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The fact is, the marine fluff was always roughly based off of real-world military squads which tend to have a limited number of specialist weapons to provide support to their unit.

In the real-world you have things to consider like specialist weapon and ammo weight not to mention cost and availability of the weapon.

Now, while these factors don't obviously weigh into a game, the idea behind them is still represented in the way the marines are organized.

The unit is made up of primarily of bolters because that is the standard weapon of the marine. Heavy and special weapons are limited in each squad due to the codex limitations written by Guilliman.

Sure it's easy to think that you'd want your forces to be entirely armed with heavy and special weapons but the fluff "reality" of 40k is that special weapons are actually rather rare and even with power-armor marines walking around with heavy weapons have to be slower and more cumbersome than marines with bolters.

Really, whatever the reason the fluff has laid down over the years about how marine squads are organized, and marines tend to be very dogmatic and ritualized and follow this organization as gospel.


It's just that GW has finally started to get around to writing the rules in the codex to somewhat match what they've writen in the fluff, which is fine with me personally.

Janthkin wrote:

yakface wrote:
It's just that GW has finally started to get around to writing the rules in the codex to somewhat match what they've writen in the fluff, which is fine with me personally.

yakface wrote:yakface's 40K rule #2: Friends don't let friends start a MEQ army.

You do have me there, but they also seem to be applying the same rationale in all the new armies (where appropriate). For example, Orks got saddled with the same type of limitation.