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 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

I will quote a higher source for my answer.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wrote:
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

 Kaldor wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
The SM's aren't *that* fast. They don't get alerts for help any faster than anyone else, they still very often take their sweet time in deciding if they want to go or not and often may have to return home to load appropriate equipment ("hey, we're gonna need tanks for this!"), etc, and they don't travel faster than the IN does through the Warp. Yeah, it helps that they've got most of their stuff ready to go and are often already oot and aboot, but it's not like the IG show up years late to every battle or the Imperium would be dead, because quite frankly Space Marines are about as abundant as Unicorns.

It happens often enough that they make specific mention of task forces arriving months, sometimes years too late in the rulebook. The background of 40K goes to great lengths to ensure we understand the ponderous nature of Imperial bureaucracy, the disjointed chain of command, the way entire worlds are lost to rounding errors, etc. The Imperial Guard itself is often described as lumbering and slow in it's processes. To raise a new Imperial Guard force to respond to a threat could take months of political debate and bureaucratic red tape before the order for conscription is even raised. We could simply pull resources from an existing conflict, but that weakens Imperial Forces there.

Right, and I won't argue that often they *will* be very slow, just that it doesn't take them 200 years to respond to every threat.

I agree that the only reason Marines are relevant is because GW says so, but GW have written the IG as to be almost irrelevant as a defensive force.

They're not really intended to be honestly, despite much IG fluff about defensive actions, that's what Planetary Defense Forces that each Imperial Governor is responsible for maintaining are for. The Guard is called in when the PDF can't manage it, they're usually only stationed defensively on worlds that are strategically important/too valuable to entrust merely to the PDF. Most of the time the PDF can hold out several months or years against all but the most powerful of opponents, long enough for the Imperial Guard to arrive. The Guard, really, is a Counterattack force more than anything else.

They simply take too long to get anywhere. Once they're loaded up and ready to go they travel just as fast as anyone else, but the process of getting ten billion men, tanks, support personnel, food, ammunition, fuel, medical supplies, clothing, replacement parts, water, so on and so forth all ready to go, then liasing with the navy to provide transport and protection for said troops and supplies, takes a huge amount of time.

Indeed it does, but the vast majority of the time they get there fast enough to be relevant.

That's why the Marines are important: they are the First Responders of the Imperium. IMO, at least.

Again, I don't disagree with this in theory, the problem is that they're so rare, so limited in number and limited in capability, that when looked at from any realistic perspective they just don't work, and the vast majority of the Imperium's wars are won, eventually, by the Imperial Guard, thus why 40k is really more of a Fantasy setting than a Scifi setting.

Vaktathi wrote:The SM's aren't *that* fast. They don't get alerts for help any faster than anyone else, they still very often take their sweet time in deciding if they want to go or not and often may have to return home to load appropriate equipment ("hey, we're gonna need tanks for this!"), etc, and they don't travel faster than the IN does through the Warp.

Going by GW's fluff - yeah, they do. A Space Marine Chapter Master is not part of the gigantic bureaucracy that is the Munitorum. Whilst astropathic communications (or "alerts") travel just as fast as for them as for anyone else, such messages are never directed at some IG regiment directly but rather some office with people who may send the IG. As page 7 in the IG Codex tells us, "a plea for aid may not be acted upon for months, years or even decades" just because it goes through so much red tape, whereas a Chapter Master simply gets tapped on his shoulder and get told "yo boss, there's xeno scum around the corner", upon which time the Chapter either gets ready to move out or not. Meanwhile at Segmentum Command, the Imperial Guard has not even begun the long process to mobilize - and that's another few weeks just to get the regiments loaded onto their transports.

Lastly, yes, they also have faster ships in addition to that. A few Imperial organizations have small fleets capable of moving through the Warp faster than the Navy. To my knowledge it has never been explained how exactly this works, but the most logical conclusion would be superior drives I guess. Just like the Imperial Guard, the Imperial Navy is a Juggernaut whose ships are more powerful than their Astartes equivalent, but also slower to move.

Vaktathi wrote:Space Marines, both Loyalist and Traitor, are relevant because they form the core of the story and GW says they are. The full might of the Traitor Legions could be defeated by a few thousand IG regiments (meaning, a statistically irrelevant percentage of the IG's total military strength) in pitched battle assuming a very generous 100-1 kill ratio in favor of the CSM's. Why doesn't that happen? Because it would make for a boring story so GW doesn't write it that way and because GW doesn't really understand numbers.

There is admittedly an "out of universe" reason for why certain stories are told the way they are, or the fluff is set up the way it is - but ultimately, the CSMs ability to be as mobile as their Marine brothers is a big bonus that enables them to strike wherever their Guard foes are the weakest. And that's not just referring to interstellar deploymen but rather the planetary level. It doesn't matter much if you have millions of Guardsmen on some world. If they are not within 5 kilometers of the CSM assault, this is wasted potential. Not to mention the bottleneck scenario: if you have a room that only fits 10 people, it does not matter how much Guardsmen are waiting at the door to get a shot at the 5 CSM inside - it matters only that only 5 Guardsmen can ever enter at once. This is, of course, a very simplified explanation, but if you apply this formula to the battlefield that is essentially the Marines' greatest advantage: not just their strength and resilience, but that this strength and resilience is packed so densely inside a single person.

Vaktathi wrote:The entire Armageddon war thing is described as one of the most apocalyptically sized battles in the Imperium's history and has fewer guardsmen fighting there than died on the irrelevant sideshow of Vraks.

And Vraks was written by Forgeworld. All this comparison does is show once again that there is no canon, and that other sources simply portray a universe that is often quite different than the vision propagated by GW. That being said, you have the liberty to pick your preferred version of the setting, so if you prefer FW's approach ... by all means, roll with it!

Also, all the stuff that Kaldor wrote. Wow, we could make a good tag team on topics such as this one.

Space Marines are only faster in that they don't have massive logistics and supply trains or massive quantities of red tape to slow them down. Their ships may be faster, but only marginally so. its the lack of bureaucratic encomburance that really makes the difference.

And yes, there are a feth ton of Guardsmen. Even with only 1 million planets that arn't all to maximum potential.

Their enemies are really just that dangerous.


And it is true that the Imperial Guard really are an unstoppable force once the ball is rolling. But the reason they arn't dominating all their enemies is because of the bloated nature of the Imperium. They are simply so big they can afford to gloss over minor problems.

And there are even more enemies out there.

Orks are supposed to outnumber all other sentient races. If all Orks were to unite, nothing in the universe could stop them. And each ork is stronger and tougher then a man.


The Imperium has a million worlds. Non-imperial human worlds are probably also at least as numerous.

orks control many times the number of human worlds.

Then there are all the minor xenos races to consider. They all together control space many times larger then humans do.


The Galaxy is frakin huge. The Imperium is mearly one of the larger political entities spread out accross the stars. You could have another entity the size of the Imperium over the same area and still have plenty of room, its possable they wouldn't even come into contact with each other if they didn't rely on Warp based FTL travel.

 Lynata wrote:
whereas a Chapter Master simply gets tapped on his shoulder and get told "yo boss, there's xeno scum around the corner", upon which time the Chapter either gets ready to move out or not.

Except the marines are probably too busy dealing with a vendetta with some other chapter (or just refuse to help because you had some long-forgotten connection to that other chapter), or already busy killing xenos somewhere else. The only reason marines are ever able to help is because GW ignores their own statements about how rare and precious marines are and has them sitting around doing nothing but waiting for someone to finally give them an opportunity to kill stuff.

Peregrine wrote:Except the marines are probably too busy dealing with a vendetta with some other chapter (or just refuse to help because you had some long-forgotten connection to that other chapter), or already busy killing xenos somewhere else. The only reason marines are ever able to help is because GW ignores their own statements about how rare and precious marines are and has them sitting around doing nothing but waiting for someone to finally give them an opportunity to kill stuff.

That is a good point, but obviously some Chapters are more dutiful than others, and/or will at least send a token force of, say, a single Company to check out what's going on rather than just ignore it. After all, it's not like a Chapter may only fight one campaign at any time.

I don't think GW ignores their statements about Marines being rare (the point is driven home numerous times in the Guard codices, actually) - it's just that (a) I would suspect most battles that happen across the galaxy do not even request Imperial aid because local forces are sufficient to deal with the threat, (b) we only ever get to hear about important battles anyways, and (c) if the Marines really want to help, there's a 99% chance they can do so and be there quicker than the IG.
In this, the "first responders" descriptor is fairly accurate, I think.

 Lynata wrote:
I don't think GW ignores their statements about Marines being rare (the point is driven home numerous times in the Guard codices, actually) - it's just that (a) I would suspect most battles that happen across the galaxy do not even request Imperial aid because local forces are sufficient to deal with the threat, (b) we only ever get to hear about important battles anyways, and (c) if the Marines really want to help, there's a 99% chance they can do so and be there quicker than the IG.
In this, the "first responders" descriptor is fairly accurate, I think.

Except they do. Space marines are supposed to be incredibly rare and precious and constantly in demand, but over and over again we have distress calls going out and finding the desired chapter sitting around doing nothing with a company or ten. If GW paid attention to their own fluff the vast majority of the time a call for help to a space marine chapter would result in "sorry, all of our forces are busy, but we'll put you on the waiting list and maybe you'll get some help in a few centuries."

Peregrine wrote:Except they do. Space marines are supposed to be incredibly rare and precious and constantly in demand, but over and over again we have distress calls going out and finding the desired chapter sitting around doing nothing with a company or ten. If GW paid attention to their own fluff the vast majority of the time a call for help to a space marine chapter would result in "sorry, all of our forces are busy, but we'll put you on the waiting list and maybe you'll get some help in a few centuries."

Yeah, well, I'm gonna go and call "selective memory" on this, as I am fairly sure that the vast majority of instances where the Astartes mobilised part of their forces did not tell us what the rest of the Chapter was doing at the time. And why would the source do that - it has no purpose for the story at hand. Similarly, why would we even read about a Chapter turning down a request other than as background for a different force? In books that tell us of Space Marines, it makes sense to talk about the battles of Space Marines, and a fluff text about how the Awesome Dudes Chapter turned down a request by Inquisitor Bob because they were too busy butting heads with some other Marines just comes across as a bit redundant, don't you think?

But of course, all fluff is subjective - I can only say that I have gotten a whole different perception of things as you did. /shrug

 Lynata wrote:
Yeah, well, I'm gonna go and call "selective memory" on this, as I am fairly sure that the vast majority of instances where the Astartes mobilised part of their forces did not tell us what the rest of the Chapter was doing at the time.

Except there shouldn't be ANY part of the chapter sitting idle, ever. Marines are too valuable and rare (according to GW's own fluff) to ever allow them to waste even the slightest amount of time, which means that every single marine chapter should already be 100% committed at all times and only the most urgent emergency could get marines on short notice (at the cost of abandoning their previous battle and leaving their allies to die).

Peregrine wrote:Except there shouldn't be ANY part of the chapter sitting idle, ever. Marines are too valuable and rare (according to GW's own fluff) to ever allow them to waste even the slightest amount of time, which means that every single marine chapter should already be 100% committed at all times and only the most urgent emergency could get marines on short notice (at the cost of abandoning their previous battle and leaving their allies to die).

Welcome to 40k, where efficiency is thrown out of the window for petty politics and simple arrogance.

Just because Space Marines are rare does not mean that the Chapter Master has to feel committed to respond to any threat - I am really not sure where you got that impression from? The way I interpret the available material actually fits to the (IG) fluff that debunks the idea of Marines being the most important defenders of the Imperium, too. The IoM does not need them. It is the Guard that holds the line, whereas the rare and precious Marines have the luxury of being able to choose their engagements based on nothing other than personal preference of their commander (they can be ordered, of course, but even then some might simply say "no" ).

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
According to the Wikipedia page on the galaxy, there are at least 10 billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars.

Let's assume 10% of them are occupied by the Imperium and paying the Imperial Tithe, and let's also assume that each one has a population of 1 million.

10% of 10,000,000,000 = 1,000,000,000
1,000,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1x10^15

Now let's assume that 1 percent of the people there are active members of the Imperial Guard.

1% of 1x10^15 = 1x10^13

Or

10,000,000,000,000 soldiers in the Guard!

How do they not win every battle they fight?

Because they are spread out to try to protect 1 billion settled worlds and billions of other non-settled worlds. Even just taking into account protecting the 1 billion civilized worlds, you are looking at a whopping 10,000 guardsman to protect each planet. Even if you just break it down by sector you might have 100,000 guardsman protecting an entire sector of space. The US military currently has about 1.5 *million* active duty troops and a near equal number of reserve troops for just the US. 100,000 guardsmen protecting an entire sector is rather insigificant when looked at comparatively. Hence that is why they don't win every battle they fight. Sure if you stacked every guard soldier into one fight they should be able to overwhelm any enemy with their massive numbers, but that would also leave the majority of imperial space without any guard protection at all.

Skriker