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ERJAK wrote:
Why is it that 'marines don't feel like marines' is the most consistent complaint in the history of 40k?

because its the most played army, there's no grand conspiracy or anything here

It's also one of the most broadly accurate things to be said. Marines don't feel like described for a number of reasons. Ranging from the fact that they can be pushing a large number of models for what's supposed to be an elite faction to the fact that their deployment and scoring methods feel incongrous.

 Kanluwen wrote:
It's also one of the most broadly accurate things to be said. Marines don't feel like described for a number of reasons. Ranging from the fact that they can be pushing a large number of models for what's supposed to be an elite faction to the fact that their deployment and scoring methods feel incongrous.

Couldn't that apply to just about every faction? Especially the scoring thing.

Well, in some sort of reversal it would be Tyranids don't feel like Tyranids because they only bring 100 models or so to the table.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well, in some sort of reversal it would be Tyranids don't feel like Tyranids because they only bring 100 models or so to the table.

100 might feel about right for nids if marines weren't pushing 50+ with support.

Dudeface wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Well, in some sort of reversal it would be Tyranids don't feel like Tyranids because they only bring 100 models or so to the table.

100 might feel about right for nids if marines weren't pushing 50+ with support.

I mean, yes the number is expressed within the typical context of a 2k battle.

Not to mention that it's possibly easier than ever to bring 100+ Marines to the table, and strangely it seems harder to bring lots of Nids, now that squad sizes are capped at 20.

ERJAK wrote:
Why is it that 'marines don't feel like marines' is the most consistent complaint in the history of 40k?

Even leaving power fantasies aside, the way they play in 40K is a reflection of the game structure and doesn't match up with their lore.

Play a game of 40K where the defender only has a few squads of Guardsmen on the field and brings in stronger assets piecemeal while the Marine player gets in, accomplishes their objective with overwhelming force, and extracts, and you'll get something closer to the typical Marine mission profile in the background. The 2K vs 2K perfectly even attrition match slugfest (where the other guy has an avalanche of plasma guns) is not generally what they're doing in fiction. And that's not even getting into how the game doesn't distinguish between 'combat ineffective' and 'dead', because it's a wargame and not an RPG.

Beyond that I think a lot of players have trouble disentangling protagonist bias from ground truth in a fictional context. You can watch Die Hard and intuitively understand that in real life a random unarmed New York cop probably isn't an even match for a dozen military-trained terrorists with assault rifles. It's harder to read stylized sci-fi fiction and understand whether the author is trying to tell you that any random Marine Captain can solo an Avatar, or show that this protagonist is cool and amazing because he manages to do that. Or even just reading background text, whether a single company of Marines killing thirteen billion Orks is meant to be an exceptionally heroic feat or business as usual.

GW used to understand this. They made a ruleset called Movie Marines that was a tongue-in-cheek representation of bolter-porn-novel Marines. Well, a good chunk of the fanbase seems to have missed the satire, as I now see it often referred to as 'a more lore-accurate Marine list'. And maybe GW has too, as Marines power creep ever further, going from brainwashed convicts in fancy armor to nine foot tall invulnerable ubermensch, while their growth in stature on the tabletop has been considerably more restrained.

And then, yeah, you've got the people who want to feel like Captain Titus and that doesn't happen when a Zzap Gun turns him to paste.

tl;dr Player expectations do not line up with the tabletop reality for a bunch of reasons, and I think it's unfair to chalk it up to people wanting to play Mary Sues.

The Captain Titus thing is another level of insane. The times I've seen "That's what a Marine should feel like." but somehow disregarding that he's a Captain, representing a particularly heroic individual to start out with, conveniently only fighting small groups of enemies at a time, somehow regenerating hit points using a Chainsword, and completely disregarding how often a player might fail and die anyways during the course of the campaign. But somehow people conflate their completion of the campaign as somehow representative of a normal Space Marine. Boggles the mind.

 catbarf wrote:
Play a game of 40K where the defender only has a few squads of Guardsmen on the field and brings in stronger assets piecemeal while the Marine player gets in, accomplishes their objective with overwhelming force, and extracts, and you'll get something closer to the typical Marine mission profile in the background.

Isn't this true of almost every faction in 40k? Especially for engagements at the scale of 40k. (An offensive would look different when the theatre is a planet (or several) and the army numbers in the millions/billions).

I think the issue with Marines is that their relative position in the 40k pecking order has fallen. (Given the ever increasing rise of monsters/tanks/daemon primarchs, Custodes etc etc).

I mean without the upgrades what would a basic Marine be? A guy with a boltgun and a single WS3+/S4/AP- punch? What's that worth in old money? 12 points? 8th edition Codex CSM would have suggested perhaps even less. For where GW seem to want to imagine a Marine, that doesn't seem very reasonable. Its a few more points than a guardsman or a termagant.

This has happened to a lot of factions. For instance the forum has seen repeated discussion over the decline of the Necron Warrior (and I don't really want to go down that road). To my mind however, GW have not being contradictory there. At some point - 5th edition, maybe later, they started to see Necron Warriors as nameless and numberless chaff. You may not like that - because it wasn't the case an ever increasingly number of years ago - but that's the case. They didn't like Marines going the same way - and I suspect nor did a lot of Marine players.

To come back to the thread title - I don't see Sisters as being "bigger" than their current stats. I think I upset the OP with this last time - but I see them at the same of tier as Eldar (and perhaps especially Dark Eldar). Sisters have been a bit more expensive - but this was because they had a 3+ while Guardians and Kabalites were running around with a 5+ (which often meant no armour save at all). I think the more elite Sisters were - and should be - priced like Aspect Warriors/Incubi. Should instead say Sacresants be more like Bladeguard? I'm not really seeing it myself.

To come back to the thread title - I don't see Sisters as being "bigger" than their current stats. I think I upset the OP with this last time - but I see them at the same of tier as Eldar (and perhaps especially Dark Eldar). Sisters have been a bit more expensive - but this was because they had a 3+ while Guardians and Kabalites were running around with a 5+ (which often meant no armour save at all). I think the more elite Sisters were - and should be - priced like Aspect Warriors/Incubi. Should instead say Sacresants be more like Bladeguard? I'm not really seeing it myself.

As a space elf player, I agree with this. A guardian should be roughly on par with a battle sister. A dominion squad should be roughly on par with a reaper squad. Etc. Obviously there are differences (exarchs should be leagues stronger than sister superiors), but it's a good rough comparison.

Tyel wrote:

I think the issue with Marines is that their relative position in the 40k pecking order has fallen. (Given the ever increasing rise of monsters/tanks/daemon primarchs, Custodes etc etc).

Mmm . . . I would say the opposite is true. Marines have always existed beside giant threats. Greater Daemons, Vehicles and Titans have been slaughtering Marines since I began in 2nd edition. The difference isn't that the threats have gotten bigger (I played games with an Armorcast Reaver Titan in 2nd ed), but that there are simply more of them on a typical table. On the other hand, many "average" units back then have dropped in value compared to Marines in the time since. The 2W thing is a big jump for Marines, but even before that other losses were taken. You mentioned the Necron Warrior thing, but did you know that the common lesser Daemons were valued comparably to Marines? They all hung around the MEQ ppm for several editions.

Marines haven't fallen in the pecking order, they've been inflated themselves to deal with an environment where anti-MEQ solutions can be endlessly spammed, and their alternative engagement strategies have been removed. (Morale, "pinning"vehicles, flanking vehicles, use of grenades, aggressive Drop-Podding, etc.)

Tyel wrote:
Isn't this true of almost every faction in 40k? Especially for engagements at the scale of 40k. (An offensive would look different when the theatre is a planet (or several) and the army numbers in the millions/billions).

Insectum7 wrote:and their alternative engagement strategies have been removed. (Morale, "pinning"vehicles, flanking vehicles, use of grenades, aggressive Drop-Podding, etc.)

I totally forgot to mention this before, but one of the big things about how Marines are portrayed in fiction is their operational tempo. Physically fast, perfectly coordinated, responding to new threats in an instant, lightning fast reflexes. That's one of the big things in the novels, even if it does get wanked up as 'transhuman dread'; the idea that they move way faster than their stature implies. I've seen a lot of people praise the Astartes animation for depicting all of this, with the Marines acting as a well-oiled machine to immediately overpower every novel threat.

How does that translate to tabletop? It doesn't. Not one iota. They're just Guardsmen with bigger guns and better armor and higher stats, shoved into a 60"x44" meat grinder against peer threats in an environment where 'take-all-comers' means 'kills Marines'.

Then you look at Epic and while it doesn't represent individual reflexes at all, Marines have the highest command rating plus mobility options for every unit plus good individual stats. It means that even if you theoretically outgun them, even if you bring tons of heavy infantry and emplaced weapons, you can't concentrate force as well as they can and while you're trying to bring that firepower to bear they're blitzing through your lines, taking you apart piecemeal while you struggle to react.

They're the ultimate special forces. They don't feel like that in 40K because they're treated like grunts. Most armies in 40K are maybe a bit off from how they're described in the fiction, but I don't think any have such a fundamental disconnect between how the operate in lore and how they operate on the table.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

To come back to the thread title - I don't see Sisters as being "bigger" than their current stats. I think I upset the OP with this last time - but I see them at the same of tier as Eldar (and perhaps especially Dark Eldar). Sisters have been a bit more expensive - but this was because they had a 3+ while Guardians and Kabalites were running around with a 5+ (which often meant no armour save at all). I think the more elite Sisters were - and should be - priced like Aspect Warriors/Incubi. Should instead say Sacresants be more like Bladeguard? I'm not really seeing it myself.

As a space elf player, I agree with this. A guardian should be roughly on par with a battle sister. A dominion squad should be roughly on par with a reaper squad. Etc. Obviously there are differences (exarchs should be leagues stronger than sister superiors), but it's a good rough comparison.

I'm not sure that Tyel was suggesting Sisters should be equivalent to Guardians, which are the closest Eldar get to a chaff unit. I always figured Sisters were supposed to be right in between Guardsmen and Marines, while Guardians have historically been closer to Guardsmen.

I think it's worth noting that Eldar have been beefed up over the years, with Guardians getting upgraded to WS4/BS4 at some point and then the more recent increase in armor to 4+, while Sisters have stayed the same. With the general expansion of statlines across most factions, a bit of a buff to Sisters doesn't seem unreasonable, but I'm not sure what would be appropriate.

 catbarf wrote:


I totally forgot to mention this before, but one of the big things about how Marines are portrayed in fiction is their operational tempo. Physically fast, perfectly coordinated, responding to new threats in an instant, lightning fast reflexes. That's one of the big things in the novels, even if it does get wanked up as 'transhuman dread'; the idea that they move way faster than their stature implies. I've seen a lot of people praise the Astartes animation for depicting all of this, with the Marines acting as a well-oiled machine to immediately overpower every novel threat.

Although one of the downsides of standard bolter porn is that it usually fails to portray what happens when Marines lose said tempo and are forced into attritional fights against peer enemies (aka the tabletop) that are able to bring their full weight against them.

Fall of Malvolion is probably one of the few that does show it:

In the first twenty minutes from drop, the Lamenters had cut a hole in the alien assault that had punished them cruelly. Now, in just five more minutes, they were being annihilated.

Marines live and die according to their tempo.

Eh... I don't know if that works.

I mean who are Space Marines "operationally better than"? Guard and Orks? Tau perhaps? "They are fast" = well, so is everyone else (depending on which version of the lore you use).

And again - in a game where the movement phase is the most important phase, I don't know how you'd represent this without being overpowered. (I'm sure the response will be that Marines didn't win every game of Epic but you'd have to explain how.)

I feel the same on Transhuman dread. (Or Reivers have scary masks). Who in-universe cares? Guardsmen? Guardians? Fire Warriors?
Do Orks care? I don't think so. Dark Eldar? No. Aspect Warriors? No. Anything Chaos? No. Ad Mech? No. Sisters? I don't think so. Tyranids? Hard no. Necrons? Hard no. GSC? Depends on what stage they are at - but if kicking off, probably no. Squats? I'm not up on the latest LoV lore but probably not.

In universe maybe Marines are meant to strike hard and then get out. In 40k I think their thing is being resilient. Toughness, armour save and wounds. Which I feel is where GW have tried to go.

 catbarf wrote:

Then you look at Epic and while it doesn't represent individual reflexes at all, Marines have the highest command rating plus mobility options for every unit plus good individual stats. It means that even if you theoretically outgun them, even if you bring tons of heavy infantry and emplaced weapons, you can't concentrate force as well as they can and while you're trying to bring that firepower to bear they're blitzing through your lines, taking you apart piecemeal while you struggle to react.

I want to be clear here: I'm not defending 10th or GW here, and I don't even disagree with your overall point, but the quality in Marines that you are praising Epic for having sounds word for word like Oath of Moment to me.

When Marines concentrate fire, they do it better than any other faction.

As I said though, I don't disagree with the overall point, because everyone can focus fire. Marines get bonuses when they do it, but that still doesn't feel the same as, say testing on leadership to aim at anything except the closest target and giving Marines a bonus to the check.

To take it back to Sisters, I think that dealing with melta is an easy fix. Whether it's the only fix, or the best fix, it's certainly the easiest. I also think the dex could make a big difference.

Tyel wrote:
Eh... I don't know if that works.

I mean who are Space Marines "operationally better than"? Guard and Orks? Tau perhaps? "They are fast" = well, so is everyone else (depending on which version of the lore you use).

And again - in a game where the movement phase is the most important phase, I don't know how you'd represent this without being overpowered. (I'm sure the response will be that Marines didn't win every game of Epic but you'd have to explain how.)

I feel the same on Transhuman dread. (Or Reivers have scary masks). Who in-universe cares? Guardsmen? Guardians? Fire Warriors?
Do Orks care? I don't think so. Dark Eldar? No. Aspect Warriors? No. Anything Chaos? No. Ad Mech? No. Sisters? I don't think so. Tyranids? Hard no. Necrons? Hard no. GSC? Depends on what stage they are at - but if kicking off, probably no. Squats? I'm not up on the latest LoV lore but probably not.

In universe maybe Marines are meant to strike hard and then get out. In 40k I think their thing is being resilient. Toughness, armour save and wounds. Which I feel is where GW have tried to go.

It isn't just that Marines are "fast", but that they are highly armored, equipped and flexible that allows them to bully the light infantry of other factions.

But they are fethed if their enemy starts bringing heavy weapons and vehicles to bear on them.

In other words, they need an operational advantage if they want to survive against most things you can find in a 40k table (because almost no one plays light infantry spam).

Tyel wrote:
And again - in a game where the movement phase is the most important phase, I don't know how you'd represent this without being overpowered. (I'm sure the response will be that Marines didn't win every game of Epic but you'd have to explain how.)

It works in Epic because that game has an activation system that abstractly models command and control. Marines can activate more reliably and are better able to press their luck by chaining activations, and pack more force into each activation. When combined with their army-wide access to mobility options, it gives them the ability to do a lot of damage or significantly reposition a large chunk of their army before the enemy can respond.

The flipside is that Marines are expensive for their raw combat stats, so against armies like Guard, Orks, and Tyranids they have to maintain the initiative and avoid a straight-up slugfest. So you typically beat Marines by bogging them down long enough to bring fire superiority to bear, then surrounding them and wiping them out. Find, Fix, Flank, Finish.

So, how do you represent high operational tempo and initiative in a game that has zero modeling of operational tempo and initiative to begin with? Probably can't. You could use some kind of activation system, or a reaction system, or like, anything other than pure IGOUGO with perfect omniscient instant control over every trooper, and then you'd have a lever you could tweak to give Marines a tangible advantage. Otherwise, of course Marines aren't going to feel like their lore in a game where they might as well be Orks in fancier armor.

I genuinely don't think this is a fixable incongruity in the current incarnation of 40K because all GW has to play with are offense, defense, and movement rates, but the way a squad of centuries-old perfectly-synchronized veterans functions is completely identical to a horde of screaming green idiots literally born yesterday.

PenitentJake wrote:
but the quality in Marines that you are praising Epic for having sounds word for word like Oath of Moment to me.

Concentration of force in Epic is an organic result of having an army with the best C&C, good mobility, and individual eliteness. It's the result of capabilities that allow you to out-play your opponent, rather than just out-shoot or out-punch them in a stand-up fight. If you just shove Marines straight into the enemy in Epic you will get creamed.

Oath of Moment is a magic 'I want this to die faster because reasons' button that facilitates Marines as brainless bruisers on a board too small for anything beyond a point-blank cage match.

^What catbarf said.

If you had an alternate activation game, and Marines always got to activate extra units before the opponent could go, you might have something.

And if you had actual suppression mechanics, and Marines were better at initially ignoring the effects, you'd have another piece of it.

And if you had decent Morale rules, you could leverage another mechanic to effect.

And while I'm at it I'll shill for the "Use Leadership to determine freedom of targeting" mechanic from 4th ed too. Yet another interaction to help define "elite".

ERJAK wrote:
Why is it that 'marines don't feel like marines' is the most consistent complaint in the history of 40k?

People don't say 'Admech don't feel like Admech' or 'Eldar don't feel Eldar' or 'Tyranids don't feel like Tyranids' ANYWHERE near as often. Usually only when their books are aggressively terrible.

My theory is that it's down to the fundamental nature of why people start playing space marines.

People are drawn to Space Marines because they want completely flat characters with no complexity or room for growth.

They want unstoppable, unflappable badasses that beat all the bad guys forever and it's not even hard; because they want to superimpose themselves over that type of character, explicitly.

Space marine players crave being Mary Sue's. So the only way they can be happy with Space Marine representation on the table is if they're Mary Sue enough.

This is a trap though, because no matter how Mary Sue the marines become, the game still has to be technically interactive. The game still has to have marines that can be killed, this means that the gnawing hole at the center of each Space Marine player can never truly be filled by the game.

Thus, 'Space Marines don't feel like Space Marines.' because they don't make ME, the Space Marine player, feel complete.

Nah.
I've found that most SM player start SMs because:
1) they come in all the starter boxes.
2) SMs are often recommended as being fairly easy to play.
3) They are easy to paint.
4) They look cool. Always have.
5) Simple advertising. Being the poster boys of the franchise their image is everywhere & they are well represented model/kit wise.

The problem with marines not feeling like marines is simple, because they don't feel like marines. They aren't durable enough, they became a fething HORDE army in 7th, and their mobility sucks because for some reason movement treats all humans as the absolute same in editions where differentiated movement is a thing. I've long argued/felt that the way marines should play is by basically fielding a bike army only the "bikes" are just marines, especially in older editions where you got the bump to T5. Eldar are arguably in the same boat save for durability since they're supposed to be fiendishly superhuman in their speed yet at their speediest move a whopping 7" if they want to shoot.

And, coming from the angle of a Deathwing guy, the only edition wherein Terminators were ever truly worth a damn and felt like Terminators is 2e, otherwise Epic is the only other game where they're done justice and feel flufy. Otherwise their durability is a right joke in the game where the only time they were good was when having a 3++ at the cost of no ranged weapons was a good deal. Arguably 9th was a heyday for Terminators but I despise the mechanics to achieve such results so much that it made me quit the game outright.

In nu40k too, Custodes are basically the movie marines army/what and how marines should feel in combat, while ideally Custodes wouldn't exist on the table.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Insectum7 wrote:
The Captain Titus thing is another level of insane. The times I've seen "That's what a Marine should feel like." but somehow disregarding that he's a Captain, representing a particularly heroic individual to start out with, conveniently only fighting small groups of enemies at a time, somehow regenerating hit points using a Chainsword, and completely disregarding how often a player might fail and die anyways during the course of the campaign. But somehow people conflate their completion of the campaign as somehow representative of a normal Space Marine. Boggles the mind.

"Captain Titus is what marines should feel like" they say as Captain Titus manages to kill something like 100-200 Chaos Space Marines in course of the campaign. I've encountered such a non-sequitur sentiment before and it makes me laugh madly every time. My biggest grief with that game is that for some reason Titus is on crack cocaine and buzzsaws through a company or two of CSM like it's nothing lmao.

I'd guess "marines don't feel like marines" because their tough power armor is a core part of the army's identity. There are a few issues with reflecting that on the tabletop:
- gw putting ever more models in 2k pts, plus the tools to delete them in droves
- the game featuring superheavies with their giant guns, plus the tools to delete those in one turn
- probably some other stuff I'm forgetting

Marines are never going to feel tough in a game like this, simply because they aren't even close to being the toughest unit in the game. And that's even before things like "marines are the meta" or "general lethality inflation".

Honestly even before superheavies all it took was a single battlecannon shell to splat the better part of a tactical squad. I think you'd need something like killteam (? Don't know the state of it) to make them shine.

It’s already been said, but the game is so flat now.
There is really no command or control, there is little room for tactical play.
Deployment has some thought, but the reach of units on a small table makes even bad deployment trivial to correct.
List building and army construction has been very stripped down. And tactical design of a list can really be summed up with do you counter what’s on the other side.
Elite units will always suffer in that environment, as they have to pay to just be blown up.
8-10 editions fixed non of this but I would argue it really started in 6.
Where they ramp up the attempts to make bring what ever a viable option.
Rather than attempting to make multiple builds and styles work.

Throwing a lot of good ideas at it, and showing little to no understanding.

Also something a term I think should be used more is narrative or internal realism!

Within the game, or world there is a realism that you stick to that gives the whole thing a neutral place to work from.
Often I think GW more went into Forge the narrative as a way to just push stupid things out and expect it to be smooth.
How elite should a marine be, when compared to a tank, and a cultist.

shortymcnostrill wrote:

Marines are never going to feel tough in a game like this, simply because they aren't even close to being the toughest unit in the game. And that's even before things like "marines are the meta" or "general lethality inflation".

Honestly even before superheavies all it took was a single battlecannon shell to splat the better part of a tactical squad. I think you'd need something like killteam (? Don't know the state of it) to make them shine.

I would like to challenge this statement. Marines can feel elite in a game like 40k without giving up 90% of the model range for all armies. The game needs to be designed around it, though. If 5 Marines (Legionares) cost me 90pts, then giving 4 of them a Lascannon that can and will delete a Marine with no problem (Havocs) should not only cost 45pts. High end weapons as well as Marine profiles are too cheap. You don't even have to change the general Marine profile, if it wouldn't be possible and viable to just spam the best weapons. If hordes were cheaper, then lower end weapons with a higher rate of fire would be necessary to deal with them.

a_typical_hero wrote:

shortymcnostrill wrote:

Marines are never going to feel tough in a game like this, simply because they aren't even close to being the toughest unit in the game. And that's even before things like "marines are the meta" or "general lethality inflation".

Honestly even before superheavies all it took was a single battlecannon shell to splat the better part of a tactical squad. I think you'd need something like killteam (? Don't know the state of it) to make them shine.

I would like to challenge this statement. Marines can feel elite in a game like 40k without giving up 90% of the model range for all armies. The game needs to be designed around it, though. If 5 Marines (Legionares) cost me 90pts, then giving 4 of them a Lascannon that can and will delete a Marine with no problem (Havocs) should not only cost 45pts. High end weapons as well as Marine profiles are too cheap. You don't even have to change the general Marine profile, if it wouldn't be possible and viable to just spam the best weapons. If hordes were cheaper, then lower end weapons with a higher rate of fire would be necessary to deal with them.

I agree, that'd reduce lethality by a bunch and would definitely help them. This would have some knock-on effects though, how do we deal with a knight army with fewer heavy weapons?

shortymcnostrill wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:

shortymcnostrill wrote:

Marines are never going to feel tough in a game like this, simply because they aren't even close to being the toughest unit in the game. And that's even before things like "marines are the meta" or "general lethality inflation".

Honestly even before superheavies all it took was a single battlecannon shell to splat the better part of a tactical squad. I think you'd need something like killteam (? Don't know the state of it) to make them shine.

I would like to challenge this statement. Marines can feel elite in a game like 40k without giving up 90% of the model range for all armies. The game needs to be designed around it, though. If 5 Marines (Legionares) cost me 90pts, then giving 4 of them a Lascannon that can and will delete a Marine with no problem (Havocs) should not only cost 45pts. High end weapons as well as Marine profiles are too cheap. You don't even have to change the general Marine profile, if it wouldn't be possible and viable to just spam the best weapons. If hordes were cheaper, then lower end weapons with a higher rate of fire would be necessary to deal with them.

I agree, that'd reduce lethality by a bunch and would definitely help them. This would have some knock-on effects though, how do we deal with a knight army with fewer heavy weapons?

Knights would also have reduced firepower and presumably fewer wounds. I don't think knights are overly robust at present anyway.

Models and weapon profiles need to be looked at individually, but the general idea is:

- Chaff units are really cheap.
- High end weaponry like lascannon are expensive.
- Only spamming low rate of fire / high quality weapons will leave you struggling to effectively combat 100 Gaunts / Boys / Cultists / ... + extras on the opposing side of the table.
- By bringing more weapons and models that are relatively harmless against a Marine profile (and similar or better), they do feel more elite in return by being more durable and threatening to the enemy.

a_typical_hero wrote:
Models and weapon profiles need to be looked at individually, but the general idea is:

- Chaff units are really cheap.
- High end weaponry like lascannon are expensive.
- Only spamming low rate of fire / high quality weapons will leave you struggling to effectively combat 100 Gaunts / Boys / Cultists / ... + extras on the opposing side of the table.
- By bringing more weapons and models that are relatively harmless against a Marine profile (and similar or better), they do feel more elite in return by being more durable and threatening to the enemy.

On the point of weapons being expensive, I think this is one of the big issues with 9th-10th.

Both editions have largely integrated weapon costs into unit costs (the latter doing so entirely). The problem is that this means the 'cheap' weapons are rarely ever worth it over the expensive ones, because you've already paid more for the model than the cheap weapon is worth. That or you end up making weapons much more samey because the costs are so similar.

In theory, having a lascannon be the same cost as a flamer could work, but the remaining game needs to be set up for this.

At the moment, 40k isn't.

 Insectum7 wrote:
The Captain Titus thing is another level of insane. The times I've seen "That's what a Marine should feel like." but somehow disregarding that he's a Captain, representing a particularly heroic individual to start out with, conveniently only fighting small groups of enemies at a time, somehow regenerating hit points using a Chainsword, and completely disregarding how often a player might fail and die anyways during the course of the campaign. But somehow people conflate their completion of the campaign as somehow representative of a normal Space Marine. Boggles the mind.

If it makes you feel any better, now he's 'just' a lieutenant and is going to single-handedly stop a tyranid invasion on two worlds along with *ahem* another faction's invasion.

Plus there's now a Sternguard single handedly turning back a Chaos invasion in Boltgun..