ease

Because they won't let you do so.

Space Marines being strong does not make them stupid. They take care to assess and take out/avoid what CAN kill them.

In this case, the whole squad is armed with said weapons, so avoiding the melta shot is only going to end up with the Marine either getting shot with a burst of super-hellgun or a techpriest powerfist in the face.

So why do you survive into meltagun/powerfist range, anyway?

epronovost wrote:
I think they write a decent game right now else I wouldn't play it let alone discuss with a perfect stranger about it.

You're wrong.

The number of armies or tools is irrelevant to game balance at this point.

No it isn't. If GW has a fixed number of hours to spend on working on 40k then spreading that work over even more armies means that quality will inevitably suffer. And GW clearly isn't willing to hire more authors to do the job right.

 Ashiraya wrote:
But Ogryns, then?

Ogryns are just the equivalent of humans on steroids. Unlike Tyranids they don't have skin that's stronger than tank armor, claws that are sharper than knives, etc. Ogryn fluff is just fine.

 Ashiraya wrote:
You know, I have always wondered how they can afford putting so much investment into each Marine yet can't afford a plasma gun for each guy.

The only explanation that makes sense is "because god said so". Spare marines are armed according to the demands of their bizarre cult, not according to what the best weapon for the job is.

 Ashiraya wrote:
Because they won't let you do so.

Space Marines being strong does not make them stupid. They take care to assess and take out/avoid what CAN kill them.

Unless of course honor demands that they face the plasma gun in honorable combat, in which case they die. Being strong doesn't make them stupid, but being religious zealots who care more about obeying god than winning wars certainly does.


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 Ashiraya wrote:
So why do you survive into meltagun/powerfist range, anyway?

Because an average war has at least a few thousand guardsmen with melta guns for every space marine on the planet, on top of all the tanks/artillery/etc. If the first hundred melta gunners don't stop a marine maybe the next one will.