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By not assuming that marines fight in the same way on the table as in the lore.

On the table, space marines fight more or less out in the open in pitched battles against opponents of equal strength without any ability for deception or for tactics to have really any meaning.

In the fluff, they set up ambushes, practice local force superiority, and use other tools like negotiation and prolonged orbital bombardments and wave after wave of guardsmen.

Space marines excel in the tactical environment in the fluff because they excel in the strategic, something that he tabletop game doesn't get across very well.

...

If you only needed three marines to make an army, then they'd charge $140 apiece, just like they do knight titans.

Nah, a conspiracy theory is more likely.

Vaktathi wrote:

Ailaros wrote:By not assuming that marines fight in the same way on the table as in the lore.

By the same token, few factions fight on the table as they do in the lore. Dark Eldar aren't going to engage in frontal attacks on entrenched Imperial Guard positions either, and Tau heavy weaponry or IG tanks/artillery wouldn't have been silent while the enemy force was approaching so closely, but that's how the game simply functions.

Exactly.

I mean, one might as well ask why DE raiders are so flimsy when you almost never see them destroyed in the fluff. That's because in the fluff DE raiders don't charge head-long into a line of guard hydras or straight into missile broadsides. They're not that stupid.

Unfortunately, the rules for the game starts with the assumption that everybody is already completely committed to a fight along a line and there's nothing left but for them to just slug it out. Put another way, in the rules, everyone plays like guard or orks or tyranid. In the fluff, of course, they don't. Which is why fluff and tabletop look so much different.