Basically, GW have spent so long writing hundreds of marine books with protagonists doing crazy stupid things, that readers conflate this with the actual skill of normal marines.
And we get power scaling runaway effects in people's expectations of how good a marine should be.
Let's be clear, protagonism is a power that grants infinite capability to the user, not just plot armour. Anyone with protagonism can defeat a titan, destroy a planet, make a dozen berserkers beg for mercy or whatever. Because the plot is specifically being written in a way that allows them to do this.
It's so bad that people will look at Kais from the Fire Warrior game accomplishing crazy feats as unrealistic, but laugh at how awesomely true Malum Caedo's actions are. Or that the harlequins dared to kill custodes, but custodes can pull stupid bs.
GW have spent so long only writing marines as protagonists, that readers think the power of a protagonist is the actual skill of a marine. Marines need to be the fodder enemies in other stories more often, or people are just going to lose any perspective and 40k is going to turn into more of a marinewank fest than it already is.
The only Marines that do better on the Tabletop are Chaos' Black Legion.
In books they die by the hundreds. Heck, in one novel, the Custodian, Valerian, wades through a Black Legion ship filled with CSM. I think he got a few scratches on his armour...
The irony is that regardless of the story, most protagonists have no intrinsic property that makes them capable of the feats they perform.
Luke Skywalker was a force sensitive human - force sensitive humans don't intrinsically have the capacity to blow up a death star in a ship they've never piloted after receiving sword lessons from a guy for a few hours on a long bus ride.
In many cases, even chosen one plots, the ONLY thing that sets the protagonist apart, is that the story is from their point of view. When that happens, your ability to accomplish tasks increases dramatically.
Protagonism doesn't care what your physical capabilities are - if you're weak, you'll use brains to win, if you're dumb, you'll use strength to win, if you're slow you'll use luck to win.
There is no limitation that plot cannot overcome when it's from your perspective.
Lathe Biosas wrote: The only Marines that do better on the Tabletop are Chaos' Black Legion.
In books they die by the hundreds. Heck, in one novel, the Custodian, Valerian, wades through a Black Legion ship filled with CSM. I think he got a few scratches on his armour...
For Chaos Marines every piece of media is Fire Warrior.
A.) I don't particularly want/need marines to get treated as punching bags left and right. They're allowed to be scary, highly competent threats. The problem comes when the scary, highly competent threats from *other factions* get diminished to make the marines look cool. A battle between marines and some aspect warriors should cost both sides a lot of lives.
B.) Thematically, I've kind of headcanon'd that "protagonism" might actually be a supernatural force at work in-universe. As in the primarchs literally had in-universe plot armor and general "protagonism" powers, and some of that rubbed off on their sons. Similar to how phoenix lords canonically bend fate around themselves, I could see astartes having some sort of low-key fate manipulation powers that frequently let them pull off stunts or endure damage they frankly shouldn't be able to. Sort of akin to the less flashy miracles of sororitas.
A.) I don't particularly want/need marines to get treated as punching bags left and right. They're allowed to be scary, highly competent threats. The problem comes when the scary, highly competent threats from *other factions* get diminished to make the marines look cool. A battle between marines and some aspect warriors should cost both sides a lot of lives.
B.) Thematically, I've kind of headcanon'd that "protagonism" might actually be a supernatural force at work in-universe. As in the primarchs literally had in-universe plot armor and general "protagonism" powers, and some of that rubbed off on their sons. Similar to how phoenix lords canonically bend fate around themselves, I could see astartes having some sort of low-key fate manipulation powers that frequently let them pull off stunts or endure damage they frankly shouldn't be able to. Sort of akin to the less flashy miracles of sororitas.
Eh… B feels like a hell of a stretch.
A is fair, though.
A.) I don't particularly want/need marines to get treated as punching bags left and right. They're allowed to be scary, highly competent threats. The problem comes when the scary, highly competent threats from *other factions* get diminished to make the marines look cool. A battle between marines and some aspect warriors should cost both sides a lot of lives.
B.) Thematically, I've kind of headcanon'd that "protagonism" might actually be a supernatural force at work in-universe. As in the primarchs literally had in-universe plot armor and general "protagonism" powers, and some of that rubbed off on their sons. Similar to how phoenix lords canonically bend fate around themselves, I could see astartes having some sort of low-key fate manipulation powers that frequently let them pull off stunts or endure damage they frankly shouldn't be able to. Sort of akin to the less flashy miracles of sororitas.
Marines have had 30 years of books not displaying them in their normal elite status, but in their protagonism uber status so it's already highly imbalanced. They never get to be the opposite, which needs to happen for them to balance out.
If you simply scale them back to competent going forward, 99% of all fiction would still depict them in the protagonist state, it doesn't help anyone coming in reading the fiction to understand relative power scales.
We can't even get one tau fire warrior protagonist to be taken seriously, but people froth at Malum caedo.
Marines need to be mooks in other books to at all start to balance out their depiction. The more their power level yoyos, the harder it is for anyone reading to think that being a protagonist reflects their true skill level. Otherwise, they just come across as always Malum Caedo level and it makes everything look dumb.
Orkeosaurus wrote: Hear hear. The "objective" power level of a space marine is the tabletop, not some book or video game.
A tactical marine is better than most basic infantry but weaker than a lot of elite infantry. That's where they belong.
The trouble is, though, tabletop Marines have been creeping in power substantially in order to make them more like the protagonists in those books.
It's the whole reason basic Marines were given 2 wounds apiece, which resulted in most small arms in the game not being worth the paper they're printed on.
Not to mention the gradual absorption of all the things that were once USPs for xeno factions.
I fully agree. And I want to elaborate a bit on why I think this happened with Marines so much.
It's because they're essentially designed to be protagonists from the word go. They were conceived as a way for players to have "your dudes", painting their own heraldry on whatever local chapter happened to be in the subsector.
They have Power Armour, which means that they can cinematically survive being shot with small arms, something other humans in the setting can't really do. This makes their plot armour into real armour.
Another trope is the hero being wounded but carrying on. That can seem silly if taken to an extreme, but Marines have all these extra clotting factors, extra organs and so on to mean that they're designed to survive dramatic injuries and keep going.
So the attraction to write very "protagonist-y" styles of stories with them is very strong.
Add to that the Primarchs with their stupid personalities, tropey quirks and super powers and you can see why 40K has been turning more and more into a super-hero style universe over time.
I always felt the tabletop was the best corrective to this, because marines on the tabletop were so different to the exaggerations in the stories that I felt it grounded things. I thought they worked pretty well from 2e-5e when I was playing the game a lot. But gradually as the fiction got more popular and fanboys took over the background and rules writing from the original creators it started to change until now Marines are warping the design of the entire game by all having two wounds, causing the lethality to increase across the board to compensate and leading to all sorts of downstream issues for non-marine factions.
But it's my contention that the game has been designed around Marines from at least 3e (the old AP system was clearly designed with them in mind and other factions as an afterthought) and arguably even earlier.
Movie Marines were in White Dwarf just over 20 years ago so I'm not sure this is a new phenomenon.
Maybe its age, but I'm long past Marine hatred and 40k being a marinewank fest is just a multiple decade reality.
I like the fact Marines have gained more wounds and other stats in 40k to separate them from other factions. I can understand some hostility on the grounds that say a Striking Scorpion or the now humbled Necron Warrior was once higher in the food chain - but I don't think pushing marines down with the general inflation of power that occurs with almost every new release was or is good for the game. (I also think, while its a source of bitterness, that if the "idea" of mass Necron Warriors acting as a silver tide is to appear on the table, they need to be relatively low points and therefore not that individually powerful.)
But then perhaps I have strange views on this. I think for instance a Grey Knight or a Custodes should have Daemon Prince level stats - but clearly in turn they couldn't exist as "armies". You'd get to bring one or at a push a small 3 person squad (they'd need to be weaker then) in an an Imperial Force like say assassins. But I can see that GW prefers selling more models to this version of the rules.
But then maybe this is in turn due to being increasingly separate from the lore. I don't really care if GW write some short fluff to the tune of "my dad's bigger than your dad". Because invariably next week it will be reversed. The issue is whether its written well - and usually it isn't.
Its a mystery to me for instance why almost any BL book written about Eldar has to be kind of trash. Then the cry goes up that no one is interested - but this is due to the fact they are bad. Normally everyone gets to be the protagonist of their own story. With Eldar they seem to blunder around like idiots, half of them invariably die, and then maybe they achieve what they wanted but it never really matters.
People say things like "ah, but if the Eldar win such and such it will change the setting" - but in that case don't write books with such crazy stakes. Every random Marine bolter porn book isn't "and lo, we're off to murder Abaddon and end the Long War."
A long time ago, there was a semi-joking article in White Dwarf that presented optional rules for playing "movie marines", space marines that have the stats you'd expect based on their depiction in fiction and/or if you had space marines as an action movie star.
I think the idea of that article was fun, and frankly I find the idea of having alternative stat lines and point values as a fun thing to include for people who want to have fun with it. Like.. having a ten man squad of firstborn space marines that count as 1,000 points seems extreme but it can be its own kind of fun.
Tyel wrote: Movie Marines were in White Dwarf just over 20 years ago so I'm not sure this is a new phenomenon.
Maybe its age, but I'm long past Marine hatred and 40k being a marinewank fest is just a multiple decade reality.
"
Whoops I missed your post, I guess I'm not the only one who remembers this
Tyel wrote: Movie Marines were in White Dwarf just over 20 years ago so I'm not sure this is a new phenomenon.
Maybe its age, but I'm long past Marine hatred and 40k being a marinewank fest is just a multiple decade reality.
I think there's been a gradual change in community perception- one which GW has adopted themselves.
Movie Marines was pretty firmly tongue-in-cheek. All the units were action movie archetypes, you could buy stunt doubles to take your wounds, and it had a little note basically saying that even if your enemy has the same guns, yours get super-stats and theirs don't because you're the star.
But more than once in the last few years I've heard Movie Marines referred to as lore-accurate Marines, with players lamenting that their models on the tabletop should be as powerful as that list. And GW has certainly leaned a little bit in that direction as well with Primaris, giving Marines a second wound, an everything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better approach to their tabletop design. The degree of Marine spank in the fiction reaches dizzying new heights, and now I'm seeing people complain that the tabletop isn't lore-accurate because every Marine ought to be Captain Titus.
Which, frankly, would be fine if the franchise was explicitly meant to a Marine POV power fantasy like the videogames. It's maintaining the pretense that this is a tabletop game about a whole universe, and not just one faction within it, that makes it weird.
I think I'm a bit of two minds with this. I view 40K as a totally over the top setting. When a friend asked me how some marvel heroes would be depicted by 40K rules he made up primarch stats while I was like: Dude, Wolverine is just a Wolfguard Sergeant with lightning claws and feel no pain because 40K is just that insane.
I actually do see Space Marines as super heroes but here comes the big BUT: they're superheroes fighting an army of T-1000's and Tripods. And little green men with pulse rifles that put the space marines' rapid-firing geenade launcher to shame. And eldar swordsman that turn every space Marine into a nice goulash. And Orks that happily fire their panzerfaust point blank range into your face. Or mulch you with a literal wrecking Ball. The best of the best of mankind are just an average Joe for many 40K factions and a guardsmen is little worth more than a grot.
And it's a shame that Primaris rules try to change that and turn them into actual hero Status because it just takes away from all other factions.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: I actually do see Space Marines as super heroes but here comes the big BUT: they're superheroes fighting an army of T-1000's and Tripods. And little green men with pulse rifles that put the space marines' rapid-firing geenade launcher to shame. And eldar swordsman that turn every space Marine into a nice goulash. And Orks that happily fire their panzerfaust point blank range into your face. Or mulch you with a literal wrecking Ball. The best of the best of mankind are just an average Joe for many 40K factions and a guardsmen is little worth more than a grot.
Unfortunately, this is the part that seems to have been completely lost in the last few editions.
A.) I don't particularly want/need marines to get treated as punching bags left and right. They're allowed to be scary, highly competent threats. The problem comes when the scary, highly competent threats from *other factions* get diminished to make the marines look cool. A battle between marines and some aspect warriors should cost both sides a lot of lives.
B.) Thematically, I've kind of headcanon'd that "protagonism" might actually be a supernatural force at work in-universe. As in the primarchs literally had in-universe plot armor and general "protagonism" powers, and some of that rubbed off on their sons. Similar to how phoenix lords canonically bend fate around themselves, I could see astartes having some sort of low-key fate manipulation powers that frequently let them pull off stunts or endure damage they frankly shouldn't be able to. Sort of akin to the less flashy miracles of sororitas.
Marines have had 30 years of books not displaying them in their normal elite status, but in their protagonism uber status so it's already highly imbalanced. They never get to be the opposite, which needs to happen for them to balance out.
Respectfully, this seems silly to me. We don't need to spend the next three decades making marines get suplexed by gretchen and having chapter masters get solo'd by guardsmen for the sake of "balancing things out." Just respect their opponents more going forward, and keep writing books from the PoV of other factions.
Hellebore wrote: What that means is that no other faction gets a protagonist that does what marines do - if their enemies are marines.
That marines appear like protagonists in the books of other factions.
.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. I don't want other factions to be written as Marty Stus the way marines often are. I also don't want marines to be written as Marty Stus. When a marine faces an incubi in a story, I want that to be a dangerous fight for both of them regardless of whose book they're in or who ultimately wins.
If you want to write a story where some aspect warriors or stealth suits or whatever flex on the enemy and get to show off their skills, then don't make marines the (only) antagonist of that story. They don't exist to fill the story niche of getting dunked on, just like aspect warriors and tau elites shouldn't.
I feel like the Shadowsun novel did a pretty good job with this. The main antagonists are Death Guard. Throughout the novel, Shadowsun and pals manage to pull off some mildly silly special ops bad company antics. The protagonists get to show off their skills, dunk on some plague zombies, and generally look cool doing it. They manage to achieve their goals (more or less) despite the odds being against them. But they author never stoops to making the Death Guard seem weak. You always have the impression that a fight involving one of the astartes is a dangerous fight that could get one of your protagonists killed. The marine forces are framed as this inevitable, creeping threat that the tau will be absolutely wrecked by in a head-on fight, so the protagonists have to use speed, stealth, and cunning to figure out a solution.
End result: tau-aligned guys look cool. Death Guard still seem scary.
Or for a loyalist-related conflict, Harrowmaster has some Alpha Legion goign up against a newly-minted primaris chapter. The book does a good job of making the antagonist primaris marines feel powerful and competent, but with reasonable weaknesses that the Alpha Legion can exploit. Which actually serves to make the Alpha Legion look *more* impressive because it lets them show off the cunning that is a big part of their shtick. There are a couple of moments where the main character gets to take down more than his fair share of loyalists, but it's generally framed as the result of daemonic gifts or the advantage of surprise, and you get the impression that those asymmetrical kills are about to get balanced out in a hurry if the protagonist doesn't do something clever.
All those are examples of space marines looking good in other people's books.
There are hundreds of marine led books where they are Marty Stu's, stopping that from now on does nothing to the image of them for readers.
Making marines scary in xenos books is the exact opposite of what you want to see because they're already dumb in their own. It's just doubling up on their protagonist power.
They don't make everyone else look good in marine books. So there's hundreds of books with marine protagonists and everyone else looking stupid.
Hellebore wrote: All those are examples of space marines looking good in other people's books.
There are hundreds of marine led books where they are Marty Stu's, stopping that from now on does nothing to the image of them for readers.
Making marines scary in xenos books is the exact opposite of what you want to see because they're already dumb in their own. It's just doubling up on their protagonist power.
They don't make everyone else look good in marine books. So there's hundreds of books with marine protagonists and everyone else looking stupid.
Reiterating that I say this with respect and don't mean to come off as attacking you... I don't see any point in making marines look like chumps other than some sort of weird meta petty revenge. I'm not interested in reading scenes where Guilliman gets KO'd by a warlock just so I can smugly go, "How do *you* like it," to some hypothetical marine fan I've made up in my head.
By making marines look good in other factions' books, it allowed those stories to use marines to make the protagonists of those books look more impressive. If the Death Guard in the tau book had been a non-threatening cake walk, then it would have robbed the story of its tension and made the eventual outcome feel hollow. If the Alpha Legion could simply have juggled intercessors, it would have made their scheming feel unnecessary and their victory look unimpressive rather than being an amusing victory of brains over brawn.
Those stories use marines as a scary, credible threat so that the protagonists can look more impressive for having taken them on. If the stories had gone out of their way to make the marines look like a low-level threat, it would have made the protagonists less impressive as a result.
If someone wants to ramble on about how ultra cool marines are because they've been binging marine novels, I can just chuckle and go, "Ha. Yeah. The bolter porn gets pretty silly sometimes."
There should definitely be enemies or scenarios where Marines really aren't a threat though. 40ks power levels really do go far beyond your average Tactical Marine. Genestealers should tear them a new hole, for example. Reminder that the entire premise of Space Hulk is Genestealers being extremely credible threats to Terminators in those cramped corridors.
Howling Banshees, ought to easily be their betters in combat. Chaos Terminators ought to mow Marines down in both ranged and cqb, and weapons like Demolisher Cannons ought to be pulverizing them out of cover.
I miss when Space Marines were 2-2.15m tall, a suit of power armour weighed 114kg, and it reduced the chance of injury from smallarms by 50-85%.
Codex Angels of Death, 1996, page 8.
Oktoglokk wrote: I miss when Space Marines were 2-2.15m tall, a suit of power armour weighed 114kg, and it reduced the chance of injury from smallarms by 50-85%.
Codex Angels of Death, 1996, page 8.
I liked it when they like half the height of a Tyanid Warrior.
Oktoglokk wrote: I miss when Space Marines were 2-2.15m tall, a suit of power armour weighed 114kg, and it reduced the chance of injury from smallarms by 50-85%.
Codex Angels of Death, 1996, page 8.
I liked it when they like half the height of a Tyanid Warrior.
Classic, I've still got some of those around somewhere.
I might be in the minority but I don't mind 2 wound marines in the current game (not specifically as primaris, just conceptually). I actually suggested 2 wound marines in 4th ed, partly in response to the proliferation of AP2 weapons, but partly because I liked the idea of them being smaller more elite armies. Then they made custodes making it virtually impossible to scale marines in the game properly without leaving custodes as 10 model armies...
The movie marine army list was way too dumb, but very explicit in its cliches, but a 4th ed marine with 2 wounds and 2 attacks would be threatening, make the army smaller and create a scenario closer to what they should look like. But in addition to that, every other faction's elites needed to be equally represented in other ways, like a banshee being able to kill a 2 wound marine, immortals being tougher, tyranid warriors having more survivability etc.
I will say, I'm not familiar with a difference in whatever special rules might apply between primary and firstborn, the main difference I see is equipment options, and that primaris have two wounds, its not even like they're stronger, tougher, more BS, more WS, or whatever else.
BanjoJohn wrote: I will say, I'm not familiar with a difference in whatever special rules might apply between primary and firstborn, the main difference I see is equipment options, and that primaris have two wounds, its not even like they're stronger, tougher, more BS, more WS, or whatever else.
Both Primaris and OG Marines have 2 Wounds now, so it's not a difference. The only difference statwise is that Primaris have an extra atrack (which now is in the weapon stats).
I honestly feel the marines were perfectly well represented in 3e - vs a guardsman they were far more durable, had a much greater damage output and could be used far more aggressively.
Much as I enjoy his books, Abnett is at least partially responsible for the silliness with Marines these days. He just couldn't hold back from really hyperbolic descriptions.
To be fair, he does have a squad of lightly armed guardsmen kill a whole squad of Chaos Marines with no casualties too, so I guess he just swings wildly in all directions.
I always find the "How Tuff is Marines" threads very funny for that reason because certain marine fans have no restraint in how strong they want their boys to be.
IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.
Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.
Tyran wrote: IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.
Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.
No no no, that's a huge misunderstanding of things. To take a planet you get a force of Marines, plus available assets from local Imperial forces, plus whatever weapon platforms are knocking about in the area, not the least of which is their Sttrike Cruiser with all sorts of ground pounding capabilities, often combined with a high tolerance for colateral damage.
It's not like five dides with bolters show up and superman it.
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Da Boss wrote: I honestly feel the marines were perfectly well represented in 3e - vs a guardsman they were far more durable, had a much greater damage output and could be used far more aggressively.
. . .
I always find the "How Tuff is Marines" threads very funny for that reason because certain marine fans have no restraint in how strong they want their boys to be.
Agree and agree. But can't comment on Abnett so I struck that out, no disrespect.
In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.
The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).
Tyran wrote: IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.
Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.
No no no, that's a huge misunderstanding of things. To take a planet you get a force of Marines, plus available assets from local Imperial forces, plus whatever weapon platforms are knocking about in the area, not the least of which is their Sttrike Cruiser with all sorts of ground pounding capabilities, often combined with a high tolerance for colateral damage.
It's not like five dides with bolters show up and superman it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Da Boss wrote: I honestly feel the marines were perfectly well represented in 3e - vs a guardsman they were far more durable, had a much greater damage output and could be used far more aggressively.
. . .
I always find the "How Tuff is Marines" threads very funny for that reason because certain marine fans have no restraint in how strong they want their boys to be.
Agree and agree. But can't comment on Abnett so I struck that out, no disrespect.
Yeah that makes sense. Combined use of arms and forces to crush foes and take a planet. It kinda makes sense to have like... IG as the main army book, with elites section having space marine squads available, or other imperial assets like SoB, Grey Knights, Deathwatch, etc.
When I started 40k, the background stories always did make it seem like there were not many marines, and there was always a struggle to keep their numbers up, with a slow diminishment of the total available because of marine geneseed not always being able to be recovered from fallen marines. Like... ten years of mutation and training to go from a recruit to a scout/marine. I mean the whole process seemed very innefecient if you could always take the same recruits, and even the recruits who die during the mutation/training, and just raise up more regiments of imperial guard. I mean its not like I think marines should be "supermen" on the battlefield, but there is some justified improvement in stats, I certainly wouldn't mind an increase in points so their numbers are fewer on the battlefield.
Tyran wrote: IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.
Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.
Like I've said in other threads, there are, at most, a few hundred US Navy SEALs in active service at any given time. Yet they have meaningfully contributed to warzones across the world.
The writers just need to remember that Marines are special forces, and use them for special forces missions, not knock-down-drag-out attrition slugfests- that's what the Guard is for. You use Marines for missions that the Guard can't do, where that eliteness is a valuable force-multiplier and not at risk of being casually turned into a smear by your friendly neighborhood Chaos Warhound Titan. 'Conquering a planet' could mean assassinating leadership, extracting VIPs before virus bombing, knocking out anti-space weapons so the Navy can bombard it into compliance, or establishing a beachhead for the Guard. Those are valuable, important capabilities that give Marines reason to exist despite their high individual cost.
They don't need to be able to solo entire armies to be relevant. They just need to be able to do things that nobody else can, and that's achievable without writing them as Mary Sues.
Orkeosaurus wrote: Hear hear. The "objective" power level of a space marine is the tabletop, not some book or video game.
A tactical marine is better than most basic infantry but weaker than a lot of elite infantry. That's where they belong.
Kinda, but I think a more accurate place for them is somewhere in the middle. They are WAY OP in the books, but they are also very underpowered on the table.
I think the time old adage from, what was it 3rd edition, or maybe even earlier? is the most apt one. "Give me one hundred Space Marines, failing that, give me one thousand of any other troop."
That's always felt like the sweet spot to me. Incredibly strong, but nowhere near unassailable or invulnerable. I've always thought that space marines should be pointed, (and to some extent play) like Custodes currently do on the table (just with more ranged capabilities). However, having your basic infantry model be ballpark of 60 points doesn't exactly tend to help move a lot of models, so they are underpowered on the table to the point of having whole companies wiped out in relatively minor engagements so that GW can move more plastic. Ops, my 2k force of 70 marines just got tabled, I guess that company is more-less done for after one fight.
Tyran wrote: IMHO the bigger issue is that there is only a million or so of them and yet they are supposed to be able to meaningfully contribute to warzones all over the galaxy. So a handful need to be able to conquer a planet, a hundred need to be able to wage interstellar war and a thousand of them need to be a very big deal.
Otherwise they are kinda irrelevant and that would be a problem for the poster boys of the setting.
Like I've said in other threads, there are, at most, a few hundred US Navy SEALs in active service at any given time. Yet they have meaningfully contributed to warzones across the world.
The writers just need to remember that Marines are special forces, and use them for special forces missions, not knock-down-drag-out attrition slugfests- that's what the Guard is for. You use Marines for missions that the Guard can't do, where that eliteness is a valuable force-multiplier and not at risk of being casually turned into a smear by your friendly neighborhood Chaos Warhound Titan. 'Conquering a planet' could mean assassinating leadership, extracting VIPs before virus bombing, knocking out anti-space weapons so the Navy can bombard it into compliance, or establishing a beachhead for the Guard. Those are valuable, important capabilities that give Marines reason to exist despite their high individual cost.
They don't need to be able to solo entire armies to be relevant. They just need to be able to do things that nobody else can, and that's achievable without writing them as Mary Sues.
Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human. But to play 10th edition, you need a healthy number of cheap, disposable squads that march out into the open to stand in magic circles, whereas you'd expect your "average" marine force to be relatively few in number and to be hard to draw a bead on. A marine offensive should have them popping up from an unexpected angle (jump packs, drop pods, infiltration, etc.) and then preventing the enemy from lining up their ideal shots through sustained pressure.
Sending a squad of intercessors out into the open so that a trio of leman russes can obliterate them is weird.
In some ways, marines are kind of like harlequins in that they feel like they'd be more at home in something like combat patrol or kill team than in full games of 40k.
-Guardsman- wrote: In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.
The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).
.
Why?
Power Armor is tough, but so is necrodermis and Nid's armored chitin.
A Bolter is a good weapon, but it doesn't literally flay you atom by atom or fire scads of monomolecular shurikens.
That's always felt like the sweet spot to me. Incredibly strong, but nowhere near unassailable or invulnerable. I've always thought that space marines should be pointed, (and to some extent play) like Custodes currently do on the table (just with more ranged capabilities). However, having your basic infantry model be ballpark of 60 points doesn't exactly tend to help move a lot of models, so they are underpowered on the table to the point of having whole companies wiped out in relatively minor engagements so that GW can move more plastic. Ops, my 2k force of 70 marines just got tabled, I guess that company is more-less done for after one fight.
100% this. Part of why custodes bug me as an army is that it feels like they're basically occupying the niche that marines *should be* occupying. That's not necessarily to say that I want marines to have custodes tier stats, but I think giving them a custodes level price tag and then skill-based abilities that let them punch above their weight would be very fluffy.
It really feels like marines are cursed to not feel like marines on the table because they're too popular to be designed around a lower model count. Then again, 3-man primaris units were kind of a move in the right direction?
Wyldhunt wrote:Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human. But to play 10th edition, you need a healthy number of cheap, disposable squads that march out into the open to stand in magic circles, whereas you'd expect your "average" marine force to be relatively few in number and to be hard to draw a bead on. A marine offensive should have them popping up from an unexpected angle (jump packs, drop pods, infiltration, etc.) and then preventing the enemy from lining up their ideal shots through sustained pressure.
Sending a squad of intercessors out into the open so that a trio of leman russes can obliterate them is weird.
In some ways, marines are kind of like harlequins in that they feel like they'd be more at home in something like combat patrol or kill team than in full games of 40k.
I find Marines 'work' in Epic: Armageddon, despite the significantly greater scale of that game, because it lets them lean into the stuff they're supposed to be good at. A well-commanded Marine army can run rings around the Guard or Orks, staying out of reach of the biggest and scariest stuff, applying overwhelming force to a narrow frontage.
This is because:
1. E:A has a command rating mechanic to model C&C, making Marines actually better-coordinated and able to operate at a higher tempo.
2. E:A has boards the same size as 40K, but much lower typical ranges, so maneuver is essential to being able to actually shoot things.
3. Marines get organic transport in the form of army-wide Rhinos, giving them high operational mobility.
4. Marines are especially resilient to morale effects, which makes them much harder to pin down with fire.
A 40K game is a cage match where transports are really just pillboxes because the mobility is superfluous, ranges are so long that the only way to get away from a Marine-mulching superheavy is to hide out of LOS, everyone else is functionally just as fearlessly willing to fight to the death, and nonexistent C&C means a Tactical Marine and an Ork Nob are functionally equivalent. Of course they aren't going to feel 'right' in that environment. If you have a modern combat game where a company of SEALs deploys 100yds away from a platoon of T90s I bet they won't feel much like SEALs, either.
There's a disconnect between what Marines are supposed to be, and what 40K actually supports through its rules and general design.
A 40K game is a cage match where transports are really just pillboxes because the mobility is superfluous.
Not really? Transports are more important than they've been since 8th came around and removed the AV rules.
Nah. I agree with catbarf's sentiment here. For my (index) eldar, wave serpents almost end up slowing my units down. Their base movement is higher than that of my infantry, but having to fly up and back down to clear a wall means it's often faster to just disembark the infantry and let them jog forward rather than moving the transport and disembarking out of it. In effect, wave serpents have basically just been bunkers that I can launch infantry units out of. Similarly, my drukhari don't really use their raiders and venoms as a way to close the gap with the enemy (unless I'm using the pounce strat from Sky Splinter Assault); they use venoms to hide from return fire by disembarking and then re-embarking around a corner in the fight phase, and they use raiders as a way to not get shot/a way to hand out Lance. Or they just shoot out of the transport, but the way that works in 10th is that the embarked squad is essentially just extra guns for the transport. It's pretty rare that you zip a raider forward and then disembark in the same turn unless you're using an assault-out-of-disembark strat.
In my experience, transports this edition are seldom useful for their mobility. They're useful because they either have a special ability to buff or protect their passengers, or because they're just a good gunboat for their points. No one is doing a rhino rush this edition because for the points you could just take more marines.
Heck, sometimes transports are active liabilities. Starting the turn in a wave serpent means my (index) farseer can't fortune her friends, for instance.
Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human.
In fairness, though, you could say that about a lot of armies.
Why are Dark Eldar launching a raid against a company of Leman Russ tanks and artillery?
Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?
Well put. I do think the tabletop kind of does marines a disservice in this regard. Especially in higher point games. post-heresy marines really shouldn't be lining up and marching towards enemy gunlines. They don't have the numbers for that, and it's kind of a waste of their skills even if they are significantly more durable than a regular human.
In fairness, though, you could say that about a lot of armies.
Why are Dark Eldar launching a raid against a company of Leman Russ tanks and artillery?
Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?
Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.
But I do think it applies to marines as well for the reasons mentioned above. If you squint and pretend custodes are marine-sized/shaped, the playstyle of custodes is probably closer to what the fluff would lead you to expect of marines than the actual playstyle(s) allowed by the marine rules. Low model count backed up by a couple of walkers and tanks. Durable against incoming damage. Hits hard. Feels every loss.
Then again, the existence/nature of custodes is such that custodes are kind of doomed to feel like more marine-y marines in a lot of ways.
Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?
Probably there is a buried Chaos artefact somewhere nearby.
That's literally the lore of the first part of Shadowbrink, in which the Grey Knights were quarantining an indestructible warp archeotect in the path of Hive Fleet Leviathan.
Wyldhunt wrote: Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.
Seems reasonable enough to me that they have to do "something" on objectives, or why are they on the battlefield at all?
But I was going to say I agree with you on transports. The whole "jump out, have your turn, jump back in via various mechanisms to avoid being shot" feels mega-gamey. It might make sense for 40k "as a game", but I don't think its a good feeling of what a mechanised force actually would be like.
I guess I don't like anything that makes the turn-based nature of 40k feel explicit. Models aren't actually trapped in stasis for 10 seconds or whatever when the other player is taking their turn.
-Guardsman- wrote: In my view, a single Space Marine in full battle gear is roughly equivalent to a five-man Militarum Tempestus squad in fluff terms. Like any other soldiers, they are trained to fight as squads, so a squad of five Marines is more than the sum of its parts.
The hardware (power armor, bolter and so on) is a huge part of what makes Marines effective, and some of it will need recharging, reloading or maintenance eventually. Realistically, a bolter shell (an egg-sized explosive bullet) should probably be S6, AP -2, D2, while power armor should provide a 2+ save. But that would result in an army with a much too low model count to be profitable for GW (or fun to play).
.
Why?
Power Armor is tough, but so is necrodermis and Nid's armored chitin.
A Bolter is a good weapon, but it doesn't literally flay you atom by atom or fire scads of monomolecular shurikens.
Bolters and power armor are primitive trash compared to the tech Eldar and Necrons are said to have. Or even a lot of what the Tau and Squats have.
This thread completely proves Hellebore's point. How is it that this super invulnerable power armor gets pierced by lasguns when it's being worn by a Chaos Marine? Easy: that's what power armor is when it isn't a plot device for marinewank. It's good armor but it doesn't make you invulnerable even to basic small arms. Your perception of it is skewed because Brother Maincharacter never dies while wearing it in his book. Commissar Gaunt never gets his head blown off in his book either, that doesn't mean he's unkillable.
In fact if you want to see what a de-protagonized Space Marine is like, it's pretty much a Chaos Marine as portrayed in a standard Imperial PoV novel. A dangerous enemy but one that can still be killed by a few regular humans with standard-issue guns and some luck. Chaos Marines are explicitly equal or superior to Space Marines in equipment and fighting experience, Helllebore's "protagonism" is the only difference in their portrayal. And the difference in their portrayal is huge, even absurd.
Wyldhunt wrote: If you squint and pretend custodes are marine-sized/shaped, the playstyle of custodes is probably closer to what the fluff would lead you to expect of marines than the actual playstyle(s) allowed by the marine rules. Low model count backed up by a couple of walkers and tanks. Durable against incoming damage. Hits hard. Feels every loss.
I think the solution there is to play smaller battles. Cramming in 2k point armies on a shrunken tabletop isn't doing the lore any favors for anybody.
But also, when you say "durability" we have to put that into context. Durable against what? when your opponents are fielding Reaper Missile Launchers, Hive Tyrants, Battle Cannons, Ion Blasters etc, Marines should be dying.
In fact if you want to see what a de-protagonized Space Marine is like, it's pretty much a Chaos Marine as portrayed in a standard Imperial PoV novel. A dangerous enemy but one that can still be killed by a few regular humans with standard-issue guns and some luck. Chaos Marines are explicitly equal or superior to Space Marines in equipment and fighting experience, Helllebore's "protagonism" is the only difference in their portrayal. And the difference in their portrayal is huge, even absurd.
Wyldhunt wrote: Sure. 40k's tabletop experience probably does a bad job of representing a lot of armies' fluff. Sending my space elves to stand around on magic circles definitely feels weird.
Seems reasonable enough to me that they have to do "something" on objectives, or why are they on the battlefield at all?
The weird part is that, when you look at the battlefield at the end of the game and see that your opponent is nearly tabled, it feels like whatever you're doing on those objectives probably could have waited five minutes for you to wrap up the battle first. We need to deploy some psychic bobble in this location to allow the seers to scan for a mcguffin? Cool. Tell the seers to wait until we've killed the last of these orks first.
While the end of game scoring made for a much worse game, it did at least have this going for it. Walking onto objectives at the end of the game once the threat was largely dealt with felt a lot more in-character than throwing precious guardians into the grinder to plant a flag or whatever.
But I was going to say I agree with you on transports. The whole "jump out, have your turn, jump back in via various mechanisms to avoid being shot" feels mega-gamey. It might make sense for 40k "as a game", but I don't think its a good feeling of what a mechanised force actually would be like.
I guess I don't like anything that makes the turn-based nature of 40k feel explicit. Models aren't actually trapped in stasis for 10 seconds or whatever when the other player is taking their turn.
Yeah. Like, venoms just feel like a really roundabout way of giving a unit move-shoot-move. Which would actually make venoms feel super mobile and agile and like they're good at shooting on the move. A lot of the more recent rules work better as a game, but some of the flavor/feel of armies has kind of been lost in the transition. So now instead of being able to give my whole eldar army battle focus or jetbike assault moves, we get pseudo strats that only benefit one unit per turn, etc. Instead of drukhari jetbikes hurting things as they turbo boost past, they're only allowed to hurt enemies if they do a normal move. Etc.
Orkeosaurus wrote:
This thread completely proves Hellebore's point. How is it that this super invulnerable power armor gets pierced by lasguns when it's being worn by a Chaos Marine? Easy: that's what power armor is when it isn't a plot device for marinewank. It's good armor but it doesn't make you invulnerable even to basic small arms. Your perception of it is skewed because Brother Maincharacter never dies while wearing it in his book. Commissar Gaunt never gets his head blown off in his book either, that doesn't mean he's unkillable.
In fact if you want to see what a de-protagonized Space Marine is like, it's pretty much a Chaos Marine as portrayed in a standard Imperial PoV novel. A dangerous enemy but one that can still be killed by a few regular humans with standard-issue guns and some luck. Chaos Marines are explicitly equal or superior to Space Marines in equipment and fighting experience, Helllebore's "protagonism" is the only difference in their portrayal. And the difference in their portrayal is huge, even absurd.
Mostly agree with this. While I can definitely think of examples of more "tame" marine stories where lasguns are presented as a credible threat to power armor marines, the stories where that's *not* the case are where the problem lies. Lasguns into power armor should be *almost* nothing at first. It's once you've chipped away at the ceramite enough to leave the armor weak overall and expose vulnerable spots that the wearer has to start worrying. And lucky shots to the eye are always a concern even if they're unlikely. In the better marine books (usually chaos marine books), this is framed as marines being durable *enough* that they can throw themselves into a few squads of lasgun humans relatively safely, but they recognize that doing so over and over again is going to get them killed eventually. So the armor becomes a tool for letting them pull off gutsy lightning attacks and dangerous scalpel missions with a relatively high success rate. You shouldn't be lining a wall of marines up across from the enemy Napoleon style and face tanking thousands of lasbolts.
Insectum7 wrote:
Wyldhunt wrote: If you squint and pretend custodes are marine-sized/shaped, the playstyle of custodes is probably closer to what the fluff would lead you to expect of marines than the actual playstyle(s) allowed by the marine rules. Low model count backed up by a couple of walkers and tanks. Durable against incoming damage. Hits hard. Feels every loss.
I think the solution there is to play smaller battles. Cramming in 2k point armies on a shrunken tabletop isn't doing the lore any favors for anybody.
Totally. 1k-1500 point games tend to feel a lot more fluffy and give enough space on the table for maneuvering and weapon ranges to matter.
But also, when you say "durability" we have to put that into context. Durable against what? when your opponents are fielding Reaper Missile Launchers, Hive Tyrants, Battle Cannons, Ion Blasters etc, Marines should be dying.
Yeah. This is kind of getting into the "people build lists to kill marines" issue. But like, if I shoot a reaper launcher at a marine, the marine feels kind of squishy. A squad of reapers is going to be permanently removing a squad of marines from the galaxy after a couple volleys. But those same reapers shooting into custodes? They'll still chip away at the custodes reasonably quickly for their points, but the custodes aren't getting obliterated by each failed save. The end result is that custodes *feel* durable while marines only really *feel* durable against D1 weapons.
vipoid wrote:Why are Grey Knights fighting battles with absolutely no daemonic presence to speak of?
I remember when playing Grey Knights entitled your opponent to take a Greater Daemon possessing one of their HQ choices.
GW used to put some effort into this.
Orkeosaurus wrote:Bolters and power armor are primitive trash compared to the tech Eldar and Necrons are said to have. Or even a lot of what the Tau and Squats have.
Which is interesting if you think about it: Imperial weapons are primitive compared to some of these factions. Imperial vehicles are primitive. Imperial spacecraft are primitive. Imperial relics of the DAoT at best rival the sorts of wonders these high-tech factions employ on a regular basis.
But the Imperium can also produce armor which is nigh-impervious to those races' weapons, and bio-engineered wearers that beat the crap out of entire armies? No longer inferior, not even equal, but actually delivering warriors who are flat-out superior to the strongest advances of those elder races?
Wyldhunt wrote: his is kind of getting into the "people build lists to kill marines" issue. But like, if I shoot a reaper launcher at a marine, the marine feels kind of squishy. A squad of reapers is going to be permanently removing a squad of marines from the galaxy after a couple volleys. But those same reapers shooting into custodes? They'll still chip away at the custodes reasonably quickly for their points, but the custodes aren't getting obliterated by each failed save. The end result is that custodes *feel* durable while marines only really *feel* durable against D1 weapons.
Right, but then the inevitable response is that some people say "well Marines should *feel better*" and suggest that Marines should be more survivable vs. Reaper Launchers etc. Which they shouldn't.
That or people play Space Marine 2 and think every Marine should be as Titus is portrayed, fogetting that numerous Marines are killed in various cutscenes by various opponents.
An aspect of marine survivability that's just not represented on the tabletop is their method of warfare. The same is true of Eldar and other armies, they don't tend to die in the droves you see on the table.
Because no one goes to war in a line against a force of equal arms with a perfectly balanced force composition.
A reaper launcher should completely kill a marine, but the chances of marines actually inserting into a battle line where a squad of reapers are, is very small. Similarly, a squad of Eldar guardians should be killed by a wall of bolter fire, but the chances of their farseers dropping them into a battle like that is really small.
Marine survival comes in large part because their day job 90% of the time is not being in front of anti marine guns, rather than because they can bounce battle cannon shells off their pecs.
The problem is that every army would be attempting to fight a battle on the most favourable of terms for themselves, so Eldar would be ambushing marine HQs without their support, while marines would be drop podding on a tau command bunker. 90% of all battles fought by every army would be against Orks or Tyranids. The few times marines do meet reapers they would be annihilated. The few times Eldar are caught in a surprise assault by Marines they might lose.
And at no time would any army actually be fighting with anything but overwhelming force against smaller enemy formations.
Every army suffers from the 1 in a million chance battle that happens 9 times out of 10 on the table top.
I think the game used to have Marine durability bang on.
50% chance to hit, 33% chance to wound, 33% chance to fail the save.
It took 18 lasgun shots to down a marine. That meant pretty much an entire squad at close range to kill a single marine with shooting. At longer ranges it took two squads firing to bring down a single marine.
But people felt that wasn't an accurate level of toughness and wanted more?
Because the real issue with marine durability was never the lasguns - it's the squad weapons. And in a game where Marines are the most popular choice of army, everyone was tooling their armies to take down marines. So you took plasma guns on your guys who could take them.
50% chance to hit, 83% chance to wound, no save. Now your single plasma gunner has a similar damage output to the entire rest of the squad. Slap a plasma pistol on your Sarge and you're out damaging the squad. That's where the feels bad comes from.
And now that marines have 2 wounds, the same thing is true. People take the guns that are the best at chewing through two wound models, so 2 wounds doesn't feel like 2 wounds.
I used to play Horde Orks. If every marine army I fought had nothing but heavy bolters, flamers and whirlwinds I'd have been feeling pretty hard done by, too.
^There are many issues creating the "feels bad", but one of the most obvious has to be the price and availability of the squad weapons. This is where things really started to fail in 5th edition, because like you say Marines only dropping after 18 Lasgun shots is fine, and even that squad weapon kill ratio should be fine. But when you can start deploying whole units of "squad weapon scale" firepower without pricing them well or limiting their number in other ways, you get major problems surfacing.
Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.
Hellebore wrote: Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.
I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.
I'm probably just finding myself wishing for more game modes balanced around 500-1000 points again.
Hellebore wrote: Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
Ah, averages.... Let's not tell my opponent from this afternoon any of that.
Hellebore wrote: Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.
I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.
I'm probably just finding myself wishing for more game modes balanced around 500-1000 points again.
It is and always has been a lethality issue. Even in 3rd ed GW took way past release to figure out that a Terminator's 2+ save wasn't worth the paper it's written on. The fix was an invulnerable save that helped fairly reasonably against AP2 weapons, but Terminators were still in the position that you paid 40 points for a model that was instead brought downed with volume of fire easily enough. That problem extended to power armored Marines eventually because GW never got all balance issues worked out to begin with and pressure to increase army sizes to sell more models translated to better means of removing models to keep game time down. As standouts assault cannons got a silly boost in 4th ed, devourers on monstrous creatures became problematic and the with Eldar jetbikes all equipping scatter lasers at the latest the proliferation of one size fits all solutions was cemented.
The force organization chart was already insufficient at keeping issues with overwhelming fire power at bay when the second 3rd ed Chaos Marine codex released, only suffered more with alternate force organizations becoming more common before and ally options adding issues after 6th ed, and was effectively gone by 8th ed. All while units received ever more special and heavy weapon options and super heavies were introduced to regular games.
Survivability was an issue reserved to a select few units enhanced by buff stacking or able to game specific rules like no one else. Ludicrous survivability only existed because a fix for other issues elevated a few units in ways the rules designers didn't intend.
The issue with two wounds on Marines decreasing the viability of small arms compared to special and heavy weapons is that the overall design goals didn't change to account for this shift. GW still wanted to sell Marines in large quantities and game length still needed to be kept in check, so all two wounds on Marines achieved was a matching increase in D2 weapons in the game. It's the same thinking that got us mortal wounds. Weapons are supposed to feel effective, so with 8th ed a great many got AP -1 or better. Now armor becomes less useful, so a lot of units get invulnerable saves to make up for it. Now weapons don't do enough damage anymore, so we need damage that circumvents invulnerable saves. And from there it didn't take long to get special saves that work against mortal wounds. Another example is how they improved cover saves in 5th ed and then handed out ignores cover weapons like candy to fight it instead of dialing back the original change.
This is one of the basic flaws GW builds into their games. For every way of mitigation, immediately or down the line they implement a way to mitigate the mitigation. And then a mitigation of the mitigation of the mitigation, until they've created a multi-layered system that creates haves and have-nots almost at random. Under such conditions it's basically impossible to get Marines to feel right. They either over-perform against one group of weapons or under-perform against another because getting Marine survivability right is neither the design goal nor something the system is built around but a tacked on fix to a specific problem of a badly cobbled together system whose primary goal is to sell more Marines.
It is also a scale issue, the game has grown to include way more tanks and heavy artillery and even super heavy vehicles.
Even lore wise Marine's durability is mostly limited to resistance against small firearms, not anti-tank weaponry. And I would say the tabletop is actually quite lore accurate when it comes to what happens to a Space Marine squad that finds themselves staring down the barrel of an Exocrine's bio-plasmic cannon: they die
I mean. Yeah, that and the fact they seemed to have been the ''And they shall know no downsides'' faction, both in fictions and to a lesser extend, the TT (immunities to a few things that other factions had to deal with)
There's a reason a lot of the game stats =/= real lore comes from the Space Marine player side, from what I gathered, it seemed even more obvious with SM2 and Boltgun, there seems very little acknowledgement that those aren't lore accurate in favor of gameplay.
Hellebore wrote: Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.
I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.
It's an issue because 2W Marines mean that most small-arms aren't worth the paper they're printed on considering they're inefficient and ineffective against the most ubiquitous infantry in the entire game.
If Marine armies predominantly consisted of guardsmen with just a small number of Marines at the centre, it would be fine. But when most armies have no guard-equivalent models, then firing small-arms just turns into a time-wasting mechanic.
It's an issue because 2W Marines mean that most small-arms aren't worth the paper they're printed on considering they're inefficient and ineffective against the most ubiquitous infantry in the entire game.
If Marine armies predominantly consisted of guardsmen with just a small number of Marines at the centre, it would be fine. But when most armies have no guard-equivalent models, then firing small-arms just turns into a time-wasting mechanic.
What's more ridiculous is we can remove the "lesser troops" from the analysis and just look at Marines themselves. How long does it take a Marine to kill a Marine?
Boltgun/Fists: .66x.5x.33 = .1 so 20 shots/attacks to kill a Marine. So it takes 10 Tactical Marines rapid firing with Boltguns to down a Marine, or Or 10 Tactical Marines to subdue one Marine in close combat. Does that make any sense?
Marines should have never gone to two wounds. The game should have been re-tuned to make 1w Marines work well.
in the end, the underlying problem is that the game is supposed to be fair and every army balanced. But Marines and most 'smart' 40k armies would never fight fair, nor is that any modern military's strategy.
Marines aren't survivable when their enemy is balanced, which is precisely why their greatest weapon is as a force multiplier applied to very specific locations/enemy forces.
The anti marine guns are over represented in armies because of the players, not the setting. 99% of all guard squads would be equipped with grenade launchers, heavy bolters and flamers. Their support weapons will all be anti-ork weapons.
Which is why a marine army sent to chastise a rebellious guard commander is likely to demolish them - they aren't going to be equipped with that many anti marine guns.
Marines are caught between a few contradictory forces of GW's own making:
They shouldn't really be an army in their own right, but a detachment deployed alongside the guard to target specific locations on the battlefield before pulling out. Marines shouldn't stick around to die in pointless last stands. That's what the guard are for.
If the army is mostly guard, then the meta shifts to anti guard weapons and marines become more survivable by default.
Every army is designed to be balanced but also up to some player choice, so every army by default maximises anti marine weapons due to their ubiquity.
Every army has its own version of survivability - orks and nids use numbers, so the counter is high shot weapons. Eldar... should be using movement, but I've yet to see them not die in droves so unsure, marines toughness so you go for higher hitting weapons. Fewer numbers is balanced by proportionally fewer weapons that can threaten them.
GW would either have to create different points costs for units depending on the enemy they face - reapers more expensive against marines, less against orks, or prevent you optimising your unit load outs to be explicitly anti marine.
The problem with the latter one is that marines fight each other so much that they have to be able to kill them, which is where the marine toughness vs marine lethality treadmill comes in.
I do not expect GW to ever fix these, because the solutions are not profit positive.
Hellebore wrote: Technically marines are now even more resistant to lasguns than they used to be.
It's still 50/33/33, but now with 2 wounds it takes 36 lasgun shots to kill a marine.
They've moved to require more special weapons in the armies, with the standard rifle being an incidental attack. Or special detachment rules or strategems that change the probabilities.
The game now needs these add ons to make whole squads viable. Lasguns gaining lethal hits in one guard detachment changes the wound probability.
I don't know. Is that more of a survivability issue, or a game scale/points issue? I feel like taking down a couple marines a turn with lasguns and then having your special weapons be the workhorses in that matchup is fine. Especially if lasguns are reasonably effective against, say, a gaunt horde. The issue is when there are 50-100 marine bodies that you have to get through that you really feel the pressure to lean into special weapons. But if you're only up against, say, 20 marines, killing a couple marines a turn with all your lasguns might be alright.
It's an issue because 2W Marines mean that most small-arms aren't worth the paper they're printed on considering they're inefficient and ineffective against the most ubiquitous infantry in the entire game.
If Marine armies predominantly consisted of guardsmen with just a small number of Marines at the centre, it would be fine. But when most armies have no guard-equivalent models, then firing small-arms just turns into a time-wasting mechanic.
This is the difference between "the game" and "the meta" in literally every table top game out there. The game as its designed holistically isn't the same as the subset of the game that players encounter on the table. The first order meta is always what is effective against the average, but what actually breaks the game is usually something that beats that first order meta that the playerbase entrenches themselves in. What's in the game and what's on the table is the primary reason developers don't get it right until after its in players' hands.
The anti marine guns are over represented in armies because of the players, not the setting. 99% of all guard squads would be equipped with grenade launchers, heavy bolters and flamers. Their support weapons will all be anti-ork weapons.
Minor point, but this is actually not true. In the 3rd or 4th ed Guard dex it lists "favored weapons" alongside various examples of Regiments, and some regiments feature Plasmaguns as a "favored weapon."
The anti marine guns are over represented in armies because of the players, not the setting. 99% of all guard squads would be equipped with grenade launchers, heavy bolters and flamers. Their support weapons will all be anti-ork weapons.
Minor point, but this is actually not true. In the 3rd or 4th ed Guard dex it lists "favored weapons" alongside various examples of Regiments, and some regiments feature Plasmaguns as a "favored weapon."
80% then. Plasma is also supposed to be relatively rare, even if some regiments favour it. iirc a meltagun would be more common than a plasma gun, which is far less effective at killing marines from range. I would imagine though that even those regiments with favoured weapons would change them if they encountered a different enemy.
That's another factor that the game can't illustrate - the shifting gear of war. A plasma favoured regiment might find itself up against orks, instead of heavier armoured enemies they'd normally be deployed against (you would imagine...) so the first few battles would be inefficient because of those guns. But they'd get resupplied from their stores and pull out the flamers etc instead, so the latter battles would be different. That might happen in reverse, but the anti marine guns tend to be rarer in general, so it would be harder for an anti ork guard regiment to resupply comprehensively to kill marines if they came up against them.
A.) I don't particularly want/need marines to get treated as punching bags left and right. They're allowed to be scary, highly competent threats. The problem comes when the scary, highly competent threats from *other factions* get diminished to make the marines look cool. A battle between marines and some aspect warriors should cost both sides a lot of lives.
B.) Thematically, I've kind of headcanon'd that "protagonism" might actually be a supernatural force at work in-universe. As in the primarchs literally had in-universe plot armor and general "protagonism" powers, and some of that rubbed off on their sons. Similar to how phoenix lords canonically bend fate around themselves, I could see astartes having some sort of low-key fate manipulation powers that frequently let them pull off stunts or endure damage they frankly shouldn't be able to. Sort of akin to the less flashy miracles of sororitas.
I figure there are two extremes. The people who think Tactical Marine #9959203 of the Generic Marine Chapter is Marneus Calgar level powerful - the story is about Heroic Dude Marine because Heroic Dude Marine is going to have both the skills, and the fate/luck to be in the place to do the thing that makes him Heroic. The flipside of that coin are the people who want to tell you Delta Force are just average because they're not Chuck Norris.
The anti marine guns are over represented in armies because of the players, not the setting. 99% of all guard squads would be equipped with grenade launchers, heavy bolters and flamers. Their support weapons will all be anti-ork weapons.
Minor point, but this is actually not true. In the 3rd or 4th ed Guard dex it lists "favored weapons" alongside various examples of Regiments, and some regiments feature Plasmaguns as a "favored weapon."
80% then. Plasma is also supposed to be relatively rare, even if some regiments favour it. iirc a meltagun would be more common than a plasma gun, which is far less effective at killing marines from range. I would imagine though that even those regiments with favoured weapons would change them if they encountered a different enemy.
That's another factor that the game can't illustrate - the shifting gear of war. A plasma favoured regiment might find itself up against orks, instead of heavier armoured enemies they'd normally be deployed against (you would imagine...) so the first few battles would be inefficient because of those guns. But they'd get resupplied from their stores and pull out the flamers etc instead, so the latter battles would be different. That might happen in reverse, but the anti marine guns tend to be rarer in general, so it would be harder for an anti ork guard regiment to resupply comprehensively to kill marines if they came up against them.
I think the weapon swapping is one solution, but Imaybe a more realistic notion is that the regiment doesn't switch its weapons out because they've already been fighting against orks with their plasma guns for hundreds of years. The doctrines they may have adopted might be architected to assume other units woukd do the flame work instead, like Sentinels with heavy flamers, Hellhounds, or just take a different route entirely and favor taking more heavy weapons platoons with heavy bolters than your average regiment.
A thought occurs. On the difference between Imperial Astartes, and Chaos Astartes.
Typically, due to their deployment preference and expertise, one doesn’t often get the chance to load lump with appropriate weapons when fighting Imperial Astartes. They favour incredibly rapid strikes, aiming to annihilate anything in the mission area, before making themselves scarce, or at least moving on rapidly down your line.
This necessitates them striking against already deployed troops and equipment, and with a speed which makes reinforcing that specific area unlikely.
Chaos Astartes though fight differently. Their tactics (use of Cultists, summoning Daemons) is more the combined arms of the Great Crusade, with many elements of the available forces acting more or less in concert. And for a more sustained period. Sieges, invasions, piracy etc.
So one could load up on Plasma and other weapons pretty decent at slaying Astartes. But you can’t realistically 3rd Ed Min-Man Jeenyus your forces, as you leave yourself then comparatively poorly equipped against the hordes of Cultists and that.
The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
The Astartes film really shows how it should be, though you do have to think that any enemy prepared for the marines would have AT weapons ready and poised to strike. 99 weapons/crew destroyed is worth if it to end a single SM.
As for Lore and the presence of high threat weapons among the foe?
That’s where any Astartes training and equipment comes in handy. Whilst not represented on the board, that power armour is doing more than just protecting. It’s identifying and categorising threats. It’s working out potential firing solutions. It’s delivering data and analysis of said data at a rate a mere smelly hooman couldn’t do much with.
But an Astartes? They’d have the weapons identified, and where possible* a firing solution on the bearer(s) in a very short space of time. Plasma Gunner is all fine and well until they’ve no face, chest, limbs etc.
*Not always going to be possible, of course. But just knowing it’s there, combined with a Marines’ reactions and training helps mitigate its presence, as even if you can’t remove it as a threat straight away, you can use the same information to stay out of likely line of fire and that.
The Space Marines remind me of the way Jedi are handled in the Star Wars franchise.
Some are the ultimate badasses, able to mow through legions of enemies without breaking a sweat, and others (see Attack of the Clones) die quickly to show how dangerous the situation is (aka to show how more badass our heroes are).
RustyNumber wrote: The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
To be honest, that level of invulnerability makes me less interested in SMs, rather than more interested.
RustyNumber wrote: The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
So basically Necrons. Because Necrons are also supposed to be an immovable legion of metal that fire their weapons with incredibly accuracy and efficiency.
What marines are supposed to be are shock troops that hit key personnel and installations deep in enemy territory and then withdraw before the enemy can retaliate with enough force to take them down. It's just that GW also tries to make them like Imperial Guard and have them fight enemies en masse on open ground. Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that they are, you know, supposed to be incredibly rare and hard to replace.
Necrons can get away with doing that because they can't be permanently killed unless you blow up their planet wide tomb complex. Marines don't have that luxury.
GW should have really given them chapter serf auxiliary forces when they expanded the game from a skirmish level to a company level game. I think that's where most of the disconnect comes from. The game was a lot smaller in RT and 2nd ed, iirc.
RustyNumber wrote: The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
To be honest, that level of invulnerability makes me less interested in SMs, rather than more interested.
They don't have any more or less invulnerability than any one/thing else as a protagonist. That scene is going to show up in one way or another all the time anyway. Its the "baseline setter". When the protagonist is "elite" they chew through the "chaff" to reset the "danger zone" expecations. When the Protagonist is a normal dude, its in there to hype the heroism levels of a "mere mortal" fighting with the gods as some chaos space marines, or lictors, or whatever else just snuff NPCs in blink of an eye.
The life of an Astartes, from the moment they’re accepted as a candidate, is little but training and action. Outside of a spectacular death in combat, they seem to be functionally immortal. Indeed whilst Dante is noted as being incredibly old, I’m not aware of an Astartes dying from old age.
But even for comparatively young Astartes? Say, 50-60 years old? They’ve training and experience far in advance of the vast majority of the Imperial Guard. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Does it make Veteran Guardsman look like absolute noobs and weekend warriors? Not as such I’d say. But comparatively, the difference is going to be appreciable. What is a desperate but winnable situation for a Veteran Guardsman, by their nature and preference, is Just Another Tuesday for a Marine.
RustyNumber wrote: The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
To be honest, that level of invulnerability makes me less interested in SMs, rather than more interested.
Agree.
The interesting thing about the Astartes animation is that it'l makes the Astarts look like amazing badasses, but without them actually being as nuts as some want to believe. Five Astartes board a ship, rarely fight more than a handful of low quality defenders at a time, and then struggle to take out some low level psykers. And then some warp artifact eats them. The Astartes look great doing it, and show their profficiency in combat against lesser foes, but they're not actually tanking any serious firepower or fighting serious threats.
In the Astartes animation they are also figthing cultists, and poorly equipped ones while at it. Poor people cultists and rebels are both an extremely common enemy for SM in the lore, and so utterly irrelevant they barely have TT representation.
Every playable race in the game has better weapons than lasguns. Ork Shootas? better than lasguns. Eldar Catapults? better than lasguns? Tyranid Fleshborers? better than lasguns.
So the whole "they are impervious to lasguns and modern firearms", while cool on paper, pretty much irrelevant against any other playable faction, even before said faction starts bringing their actual big guns.
RustyNumber wrote: The idea of a handful of SMs being able to absolutely demolish a defensive line of (for relatability's sake) guardsmen is pretty awesome. When you assume they have almost flawless marksmanship with every single round within say a 200m range, are functionally immune to anything smaller than a light anti-tank cannon round, have advanced coms/intel and don't fatigue or slow down. You can see why against an unprepared enemy they'd just cause a complete rout. Let alone without having a Whirlwind in support, which let's be honest should be firing a cluster of tactical nuke size explosives or somesuch. It's a bit funny to think of SMs as basically walking auto-turrets but that's functionally what they are. Imagine how terrifying it would be to have 10ft of armour walking, aiming and firing repeatedly to almost perfect effect nonstop.
To be honest, that level of invulnerability makes me less interested in SMs, rather than more interested.
Agree.
The interesting thing about the Astartes animation is that it'l makes the Astarts look like amazing badasses, but without them actually being as nuts as some want to believe. Five Astartes board a ship, rarely fight more than a handful of low quality defenders at a time, and then struggle to take out some low level psykers. And then some warp artifact eats them. The Astartes look great doing it, and show their profficiency in combat against lesser foes, but they're not actually tanking any serious firepower or fighting serious threats.
They also use actual tactics and cover instead of Leeroy Jenkins their way through enemy kill zones.
Space Marines are more interesting when they act like highly trained soldiers and try not to get shot as opposed to be being T-800 knockoffs. Leave that to the Necrons.
It's why I found Secret Level to be a bit boring, because all it is is 4 Marines slowly walking in a straight line out in the open while ridiculous numbers of trash mobs throw themselves at them.
As you say, Marines are more than just Big Huge Splungers. That they can quite happily run through a household wall, doesn’t mean that’s all they’re capable of.
Indeed, given Power Armour and Black Carapace allow the Marine to act as if he’s running around in just his pants, to see that put to use whilst using cover is visually going to be more terrifying than just plodding forward with methodical, measured violence.
It needs the combination of the two. The Terminator effect, just wading trough incoming fire is cool. The Predator effect, using your skills and environment to avoid incoming fire is cool. To combine the two? Now that’s something I want to see!
In fact, that could make Combat Squads work on screen. One doing the Terminator, the other being a bit sneakier, even if it involves the sneakier ones eventually just barging through a wall to surprise the enemy.
I'm not sure they could run through a brick wall, some thin, badly made brick walls maybe but there's plenty of brick walls that can survive an impact from a car, and I don't think a space marine is going to be able to transfer as much force as a car.
Especially if they were made of cinderblocks or something.
I think smashing through a wall is more Carnifex level of force.
I dunno. We know they can maintain a running speed of 35-45mph. And like your regular human, doesn’t need an especially long run up to hit top speed.
Then, apply that force across their fist (I’m assuming they’d punch first), and the body to follow, and no, they’re not going anything built to military specifications, but bricks and mortar or similar?
They’re fast, they’re heavy, and unlike a car, have at least the opportunity and ability to concentrate the initial impact across a much smaller area.
As ever I’d be interested if anyone can offer a calculation, whether it supports my claim or not.
A car can go much faster than 45MPH.
A space marine is apparently 1000kg which is still lighter than a car, which can be 1400kg to 2000kg
Knowing that Force = Mass times Acceleration if a car traveling at 90MPH and weighing at 1400kg can't break a brick wall, then a Space Marine running at 45MPH and weighting at 1000kg definitely wouldn't be able to cool-aid man his way through it.
Even if he punched the wall first (thereby applying more pressure on impact) he would still just be able to make a sizeable dent. Even if he manages to punch through he'd have to destroy the rest of the wall which would slow him down.
He'd be better off just asking a Centurion or Dread to do it, as the Centurions come with Drills (iirc) and Dreads are much larger and stronger than marines.
Still not accounting for a smaller surface area meaning a greater force.
And a car going 45mph absolutely can go through a brick wall. I’ve worked in car insurance. I’ve seen evidence of a car at less than that speed going through a low perimeter wall, shunting two parked cars out the way, and ending up in someone’s front room.
Of course, anecdote is anecdotal, and not only is such an incident thankfully rare, you don’t tend to see the ones where the car bounced off.
Pressure, not force. You don't suddenly gain newtons just by using a small hammer. You do get more pressure though, as you are exerting more force over a small surface area.
The formula for pressure is Pressure = Force / Area.
Please note that this is for force applied to a perpendicular surface area, hence why sloped armour is better against piercing rounds, as it makes it harder to concentrate sufficient pressure to compromise the armour.
As I said there's probably walls they can smash through - badly made ones with small bricks mortared together probably. But It's also possible that they'd just wham into it and stop.
I've no problem with a Dread smashing through a wall, or a Powerfist that uses magic physics disrupting the structure enough to punch a huge hole in it, but smashing through a wall seems more like Dreadnaught/Carnifex level power than infantry trooper.
I suppose this is the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say these threads always leave me bemused.
If its a battlefield situation you could also argue that many of the buildings would be damaged by direct fire or indirect. Walls might well be unstable or weakened to start with.
Finally lets not forget they are wearing power-armour. So not only have you got mass and speed, but they could also apply increased force from the armour's own power aid. Their leading leg using pistons and such to apply even greater downward force to allow their upper body to apply more.
So Carnifexes and Tyranid Warriors should be going through walls like they're not even there, right?
Necron Immortals too? Ork Nobs? Necron Warriors are the same strength as a marine and made of ultra strong alloys - they're probably heavier than a marine in armour. Can they explode through walls?
I think warriors and immortals should shoot through walls. Gauss weapons are supposed to disintegrate everything and had unique rules to reflect that before GW decided to just make them bolters.
I feel you need a certain amount of strength to hit the wall hard enough to go through - but then also armour not to be mangled in the process.
I mean Genestealers for example could clearly punch/rip their way through brick and even metal. But I think if they just run as fast as they can into a wall they going to wreck themselves even if the wall eventually comes down. Similar story for Nobs.
Tyranid Warriors are probably as capable as Marines.
Necron Immortals are probably marginal - while say Tomb Guard a clear yes. Necron Warriors I think are too spindly in the current imagination. They could probably claw their way through a wall given some time - but if they jus try to charge into it they are going to lose limbs.
Also speed. Immortal? I’d agree with a “possibly”. Necron Warrior? They just don’t strike me as fast moving enough to get the speed yup.
Tyranid Warrior? Pretty sure it could.
Remember, in my hypothesis I’ve relied not just on raw strength, but that Marines can run at a speed sufficient to really increase that.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, there’s a difference between just smashing straight through a wall, and being able to demolish it in a number of blows.
A brick wall isn't stopping a car at high speeds. A concrete wall might stop a car but depends on how thick it is (and most house walls aren't thick enough even when made of concrete).
Mind you a Space Marine bursting through a wall is silly because the Marine has no way to know how the wall will collapse and might suffer minor damage to his equipment or even trip.
Even tanks prefer to avoid walls that they can on paper easily run over as they risk equipment damage and can even get stuck.
Da Boss wrote: And the rest of my list? I agree Carnifexes should be able to smash through walls as I said in my first and second posts.
What about the rest?
Necron Immortals? Necron Warriors? Ork Nobs? Tyranid Warriors? Genestealers?
Am I to infer that by leaving these out you think they shouldn't be smashing through walls? I think it's interesting where we draw the line here.
Naw it just means that carny was quick to reply with
There's a LOT of bits to consider. The wall alone isn't a static concept to start with so first you've got to go not just "brick wall" but what kind etc...
Then condition of said brick wall
Then you've got the problem that the game is a gross simplification of reality and isn't based on any real simulated data. Heck we can't even agree on what a single model represents when we have debates on it. Is it 1:1; 1:10; 1:1000 - is it universally equal across all armies and units or does it vary. Eg is it 1:1 for marines but 1:1000 for gaunts 1:100 for Warriors and 1:1 for hive tyrants.
Even if its 1:1 you've got the simplification of reality where even two units with the same in-game strength value might have very different strength in reality. Not just in terms of raw power but in terms of dynamics and ability to apply and project that force. Plus the fact that the game stats might well represent ideal average so on "average" a marine might not go through a wall; but if they are going all out in the extreme they might be able to do it once. etc....
So there's a lot of bits that come into play plus the fact that the lore and our interpretation of it is coloured by visual and written references and themes. Eg the idea of a carnfiex bashing through a wall sounds good to us; a marine doing the same clearly sounds good to some and not good to others meanwhile I'd wager most of us would think it wrong for a gaunt to bash through a wall unless via sheer weight of numbers
1: Marines have always been the same speed as a regular human in game.
2: When the stats have allowed for it, Eldar, Genestealers, etc have always been faster than Marines. So how fast are they, if the Marines are already capable of 45mph?
Now I get the abstractions for the tabletop muddy things, the presented relationships with other units are still important to heed, imo.
In general I prefer the idea that Marines aren't really that much faster than a person, but rather their superhuman ability is to maintain that speed far, far longer than a human could. That can already be a very valuable ability without requiring the speed of, say, horses.
Lathe Biosas wrote: All this talk of busting through brick walls has made me wonder how strong the Kool-Aid Man truly is.
And the Kool-Aid man is an animated glass pitcher, so how does he not smash himself in the process?
Probably a powerfield similar to powerfist. Crossover confirmed.
Here's the math/reasoning for Operation: Kool-Aid
Spoiler:
How Strong Would He Need to Be?
Imagine the Kool-Aid Man as a large glass pitcher filled with delicious red Kool-Aid. This perspective actually refines our thought experiment, because now we have two distinct components to consider: the glass pitcher (the container) and the liquid inside.charging at a building wall. In order to break through a typical brick or concrete wall, he’d have to deliver an impact force that exceeds the material’s compressive and tensile strength. Here are some points to imagine:
• A rough analogy is with a high-velocity impact such as meteorite strikes — though the Kool-Aid Man wouldn’t have the mass of a meteorite, the concept is similar: he must provide enough energy to overcome the “failure stress” of the wall material. For instance, a concrete wall might fail with stresses on the order of 20–40 megapascals. Of course, an exact number would be speculative, but think in terms of delivering forces in the tens of millions of newtons over a very short duration.
Impact Forces and Kinetic Energy
Imagine the pitcher barreling toward a solid wall. To break through the wall (and do it in one dramatic burst), the pitcher must generate enough kinetic energy upon impact to exceed the structural strength of the wall. Here’s a simplified picture:
• Kinetic Energy (KE) is given by ½mv². Even for a moderately heavy and fast-moving glass pitcher, you’d need a very short impact duration (Δt) to generate the high forces necessary to break through a material such as reinforced concrete or brick.
• The instantaneous force depends on how quickly the momentum is changed on impact. If the pitcher’s momentum changes from mv to 0 in a fraction of a second, the force, F = Δp/Δt, could be enormous.
• That said, breaking through a wall involves both compressive and shear forces. Typical concrete can handle compressive stresses of roughly 20–40 megapascals; so you’d want the impact’s pressure (force per unit area) to exceed that limit locally.
Thus, even as a glass pitcher, our Kool-Aid Man would have to be moving with tremendous kinetic energy. To “smash” through a wall in one hit, the Kool-Aid Man might need to generate forces equivalent to, say, a few hundred kilotons of TNT—though our character’s mass is far less than what would normally be invoked in such explosive energy. This suggests that his motion would have to be incredibly high-energy. In short, he’d be part superhuman, part living kinetic bomb.
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The Glass Pitcher Dilemma
Now, let’s consider the container: a glass pitcher. In the real world, glass is notoriously strong under compression but weak under tension or impact—especially if it’s not engineered for high-impact applications. Here’s what we’d need to consider:
• Glass Strength: Ordinary glass (like that used in windows or glassware) can be brittle. However, there are formulations like tempered or laminated glass that are more resistant to impact. Tempered glass, for example, has greater impact resistance due to its internal stresses, though it still shatters once its threshold is exceeded.
• Design Consideration: For our wall-smashing character not to break apart upon impact (or at least not before delivering his punch), the glass might need to be of a specially engineered variety. Think of it as an “ultra-tough reinforced glass” or even a transparent composite material that retains a glassy look but has a dramatically increased fracture toughness.
• Fracture Toughness: In materials science, fracture toughness (K_IC) describes a material’s ability to resist crack propagation. To survive an impact robustly yet still shatter the opposing wall, the pitcher would need a K_IC high enough to prevent immediate self-destruction.
• Structural Reinforcement: Another avenue is a design that includes internal reinforcement—perhaps a network of fine, nearly invisible fibers (like glass fibers in fiberglass) or nano-scale reinforcements. This would maintain the clear, “glass pitcher” aesthetic while dramatically boosting resilience.
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Interaction Between Container and Liquid
The red Kool-Aid inside is a fluid, meaning that upon impact, its inertia will interact with the dynamics of the container. Two aspects are worth mentioning:
• Sloshing: When the pitcher hits the wall suddenly, the liquid will continue moving until the container’s walls force it to decelerate, leading to sloshing. This can increase stresses on the container walls if the liquid mass is significant in comparison to the pitcher’s mass.
• Internal Damping: Conversely, a fluid can help absorb some energy through internal friction, which might distribute stresses more evenly along the container. In a carefully engineered scenario, the properties of Kool-Aid (its density, viscosity, and surface tension) could contribute marginally to the overall impact behavior.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
So, to answer your question within this refined scenario:
• For a glass pitcher (filled with red Kool-Aid) to smash through building walls, it must be moving with an extremely high kinetic energy that converts into immense impact force over a very short time interval. The speeds and masses involved would be in the realm of cartoon physics, where energy flux is high enough to exceed the structural limits of conventional building materials.
• The glass pitcher would likely need to be made of an ultra-tough, reinforced, and possibly composite form of glass—a material that combines the transparency and aesthetic of regular glass with advanced treatments (tempering, fiber-reinforcement, or nano-engineered modifications) that grant it exceptional fracture toughness. This ensures that it can deliver its wall-shattering impact without simply disintegrating upon contact.
In short, our Kool-Aid Man-as-a-glass-pitcher would be a marvel of cartoon engineering—a masterful balance of extreme kinetic energy and advanced material science to allow him to both survive and inflict colossal impact forces on architectural structures!
Which brings me to the most bizarre concept I have ever contemplated: Could a Space Marine withstand the charge of the Kool-Aid Man?
Spoiler:
Ok. Here's an answer to a hypothetical scenario contrasting the cartoon physics of the Kool-Aid Man with the superhuman durability and heavy weaponry of a Space Marine.
─────────────────────────────
The Character Profiles
• Kool-Aid Man: In our scenario, imagine him as a gigantic, ultra-tough glass pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid—a being whose kinetic energy and impact force defy conventional physics. His charge is cinematic, designed to smash through solid walls with cartoonish exaggeration.
• Space Marine: A genetically enhanced super-soldier clad in the iconic, power-armored exoskeleton. These warriors are built to handle devastating impacts, firepower, and close-quarters combat with technology that lets them shrug off blows that would be fatal for ordinary humans. Their armor (for example, the iconic Power Armor: the Tactical, Terminator, or Assault variants) is built from advanced alloys and energy-dispersing materials and is backed by cybernetic enhancements and personal shields (in some cases).
─────────────────────────────
The Collision of Cartoon and Grimdark
If the Kool-Aid Man charged a Space Marine, several factors come into play:
• Massive Kinetic Energy vs. Superhuman Toughness:
The Kool-Aid Man’s charge is essentially a burst of cartoonish, over-the-top energy. In his world, he might demolish buildings without so much as a scratch on himself—essentially a physics-defying, narrative exaggeration.
A Space Marine, however, is designed to withstand tremendous forces—from explosion blasts, heavy caliber impacts, and even impacts from massive war machines. Their armor is engineered to disperse shock and absorb energy.
• Impact Dynamics:
The Kool-Aid Man’s impact with a Space Marine would involve a sudden collision—transferring a large amount of momentum over a very short duration. Depending on his speed and mass, this could result in an incredibly high instantaneous force.
That being said, Space Marine power armor and enhanced musculature (enhanced reflexes, reinforced tendons, and bio-engineered physiology) could likely mitigate a large fraction of the impact energy. Even if the armor suffers localized damage (or in grimdark lore, battle scars), the Space Marine’s resilience and determination often let him keep fighting.
• Cartoon Physics vs. Warhammer 40K Reality:
The Kool-Aid Man operates in a realm of cartoon physics where narrative convenience often overrules realistic consequences. His impact might ruffle a Space Marine’s power armor in a visually spectacular way, but in a traditional Warhammer setting—a universe filled with titanic weapons, brute force, and cosmic horrors—the Space Marine is built to survive far worse blows.
Essentially, if you fuse the two aesthetics, the result would be: the Kool-Aid Man might momentarily send a Space Marine flying or momentarily stagger him, but it’s unlikely that a Space Marine would be outright obliterated by a single charge. Their armor, combined with their regenerative and augmented capacities, would probably allow the Marine to continue fighting—perhaps with a dented armor and a re-evaluated approach to facing such oddball attacks.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
While the Kool-Aid Man’s impact is undeniably massive in the realm of cartoon physics, a Space Marine’s design in Warhammer 40,000 is meant to endure apocalyptic levels of punishment. In a direct head-on collision, it’s likely that:
• The Space Marine might take severe damage or be knocked off balance for a moment—the kind of dramatic, gritty effect you'd expect in a Warhammer battle scene.
• However, thanks to his power armor and bio-enhancements, the Marine would most likely survive the assault, albeit with a great story (and possibly a dented helmet) to tell.
So, in this clash of over-the-top fictional physics versus grimdark super-soldiers, the Space Marine would stand, scarred but still very much in the fight—even against the mighty charge of the Kool-Aid Man!
Necron Warriors, Immortals and Nobs have always been modelled as moving as fast as a space marine, marines have never been shown in the rules to be faster than them.
Whereas Genestealers have been at least 50% faster than them in most rulesets. So can Genestealers run at nearly 70mph?
This is what Hellebore is talking about. The Marines are given special exceptions and people are reluctantly admitting that the elites of other armies MIGHT be able to do SOME of those things that a basic marine can apparently do.
I mean I think it's plainly outrageous to suggest that a Marine can smash through a wall casually. Drywall, half collapsed wall, fine. Fully intact wall? Come on. If basic Marines can do that there are so many other units in 40K that can do so and more, that it becomes ludicrous. It's much more reasonable to think that maybe that background is being exaggerated to make Marines look cooler and the reality is less extreme.
But as I often end up saying in these debates, that ship has likely sailed.
The background has given us lots of stuff on Marines. Other things? Not as much.
Can a Genestealer hit 70mph? Quite possibly. Their body is fundamentally unnatural, being artificially evolved. We know they can squeeze through gaps you might not believe. And, as a predator species I don’t see why they couldn’t hit at 70mph, even if only for a short burst. Cheetahs can manage 110kph after all, and they’ve evolved naturally.
If anything a regular gaunt should be able to hit cheetah speeds too. Hormagaunts faster and sustained
Again the game doesn't equal the lore in any way shape nor form. You see this even in historical games where even they have to simplify things for the sake of simulation.
Can a mortar unit take out a tank in a tabletop wargame at point blank range - probably not. Can 1 guy handhold a mortar to take out multiple tanks at close range in battle - yes (sorry can't find the right wiki referencing the guy who did it - I believe he was American in WW 2)
I like to use the game as a frame of reference, rather than hard number. A Bolter is stronger than a lasgun but not that much better than a shootah. Carapace armor can somewhat reliably protect you from a lot of weapons that would pierce flak. Space Marines can survive a lot of small arms fire but they're not invincible against them, stuff like that.
Though the change from AP to modifiers makes that a bit of a mess, amongst other things.
Yeah I think the change to AP actually made weapons less varied rather than more.
When they got rid of the old AP system they also got rid of a bunch of rules that differentiated those weapon systems from other other weapon systems.
It also narrowed the design space, imo, because a -1 to your saves when saves already go from 2+ to 6+ is already pretty powerful, so you can't really do anything mechanically interesting to improve them.
It would be fine if armour saves can go up to high levels (like a -3+ save on a vehicle), but they don't so a -1 modifier will always result in a 20% decrease in armour effectiveness, as armour saves basically go from 2-6 due to that silly nat one always fails rule. That rule is fine in DnD because that system is based on a D20, not so much for a D6 system game.
It almost means that to compensate GW had to come up with convoluted ways to increase resilience, such as even more invuls, rerolls, different flavors of FNP and caps to how many wounds a model can take in a turn. This all slows down the game and makes it clunky and hard to translate into fluff.
I think GW needs to get over their fear of "unwoundable" units. It's ok if a lasgun never has a chance to kill a dreadnought, that's what lascannons are for.
I'd rather fight against a model that I know that I need specialized weapons to hurt than a model that has a 1% chance to be wounded by any weapon I have because of rerollable 2+ invuls followed by FNP or something obscene like that.
We're talking about guys who probably weigh close to a tonne sprinting 150% as fast as elite sprinters. Running AS fast as a sprinter at that size would already be impressive, running so much faster is just ridiculous.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: It’s the background, isn’t it. And it’s both. Fast, and able to maintain that speed for an unnaturally long time.
The game stats can’t really be used as a guide or limitation on the background.
Which background is it though? Because some of it is highly suspect. Many cases are clearly exaggeration. Many cases are authors not understanding numbers. And many cases are improbable but possible, but then extrapolated by readers to mean "always" or "often".
The game stats are also flawed from abstractions and edition changes, but one thing they offer over much of the lore is fewer biases because rather than a single author trying to tell a story, two parties are effectively negotiating over a scenario.
And game stats/effects aren't always consistent either. But when they've been consistent for years, surviving big edition changes and shifts, then that's something worth paying close attention to.
Lathe Biosas wrote: All this talk of busting through brick walls has made me wonder how strong the Kool-Aid Man truly is.
And the Kool-Aid man is an animated glass pitcher, so how does he not smash himself in the process?
Probably a powerfield similar to powerfist. Crossover confirmed.
Here's the math/reasoning for Operation: Kool-Aid
Spoiler:
How Strong Would He Need to Be?
Imagine the Kool-Aid Man as a large glass pitcher filled with delicious red Kool-Aid. This perspective actually refines our thought experiment, because now we have two distinct components to consider: the glass pitcher (the container) and the liquid inside.charging at a building wall. In order to break through a typical brick or concrete wall, he’d have to deliver an impact force that exceeds the material’s compressive and tensile strength. Here are some points to imagine:
• A rough analogy is with a high-velocity impact such as meteorite strikes — though the Kool-Aid Man wouldn’t have the mass of a meteorite, the concept is similar: he must provide enough energy to overcome the “failure stress” of the wall material. For instance, a concrete wall might fail with stresses on the order of 20–40 megapascals. Of course, an exact number would be speculative, but think in terms of delivering forces in the tens of millions of newtons over a very short duration.
Impact Forces and Kinetic Energy
Imagine the pitcher barreling toward a solid wall. To break through the wall (and do it in one dramatic burst), the pitcher must generate enough kinetic energy upon impact to exceed the structural strength of the wall. Here’s a simplified picture:
• Kinetic Energy (KE) is given by ½mv². Even for a moderately heavy and fast-moving glass pitcher, you’d need a very short impact duration (Δt) to generate the high forces necessary to break through a material such as reinforced concrete or brick.
• The instantaneous force depends on how quickly the momentum is changed on impact. If the pitcher’s momentum changes from mv to 0 in a fraction of a second, the force, F = Δp/Δt, could be enormous.
• That said, breaking through a wall involves both compressive and shear forces. Typical concrete can handle compressive stresses of roughly 20–40 megapascals; so you’d want the impact’s pressure (force per unit area) to exceed that limit locally.
Thus, even as a glass pitcher, our Kool-Aid Man would have to be moving with tremendous kinetic energy. To “smash” through a wall in one hit, the Kool-Aid Man might need to generate forces equivalent to, say, a few hundred kilotons of TNT—though our character’s mass is far less than what would normally be invoked in such explosive energy. This suggests that his motion would have to be incredibly high-energy. In short, he’d be part superhuman, part living kinetic bomb.
─────────────────────────────
The Glass Pitcher Dilemma
Now, let’s consider the container: a glass pitcher. In the real world, glass is notoriously strong under compression but weak under tension or impact—especially if it’s not engineered for high-impact applications. Here’s what we’d need to consider:
• Glass Strength: Ordinary glass (like that used in windows or glassware) can be brittle. However, there are formulations like tempered or laminated glass that are more resistant to impact. Tempered glass, for example, has greater impact resistance due to its internal stresses, though it still shatters once its threshold is exceeded.
• Design Consideration: For our wall-smashing character not to break apart upon impact (or at least not before delivering his punch), the glass might need to be of a specially engineered variety. Think of it as an “ultra-tough reinforced glass” or even a transparent composite material that retains a glassy look but has a dramatically increased fracture toughness.
• Fracture Toughness: In materials science, fracture toughness (K_IC) describes a material’s ability to resist crack propagation. To survive an impact robustly yet still shatter the opposing wall, the pitcher would need a K_IC high enough to prevent immediate self-destruction.
• Structural Reinforcement: Another avenue is a design that includes internal reinforcement—perhaps a network of fine, nearly invisible fibers (like glass fibers in fiberglass) or nano-scale reinforcements. This would maintain the clear, “glass pitcher” aesthetic while dramatically boosting resilience.
─────────────────────────────
Interaction Between Container and Liquid
The red Kool-Aid inside is a fluid, meaning that upon impact, its inertia will interact with the dynamics of the container. Two aspects are worth mentioning:
• Sloshing: When the pitcher hits the wall suddenly, the liquid will continue moving until the container’s walls force it to decelerate, leading to sloshing. This can increase stresses on the container walls if the liquid mass is significant in comparison to the pitcher’s mass.
• Internal Damping: Conversely, a fluid can help absorb some energy through internal friction, which might distribute stresses more evenly along the container. In a carefully engineered scenario, the properties of Kool-Aid (its density, viscosity, and surface tension) could contribute marginally to the overall impact behavior.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
So, to answer your question within this refined scenario:
• For a glass pitcher (filled with red Kool-Aid) to smash through building walls, it must be moving with an extremely high kinetic energy that converts into immense impact force over a very short time interval. The speeds and masses involved would be in the realm of cartoon physics, where energy flux is high enough to exceed the structural limits of conventional building materials.
• The glass pitcher would likely need to be made of an ultra-tough, reinforced, and possibly composite form of glass—a material that combines the transparency and aesthetic of regular glass with advanced treatments (tempering, fiber-reinforcement, or nano-engineered modifications) that grant it exceptional fracture toughness. This ensures that it can deliver its wall-shattering impact without simply disintegrating upon contact.
In short, our Kool-Aid Man-as-a-glass-pitcher would be a marvel of cartoon engineering—a masterful balance of extreme kinetic energy and advanced material science to allow him to both survive and inflict colossal impact forces on architectural structures!
Which brings me to the most bizarre concept I have ever contemplated: Could a Space Marine withstand the charge of the Kool-Aid Man?
Spoiler:
Ok. Here's an answer to a hypothetical scenario contrasting the cartoon physics of the Kool-Aid Man with the superhuman durability and heavy weaponry of a Space Marine.
─────────────────────────────
The Character Profiles
• Kool-Aid Man: In our scenario, imagine him as a gigantic, ultra-tough glass pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid—a being whose kinetic energy and impact force defy conventional physics. His charge is cinematic, designed to smash through solid walls with cartoonish exaggeration.
• Space Marine: A genetically enhanced super-soldier clad in the iconic, power-armored exoskeleton. These warriors are built to handle devastating impacts, firepower, and close-quarters combat with technology that lets them shrug off blows that would be fatal for ordinary humans. Their armor (for example, the iconic Power Armor: the Tactical, Terminator, or Assault variants) is built from advanced alloys and energy-dispersing materials and is backed by cybernetic enhancements and personal shields (in some cases).
─────────────────────────────
The Collision of Cartoon and Grimdark
If the Kool-Aid Man charged a Space Marine, several factors come into play:
• Massive Kinetic Energy vs. Superhuman Toughness:
The Kool-Aid Man’s charge is essentially a burst of cartoonish, over-the-top energy. In his world, he might demolish buildings without so much as a scratch on himself—essentially a physics-defying, narrative exaggeration.
A Space Marine, however, is designed to withstand tremendous forces—from explosion blasts, heavy caliber impacts, and even impacts from massive war machines. Their armor is engineered to disperse shock and absorb energy.
• Impact Dynamics:
The Kool-Aid Man’s impact with a Space Marine would involve a sudden collision—transferring a large amount of momentum over a very short duration. Depending on his speed and mass, this could result in an incredibly high instantaneous force.
That being said, Space Marine power armor and enhanced musculature (enhanced reflexes, reinforced tendons, and bio-engineered physiology) could likely mitigate a large fraction of the impact energy. Even if the armor suffers localized damage (or in grimdark lore, battle scars), the Space Marine’s resilience and determination often let him keep fighting.
• Cartoon Physics vs. Warhammer 40K Reality:
The Kool-Aid Man operates in a realm of cartoon physics where narrative convenience often overrules realistic consequences. His impact might ruffle a Space Marine’s power armor in a visually spectacular way, but in a traditional Warhammer setting—a universe filled with titanic weapons, brute force, and cosmic horrors—the Space Marine is built to survive far worse blows.
Essentially, if you fuse the two aesthetics, the result would be: the Kool-Aid Man might momentarily send a Space Marine flying or momentarily stagger him, but it’s unlikely that a Space Marine would be outright obliterated by a single charge. Their armor, combined with their regenerative and augmented capacities, would probably allow the Marine to continue fighting—perhaps with a dented armor and a re-evaluated approach to facing such oddball attacks.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
While the Kool-Aid Man’s impact is undeniably massive in the realm of cartoon physics, a Space Marine’s design in Warhammer 40,000 is meant to endure apocalyptic levels of punishment. In a direct head-on collision, it’s likely that:
• The Space Marine might take severe damage or be knocked off balance for a moment—the kind of dramatic, gritty effect you'd expect in a Warhammer battle scene.
• However, thanks to his power armor and bio-enhancements, the Marine would most likely survive the assault, albeit with a great story (and possibly a dented helmet) to tell.
So, in this clash of over-the-top fictional physics versus grimdark super-soldiers, the Space Marine would stand, scarred but still very much in the fight—even against the mighty charge of the Kool-Aid Man!
Yeah. Thats where the figure came from? Given space magic gene wizardry and techno speed boost armour, I don’t think that’s an inherently ludicrous speed.
Lathe Biosas wrote: All this talk of busting through brick walls has made me wonder how strong the Kool-Aid Man truly is.
And the Kool-Aid man is an animated glass pitcher, so how does he not smash himself in the process?
Probably a powerfield similar to powerfist. Crossover confirmed.
Here's the math/reasoning for Operation: Kool-Aid
Spoiler:
How Strong Would He Need to Be?
Imagine the Kool-Aid Man as a large glass pitcher filled with delicious red Kool-Aid. This perspective actually refines our thought experiment, because now we have two distinct components to consider: the glass pitcher (the container) and the liquid inside.charging at a building wall. In order to break through a typical brick or concrete wall, he’d have to deliver an impact force that exceeds the material’s compressive and tensile strength. Here are some points to imagine:
• A rough analogy is with a high-velocity impact such as meteorite strikes — though the Kool-Aid Man wouldn’t have the mass of a meteorite, the concept is similar: he must provide enough energy to overcome the “failure stress” of the wall material. For instance, a concrete wall might fail with stresses on the order of 20–40 megapascals. Of course, an exact number would be speculative, but think in terms of delivering forces in the tens of millions of newtons over a very short duration.
Impact Forces and Kinetic Energy
Imagine the pitcher barreling toward a solid wall. To break through the wall (and do it in one dramatic burst), the pitcher must generate enough kinetic energy upon impact to exceed the structural strength of the wall. Here’s a simplified picture:
• Kinetic Energy (KE) is given by ½mv². Even for a moderately heavy and fast-moving glass pitcher, you’d need a very short impact duration (Δt) to generate the high forces necessary to break through a material such as reinforced concrete or brick.
• The instantaneous force depends on how quickly the momentum is changed on impact. If the pitcher’s momentum changes from mv to 0 in a fraction of a second, the force, F = Δp/Δt, could be enormous.
• That said, breaking through a wall involves both compressive and shear forces. Typical concrete can handle compressive stresses of roughly 20–40 megapascals; so you’d want the impact’s pressure (force per unit area) to exceed that limit locally.
Thus, even as a glass pitcher, our Kool-Aid Man would have to be moving with tremendous kinetic energy. To “smash” through a wall in one hit, the Kool-Aid Man might need to generate forces equivalent to, say, a few hundred kilotons of TNT—though our character’s mass is far less than what would normally be invoked in such explosive energy. This suggests that his motion would have to be incredibly high-energy. In short, he’d be part superhuman, part living kinetic bomb.
─────────────────────────────
The Glass Pitcher Dilemma
Now, let’s consider the container: a glass pitcher. In the real world, glass is notoriously strong under compression but weak under tension or impact—especially if it’s not engineered for high-impact applications. Here’s what we’d need to consider:
• Glass Strength: Ordinary glass (like that used in windows or glassware) can be brittle. However, there are formulations like tempered or laminated glass that are more resistant to impact. Tempered glass, for example, has greater impact resistance due to its internal stresses, though it still shatters once its threshold is exceeded.
• Design Consideration: For our wall-smashing character not to break apart upon impact (or at least not before delivering his punch), the glass might need to be of a specially engineered variety. Think of it as an “ultra-tough reinforced glass” or even a transparent composite material that retains a glassy look but has a dramatically increased fracture toughness.
• Fracture Toughness: In materials science, fracture toughness (K_IC) describes a material’s ability to resist crack propagation. To survive an impact robustly yet still shatter the opposing wall, the pitcher would need a K_IC high enough to prevent immediate self-destruction.
• Structural Reinforcement: Another avenue is a design that includes internal reinforcement—perhaps a network of fine, nearly invisible fibers (like glass fibers in fiberglass) or nano-scale reinforcements. This would maintain the clear, “glass pitcher” aesthetic while dramatically boosting resilience.
─────────────────────────────
Interaction Between Container and Liquid
The red Kool-Aid inside is a fluid, meaning that upon impact, its inertia will interact with the dynamics of the container. Two aspects are worth mentioning:
• Sloshing: When the pitcher hits the wall suddenly, the liquid will continue moving until the container’s walls force it to decelerate, leading to sloshing. This can increase stresses on the container walls if the liquid mass is significant in comparison to the pitcher’s mass.
• Internal Damping: Conversely, a fluid can help absorb some energy through internal friction, which might distribute stresses more evenly along the container. In a carefully engineered scenario, the properties of Kool-Aid (its density, viscosity, and surface tension) could contribute marginally to the overall impact behavior.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
So, to answer your question within this refined scenario:
• For a glass pitcher (filled with red Kool-Aid) to smash through building walls, it must be moving with an extremely high kinetic energy that converts into immense impact force over a very short time interval. The speeds and masses involved would be in the realm of cartoon physics, where energy flux is high enough to exceed the structural limits of conventional building materials.
• The glass pitcher would likely need to be made of an ultra-tough, reinforced, and possibly composite form of glass—a material that combines the transparency and aesthetic of regular glass with advanced treatments (tempering, fiber-reinforcement, or nano-engineered modifications) that grant it exceptional fracture toughness. This ensures that it can deliver its wall-shattering impact without simply disintegrating upon contact.
In short, our Kool-Aid Man-as-a-glass-pitcher would be a marvel of cartoon engineering—a masterful balance of extreme kinetic energy and advanced material science to allow him to both survive and inflict colossal impact forces on architectural structures!
Which brings me to the most bizarre concept I have ever contemplated: Could a Space Marine withstand the charge of the Kool-Aid Man?
Spoiler:
Ok. Here's an answer to a hypothetical scenario contrasting the cartoon physics of the Kool-Aid Man with the superhuman durability and heavy weaponry of a Space Marine.
─────────────────────────────
The Character Profiles
• Kool-Aid Man: In our scenario, imagine him as a gigantic, ultra-tough glass pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid—a being whose kinetic energy and impact force defy conventional physics. His charge is cinematic, designed to smash through solid walls with cartoonish exaggeration.
• Space Marine: A genetically enhanced super-soldier clad in the iconic, power-armored exoskeleton. These warriors are built to handle devastating impacts, firepower, and close-quarters combat with technology that lets them shrug off blows that would be fatal for ordinary humans. Their armor (for example, the iconic Power Armor: the Tactical, Terminator, or Assault variants) is built from advanced alloys and energy-dispersing materials and is backed by cybernetic enhancements and personal shields (in some cases).
─────────────────────────────
The Collision of Cartoon and Grimdark
If the Kool-Aid Man charged a Space Marine, several factors come into play:
• Massive Kinetic Energy vs. Superhuman Toughness:
The Kool-Aid Man’s charge is essentially a burst of cartoonish, over-the-top energy. In his world, he might demolish buildings without so much as a scratch on himself—essentially a physics-defying, narrative exaggeration.
A Space Marine, however, is designed to withstand tremendous forces—from explosion blasts, heavy caliber impacts, and even impacts from massive war machines. Their armor is engineered to disperse shock and absorb energy.
• Impact Dynamics:
The Kool-Aid Man’s impact with a Space Marine would involve a sudden collision—transferring a large amount of momentum over a very short duration. Depending on his speed and mass, this could result in an incredibly high instantaneous force.
That being said, Space Marine power armor and enhanced musculature (enhanced reflexes, reinforced tendons, and bio-engineered physiology) could likely mitigate a large fraction of the impact energy. Even if the armor suffers localized damage (or in grimdark lore, battle scars), the Space Marine’s resilience and determination often let him keep fighting.
• Cartoon Physics vs. Warhammer 40K Reality:
The Kool-Aid Man operates in a realm of cartoon physics where narrative convenience often overrules realistic consequences. His impact might ruffle a Space Marine’s power armor in a visually spectacular way, but in a traditional Warhammer setting—a universe filled with titanic weapons, brute force, and cosmic horrors—the Space Marine is built to survive far worse blows.
Essentially, if you fuse the two aesthetics, the result would be: the Kool-Aid Man might momentarily send a Space Marine flying or momentarily stagger him, but it’s unlikely that a Space Marine would be outright obliterated by a single charge. Their armor, combined with their regenerative and augmented capacities, would probably allow the Marine to continue fighting—perhaps with a dented armor and a re-evaluated approach to facing such oddball attacks.
─────────────────────────────
Conclusion
While the Kool-Aid Man’s impact is undeniably massive in the realm of cartoon physics, a Space Marine’s design in Warhammer 40,000 is meant to endure apocalyptic levels of punishment. In a direct head-on collision, it’s likely that:
• The Space Marine might take severe damage or be knocked off balance for a moment—the kind of dramatic, gritty effect you'd expect in a Warhammer battle scene.
• However, thanks to his power armor and bio-enhancements, the Marine would most likely survive the assault, albeit with a great story (and possibly a dented helmet) to tell.
So, in this clash of over-the-top fictional physics versus grimdark super-soldiers, the Space Marine would stand, scarred but still very much in the fight—even against the mighty charge of the Kool-Aid Man!
I thank you for this from the bottom of my heart.
You are welcome, just spread the good news of the epic battle.
Yeah. Thats where the figure came from? Given space magic gene wizardry and techno speed boost armour, I don’t think that’s an inherently ludicrous speed.
I suspect Insectum is asking for a source to be cited, Doc.
Tyran wrote: IMHO regular humans should have dropped to Move 4" or even 3" with the change to 8th. A personal and mostly irrelevant peeve of mine.
Remember the Move characteristic isn't how fast they can move, its how fast they can move (for lack of a better word) carefully. In other words, built into that move rate is picking their way through terrain, maintaining a modicum of cover and visibility, maintaining awareness of the battle at large, some you-move-I-move inside their unit coherency, yadda yadda. So in theory an Aeldari or Space Marine can probably run a 2 second 40 yard dash (or whatever) they're not doing that in a combat move. Even a Combat Run is going to be slower than their max. I'd wager GW is using that rationale to limit all races to a somewhat basic/universal speed.
Yeah. Thats where the figure came from? Given space magic gene wizardry and techno speed boost armour, I don’t think that’s an inherently ludicrous speed.
I suspect Insectum is asking for a source to be cited, Doc.
Will dig it out when I’m home. Currently house and pet sitting
Tyran wrote: IMHO regular humans should have dropped to Move 4" or even 3" with the change to 8th. A personal and mostly irrelevant peeve of mine.
Remember the Move characteristic isn't how fast they can move, its how fast they can move (for lack of a better word) carefully. In other words, built into that move rate is picking their way through terrain, maintaining a modicum of cover and visibility, maintaining awareness of the battle at large, some you-move-I-move inside their unit coherency, yadda yadda. So in theory an Aeldari or Space Marine can probably run a 2 second 40 yard dash (or whatever) they're not doing that in a combat move. Even a Combat Run is going to be slower than their max. I'd wager GW is using that rationale to limit all races to a somewhat basic/universal speed.
That would be my interpretation as well; really heavy things can have a high top speed, it's acceleration and handling (and footing) that hold them back. A hippo can run 30 mph. And I guess technically a space marine can move 18" on a charge.
As for a brick wall, that's a total crap shoot because it depends on the wall's quality. But I don't think space marines can rely on smashing through brick walls as a tactic, while a carnifex can.
In the game rules there's never been any sign that marines are faster than normal humans. As fast, despite being massive and heavily armoured, and having supernatural reaction speed (higher initiative), yes, but running way faster than a normal human, no.
So I don't see the argument for making them super sprinters.
Tyran wrote: IMHO regular humans should have dropped to Move 4" or even 3" with the change to 8th. A personal and mostly irrelevant peeve of mine.
Remember the Move characteristic isn't how fast they can move, its how fast they can move (for lack of a better word) carefully. In other words, built into that move rate is picking their way through terrain, maintaining a modicum of cover and visibility, maintaining awareness of the battle at large, some you-move-I-move inside their unit coherency, yadda yadda. So in theory an Aeldari or Space Marine can probably run a 2 second 40 yard dash (or whatever) they're not doing that in a combat move. Even a Combat Run is going to be slower than their max. I'd wager GW is using that rationale to limit all races to a somewhat basic/universal speed.
That would be my interpretation as well; really heavy things can have a high top speed, it's acceleration and handling (and footing) that hold them back. A hippo can run 30 mph. And I guess technically a space marine can move 18" on a charge.
As for a brick wall, that's a total crap shoot because it depends on the wall's quality. But I don't think space marines can rely on smashing through brick walls as a tactic, while a carnifex can.
Not just the quality of the wall, but what's behind it.
A wall that has weak mortar and thin bricks might not be particularly sturdy, but the same wall with a steel shelf unit behind it that's bolted onto the floor? That's going to be hard to break through.
I think people give marines way too much credit. That's a problem, because rather than understanding their limitations and allowing them to fight intelligently they just have them plot-armour through every encounter they face.
Da Boss wrote: In the game rules there's never been any sign that marines are faster than normal humans. As fast, despite being massive and heavily armoured, and having supernatural reaction speed (higher initiative), yes, but running way faster than a normal human, no.
So I don't see the argument for making them super sprinters.
I think it's silly to cherry-pick elements from the game like that. After all marines never used to have two wounds, even though going by the lore they were much MUCH harder to kill than a normal human.
As for the wall debate (this is fun being complete beards eh?) I wonder what does our ton of armour moving at 20kmph does when the surface making contact is just one shoulder, or even a rigid fist/arm. And then of course the marine can just stop and punch his way through using his power armour strength anyway. And if we assume a marine bolter has the effect similar to a 20mm cannon round (or even just a 50cal) then using that to weaken a seam on the wall first will do a lot.
I think people give marines way too much credit. That's a problem, because rather than understanding their limitations and allowing them to fight intelligently they just have them plot-armour through every encounter they face.
I think the main elements are
1. ultra-special forces who don't tire/just keep on going on top form for days at a time
2. more advanced coms/sensors/intel/planning
3. elite armour
If even just point 1 could apply to a real-life special forces team they'd be an utter terror in support of regular military units.
Da Boss wrote: In the game rules there's never been any sign that marines are faster than normal humans. As fast, despite being massive and heavily armoured, and having supernatural reaction speed (higher initiative), yes, but running way faster than a normal human, no.
So I don't see the argument for making them super sprinters.
Also important to remember that momentum and inertia are things that exist.
If a Space Marine was able to get up to the speed of a car, then that's an awful lot of weight (and top-heavy weight at that) to try and turn or bring to a quick stop.
They would need a fair amount of braking distance if they didn't want to frequently test the 'Space Marine vs. Brick Wall' experiment outlined above.
Though I'll admit Space Marines running so fast they keep blundering into walls would be pretty funny.
Bobthehero wrote: Part of the ''They shall know no downsides'' thing someone mentioned the other day, all the upsides of stuff like that, with none of the downsides
It's the same thing you always see with superheroes, like them being able to lift a truck while still walking on the normal ground. And that makes it one of the things I don't like about the direction things have been moving in. To me, it's much more interesting if they're not so explicitly superhuman and actually have some kind of opposition. Sure, Space Marines are over the top, but so are Aspect Warriors and the like.
Da Boss wrote: In the game rules there's never been any sign that marines are faster than normal humans. As fast, despite being massive and heavily armoured, and having supernatural reaction speed (higher initiative), yes, but running way faster than a normal human, no.
So I don't see the argument for making them super sprinters.
I think it's silly to cherry-pick elements from the game like that. After all marines never used to have two wounds, even though going by the lore they were much MUCH harder to kill than a normal human.
I don't think it counts as cherry picking when it's been the case for literally every edition of the game over 30 years. It's too consistent to be cherry picking.
For relative toughness Marines have always been harder to kill than a normal human as well, especially with small arms, 2w or not. The numbers get fuzzier though because the math is a combination of multiple stats. At the moment a Marine is easier to kill wirh a Heavy Bolter than he would be in 3-7th edition, yet harder to kill compared to 2nd ed, unless you count having to hit him in hard cover and it's modifiers to-hit. But A Marine is much harder to kill with Lasguns now, argiably far to hard, as it takes 36(?) Lasgun shots to average a kill.
Bobthehero wrote: Part of the ''They shall know no downsides'' thing someone mentioned the other day, all the upsides of stuff like that, with none of the downsides
It's the same thing you always see with superheroes, like them being able to lift a truck while still walking on the normal ground. And that makes it one of the things I don't like about the direction things have been moving in. To me, it's much more interesting if they're not so explicitly superhuman and actually have some kind of opposition. Sure, Space Marines are over the top, but so are Aspect Warriors and the like.
This reminds me of the history of Superman, where orinally he could lift heavy loads and jump really high. But it kept getting added to and added to, to where he's a sort of invulnerable god being now. I remember hearing about how boring he is because there's either no challenge, or you have to really twist up odd scenarios for him to actually be under threat.
I think the upping of Marines wounds is not a balance with Guardsmen, but with the giant monsters that are now in the game, from Norn Emissaries to Primarchs (Daemonic and Classic), the regular Marine had to get tougher to survive these monsters.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I think the upping of Marines wounds is not a balance with Guardsmen, but with the giant monsters that are now in the game, from Norn Emissaries to Primarchs (Daemonic and Classic), the regular Marine had to get tougher to survive these monsters.
The monsters who's weapons are primarily D2 or better?
Lathe Biosas wrote: I think the upping of Marines wounds is not a balance with Guardsmen, but with the giant monsters that are now in the game, from Norn Emissaries to Primarchs (Daemonic and Classic), the regular Marine had to get tougher to survive these monsters.
Be that as it may, it really messes with the balance of infantry.
But also, the solution in the past against these super-creatures wasn't to add beef to a Marine, but to deploy heavy weapons. There was an issue for a time because heavy weapons only did a single pip of damage while the MCs kept getting tougher, but that shouldn't be an issue now.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I think the upping of Marines wounds is not a balance with Guardsmen, but with the giant monsters that are now in the game, from Norn Emissaries to Primarchs (Daemonic and Classic), the regular Marine had to get tougher to survive these monsters.
The monsters who's weapons are primarily D2 or better?
I was thinking of Magnus the Red (14 attacks, D1) and Superheavies like Baneblades (also D1).
The other issue is Toughness vs Wounds. Which I have trouble discerning sometimes.
The idea that a basic Marine ought to be able to stand up to tank-sized monsters and setting-warping demigods is ridiculous.
They should die in droves against serious threats. Having superhuman strength and endurance doesn't put you at the top of the totem pole in the 41st millennium, it puts you at S4/T4.
Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
So they should die against serious threats, but they won't because if they do then no more space marines.
The only way it makes sense is if GW actually portrayed them as intended and had them only attacking isolated, weak targets. But the SM fanbase doesn't want to see their chapter bully some heretic commander, they want to see them do stupid gak like German Suplex an Avatar of Khaine.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I think the upping of Marines wounds is not a balance with Guardsmen, but with the giant monsters that are now in the game, from Norn Emissaries to Primarchs (Daemonic and Classic), the regular Marine had to get tougher to survive these monsters.
The monsters who's weapons are primarily D2 or better?
I was thinking of Magnus the Red (14 attacks, D1) and Superheavies like Baneblades (also D1).
The other issue is Toughness vs Wounds. Which I have trouble discerning sometimes.
Toughness should probably be merged with armour.
It's basically the same, really. Toughness is supposed to represent the target shrugging off the hit because it hit a non-vital area.
Armour is supposed to represent the target shrugging off the hit because it didn't go through the armour.
Think is though that in either case the result is the same; the target doesn't get hurt enough to impact his combat effectiveness.
Wounds are basically just health pools. They are supposed to represent how much of a beating the target can take before going down. It's not just physical injuries but also fatigue, because remember, incapacitated does not mean dead. It could just mean that the bloke got winded a few too many times and is out of the fight for a while, because you can't fight when you're on the ground, writhing in pain and trying to catch your breath.
A bulletproof vest might be able to block the hit (successful save / toughness), but you're still going to feel it.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
So they should die against serious threats, but they won't because if they do then no more space marines.
The only way it makes sense is if GW actually portrayed them as intended and had them only attacking isolated, weak targets. But the SM fanbase doesn't want to see their chapter bully some heretic commander, they want to see them do stupid gak like German Suplex an Avatar of Khaine.
That is a problem only if the initial assumption is that avarge space marines can't do stuff they are described to do, which others can not do. If anything the modern GW lore down grades marines and custodes. In older role custodes were unkillable demi gods, and marines could pull of stuff like purging a craftworld with a demi chapter of marines. I get not wanting marines to be the best in game, especialy if someone is a non marine player. I don't understand the opposition to it in the lore though. Someone has to be the best and most powerful, someone is the protagonist of the story, someone is better and the winner. Just like in sports. Saying marines can do X or Y, is like being angry that Kenyans are the best at long run. Marines are the best at war, within that setting. And while it would be not fun, at least not for the non marine players, for marines to win all the time. In lore it should represented.
Nah Marines were special because it put humanity on equal footing with the terrors out there. They've jumped the shark big time, remember that thread where people were arguing straight faced a single marine could take down a planet of a million guardsmen?
Tabletop marines are basically a desperate last stand, if marines standard operation were pitched battles like that there would be no marines. If fluff was taken into consideration at all they'd be as others have suggested elite units in imperial armies but people really like marines and want battles like they see on the book and box covers and they've always been their own thing so I'm ok with that not being the case.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: So they should die against serious threats, but they won't because if they do then no more space marines.
Dan Abnett wrote a short story where an entire company of Lamenters drop pods into a pitched battle against Tyranids and gets killed to a man within thirty minutes.
The cover art of the 3rd Ed Space Marine codex shows a desperate last stand of Crimson Fists standing on a pile of their dead battle-brothers.
Both of these chapters still exist in the fiction. Because it's fiction, and there are always as many Marines as there need to be.
Besides, there's no reason a 2000pt game has to reflect how the faction normally fights. We don't want to play the one-sided stomps where some backwoods renegade gets his face inverted by a strike force, we want to play the last stands and Pyrrhic victories. It's fine if, in the fiction, those are the exception rather than the norm.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
Surely it's no worse than when a named character dies on the table but is miraculously still alive and kicking in the next game?
That aside, if GW is going to retcon anything it should probably be the number of Marines in existence. Play it off as Imperial propaganda or something.
As it is, it just comes across as GW not understanding numbers - in the same way that galactic-level conflicts can somehow have fewer casualties than the first world war.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
Surely it's no worse than when a named character dies on the table but is miraculously still alive and kicking in the next game?
Yeah, it's why I never liked special named characters. Marneus Calgar is probably a Perpetual at this point.
There are mutually exclusive intersections on marine capability and GW in classic fashion tries to have it all with their cop out 'everything is canon' approach.
We'd be having these conversations about other factions if they got even a tenth of the power fantasy fiction marines get.
The more OTT levels of background like THE sanguinor carrying a bloodthirster into the air, grey knights bathing in sister blood, or a bunch of marines destroying a craftworld are all from a very Matt Ward shaped era of GW fiction where they went off the rails with pure cartoon idiocy.
That was an anomaly in the long history of how marines have been portrayed in the lore (vs novels) but some people decided because it made them so much cooler, it was the one true image.
The most egregious aspects of the wardian era have been slowly deemphasised, or just dropped from the background precisely because they were terrible. But their ill still exist in the fiction being published.
I think it's important to point out that the Lore(TM) or fluff takes a protagonistless approach to describing events in comparison to novels with protagonists where the story seemingly revolves around them.
40kIMO was at its strongest when it was written with the characters existing within events, rather than the events revolving around them. The former makes the setting much larger, the latter shrinks things down and prevents any story movement without the actions of a few.
Hellebore wrote: There are mutually exclusive intersections on marine capability and GW in classic fashion tries to have it all with their cop out 'everything is canon' approach.
We'd be having these conversations about other factions if they got even a tenth of the power fantasy fiction marines get.
The more OTT levels of background like THE sanguinor carrying a bloodthirster into the air, grey knights bathing in sister blood, or a bunch of marines destroying a craftworld are all from a very Matt Ward shaped era of GW fiction where they went off the rails with pure cartoon idiocy.
That was an anomaly in the long history of how marines have been portrayed in the lore (vs novels) but some people decided because it made them so much cooler, it was the one true image.
The most egregious aspects of the wardian era have been slowly deemphasised, or just dropped from the background precisely because they were terrible. But their ill still exist in the fiction being published.
I think it's important to point out that the Lore(TM) or fluff takes a protagonistless approach to describing events in comparison to novels with protagonists where the story seemingly revolves around them.
40kIMO was at its strongest when it was written with the characters existing within events, rather than the events revolving around them. The former makes the setting much larger, the latter shrinks things down and prevents any story movement without the actions of a few.
I'm pretty sure the Sanguinor isn't a Marine. Its some sort of Psychic Construct Super Sanctic Daemon type thing not?
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
Surely it's no worse than when a named character dies on the table but is miraculously still alive and kicking in the next game?
That aside, if GW is going to retcon anything it should probably be the number of Marines in existence. Play it off as Imperial propaganda or something.
As it is, it just comes across as GW not understanding numbers - in the same way that galactic-level conflicts can somehow have fewer casualties than the first world war.
You're confusing and conflating "removed as a casualty" with "dead". During the fluff for Vigilus you can easily see where Marneus Calgar was removed as a casaulty. And again during the Tyrannic Wars vs the Swarmlord.
You're confusing and conflating "removed as a casualty" with "dead". During the fluff for Vigilus you can easily see where Marneus Calgar was removed as a casaulty. And again during the Tyrannic Wars vs the Swarmlord.
True, but as a counterpoint, there are weapons in game that do outright kill targets.
I'm not sure Calgar is getting up after eating a direct hit from a D-Cannon, Doomsday Cannon, Railgun (which in previous editions would apply Instant Death due to being S10. I think Calgar is T5?) and vortex grenades.
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
So they should die against serious threats, but they won't because if they do then no more space marines.
The only way it makes sense is if GW actually portrayed them as intended and had them only attacking isolated, weak targets. But the SM fanbase doesn't want to see their chapter bully some heretic commander, they want to see them do stupid gak like German Suplex an Avatar of Khaine.
I think catastrophic events are totally acceptable even given the 1000 per chapter limit X 1000 chapters. This means at roughly any given time there can be 10,000 100-man battlegroups of Marines pushing around the galaxy and getting into trouble. A thousand of those battlegroups could suffer catastrophic losses and it would only represent 10% of the total Marine numbers available at that time, and each loss is still replaceable in raw numbers in some amount of time, maybe 10-50 years? If my math is right, even if it took 100 years to replace a company of Marines, that means the equivalent of 100 company-level catastrophes could happen every year, and the Marine numbers would be alright.
And we have to remember that most of the fighting is really done by other branches to begin with. Marines will normally be choosing for optimal deployments alongside the IG, Sisters, Mechanicum etc. in most cases, greatly reducing the chances of unforeseen catastrophe. So even while 100 catastrophes a year seems small compared to the number of conflicts at any given time in the Imperium, I think the wiggle room is there in the numbers and scenarios to make it feasible.
Calgar is Gravis. Gravis is T6. Terminators are T5.
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Tyran wrote: I mean, its current damage of D6+6 is pretty much the same as instant death as far as Calgar and his 6 wounds are concerned
Even Instant Death isn't death. Its still removed as a casualty. Getting poked in your second heart by either the most famous Daemon Sword or the Most famous Lightning Claw (I forget which, if it was even mentioned) is pretty instant-deathy too but its still removed as a casualty where the Apothecarion will rebuild you
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
Surely it's no worse than when a named character dies on the table but is miraculously still alive and kicking in the next game?
That aside, if GW is going to retcon anything it should probably be the number of Marines in existence. Play it off as Imperial propaganda or something.
As it is, it just comes across as GW not understanding numbers - in the same way that galactic-level conflicts can somehow have fewer casualties than the first world war.
If anything the number of space marines is so tiny that the Imperium should be able to replace a destroyed chapter with no effort. Hell the Imperium should be able to found a new chapter of space marines every single day. It's a thousand guys in an empire with quadrillions of people. If the Imperium was the entire planet earth then every space marine in existence would be one person. The Ultramarines would be I dunno, a single finger of that person? It's really really dumb for real.
The numbers aspect is fundamentally flawed because it's artificial.
Even the genetic compatibility issue is meaningless in an empire as large as the imperium. If only 0.5% of the population is compatible, then the current male population of earth has 20 million suitable candidates....
The space wolves are relatively unique in that they recruit from a single planet with a very small human population (even the blood angels recruit from multiple moons - and their genetics ignore the limitations anyway).
Yet the wolves are actually larger than normal chapters and they're not exactly driving the human population of fenris to extinction keeping their numbers up, so I imagine the compatibility issue is nowhere near as severe as 0.5%.
The uniqueness of marines is partially based on their rarity, but that rarity is De Beers level faked.
So the Imperium in reality has an unlimited resource of marines that are uber in all aspects. If they were as powerful as they've been protagonisted to be, the imperium would be unstoppable.
They just keep churning their marines through, casualties mean nothing, so killing them is not tragic at all, and the imperium can make as many as they want.
Hellebore wrote: The numbers aspect is fundamentally flawed because it's artificial.
Even the genetic compatibility issue is meaningless in an empire as large as the imperium. If only 0.5% of the population is compatible, then the current male population of earth has 20 million suitable candidates....
The space wolves are relatively unique in that they recruit from a single planet with a very small human population (even the blood angels recruit from multiple moons - and their genetics ignore the limitations anyway).
Yet the wolves are actually larger than normal chapters and they're not exactly driving the human population of fenris to extinction keeping their numbers up, so I imagine the compatibility issue is nowhere near as severe as 0.5%.
The uniqueness of marines is partially based on their rarity, but that rarity is De Beers level faked.
So the Imperium in reality has an unlimited resource of marines that are uber in all aspects. If they were as powerful as they've been protagonisted to be, the imperium would be unstoppable.
They just keep churning their marines through, casualties mean nothing, so killing them is not tragic at all, and the imperium can make as many as they want.
There's one more factor for the slow replacement/addition of Space Marines. Its a fairly easy claim to make that the harder compatability obstacle to overcome is the mental/spiritual/character aspect not the genetic one.
Yeah don't even try to bring any sort of scale "realism" into the equation with galactic sized empires... Even just the concept of hive cities/urbanised planets has insane figures attached to it let alone the idea of an empire spanning a galaxy of 100 million stars.
"science and futurism with isaac arthur" has good fun breaking down those kinds of narrative things and seeing just how absurd a Coruscant style planet would actually be, or what mining an entire planet can produce etc
CthuluIsSpy wrote: Yeah, but the 1000 marine per chapter limit makes that unfeasible. Especially when GW insists on having them fight in large scale battles where they are out in the open when things like Doomsday Cannons exist.
Surely it's no worse than when a named character dies on the table but is miraculously still alive and kicking in the next game?
That aside, if GW is going to retcon anything it should probably be the number of Marines in existence. Play it off as Imperial propaganda or something.
As it is, it just comes across as GW not understanding numbers - in the same way that galactic-level conflicts can somehow have fewer casualties than the first world war.
If anything the number of space marines is so tiny that the Imperium should be able to replace a destroyed chapter with no effort. Hell the Imperium should be able to found a new chapter of space marines every single day. It's a thousand guys in an empire with quadrillions of people. If the Imperium was the entire planet earth then every space marine in existence would be one person. The Ultramarines would be I dunno, a single finger of that person? It's really really dumb for real.
Space Marine creation is resource intensive with a high failure rate. That's why they are so rare. Geneseed is in itself a rare resource too, and you need that to make marines. Even before the high failure rate one has to account for the screening process which is highly selective. So that's a small recruitment pool that's further reduced by a high failure rate.
The Imperium can't just snap their fingers and grab a bunch of cannon fodder to turn into marines, it's much more complicated than that. Whilst on paper they do have the numbers, in practice it's probably not that clear cut because every failed aspirant could be doing something more useful. How does the saying in setting go? "Lives are the Emperor's currency. Spend them wisely."
Not to mention that every chapter has their own traditions with incredibly specific training methods, which limits scope even further. Whilst the Imperium may have an absurd population as a whole, Space Marines do not recruit from every world in the Imperium, they recruit from very specific worlds in the Imperium which have much lower population densities. That has to be factored into account too.
Then we have the codex astartes which is less a logistical restraint and more a political one that came about because of the Heresy, in an attempt to prevent another large scale Space Marine coup.
But yeah, Space Marine fluff is pretty bad and inconsistent.
I'm still unclear about what age you actually recruit aspirants, because the fluff says 10-12 but if you actually read what the recruitment process entails it's gak that's very hard to imagine a 10-12 doing it. For example, iirc, the Space Wolf selection process involves recruiting warriors who's fought in a few raids and can drink a lot of booze. So are they recruiting a bunch of drunk, murderous 10 year olds? It doesn't make sense.
I suspect the fluff says that they are that age, but the writer writes them as if they were much older and it really sticks out to me.
Hellebore wrote: The more OTT levels of background like THE sanguinor carrying a bloodthirster into the air, grey knights bathing in sister blood, or a bunch of marines destroying a craftworld are all from a very Matt Ward shaped era of GW fiction where they went off the rails with pure cartoon idiocy.
Depending on the specifics, two out of those three could be reasonable - I'm never going to defend the GK/SOB one, though.
As has been pointed out, the Sanguinor isn't even a Marine, but a Warp spirit of some form - and echoing the Sanguinius/Bloodthirster fight may make narrative sense. Also, the size of Bloodthirsters - like your beloved Avatar - have varied significantly over time.
Mental note - we need some fiction where the Sanguinor beats an Avatar up.
As for "a bunch of Marines destroying a Craftworld", plausibility would vary depending on how many "a bunch" is, and the size and condition of the Craftworld in question. Half a squad of Intercessors taking out Ulthwe would be problematic, for example, but significant elements from multiple Chapters taking down a smaller and/or damaged Craftworld would be reasonable.
Hellebore wrote: The more OTT levels of background like THE sanguinor carrying a bloodthirster into the air, grey knights bathing in sister blood, or a bunch of marines destroying a craftworld are all from a very Matt Ward shaped era of GW fiction where they went off the rails with pure cartoon idiocy.
Depending on the specifics, two out of those three could be reasonable - I'm never going to defend the GK/SOB one, though.
As has been pointed out, the Sanguinor isn't even a Marine, but a Warp spirit of some form - and echoing the Sanguinius/Bloodthirster fight may make narrative sense. Also, the size of Bloodthirsters - like your beloved Avatar - have varied significantly over time.
Mental note - we need some fiction where the Sanguinor beats an Avatar up.
As for "a bunch of Marines destroying a Craftworld", plausibility would vary depending on how many "a bunch" is, and the size and condition of the Craftworld in question. Half a squad of Intercessors taking out Ulthwe would be problematic, for example, but significant elements from multiple Chapters taking down a smaller and/or damaged Craftworld would be reasonable.
Didn't Sanguinor pick up the Avatar and do a pile driver on him in one of the Ward codices? I know that Ward had Calgar and Sanguinor do incredibly questionable feats, I forgot the specifics though.
Yeah there's definitely inconsistencies with the age and behaviours of the aspirants. Seems like someone thought it would make more sense if the aspirants were prepubescent for some idea of believability or metaphor for puberty, but they wanted the aspirants to come from dangerous worlds with lots of battles to echo the ideas in Dune.
I personally don't believe the 10 year old aspirant thing. I think you can probably start indoctrinating them then, and you can probably make early implants and so on, but I reckon based on background descriptions the process pretty much HAS to work on any young adult, IMO 20 is the likely cut off point.
Maybe there's a peak chance of success at one of the younger ages, or the psycho indoctrination works better then.
Hellebore wrote: The more OTT levels of background like THE sanguinor carrying a bloodthirster into the air, grey knights bathing in sister blood, or a bunch of marines destroying a craftworld are all from a very Matt Ward shaped era of GW fiction where they went off the rails with pure cartoon idiocy.
Depending on the specifics, two out of those three could be reasonable - I'm never going to defend the GK/SOB one, though.
As has been pointed out, the Sanguinor isn't even a Marine, but a Warp spirit of some form - and echoing the Sanguinius/Bloodthirster fight may make narrative sense. Also, the size of Bloodthirsters - like your beloved Avatar - have varied significantly over time.
Mental note - we need some fiction where the Sanguinor beats an Avatar up.
As for "a bunch of Marines destroying a Craftworld", plausibility would vary depending on how many "a bunch" is, and the size and condition of the Craftworld in question. Half a squad of Intercessors taking out Ulthwe would be problematic, for example, but significant elements from multiple Chapters taking down a smaller and/or damaged Craftworld would be reasonable.
Regarding the sm vs craftworld part, that's another part where gw's aversion to numbers makes anything possible. Are aspect warriors still at least as powerful as marines lore-wise? If so then say a massive 500 marines strong strikeforce attacking a craftworld would only be succesful if there were 100-200 aspect warriors at most, since they'd also have guardians, wraith units, automated defenses and who knows what else. That's not a craftworld crew, that's maybe a cruiser (or even just a frigate).
At least that's what'd make sense to me, but afaik we don't have any hard numbers on the amount of eldar on craftworlds (and given gw's track record I don't think it'd help if we did). So anything goes.
GW's numbers are just all over the place, as different writers clearly have a massive variance in scale.
In some stories Craftworld's seem utterly tiny, with low thousands if not hundreds of Eldar and maybe 10 Aspect Warriors that can be taken down by whoever's the protagonist in this bit of fiction.
But then you have Iyanden: "The craftworld's armies and fleets were all but gone, destroyed by the relentless Tyranid advance. Countless billions were slain, whole families and bloodlines lost forever; the living were outnumbered many times over by the dead."
Which rather suggests that at least before its collapse Iyanden had... countless billions to lose. Cue lots of debate online on what number is "countless".
I think Space Marine Chapters are too small. As people say you can zoom the camera in to make the exploits of the Ultramarines 2nd company interesting. But its like talking about the mission of one small commando unit in the context of WW2.
But in terms of grand strategy scale, GW always want to do a lot more. So it becomes "The Ultramarines conquered planet X" - prompting sorry, what? With all six of them? They couldn't conquer a small town.
But I suspect if GW ever want to tidy up the lore they'll just expand the Marine numbers. Kind of feel they've been doing that anyway as founding Chapter after founding Chapter turns out to "secretly be in control/cahoots with all its successors."
The size of chapters was probably at least partially to encourage the idea that people might collect 100 marines for a full company. It's a pretty achievable target.
Personally, I think the worst SW inconsistences happen after the HH ends.
Crusades era: SW have reportedly anywhere from 80k-200k marines.
HH: SW did not take part in the SoT, engaged elsewhere; inconclusive data.
Post-HH: Legions are broken up into ~1000-man chapters. SW, historically referred to as a smaller legion, only have the troop numbers to make 1 Second Founding Chapter, the "ill-fated Wolf Brothers".
So...the SW lost ~78-198k Marines from the height of the Crusade to implementation of the Codex Astartes?
Da Boss wrote: The size of chapters was probably at least partially to encourage the idea that people might collect 100 marines for a full company. It's a pretty achievable target.
I think it also aimed to sell how hyper rare and powerful they were compared to regular Imperial Guardsmen and such. These were your super-elite super-soldier warriors.
Yes 40 years later they are the most heavily sold army as a result of marketing and popularity; yes mandates on BL to focus on the Imperial factions and sales of Marines means that they have a gross over-representation in the number of books about them.
We see this in the real world too - how many action-flicks are based on regular grunt recruits - not half as many as are based on "Ex super-military para-SAS-SEAL mega operative".
Da Boss wrote: The size of chapters was probably at least partially to encourage the idea that people might collect 100 marines for a full company. It's a pretty achievable target.
Rogue Trader and 2nd Ed were also far smaller in scale. Even for Orks, you’d rarely field more than 60 models in 2nd Ed.
Epic kinda broke that though, as a Space Marine army would represent a significant proportion of a Chapter.
That's true - armies way back in 2nd and even 3rd ed were way smaller than they are now. That was back in the day where some troops were all metal and sold in blisters of one or two models to a pack (3 for some if I recall right).
A 2K army today, back then would have seen insanely expensive and huge not to mention something like a knight or baneblade would have been FW only (place your order by mail or phone and wait up to 2 weeks to arrive)
Even Instant Death isn't death. Its still removed as a casualty. Getting poked in your second heart by either the most famous Daemon Sword or the Most famous Lightning Claw (I forget which, if it was even mentioned) is pretty instant-deathy too but its still removed as a casualty where the Apothecarion will rebuild you
Sure, but getting hit by 20 kilograms of tungsten at ten times the speed of sound is going to turn Calgar into half vaporized meat sauce, and an Apothecary isn't rebuilding him from that.
Lord Clinto wrote: Personally, I think the worst SW inconsistences happen after the HH ends.
Crusades era: SW have reportedly anywhere from 80k-200k marines.
HH: SW did not take part in the SoT, engaged elsewhere; inconclusive data.
Post-HH: Legions are broken up into ~1000-man chapters. SW, historically referred to as a smaller legion, only have the troop numbers to make 1 Second Founding Chapter, the "ill-fated Wolf Brothers".
So...the SW lost ~78-198k Marines from the height of the Crusade to implementation of the Codex Astartes?
The Wolves sent out a lot of babysitter forces that were never heard from again, They also engaged in two Marine on Marine punishment tours with Angron and Propsero among other less sanctioned, less suported, less wise decisions.
Even Instant Death isn't death. Its still removed as a casualty. Getting poked in your second heart by either the most famous Daemon Sword or the Most famous Lightning Claw (I forget which, if it was even mentioned) is pretty instant-deathy too but its still removed as a casualty where the Apothecarion will rebuild you
Sure, but getting hit by 20 kilograms of tungsten at ten times the speed of sound is going to turn Calgar into half vaporized meat sauce, and an Apothecary isn't rebuilding him from that.
You're very literal, I get that. And it has its uses. But in this case not so much. Getting hit by an instant death weapon isn't necessarily a direct hit. An indirect hit can still remove you as a casualty. And its much more likely to be an indirect or near miss removing a man sized target as a casualty than it is an anti-titan weapon sniping a man sized target.
And that difficulty is represented by Calgar having character rules that allow him to hide behind his buddies so he doesn't get hit by a Hammerhead railgun.
But if for some reason his buddies are removed as casualties, Calgar is in the open and he gets hit by a railgun? He is dead
The numbers of marines are at odds with the sheer number of large weapons in 40k that can kill them. Marines may be resistant to small arms, but they will die to lascannons, plasma guns and krak missiles.
And although there are more lasguns than lascannons, the sheer number of lascannons outnumbers the marines by substantial amounts. And that doesn't include every alien or chaos faction's anti tank weapons that will kill marines.
This just highlights more contradictions in 40k - either there are small numbers of marines and every army has even smaller numbers of AT weapons that could kill them, or there are plenty of marines and those weapons aren't that rare.
It's like the setting is a whole bunch of multiverses that overlap, where in one marines can one punch a tank and bounce of lascannon and in the other, an enemy force has a hundred lascannons that will incinerate a whole marine army.
But where the quantum super position of each collapses always in favour of the marines.
Hellebore wrote:The numbers of marines are at odds with the sheer number of large weapons in 40k that can kill them. Marines may be resistant to small arms, but they will die to lascannons, plasma guns and krak missiles.
And although there are more lasguns than lascannons, the sheer number of lascannons outnumbers the marines by substantial amounts. And that doesn't include every alien or chaos faction's anti tank weapons that will kill marines.
This just highlights more contradictions in 40k - either there are small numbers of marines and every army has even smaller numbers of AT weapons that could kill them, or there are plenty of marines and those weapons aren't that rare.
It's like the setting is a whole bunch of multiverses that overlap, where in one marines can one punch a tank and bounce of lascannon and in the other, an enemy force has a hundred lascannons that will incinerate a whole marine army.
But where the quantum super position of each collapses always in favour of the marines.
Well, this is where tabletop games get wonky when they meet lore. Generally, marines would probably be trying to take measures to mitigate how many of those lascannons ever get pointed their direction in the first place. They shouldn't be face tanking every lascannon a traitor guard army has; they should be doing spec ops missions to wreck the traitors' cohesion and lightning attacks to prevent the enemy from amassing forces in one place for a head-on battle.
But you're not wrong; realism is not super compatible with 40k.
Tyran wrote:And that difficulty is represented by Calgar having character rules that allow him to hide behind his buddies so he doesn't get hit by a Hammerhead railgun.
But if for some reason his buddies are removed as casualties, Calgar is in the open and he gets hit by a railgun? He is dead
Breton's point, I think, is that we're supposed to assume a named character like Calgar is never actually taking a direct hit thanks to the power of plot armor. When you remove his model from the table, it can be assumed that a near miss from a railgun was still enough to knock him out or that a d-cannon caused some wonky warp lightnign to arc out and fry his nervous system even though he wasn't dragged into the warp.
There's also the fact that if the game followed the lore then everyone would be sick of the fact that most Marine armies would be 1 tactical squad - whilst IG and Tyranid players would never get past the huge mountain of chaff models they'd have to assemble and paint to get to the tabletop.
I've always maintained that whilst the game is cool and lifts some elements from the lore; its never really supposed to "work" like in the lore itself. Heck a Greater Demon manifesting is a massive thing - two or three or four at once is almost pure insanity and yet we have that tabletop side. Lore side you'd be calling on ships in orbit to fire; whole vast armies to take them down and more
I think trying to draw a line from the lore(reality) to the tabletop is always going to lead to either insanely wonky representations or disappointment because its never going to line up.
Well, this is where tabletop games get wonky when they meet lore. Generally, marines would probably be trying to take measures to mitigate how many of those lascannons ever get pointed their direction in the first place. They shouldn't be face tanking every lascannon a traitor guard army has; they should be doing spec ops missions to wreck the traitors' cohesion and lightning attacks to prevent the enemy from amassing forces in one place for a head-on battle.
But you're not wrong; realism is not super compatible with 40k.
I mentioned a few pages back that this isn't specific to marines. Apart from say orks or nids, virtually no army is going to choose a fight that isn't heavily skewed in their favour. The table top's balanced approach leads to massive casualties far in excess of what many armies (notably eldar and marines) would actually receive based on how they fight and choose their battles.
The irony with marines is that their normal modus operandi is at odds with showing how badass they actually are - as much as people love the astartes animation, and as accurate as it is, it shows marines killing peasants in vast numbers, which is not really a challenge.
Marines setting themselves up for success by only attacking weak foes in advantageous ways is at odds with the superhero Titus taking on carnifexes. Which is just another contradiction GW has no interest in resolving.
People want the indestructibility of marines from astartes but applied to things that kill them like carnifexes, aspect warriors, immortals, nobz etc. And don't care or realise that their survivability is due to their opponent's weakness, not their strength.
Well Titus is not only a marine but a video game protagonist, so I don't mind he can do those things with that in mind but if people do take that as standard marine officer ability can see how it'd get annoying. Would love to see them take a risk with an autarch or something in one of those games, they'd be perfectly fluffy to have different power ups etc.
We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
Hellebore wrote: The numbers aspect is fundamentally flawed because it's artificial.
Even the genetic compatibility issue is meaningless in an empire as large as the imperium. If only 0.5% of the population is compatible, then the current male population of earth has 20 million suitable candidates....
The space wolves are relatively unique in that they recruit from a single planet with a very small human population (even the blood angels recruit from multiple moons - and their genetics ignore the limitations anyway).
Yet the wolves are actually larger than normal chapters and they're not exactly driving the human population of fenris to extinction keeping their numbers up, so I imagine the compatibility issue is nowhere near as severe as 0.5%.
The uniqueness of marines is partially based on their rarity, but that rarity is De Beers level faked.
So the Imperium in reality has an unlimited resource of marines that are uber in all aspects. If they were as powerful as they've been protagonisted to be, the imperium would be unstoppable.
They just keep churning their marines through, casualties mean nothing, so killing them is not tragic at all, and the imperium can make as many as they want.
You know it's funny, but there's really only one interpretation of all this that works: Space Marines have no significant impact on the Imperium's military power at all, and only still exist as a ceremonial throwback like the Swiss Guard. They're objects of cultural and religious reverence, not a real fighting force.
I mean they do still fight aliens and are individually very good at it, but it never affects the outcome of a war because there are so few of them. All of the real "elite shock troop" work is done by modern units like the Tempestus or Arbites, who number in the hundreds of billions. The Space Marines are deliberately kept irrelevant by the High Lords and the Emperor accepts this because he considers the Space Marines to be a failure, but he won't allow them to be totally destroyed because he feels responsible for them. The Space Marine chapters themselves are mostly deluded, convinced by hypno-indoctrination from childhood into believing that they're essential to humanity's survival. The few that see the truth often become rebels or turn to Chaos, but unless they escape to the Eye of Terror they're easily crushed by the Guard.
Ha that's a good depiction, pure propaganda and tradition which fits the Imperium to a tee. They're akin to those administratum divisions that are churning out reports and putting them straight into the shredder division to destroy immediately, no one ever questioning them.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
But you see, that's CLEARLY when the story is non canon and fake. Malum Caedo on the other hand is peak 40k accuracy.
Breton's point, I think, is that we're supposed to assume a named character like Calgar is never actually taking a direct hit thanks to the power of plot armor. When you remove his model from the table, it can be assumed that a near miss from a railgun was still enough to knock him out or that a d-cannon caused some wonky warp lightnign to arc out and fry his nervous system even though he wasn't dragged into the warp.
Not just Calgar. Its a question of scale - Using the main turret of the USS Iowa to kill a rat 20 miles inland isn't very likely. Sure you might concuss the thing if you get within 10 yards, but a direct hit from a 16" shell on a 2" rat is pretty unlikely. So the big giant Instant Death Weapons designed to take out a 40 foot tall Knight is unlikely to be accurate enough to really snipe an 8 foot tall dude.
While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.
The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.
The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.
Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.
GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...
GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...
Most campaigns aren't even a whole edition long - perhaps half that at best. So you're looking at models that have - in this market - a tiny lifespan.
It could work if they were generic style models so they'd just "retire" to being a leader with a specific custom loadout from the codex; or a random trooper in a squad. Otherwise people would fast dislike such rapid cycling of models in this market and it would 100% feel like GW were just doing it to print money and nothing else.
Even if they lasted the 3 years of an edition that's not that long - esp if you come in part way along the edition.
Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad. And if they weren't required to be set in the last seconds of the 41st millennium...
Also, if they released them uthar the destined style, with generic plus specific, it would also come across ok.
But it would also go back to encouraging people to play throughout time in the setting, rather than feeling like they could only play at the bleeding edge 10 seconds to midnight point which GW has become slaved to.
ie, they release the Macharian crusade as the next campaign and we get Macharius, unique other characters etc, but it's set thousands of years in the past. Opportunities to do new guard regiments, add interesting unit types etc.
Then they launch their next campaign which may or may not be in the 41st millennium.
Sergeant Namaan is an example of a character that was introduced in a campaign and then killed off later. Macharius never got a campaign - he was literally introduced as a dead character....
EDIT: To be more specific on the 'killing off' component, the setting should just move on without them and they die from the passage of time, whether in a battle or whatever. But the setting itself should never be tied to the life span of a character, which is what's happening when the plot can't move without characters acting first.
You get just as much stagnation of plot by having a bunch of characters everything revolves around and none can die, as you do not having a 'moving narrative'.
Hellebore wrote: While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.
The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.
The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.
Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.
GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...
What is firing the 20KG magnetically accellerated Tungsten rod? If you want to switch to some Dark Reapers with anti-tank missiles we're no longer talking about an Instant Death weapon and Calgar spent most of his life in a Personal Tank suit of Terminator Armor.
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Hellebore wrote: Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yes it would. $60-80 for stuff that's going to get squatted is bad.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
That game did have one accurate bit. Ever tried to kill a marine with your honor blade?
Hellebore wrote: The numbers of marines are at odds with the sheer number of large weapons in 40k that can kill them. Marines may be resistant to small arms, but they will die to lascannons, plasma guns and krak missiles.
And although there are more lasguns than lascannons, the sheer number of lascannons outnumbers the marines by substantial amounts. And that doesn't include every alien or chaos faction's anti tank weapons that will kill marines.
This just highlights more contradictions in 40k - either there are small numbers of marines and every army has even smaller numbers of AT weapons that could kill them, or there are plenty of marines and those weapons aren't that rare.
It's like the setting is a whole bunch of multiverses that overlap, where in one marines can one punch a tank and bounce of lascannon and in the other, an enemy force has a hundred lascannons that will incinerate a whole marine army.
But where the quantum super position of each collapses always in favour of the marines.
Or it could just be an often enough fun game with alot of poorly written fiction too many take too seriously....
Hellebore wrote: While I agree, we're not really talking about a railgun 20 miles away and we are talking about technologies with auto targeting systems.
The Dark reapers for example and their auto targeting range finders. A squad of those firing anti tank rounds at calgar should obliterate him, regardless of scale.
The protection of protagonism is the only thing keeping him from perma death.
Him and every named character - Eldrad should be dead. Thraka should be dead. Abaddon should be dead.
GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...
What is firing the 20KG magnetically accellerated Tungsten rod? If you want to switch to some Dark Reapers with anti-tank missiles we're no longer talking about an Instant Death weapon and Calgar spent most of his life in a Personal Tank suit of Terminator Armor.
I think the previous examples of hammerhead railguns and d-cannons were pretty decent examples to bring up. A d-cannon isn't super long-ranged (comparable range to a bolter). A hammerhead's railgun *is* quite long-ranged, but will frequently see use much closer than the "20 miles inland" example. It's fair to say that if <insert character here> is appearing in a number of battles featuring such weapons, eventually they have a really good chance of doing some kind of permanent damage.
A near miss from one d-cannon that leaves you incapacitated for the rest of a fight is certainly plausible. *Several* such near-misses in a single campaign, all resulting in incapacitating levels of harm, gets a bit harder to swallow. I chalk it up to a conceit of the setting. The same way blaster shots and explosions almost never seem to finish a named jedi off, characters in 40k are similarly suspiciously death-proof.
But I *do* interpret it as suspiciously frequent near-misses/non-lethal hits. I don't interpret Calgar getting taken out by a railgun as him literally taking a direct hit to the torso and soldiering on.
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Hellebore wrote: Well if they actually had their campaigns last the length of an edition the way they set them up to, it wouldn't be so bad.
Yes it would. $60-80 for stuff that's going to get squatted is bad.
Yeah. I'd be pretty peeved if the Lhykis model that just came out was only expected to be usable for a few years. I *do* think an okay example of how to handle it is the named captain from the Baal campaign back in 7th. (Carlisle?) He got a name. He got some story. He got some campaign missions. I don't know if he survived the Shield of Baal event in canon, but he seems to have been allowed to drop out the wider galaxy's attention after that. He works as just a generic captain (not sure if he actually got his own bespoke model or not). You can make him your army's captain if you took a shine to him and want to spend more time with the guy, but you can also forget he ever existed. GW doesn't need to keep inventing reasons for him to be relevant nor do they need to treat him as being especially bullet proof.
Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.
Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead. Lhykis being immortal can't really die, but can be inactive.
The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.
THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.
Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.
No one had a problem with Macharius being dead - he was being used in games all the time while he was in the guard codex. But none of the narrative was slaved to his actions because he was dead. In fact him being dead gave players far more freedom to use him however they wanted than a 10 novel bloated narrative going nowhere ever could.
Hellebore wrote: Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.
Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead.
Canon deaths come with some limitations on the stories you can tell with those characters. If they had killed Karlaen off during the Shield of Baal (idk if they did or not), then you couldn't have him participating in any events that occurred after that point. Pre-retcon, if you liked Eldrad's story but wanted to play a campagin where he came to terms with his own savior complex, you kind of couldn't. Because he died on the blackstone fortress during the 13th Black Crusade with savior complex still in full swing.
The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.
THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.
Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.
There are options other than killing characters off or making the whole galaxy revolve around them. At their best, I think named characters serve as an *example* of *some* of the cool things going on in the setting. You can have Farsight rebelling against the tau empire and raising questions about the intentions and authority of the ethereals without making him the galaxy's last hope against chaos or whatever. And you can stop telling stories about him for a while as you jump over to see what Lelith is up to in Commorragh or what shenanigans Snikrot is getting into.
You can move on to new stories without killing off old characters, and you can make a character's story exciting/impactful without the whole setting hinging on the outcome. I'd say you *should* do the former because inspiring people with evocative plot hooks and making them want to play out the "what ifs" on the tabletop is kind of the point of those characters. I'd say some characters do the latter pretty well. I'm super invested in Ahriman's ongoing (doomed) struggle to de-rubric his brothers. But even if he were to succeed, the setting as a whole could continue on.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
True but it was pretty terrible
But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?
I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.
Hellebore wrote: Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.
Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead. Lhykis being immortal can't really die, but can be inactive.
The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.
THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.
Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.
No one had a problem with Macharius being dead - he was being used in games all the time while he was in the guard codex. But none of the narrative was slaved to his actions because he was dead. In fact him being dead gave players far more freedom to use him however they wanted than a 10 novel bloated narrative going nowhere ever could.
That would be even worse. Tycho drove me absolutely bonkers sticking around so long after he died. Might as well have tried to play the game with a fingernails on chalkboard sound track.
Hellebore wrote: Nowhere did I say the model was squatted - this is part of the problem. People think that the setting is pointless unless it's on the bleeding edge of 'now'.
Those characters become macharius, historical characters that can be used but aren't plot drivers because they're dead.
Canon deaths come with some limitations on the stories you can tell with those characters. If they had killed Karlaen off during the Shield of Baal (idk if they did or not), then you couldn't have him participating in any events that occurred after that point. Pre-retcon, if you liked Eldrad's story but wanted to play a campagin where he came to terms with his own savior complex, you kind of couldn't. Because he died on the blackstone fortress during the 13th Black Crusade with savior complex still in full swing.
The story should stop revolving around characters and move on, or pick up a new story in a different era with new characters.
THe game is completely slaved to a bunch of characters' actions and it shrinks the setting to a tiny blip in a 10,000 year canvas.
Killing them off and new narratives forming around new characters doesn't invalidate those other characters, it just stops them bottlenecking the story and stops locking people to playing in a tiny window of the setting.
There are options other than killing characters off or making the whole galaxy revolve around them. At their best, I think named characters serve as an *example* of *some* of the cool things going on in the setting. You can have Farsight rebelling against the tau empire and raising questions about the intentions and authority of the ethereals without making him the galaxy's last hope against chaos or whatever. And you can stop telling stories about him for a while as you jump over to see what Lelith is up to in Commorragh or what shenanigans Snikrot is getting into.
You can move on to new stories without killing off old characters, and you can make a character's story exciting/impactful without the whole setting hinging on the outcome. I'd say you *should* do the former because inspiring people with evocative plot hooks and making them want to play out the "what ifs" on the tabletop is kind of the point of those characters. I'd say some characters do the latter pretty well. I'm super invested in Ahriman's ongoing (doomed) struggle to de-rubric his brothers. But even if he were to succeed, the setting as a whole could continue on.
And to some extent the characters that SHOULD be getting stories should be getting, you know, stories. Guilliman, Johnson, Angron, Magnus, and Morty have returned to the setting. Johnson only got an upjumped catalog blurb. Hasn't met Guilliman yet. And that's a pretty big deal as the only two Loyalist Primarchs who aren't really all that fond of each other trying to find their new place in the old world. Instead we get stuff like this Dawn of Fire series. I've played Ultramarines for 30-35 years now, and even I'm thinking we didn't really need yet another series about yet another Ultramarine. Pick another chapter, or do the characters we already have.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
True but it was pretty terrible
But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?
I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.
In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.
Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).
GW should just have gone with killing off characters after campaigns and releasing new characters and models to take their places - and killing those off after campaigns...
Most campaigns aren't even a whole edition long - perhaps half that at best. So you're looking at models that have - in this market - a tiny lifespan.
It could work if they were generic style models so they'd just "retire" to being a leader with a specific custom loadout from the codex; or a random trooper in a squad. Otherwise people would fast dislike such rapid cycling of models in this market and it would 100% feel like GW were just doing it to print money and nothing else.
Even if they lasted the 3 years of an edition that's not that long - esp if you come in part way along the edition.
I think it could work if GW brought back proper wargear selections and just made special characters have specific loadouts. So special characters are always options you can take, they just don't get oodles of special wargear and rules that aren't available to any other character because no one else in the setting is allowed to rival their awesomeness.
I'd note, too, that WHFB had numerous characters who were canonically dead but still available to be used (most of the characters in the Vampire Counts book were very, very dead in the setting). So there's certain some precedent in GW games for using characters even after they've died in the setting.
If this isn't desirable, I think the best alternative would be for most special characters to take a back seat in the story. They exist but it's a huge galaxy and they're either taking a more strategic role (i.e. not putting themselves on the front line) or otherwise so rare as to practically be a myth. By all means still name-drop them once in a while and indicate that they're doing stuff elsewhere or behind the scenes. But have the focus on a lot of new characters, to emphasise that it's a huge galaxy and the big names simply can't be everywhere at once.
Lord Damocles wrote: We had a game where a lone Fire Warrior murdered his way through hundreds of Marines (loyalist and chaos), multiple Daemon princes, and a Lord of Change.
True but it was pretty terrible
But was it more or less "realistic" than Space Marine, where health is recharged by killing bad guys in CC?
I don't remember the game much, but one thing That ought to be appreciated is that the Tau pulse rifle and carbine were/are more effective weapons than bolters. That's something working in favor of the Fire Warrior. I remember being able to use bolters in that game too, but forget how they compare.
Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.
In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.
Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).
Gah. Bugger about the bolters then. The pulse rifle being better than a bolter is/was such a key feature in 40k.
Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.
To be fair, I cannot remember whether or not I enjoyed it because that was 20 years ago (ugh!). I probably thought it was "fine" for a console shooter on a PS 2(?), and then went back to CS 1.6 on my PC.
In the game bolters were better than the pulse rifle. Pulse rifle was your starting weapon you used against the guard, you updated to carbine relatively soon because of the higher firing rate. By the time marines arrived your Tau gun was a burst cannon. The bolter was actually pretty good to take out marines, unlike your carbine, but you'd eventually swap it for a plasma gun. Even later you get a railgun and that's what gets work done against the incoming raptors, obliterators, havocs and chaos dreads.
Edit: I'm always thinking if they did that game today you'd probably just move from scout to firewarrior to crisis to riptide, which would actually give you capabilities that'd be in line with the fluff (kiling a bunch of loyalist and Chaos Marines and stuff).
Gah. Bugger about the bolters then. The pulse rifle being better than a bolter is/was such a key feature in 40k.
Of course, Space Marine 2 was a fun game which is getting over a very low bar when it comes to comparing to most Games Workshop video games but in not very "realistic" to how i view the fluff. Apologies for being so dismissive of Fire Warrior though, I'm sure plenty of people enjoyed it and that is valid, realising it's grating when people act that way towards something enjoyed.
To be fair, I cannot remember whether or not I enjoyed it because that was 20 years ago (ugh!). I probably thought it was "fine" for a console shooter on a PS 2(?), and then went back to CS 1.6 on my PC.
The strength of pulse rifle and bolter had more to do with the campaign progress. If Space Marines had featured right at the beginning I guess the rifle would have been better than the bolter. Just like the Chaos Bolter was a pip better than the loyalist bolter because you encountered Chaos after the loyalists .
The game was good for its time. A nice shooter of the type like Medal of Honor Frontline or Half life 1, meaning most of the time you'de be running around on your own and kill enemies 1 on 1. It needed Call of Duty to come out to give us the feel of mass battles and allies that wouldn't stop at the next corner, telling you to move on alone because they're securing the area...
I think having characters be canonically alive for all of 18 months is kind of insane. People are vaguely aware say Eldrad exists because he's been running around doing stuff for decades. I don't see "Farseer blinkandyoumissedme" really doing anything for anyone.
Tbh I didn't really get the special character hate all the way back in 5th edition - and I don't get it now. I think special characters are cool and thats why people buy them. From a DE perspective, it seems more fun to be a faction with characters, rather than watch them all be scrubbed.
I think it could work if GW brought back proper wargear selections and just made special characters have specific loadouts. So special characters are always options you can take, they just don't get oodles of special wargear and rules that aren't available to any other character because no one else in the setting is allowed to rival their awesomeness.
I'd note, too, that WHFB had numerous characters who were canonically dead but still available to be used (most of the characters in the Vampire Counts book were very, very dead in the setting). So there's certain some precedent in GW games for using characters even after they've died in the setting.
If this isn't desirable, I think the best alternative would be for most special characters to take a back seat in the story. They exist but it's a huge galaxy and they're either taking a more strategic role (i.e. not putting themselves on the front line) or otherwise so rare as to practically be a myth. By all means still name-drop them once in a while and indicate that they're doing stuff elsewhere or behind the scenes. But have the focus on a lot of new characters, to emphasise that it's a huge galaxy and the big names simply can't be everywhere at once.
Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I would love a one-per-army option to build a custom character to lead your army.
Let the player choose loadouts, special gear, special rules, etc.
If you are worried about game balance, slap the Legends tag on this, and let all of us non tourney people have a blast.
I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini. Use that to fill out the rest of the factions/subfactions with the pivotal people. That means you need a little more than The Lion, The Son of The Forest. It was an OK book, but it was pretty obviously a "Buy my mini" book.
Breton wrote: Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.
And this is exactly the issue. In a vast galaxy, and in a game that (at least in the past) had a heavy emphasis on 'Your Dudes', it seems ridiculous to say that there is only one of these jetbikes in the entire galaxy. No one else can have either that jetbike or their own jetbike that's close enough to be represented with the same rules. And said jetbike is never destroyed, damaged beyond repair etc., even against enemies who use the equivalent of naval-guns or molecular-disintegration weapons.
The idea of a given Space Marine wielding a completely unique, one-of-a-kind sword or such seems more suited to imperial propaganda.
More importantly still, if special characters were only permitted wargear available to generic characters, then that might encourage designers to give generic characters a decent selection of wargear. As opposed to the current tosh.
I'd like to see a lot more "Uriel Ventris" characters. A character that starts in the books, becomes popular enough to get a mini.
No, no, I'm sure that it's totally organic that Mira Lensk is really so popular that she's had TWO miniatures now...
That's why I said Ventris not anyone else. Ventris was organic. Let the writers earn their keep by creating some characters. The characters that do take off on their own, naturally, organically then get a mini to fill out the other (sub)factions.
Breton wrote: Except most of the special characters are special because they have special gear. Not even talking about the super special but still modeled by a Power Fist type stuff - but Calgar who was an Aggressor 25 years before Aggressors were a thing - and you still can't take a character version- or Sammael's Jetbike, the Blades of Reason, Dante's Inferno Pistol that predates all the others by a bunch. And so On.
And this is exactly the issue. In a vast galaxy, and in a game that (at least in the past) had a heavy emphasis on 'Your Dudes', it seems ridiculous to say that there is only one of these jetbikes in the entire galaxy. No one else can have either that jetbike or their own jetbike that's close enough to be represented with the same rules. And said jetbike is never destroyed, damaged beyond repair etc., even against enemies who use the equivalent of naval-guns or molecular-disintegration weapons.
The idea of a given Space Marine wielding a completely unique, one-of-a-kind sword or such seems more suited to imperial propaganda.
More importantly still, if special characters were only permitted wargear available to generic characters, then that might encourage designers to give generic characters a decent selection of wargear. As opposed to the current tosh.
I'm pretty sure the wink-wink-nudge-nudge fluff is that the Dark Angels have an entire storehouse of his jetbikes, but only give them to him and one at a time. In editions past, you also had him as the Captain of the Successor Chapter Ravenwings and they had his wink-wink-nudge-nudge jetbike. You were just supposed to change his name from Sammael to something of your own - like Asmodeus, Azazel, Apollyon, Mephistopheles, etc.
Lord Clinto wrote: Personally, I think the worst SW inconsistences happen after the HH ends.
Crusades era: SW have reportedly anywhere from 80k-200k marines.
HH: SW did not take part in the SoT, engaged elsewhere; inconclusive data.
Post-HH: Legions are broken up into ~1000-man chapters. SW, historically referred to as a smaller legion, only have the troop numbers to make 1 Second Founding Chapter, the "ill-fated Wolf Brothers".
So...the SW lost ~78-198k Marines from the height of the Crusade to implementation of the Codex Astartes?
The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.
The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.
Doesn't it say "known" successor chapters to give DIY players more than enough room to play in the "unknown" successor chapters?
The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.
Doesn't it say "known" successor chapters to give DIY players more than enough room to play in the "unknown" successor chapters?
Yes, but over the years, people have developed an ever stronger idea that DIY chapters and anything DIY shouldn't really be there. That also is an issue with so mcuh more becoming known about the distant past.
Unless you are adopting late-season Game of Thrones offscreen cloning technology, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the bulk of Marines after the Horus Heresy are dead and so numbers should be a lot lower.
I guess question marks for the few chapters that never really did anything (looking at you Ultramarines.)
Yes, but over the years, people have developed an ever stronger idea that DIY chapters and anything DIY shouldn't really be there. That also is an issue with so mcuh more becoming known about the distant past.
*In your experience. In mine people are doing homebrew factions just as much as they were doing before.
And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.
Splinter forces like Blackshields, Shattered Legions and various bands of Loyalists from Traitor Legions were also commonplace and are ripe pickings for making up new Successors.
The Apocrypha of Davio attempted to track the Second Founding but failed.
And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.
But that is only 23 000 marines for legion of hundreds of thousands strong that famously did not do that much fighting. It doesn't add up. Also, Salamanders had no successors as they were a small legion. Small, as only thousand when others were hundreds of thousands? And of course same issue with Space Wolves.
Hence why I put "hard" because the source for the 23 Chapters is from 2nd Edition.
And no, the XIIIth did not "famously do not that much fighting".
Calth lost the Legion half it's fighting number, then they took heavy losses during the Shadow Crusade including important recruiting and training worlds like Armatura. There was a period of relative calm during the Imperium Secundus but this was swiftly followed by the push to Terra and then the Scouring before the Second Fouding was initiated.
At no point am I saying that there should only be 23 Ultramarine Successors, I am saying that there is absolutely room to do so.
The Salamanders were one of the smallest Legions who then lost almost everything at the Dropsite Massacre and never had the chance to rebuild.
The Raven Guard at least got help from the Emperor and the Iron Hands weren't fully gathered for Isstvan V with the majority of their losses being from the more veteran Clans like the Avernii.
The Wolves lost a third of their Legion at Prospero then got jumped by Traitors all the way back to Terra before heading back out to try and gut the Sons of Horus before they reached the throneworld.
There are explanations for literally everything if you look further than memes and reddit posts.
Gert wrote: Hence why I put "hard" because the source for the 23 Chapters is from 2nd Edition.
And no, the XIIIth did not "famously do not that much fighting".
Calth lost the Legion half it's fighting number, then they took heavy losses during the Shadow Crusade including important recruiting and training worlds like Armatura. There was a period of relative calm during the Imperium Secundus but this was swiftly followed by the push to Terra and then the Scouring before the Second Fouding was initiated.
At no point am I saying that there should only be 23 Ultramarine Successors, I am saying that there is absolutely room to do so.
The Salamanders were one of the smallest Legions who then lost almost everything at the Dropsite Massacre and never had the chance to rebuild.
The Raven Guard at least got help from the Emperor and the Iron Hands weren't fully gathered for Isstvan V with the majority of their losses being from the more veteran Clans like the Avernii.
The Wolves lost a third of their Legion at Prospero then got jumped by Traitors all the way back to Terra before heading back out to try and gut the Sons of Horus before they reached the throneworld.
There are explanations for literally everything if you look further than memes and reddit posts.
No. it still doesn't quite add up. If legions are hundreds of thousands strong, it doesn't make sense that there are only couple of thousand remaining for the second founding. Like Wolves might have lost third, or even half, but it seems that there is only about 1% left for the second founding. And if ultras were split into 23 chapters, and were the most numerous, it means everyone else had way less remaining. This is a glitch caused by increasing the sizes of legions.
Under the assumption that there always existed a 1000 space marine chapters since the second founding (even if there only where 500 or 200), doesn't that result in a million marines?
Even if only 200 chapters where founded during the second founding, and each chapter was half strength, that's still a hundred thousand marines. Considering the immense attrition and losses mentioned by posters above, this might actually add up.
And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.
But that is only 23 000 marines for legion of hundreds of thousands strong that famously did not do that much fighting. It doesn't add up. Also, Salamanders had no successors as they were a small legion. Small, as only thousand when others were hundreds of thousands? And of course same issue with Space Wolves.
Not fighting at Terra doesn't mean they didn't fight. They fought at Calth, they fought at Numeria, they fought a gauntlet of battles vs the Iron Warriors on the way to Terra.
Edit: They also did the bulk of the work after the Heresy keeping systems safe and compliant to buy time for the rest of the legions.
Not all Legions were huge. The Shattered ones were obviously small, but others were never large - Russ always had a midsized for example.
The "largest" loyalists were originally the Dark Angels who then lost a lot during the Crusade itself even before the Heresy (then lost a bunch on Caliban) It took a while into the Crusade for them to find Guilliman for the mature Primarch DNA plus his logistical gifts to really kick the Legion Recruiting into overdrive so the Ultras could pass the First.
With pretty much anything GW, don’t look too close at the numbers. Not only do they not make sense, but with the retcons and different perspectives, it’s hard to even compare apples to apples.
The 1,000 marine number refers to the line strength, not total manpower in a chapter. There is also the HQ and support elements, which can roughly double that. Although that’s been debated at length historically.
Oktoglokk wrote: I miss when Space Marines were 2-2.15m tall, a suit of power armour weighed 114kg, and it reduced the chance of injury from smallarms by 50-85%.
Codex Angels of Death, 1996, page 8.
Hellebore wrote: The numbers aspect is fundamentally flawed because it's artificial.
Even the genetic compatibility issue is meaningless in an empire as large as the imperium. If only 0.5% of the population is compatible, then the current male population of earth has 20 million suitable candidates....
The space wolves are relatively unique in that they recruit from a single planet with a very small human population (even the blood angels recruit from multiple moons - and their genetics ignore the limitations anyway).
Yet the wolves are actually larger than normal chapters and they're not exactly driving the human population of fenris to extinction keeping their numbers up, so I imagine the compatibility issue is nowhere near as severe as 0.5%.
The uniqueness of marines is partially based on their rarity, but that rarity is De Beers level faked.
So the Imperium in reality has an unlimited resource of marines that are uber in all aspects. If they were as powerful as they've been protagonisted to be, the imperium would be unstoppable.
They just keep churning their marines through, casualties mean nothing, so killing them is not tragic at all, and the imperium can make as many as they want.
You know it's funny, but there's really only one interpretation of all this that works: Space Marines have no significant impact on the Imperium's military power at all, and only still exist as a ceremonial throwback like the Swiss Guard. They're objects of cultural and religious reverence, not a real fighting force.
I mean they do still fight aliens and are individually very good at it, but it never affects the outcome of a war because there are so few of them. All of the real "elite shock troop" work is done by modern units like the Tempestus or Arbites, who number in the hundreds of billions. The Space Marines are deliberately kept irrelevant by the High Lords and the Emperor accepts this because he considers the Space Marines to be a failure, but he won't allow them to be totally destroyed because he feels responsible for them. The Space Marine chapters themselves are mostly deluded, convinced by hypno-indoctrination from childhood into believing that they're essential to humanity's survival. The few that see the truth often become rebels or turn to Chaos, but unless they escape to the Eye of Terror they're easily crushed by the Guard.
They're sci-fi Don Quixote.
This i like. Yes. Love this idea. I use that in my homebrew setting
Man I just read this entire thread thus far and it's given me a lot to think about in the setting of 40k, and solidified a lot of ideas that I've always sort of had about the setting but could never really put into words.
To me, Warhammer 40k has always been a better setting than a story. I believe that the idea was initially conceived as a setting in which you field your army in your battles with your lore, with a cool setting to place that lore into. Selling models was still the primary goal, but it was designed by nerds who wanted to see other nerds have a good time.
I no longer feel this is the case. Warhammer is now about selling models not only primarily, but almost unilaterally. Many of the books I've read post 7th (maybe earlier) have felt like "buy my models" books, the space marines are extremely epic because it makes people want to play them, they are protag level powerful because people want to play as the protags. As a consequence of this, GW has to continually increase the power of space marines to make the next threat even crazier than the one before to continue making new, stronger, better models to sell.
Conversely though, GW can't settle on a defined "number" for many things, as it would make minis harder to sell. as such, we end up in a weird zone where warhammer 40k has to be both more of a story and less of one at the same time
gonna set up a theoretical conflict here, with one billion guardsmen vs an equal number of chaff units like one billion cultists, something of that nature.
1: Space marine's "canonical power"
This is something that, as many many many people have said before, is so damn variable its hard to ever make any sort of concrete answer. Because of how grand the scale of 40k is, to make them feel at all elite the setting has to push this narrative that one marine is worth 100, 1000, even 10000 marines which makes them certainly feel like demigods, but puts them out of place when you realize that these battles are being fought by billions over a planet. even one marine being worth 10000 regular men is still means 100000 marines assuming that, like many books say, there are a billion guardsmen in any given large scale conflict. That cannot work while making each marine feel special, so you gotta switch it up.
I really like this idea pushed in pages, 5 to 6? of this thread that marines aren't special because they can take the same number of hits as 1000 men, its because they are smarter, faster, sneakier, and more tactical than 1000 men. they will succeed where uncountable fail, to infiltrate and take out critical targets. Unfortunately media likes to portray them tanking trucks running into them at full speed, so this image of them being infiltrators is rarely shown. which is a shame because it makes my next point way easier.
2: How many marines are there anyway?
to keep a company to 1000 marines in a conflict with 1 billion people that leaves 1 marine per 1 million people. if they WERE portrayed as expert high value target hunters, ironically 1000 would be a lot, flying around a planet to take out military experts actually ends up feeling very achievable with 1000 people in that context, but if they are frontline troops sent to shield guardsmen... then they feel completely outclassed. with 1000 people they can only be in so many places at once, again that's 1 marine per 1 million guards, and I dont even think "movie marines" have that kind of toughness.
So as said in previous posts, either there are a lot more marines per battle than previous suggested, or the battles they aren't nearly as influential to a battle as the lore suggests.
Numbers never make sense in 40k anyways though, so all of this is sort of a moot point.
3: Table Top representation
If we are going to compare "power levels" one thing I havent seen done yet is compare point costs. Lets break down a tac marine. in 10th ed a tac squad costs 140 points where a guard shock group is 65.
140/ 10 is 14, so a tac marine is worth 14 points, maybe a bit less if you think of the lieutenant model as being worth an extra point or so. 65/10 is 6.5, again maybe a bit less if the sergeant is worth a tiny bit more. this means that on the tabletop one marine is worth 2.3 guardsmen. I have no idea how you would balance this correctly, if we are going by "in universe" numbers then realistically one marine could take out all 10 guards by himself, should one marine then be worth 65 points?
I don't know the answer to that question, but I will say that either answer feels strange from a gameplay perspective.
Sorry for the long rant, it may be a bit disjointed.
Brickfix wrote: Under the assumption that there always existed a 1000 space marine chapters since the second founding (even if there only where 500 or 200), doesn't that result in a million marines?
Even if only 200 chapters where founded during the second founding, and each chapter was half strength, that's still a hundred thousand marines. Considering the immense attrition and losses mentioned by posters above, this might actually add up.
As with all things, corporate changed that with one line in the 9th Edition Grey Knight's Rulebook.
At this time, the mighty Space Marine Legions were in the process of being separated into Chapters according to the precepts of the Codex Astartes. Much of the process of the Second Founding was being carried out at the direction of the newly formed Inquisition and was in turn overseen by those same lords who left Terra with Malcador some years earlier. It was a simple task for them to include the Grey Knights amongst the growing roster of Space Marine Chapters, bestowing upon them the designation Chapter 666 - an oddity, as at the time, there were barely four hundred Space Marine Chapters commissioned. Few other details ever became a matter of record, and most of these were erased form the archives within a century.
You're all arguing about 40+ years of constantly-changing canon/narrative and a healthy dose of Superman Syndrome, where the writers literally paint themselves into a corner and have to scramble to escape it. Couple that with GW's feeble attempts to produce anything even remotely resembling a balanced game for 22+ iterations of 40K/WFB, and WTF are we even talking about?
Trying to reconcile novels and fiction with table-top wargaming is an exercise in futility at the best, pure folly on the other end. Pick an edition of 40k. Realize that, if you show up at a competitive event, or even just a LGS for some random pick-up games, you're going to be facing a version of Space Marines/Chaos Space Marines 66%-75% of the time. They're cheap. They're in EVERY edition's boxed set. They're easy to paint. They're the "cool guys" in all the fiction. Back when I was active in the tournament scene, I knew I'd face 2 Marine armies at a RT event. 3+ at a GT, fighting them every battle at an RT of 4 times at a GT wasn't unexpected. Guess what? I geared my army to table Marine armies, and watched them whine and cry about how OP my list was as I did it.
I was far from alone. Every single non-Marine player did the same thing. So did every Marine player worth their salt, as they knew exactly who they'd be facing too. They'd cram as many Power Armor-ignoring weapons into their list as they possibly could, and try and delete their foes. The only crybabies were the people who thought Marines should win every fight, because they always win in the books over impossible odds, while wounded, For the Emperor!
Get over it already. No matter what they make Marines into, T4/2W/3+, T5/3W/2+/4++ Termies, whatever...they will always die on the tabletop like a troop of Campfire Girls because GW wants to sell their other armies also. So, every army will have the ability to obliterate Marines, if they choose to do so and field the appropriate minis. And because people know they're going to be facing Marines 50%+ of the time, they'll come geared to do so.
I mean, if we went by the fluff, no one would ever be able to stop the Tyranids or Orks except by Exterminatus or the incredible plot device of Space Marines! Eldar and Dark Eldar would appear from nowhere, table an enemy, and vanish again into the Webway. Necrons would awaken and scour their tomb-world clean. The only armies that would ever lose a battle would be the ever-faithful-yet-tragically-doomed Sisters, the IG, and the always naive Tau, the underdogs who never fail to battle back. Because that's how they're written.
"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."
Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.
Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.
But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.
I disagree. They certainly could be the same. But the scenarios just tend to be different. 40k the game is built around evenly matched battles, while the fiction almost never is. The relarive power levels of units can be consistent accross both, they just don't play out the same because of the context.
But in 40k you can still get your narrative moments. 2-3 Marines assaulting into cover and clearing a room of 10 Cultists is/was totally a thing that could happen in the game, and that's a pretty common occurence in the fiction. The hero felling the monster with a final blow after his comrades have fallen in battle is likewise a total possibility. The only differences are that the dice may not be with you, and your opponent is also controlling their own Main Characters.
But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.
And it's not just Warhammer, but BattleTech, etc. Because the entertainment is different, with different skills required to enjoy them.
Writing fiction is hard. I belong to a writer's critique group, with published authors. I try my best to join in the fun, but I'll likely never be published or make a dime from my writing hobby.
At the same time, writing balanced tabletop wargame rules is hard. GW hasn't managed it yet, with the exception of "side games" that they fail to support and watch whither on the vine. The best examples usually come from rulesets where every "unique faction" is functionally the same, with different aesthetics to make a variety of players happy. Take a hard look at old games like original Mordheim/Necromunda, where the difference between gangs was a point of BS, WS, or maybe S or T. But at the start of the game, everyone was on an essentially even playing field. Ditto outside games like Wargods or Dark Age, where the differences were small and strategy/tactics actually matter.
40k? WFB? Fugeddaboutit. Balance between Aeldari, Orks, Tyranids, Tau, Space Marines, innumerable Chaos Factions, Imperial Guards/Agents/Sisters//Whatever? Every book has a hero/heroine. The narrative has to support that. Every game has to have a semblance of balance. The gameplay has to support that.
To expect those two things to intersect? Folly. Get over it already. In the fiction, a Space Marine will be an unstoppable 3m tall ceramite-armor coated killing machine who will suffer the worst wounds and still raise his sacred bolter in the Emperor's name to fire a final bolter round at the enemy, the catechism of his chapter whispered on his lips with his final breath.
On the tabletop, you'll pick him up when I deal a single 2W attack to his unit. Suck it, I'm doing the same thing to the ultra-incredible fictional god-units in my army when you roll your dice. You know, the Ork Nob who wades through Imperial units like he's walking in grass, or the Tyranid genesteler who just burst over a fortification to tear into the squishy flesh behind it, or the Aeldari Aspect Warrior who just danced around your hero like he was a clumsy child before slicing his head from his shoulders.
Fiction is fiction. The hero of the story is the hero. Go read books, or show up with miniatures and play a game. They are so far from the same as to not even be in the same zip code.
I just think this is such regressive thinking, basically "It hasn't been done well yet so it can't be done at all."
As I said before, WH40k will always be a better setting to me than a story, and I think that is the crux of what you are saying too. The books are the books and the game is the game. However, asking that these two mediums that are set in the same universe, both of them designed to SELL MODELS match a little closer? Not an unreasonable request. Asking that marines be treated with a little less main-character syndrome? also not an unreasonable request.
This is a multi billion dollar corporation that had stocks increase 50% last year, That made over half a billion dollars in revenue, this isn't some random indie group yknow? Writing balanced rules is hard, but who else to succeed but a group with this much capital.
firechcken23 wrote: I just think this is such regressive thinking, basically "It hasn't been done well yet so it can't be done at all."
As I said before, WH40k will always be a better setting to me than a story, and I think that is the crux of what you are saying too. The books are the books and the game is the game. However, asking that these two mediums that are set in the same universe, both of them designed to SELL MODELS match a little closer? Not an unreasonable request. Asking that marines be treated with a little less main-character syndrome? also not an unreasonable request.
This is a multi billion dollar corporation that had stocks increase 50% last year, That made over half a billion dollars in revenue, this isn't some random indie group yknow? Writing balanced rules is hard, but who else to succeed but a group with this much capital.
I'd argue that the largest problem is, again, everyone is the protagonist of their own narrative. In order for the little plastic models on the table to be like their fictional counterparts, they would all have to be near-godlike in power, in some fashion. Tyranid, IG, and Orks would have to be literally numberless, Eldar/Dark Eldar/Harlequins would have to be able to appear from nowhere, obliterate an unsuspecting enemy without taking significant casualties, then fade away, Necrons, Chaos Marines and Daemons would essentially be doing the same thing, just in a different fashion (and with less regard to casualties), Tau firepower would need a significant boost, and Marines would all have to get even better to deal with everyone else's increased power and lethality.
How does the old quote go? "There are a thousand chapters, each with a thousand Marines. One million warriors, less than one for each inhabited world in the Imperium. And it is enough." Or some nonsense like that.
You'd be re-writing the entire game to match the nonsense in the fluff.
And the multi-billion dollar corporation you speak of hasn't managed to put out a truly balanced set of rules in 40 years. They're not going to start now. I'd argue that with 27 different factions in 40K alone, not to mention AoS and their other games, with dozens of units in each faction, hundreds of weapons, and utter scads of special rules everywhere, it's a functionally impossible task.
I mean, at least they're giving it a go this time with updates, points adjustments, etc. After all this time though, I don't really have much hope in actual success. It certainly won't help matters to try and make everything more like the fiction. That's just my opinion though, nothing more. It'd certainly prove to be an interesting experiment.
RaptorusRex wrote: I would never want the lore to be slavishly accurate to the game.
'Brother Sergeant, your Terminator Squad is being assigned a member of the Sanguinary Priesthood for this boarding action. He has been provided a suit of modified tactical dreadnought plate for the duration of the mission.'
'What!? No! The Codex Supplement does not support this action! REEEEEE!' - James Swallow's next book, probably
Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.
But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.
I disagree. They certainly could be the same. But the scenarios just tend to be different. 40k the game is built around evenly matched battles, while the fiction almost never is. The relarive power levels of units can be consistent accross both, they just don't play out the same because of the context.
But in 40k you can still get your narrative moments. 2-3 Marines assaulting into cover and clearing a room of 10 Cultists is/was totally a thing that could happen in the game, and that's a pretty common occurence in the fiction. The hero felling the monster with a final blow after his comrades have fallen in battle is likewise a total possibility. The only differences are that the dice may not be with you, and your opponent is also controlling their own Main Characters.
This is what drives me crazy about the marinefans. The rules of 40kdo allow a single space marine to kill a carnifex with a chainsword. Technically it could even be done if the carnifex was at full wounds, if the marine player was extremely lucky for multiple turns. That's the sort of super-rare 1% chance event that makes for a dramatic story, the "man bites dog" scenario, rather than the normal 99% chance result of the space marine doing a single wound if he's lucky and then getting chomped.
But when you're passively consuming pre-written media, the audience obviously knows that the protagonist who the entire story is about isn't going to die halfway through. So if the only way Brother Protagonus can survive is by killing a carnifex with his chainsword, you know there's a 100% chance he will succeed at it in that story. Just like you know that there is a 0% chance that John McClane gets shot in the head and dies halfway through Diehard. And that Frodo will survive the troll in Moria. And there's no possibility of Luke Skywalker actually freezing to death ignominiously on Hoth, and so on.
To a normal emotionally-mature adult (even if he's a Black Library space marine fan) it's understood that Brother Protagonus is not "more powerful than a carnifex" just as it's understood that NYPD cops aren't more powerful than a dozen terrorists, and that hobbits are not too tough to be killed by trolls, and that Luke isn't immune to hypothermia. But for some bizarre subcultural reason marinefans want to convince everyone that killing a carnifex in melee is "the true power of a space marine" and that GW is somehow lying by making a carnifex way more powerful in the game.
Even when GW went out of their way to mock the marinefans with "Movie Marines" the marinefans somehow invented a crazy delusion where Movie Marines were the "true" space marines and the wargame was fake because non-SM players "couldn't handle the truth" or some nonsense. The Movie Marines were making fun of people who "conflate space marine protagonism with skill", comparing them to the kinds of people who think that B-list action movies represent real Navy SEALs and so on. The rules go out of their way to point out that non-protagonist marines don't change their stats and the Movie Marines can use "stunt doubles" to take hits for them (before "going to the refreshments trailer"). Or to sum it up with the opening quote of the list: "I'm not a tough guy, but if I fight you in a movie that I'm starring in I'll kick your ass."
And I think that what's strangest to me is that if you genuinely like space marine action-hero fiction, you need your space marines to be real space marines by default, not Movie Marines. Because that's the only way that your protagonist can actually be exceptional, and dramatically defeat enemies who he was favored to lose against. Just as you can get excited when your lone tactical marine charges a carnifex and manages to finish it off in a real game of 40k, but you can't really get excited when a full squad of terminators with power fists does the same thing. When it's favored to happen that isn't a story worth reading a novel about.
RaptorusRex wrote: I would never want the lore to be slavishly accurate to the game.
'Brother Sergeant, your Terminator Squad is being assigned a member of the Sanguinary Priesthood for this boarding action. He has been provided a suit of modified tactical dreadnought plate for the duration of the mission.'
'What!? No! The Codex Supplement does not support this action! REEEEEE!' - James Swallow's next book, probably
"Don't worry, Brother Sergeant, when we reach the planet in half a year, that supplement will be outdated and replaced by a new one. Just like our handbook on Boarding actions."
The game of 40k is where protagonists clash and their protagonite defences are cancelled out, leaving only their species and training specific probabilities of success to determine the winner.
But if all you've consumed is BL fiction, it is easy to see how you might be confused that your marine isn't Doom-ing everyone on the table. Why Titus the model can be removed by lasguns when Titus the character can't even die to Carnifexs...
And despite the overwhelming marine favouritism GW has, they haven't yet turned the wargame into a protagonist led Mook slaughter, - that one Titus vs Gaunts game was about as close as they've gotten.
GW need to dial up the non human protagonism like Kais from Fire Warrior - who gets crap for doing things any protagonist could do because he's not a Gaunt's ghost or a space marine - if they want anyone to feel like their faction is anything other than fodder for the Protagonus Chapter of marines (nice one Orkeosaurus).
He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
That's awesome. It'd be cool if a certain type of fan remembered that those things happened though.
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
That's awesome. It'd be cool if a certain type of fan remembered that those things happened though.
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
That's awesome. It'd be cool if a certain type of fan remembered that those things happened though.
To be honest it is absurd people want to use Titus as an example of an "average Marine".
We are talking about a guy that personally kills dozens of Chaos Space Marines in the first game, kills a Daemon Prince with his bare hands and kills who knows how many Thousand Sonds Rubrics, Scarab Occult Terminators and even Hellbrutes in the second game.
It is pretty damn evident he is exceptional for Space Marines standards, because he kills many many Space Marines.
You're right, it definitely should be evident. . .
Or people could also take into account that it's very, very possible to see him get killed while playing the game too. I imagine the no-death playthrough is pretty uncommon. That at the very least should make it clear just how deadly opposition forces can be too.
You know... my Gorgutz killed MANY Space Marines in my DOW 1 campaign, it's a wonder there were enpugh Blood Ravens left to help in the Space Marine 1 finale.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: You know... my Gorgutz killed MANY Space Marines in my DOW 1 campaign, it's a wonder there were enpugh Blood Ravens left to help in the Space Marine 1 finale.
No no no. See, the game events only count if it's pro Space Marine. Duh!
Sgt. Cortez wrote: You know... my Gorgutz killed MANY Space Marines in my DOW 1 campaign, it's a wonder there were enpugh Blood Ravens left to help in the Space Marine 1 finale.
Ah, but that was before they were led by a master tactician like Boreale.
How well do you think Gorgutz would fair against operation Steehl Reehn, wherein SPESS MAHRENS Space Marines launch muhltiple, simuln-tehneous and devashtehting defensive deep strikes?
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
The 'death' at the beginning of the game is classic narrative troping and has 0 effect. It's there for aesthetic. Death means death, not levelling up to your final form...
Which as Orkeosaurus points out, is a given for protagonists. They never die unless the story wants them to. His side kicks are also virtually indestructible as well, which is a common BL trope, there's the protagonist and their immediate squad that gets a 2+ aura save from being in proximity to him. Space Marine follows the Uriel Ventris playbook pretty closely.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: You know... my Gorgutz killed MANY Space Marines in my DOW 1 campaign, it's a wonder there were enpugh Blood Ravens left to help in the Space Marine 1 finale.
There is also the Shootas, Blood and Teef game in which the Ork protagonist kills what seems an entire Marine company and an Imperial knight.
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
The 'death' at the beginning of the game is classic narrative troping and has 0 effect. It's there for aesthetic. Death means death, not levelling up to your final form...
Which as Orkeosaurus points out, is a given for protagonists. They never die unless the story wants them to. His side kicks are also virtually indestructible as well, which is a common BL trope, there's the protagonist and their immediate squad that gets a 2+ aura save from being in proximity to him. Space Marine follows the Uriel Ventris playbook pretty closely.
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
GW uses BL as a marketing tool, and if it happens to turn a profit, that's brilliant in their eyes. If it doesn't, it nothing but a loss-leader, and a cost of doing business.
Tyran wrote: He actually dies to one in the prologue mission, and background Marines get killed by gaunts, rippers, warriors, lictors and an entire squad gets wiped out by a Neurothrope.
Even a random Chaos cultist manages to kill a Space Marine with suicide demo charge.
The 'death' at the beginning of the game is classic narrative troping and has 0 effect. It's there for aesthetic. Death means death, not levelling up to your final form...
Which as Orkeosaurus points out, is a given for protagonists. They never die unless the story wants them to. His side kicks are also virtually indestructible as well, which is a common BL trope, there's the protagonist and their immediate squad that gets a 2+ aura save from being in proximity to him. Space Marine follows the Uriel Ventris playbook pretty closely.
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
GW uses BL as a marketing tool, and if it happens to turn a profit, that's brilliant in their eyes. If it doesn't, it nothing but a loss-leader, and a cost of doing business.
Except for Marvel Comics (a Subsidiary of Disney) published a number of Warhammer 40k comics.
Sgt. Cortez wrote: You know... my Gorgutz killed MANY Space Marines in my DOW 1 campaign, it's a wonder there were enpugh Blood Ravens left to help in the Space Marine 1 finale.
The Imperial Guard also lost 100 baneblades in that campaign, but fortunately they can build a new one every 5 minutes.
Early in this thread someone commented that Marines' 'super-solider' status was just meant to put them on an even fitting with the Xenos. As a player from back than, I agree that felt like the original intent.
However, from talking to marine players in my area, many seem to think that to match the current 'lore' Marines should have Custodes level stats!
Souleater wrote: Early in this thread someone commented that Marines' 'super-solider' status was just meant to put them on an even fitting with the Xenos. As a player from back than, I agree that felt like the original intent.
However, from talking to marine players in my area, many seem to think that to match the current 'lore' Marines should have Custodes level stats!
And I think standard Custodes should have the strength, Toughness and Wounds of Armiger
Warglaive Knights.
Trajann Valorian on the other hand... easily Knight Gallant level stats... but with more attacks... and better saves...
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
Clearly you've never read a Halo novel, about 1/2 of all the Star Wars & Star Trek stuff, alot of Battletech, etc.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here & bet the quality of a great many things in the Romance section are of questionable quality as well.
There's a vast array of drek published by non-GW companies.
Quality is not much of a concern.
I can only assume that GW wanted more $ than these other publishers were willing to part with.
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
Clearly you've never read a Halo novel, about 1/2 of all the Star Wars & Star Trek stuff, alot of Battletech, etc.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here & bet the quality of a great many things in the Romance section are of questionable quality as well.
There's a vast array of drek published by non-GW companies.
Quality is not much of a concern.
I can only assume that GW wanted more $ than these other publishers were willing to part with.
Fair enough. You're correct that I haven't read any of that drek. I was mostly thinking of TOR, Penguin, and the other "old school" publishing houses. They tend to be "gate keepers," but OTOH, they also don't accept fanfic garbage like the GW self-published dumpster-fare.
Fair enough. You're correct that I haven't read any of that drek. I was mostly thinking of TOR, Penguin, and the other "old school" publishing houses. They tend to be "gate keepers," but OTOH, they also don't accept fanfic garbage like the GW self-published dumpster-fare.
Having a bit of a collection of 70s/80s sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks from 'proper' publishers, erm... I got news for you
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
Clearly you've never read a Halo novel, about 1/2 of all the Star Wars & Star Trek stuff, alot of Battletech, etc.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here & bet the quality of a great many things in the Romance section are of questionable quality as well.
There's a vast array of drek published by non-GW companies.
Quality is not much of a concern.
I can only assume that GW wanted more $ than these other publishers were willing to part with.
Fair enough. You're correct that I haven't read any of that drek. I was mostly thinking of TOR, Penguin, and the other "old school" publishing houses. They tend to be "gate keepers," but OTOH, they also don't accept fanfic garbage like the GW self-published dumpster-fare.
I assure you that they publish crap every bit as bad as the BL. It just doesn't feature Space Marines (tm)
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
Clearly you've never read a Halo novel, about 1/2 of all the Star Wars & Star Trek stuff, alot of Battletech, etc.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here & bet the quality of a great many things in the Romance section are of questionable quality as well.
There's a vast array of drek published by non-GW companies.
Quality is not much of a concern.
I can only assume that GW wanted more $ than these other publishers were willing to part with.
Fair enough. You're correct that I haven't read any of that drek. I was mostly thinking of TOR, Penguin, and the other "old school" publishing houses. They tend to be "gate keepers," but OTOH, they also don't accept fanfic garbage like the GW self-published dumpster-fare.
There's a very real reason anything Warhammer is self-published by Black Library. None of it...none...would ever be picked up by a major publishing house looking to make actual money.
Clearly you've never read a Halo novel, about 1/2 of all the Star Wars & Star Trek stuff, alot of Battletech, etc.
And I'm going to go out on a limb here & bet the quality of a great many things in the Romance section are of questionable quality as well.
There's a vast array of drek published by non-GW companies.
Quality is not much of a concern.
I can only assume that GW wanted more $ than these other publishers were willing to part with.
Fair enough. You're correct that I haven't read any of that drek. I was mostly thinking of TOR, Penguin, and the other "old school" publishing houses. They tend to be "gate keepers," but OTOH, they also don't accept fanfic garbage like the GW self-published dumpster-fare.
I'd counter that some of those book series (Twilight, Fifty Shades) made a literal fortune though. I doubt they'd make nearly as much on Space Marines stories.
Dysartes wrote: Making money =/= automatically mean quality.
See: Harry Potter
Transformers movies.
I don't think comparing summer blockbusters, which are purposely made to reach the largest audiences (and the audiences like big, dumb, films, traditionally - ie. Independence Day, 2012, Avatar, Transformers, etc.) and novels that were never written to be blockbusters.
Dysartes wrote: Making money =/= automatically mean quality.
See: Harry Potter
Transformers movies.
I don't think comparing summer blockbusters, which are purposely made to reach the largest audiences (and the audiences like big, dumb, films, traditionally - ie. Independence Day, 2012, Avatar, Transformers, etc.) and novels that were never written to be blockbusters.
There are literal mountains of "trashy novels" designed "for the masses".
Even more if you include those fad biographies of celebrities.
Not everything put to paper is some kind of holy document, even if society tends to earmark reading as a higher level of skill/activity than TV viewing. Heck there's more individual skills and whole teams of people that goes into the production of a film than into the production of the average book - which is typically the work of just one person. A film has so many different skillsets and big films take years to produce.
Dysartes wrote: Making money =/= automatically mean quality.
See: Harry Potter
Transformers movies.
I don't think comparing summer blockbusters, which are purposely made to reach the largest audiences (and the audiences like big, dumb, films, traditionally - ie. Independence Day, 2012, Avatar, Transformers, etc.) and novels that were never written to be blockbusters.
There are literal mountains of "trashy novels" designed "for the masses".
Even more if you include those fad biographies of celebrities.
Not everything put to paper is some kind of holy document, even if society tends to earmark reading as a higher level of skill/activity than TV viewing. Heck there's more individual skills and whole teams of people that goes into the production of a film than into the production of the average book - which is typically the work of just one person. A film has so many different skillsets and big films take years to produce.
A book is never the work of just one person. With editors, agents, reader groups, publicists, heck, I could go on - but from personal experience the production of a single novella for an omnibus was the work of at least 25 people.
Dysartes wrote: Making money =/= automatically mean quality.
See: Harry Potter
Transformers movies.
I don't think comparing summer blockbusters, which are purposely made to reach the largest audiences (and the audiences like big, dumb, films, traditionally - ie. Independence Day, 2012, Avatar, Transformers, etc.) and novels that were never written to be blockbusters.
I think if we're comparing both to the "blockbuster" game of 40k, it's relevant enough. The point is that "quality" isn't so directly tied to profit.
40k has gotten bigger. But it's also gotten dumber. The publisher of 40k will obviously happily make that trade.
A book is never the work of just one person. With editors, agents, reader groups, publicists, heck, I could go on - but from personal experience the production of a single novella for an omnibus was the work of at least 25 people.
I guess I don't know what those 25 people did, but there's still typically one author which is resposible for the creative voice. An author can write a book without an editor. An editor can't write a book without an author.
Exactly. You talked like the Tormentor Statline was so much better than the standard Marine Statline when it is literally the same except for +1" M. Even the weapons are exactly the same when you compare Tormentors to Tactical Marines.
Do you think that the main issue with Marines' representation is they're 1" too slow?
yes
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alextroy wrote: Exactly. You talked like the Tormentor Statline was so much better than the standard Marine Statline when it is literally the same except for +1" M. Even the weapons are exactly the same when you compare Tormentors to Tactical Marines.
You literally said they had better attacks et al, so I can see why people would be confused by your suggestion. If you'd said 'use tormentors because they're 1" faster" then it would have made sense.
kabaakaba wrote: doesn't tormentos is a basicaly marine but overflowed with warp power? why in sake of God-Emperor basic marine should have same stats??
No. A Tormentor is a basic Emperor's Children Infantry.
Why they should be? Bile creates them already modified compared to standard SM. it's a sm2 perspective, like there should be something less cool/powerful compared to sm, to beat to pulp. But lore wise(excluding plot armoured guys) sm dies as easy as imperial guards. Virtually any threat around are stronger. We know some guys do cool in necron tomb, but how many whiped whithout any notice? Calgar defended Macrage with a lot of dead, but hom many guards was there in a moment to allow SM do their things.
Is Bile hanging out with the EC again? Last I heard, he was a off working on personal projects rather than fostering close ties to his own legion.
Regardless, Bile is one guy with limited access to geneseed. He's not creating every chaos marine (EC or otherwise) that comes into existence in the modern era.
We see in plenty of books that there are CSM who are basically just on par with loyalist marines. Not every CSM is a warp-charged super marine loaded up with useful blessings. I don't know enough about the new EC units to say whether or not they're meant to be particularly super-charged compared to normal CSM.
kabaakaba wrote: Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy
Then do you think basic CSM Legionnaires should also be massively better than a Loyalist Marine?
It's a valid argument to make, but there should still be new inductees who aren't so powerful.
Part of me kind of likes the idea of aspiring champions and other chaos marine sergeants being notably more powerful than normal CSM. Give them the chaos version of the eldar exarch treatment. But that probably shouldn't be mandatory for all CSM.
I also think there's a case to be made for renegades/freshly fallen/just-not-that-chaos-y marines maybe using the loyalist marine book. Maybe even adding a "renegades" detachment to the marine book that gives you some light chaos elements to sprinkle onto your army.
I'm pretty sure the +1 Move is just the new "Mark of Slaanesh", since Init was removed. The norm was always for god-marked Chaos marines to get a slight buff over loyalists representing their blessing. Slaanesh is speed, Khorne attacks, Nurgle toughness, Tzeentch an invul.
The tabletop doesn't represent the lore, in most cases. Hell, my last game was tau vs custodies. The custodies were wipped out to the man while the Tau lost 5 firewarriors.
Not lore accurate at all.
I dont think its possible to accurately represent any of the factions lore due to scale limitations of the tabletop. Epic is probably the only system that came close due to titans only being a few inches tall.
Jayden63 wrote: The tabletop doesn't represent the lore, in most cases. Hell, my last game was tau vs custodies. The custodies were wipped out to the man while the Tau lost 5 firewarriors.
Not lore accurate at all.
I dont think its possible to accurately represent any of the factions lore due to scale limitations of the tabletop. Epic is probably the only system that came close due to titans only being a few inches tall.
To me, lore isn't "This faction is stronger than that one so it should win."
Part of that is that no matter the odds, I'm kind of an any given Sunday kinda guy. There might be a 90% chance one army will win and another will lose- even 99%. That doesn't make it lore breaking when there's an upset. Ask Vlad how easy he thought Ukraine would be.
To me lore is "Who fights who, when, where, why and how."
Now don't get me wrong- the argument about scale is valid- you can't get the big picture with just 40k; you can plan your mission so that it reflects big picture- Orbital bombardments, terrain destruction from off-board Titan weapons, etc, but you would need Epic to fight it out rather than represent it with special rules. However, I think that the same can be said of Epic: it can't tell the whole story of a 40k war either- it has a bit of difficulty representing the spy-infiltrator stuff that's better left for Kill Team, and sometimes that stuff wins wars.
In order to accurately represent many wars in the 41 millennium, I think you have to use ALL of GW's games- BFG, Epic, 40k and KT. Some may be playable at one scale, more could be played using two... But some need it all.
This idea of an objective powerscale misses the fact that no one fights battles on even terms. that's what strategy is for, you use it to only fight on your terms.
Custodes are entirely capable of being wiped out like that, it just requires a particular set of circumstances. 'Lore accurate' is my most hated phrase in 40k because it's used as this supposed objective measure when it's just as skewed as anything else, with the pretence of 'evidence'.
40k 'lore accurate' arguments are basically like looking at the physical strength of different olympic athletes and saying that power lifters should beat all other olympians at their sport because they're strongest. In a long distance shooting match tau defeat custodes because they have guns with a longer range. So saying that its lore accurate for tau to defeat custodes is no more or less accurate than the inverse.
Fan 'lore accuracy' statements take a single factoid about a faction, like custodes are better melee warriors, and then assume that any fight they go into will allow them to dominate in that field. Which is absurd. It's an argument from protagonism without admitting it. Lore accurate is a short cut for, the story revolves around the strengths of this faction and so they will always come out on top.
Maybe the Custodes were so overconfident in themselves that they mis-deployed into a Tau ambush, and brought short range scissors to the Tau's long range rock.
I always felt there was a strange incongruity between fans professing to like the gritty grimdark satirical setting, but also expressing a strong dislike any time their protagonist dudes overcommit, underestimate the enemy, are blinkered by their own dogma, self-sabotaging, or just plain lose a fight.
The notion that the game, around which all the fiction orbits and which all those books/games/animations/etc exist to sell, is not 'lore-accurate' is an odd one too.
Power scaling is just a huge problem with fandom in general. It demands a kind of predetermined storytelling that is completely at odds with the kind of narrative freedom that made the setting exciting in the first place. So many stories are overburndened by a need to justify themselves and it's created this awful expectation that every protagonist needs to be born special to have any value.
It also just creates this awful lack of nuance. Tyranids can be an unbeatable, galactic level threat that will inevitably consume the galaxy, but that doesn't mean they can't be defeated in small scale encounters. The whole point of the Imperium isn't that they're weak; its that their strength is unsustainable. They can stop a Tyranid incursion, but doing so costs the Imperium more than the Tyranids lose. The horror of the Nids isn't that they can't be stopped, its that they can make way more Gaunts than the Imperium can make bullets.
I think that GW have found a way to solve the Protagonism issue- not just for Marines, but for everyone: PVE.
The most recent Dwarf had two Space Marine specific minigames/ adapted rule sets that dialed Marine power up to BL bolter-porn levels, but it's not a big deal because those rules are designed for PVE scenarios.
If someone had to actually play the Tyrannid NPO's, they probably wouldn't have a whole lot of fun playing against the improved Marine profiles, but since they're NPO's, nobody cares.
Granted, this doesn't solve problems for 40k, and it doesn't address Marine ubiquity... But it does provide a release valve for players who LOVE Marines and want to recreate the kind of stuff that only ever happens in fiction.
I think it's a shame there's not more editorial control exercised on the book writers writing crazy stuff for Marines which is then taken as 100% inviolable truth by fans. The argument that the game is secondary to the books is bonkers to me - it was a game first, it remains a game, and the game is much more consistent through it's existence than the novels.
The rot has set in at the game level by now as well though, so I'm on a hiding to nothing complaining about it.
I don't understand the appeal of this powerscaling stuff at all. I always thought the Ork "Biggest Ork is the Leader" stuff was poking fun at this sort of thing, but the Imperium works on this logic now too and no one seems to think it's ridiculous. We've got Guard, then Firstborn, then Primaris, then Grey Knights, then Custodes, then Primarchs, and then the Emperor, not only increasing in power at each step but also increasing in physical size (still one of the most ludicrous aspects of the modern setting to me - I remember years ago there was a joke on Dakka Dakka to always exaggerate the height of Marines in any discussion, but that's essentially become the actual in universe truth now).
I suppose the game at it's heart is designed to appeal to nerdy teenage boys, and nerdy teenage boys grew up on a diet of shonen anime these days so it's much more in that direction. I grew up on 2000AD and that's why 40K seemed so easy for me to grasp as it was.
But I'm always baffled about how people with that sort of idea see the game and how they enjoy it that way, it's totally offputting to me. And I don't get how people who see the setting this way expect people who play the NPC factions to actually be having fun having their guys be mown down by the main characters in all the fiction and all their games?
I don't even mind reading books where the Imperium wins but I just want the antagonist factions to be properly scary along with it.
Imagine the world where books like gaunt's ghosts and last chancers became more popular than the space marine books, and imperial guard heroism led to guard squads being very powerful in the game hehe.
But I'm always baffled about how people with that sort of idea see the game and how they enjoy it that way, it's totally offputting to me. And I don't get how people who see the setting this way expect people who play the NPC factions to actually be having fun having their guys be mown down by the main characters in all the fiction and all their games?
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Fiction =/= how the game plays.
My opponents can like that thier SMs/GK/Custodes are THE premier badasses of the galaxy all day long in the lore.
But if they meet me for an actual game? They'll quickly learn that, wether I'm fielding Guard/non-SM Imperial/Chaos/or some Xenos, I'm not playing the "NPCs" they read about in their beloved novels....
As for whatever gak GW & the BL crank out that makes it seem non-SM forces are nothing more than hapless NPCs?
Doesn't affect me. Because I play the game & know there's all manner of perfectly viable forces.
Iirc there's no situations where guards kill bunch of csm solo. They are always outnumber them and have heavy weapon. Well, except mkoll, he is emperor in disguise...
And I think I absolutely need some sm squads to be NPC for my kill team games.
Nothing like that happens. Ever.
