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People going on about truescale marines and mutilating the minis to make these mutants is a real bugbear for me, it confuses the hell out of me. Space Marines are not giants they are 7-8foot tall fully armored which is tall but not any taller than people today can be (Basketball players ect...), you know what else tall and intimidating in the 40k universe? Everything!! The Orks your marines are on the table with are supposed to be huge scary things, Eldar are considered tall compared to Humans, Tyranids/Necrons are as tall as they want to be and your Chaos counterparts are also the correct height. In an effort to make Marines seem bigger compared to imperial guard people make them look wrong compared to every other mini that exists and wrong vs any army you will play against, especially crazy considering guard are supposed to be pretty strong/healthy examples of what a human can be.

Looking back i don't mean this to sound as bitchy as it probably does , i dont care what people do with their own minis but am curious about the thinking behind it since doesn't appear to be supported at all in lore yet i keep seeing horribly deformed spindly legged marines out there.

Being entirely honest, I agree with you. Put a Space Marine mini next to an Eldar, Necron, Tau or SoB mini and they are perfectly in scale. The issue is the ape-proportioned Guardsmen, swap them out for properly scaled infantry (Mantic, Forge World, Vic Minis) and the problem goes away.

However, Truescaling does have a place, and that is when minis go beyond gaming pieces to become artistic displays. There are some amazing things done with TS Marines as part of dioramas or such.

You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants, they are not supposed to just be your average joe. I agree a marine would be bigger mostly thanks to the armor but not by the amount people seem to assume.

I agree with you about making display pieces but in 90% of the time folks just stretch the legs and they look horrible lol, its one of those conversions that if not done perfectly just destroys your work imo.

 Gantoris wrote:
You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants,

Uh.... No. Care to provide a source on that? Outside of the Mechanicus based Skitarii and probably some inquisitorial based troops I think you'll find that this just isn't the case.

they are not supposed to just be your average joe.

Yes. Yes they are.


If memory serves me right then some troops like the Kasrkin do receive minor cybernetic upgrades. Kasrkin are far from basic troops though.

 Snrub wrote:

 Gantoris wrote:
You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants,

Uh.... No. Care to provide a source on that? Outside of the Mechanicus based Skitarii and probably some inquisitorial based troops I think you'll find that this just isn't the case.

they are not supposed to just be your average joe.

Yes. Yes they are.


If memory serves me right then some troops like the Kasrkin do receive minor cybernetic upgrades. Kasrkin are far from basic troops though.

Do Solar Auxilia receive implants?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
A TS marine should be a bit higher than a Tau. Check Tau Codex, 6th ed softback for proof.

 Gantoris wrote:
You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants, they are not supposed to just be your average joe. I agree a marine would be bigger mostly thanks to the armor but not by the amount people seem to assume.

I agree with you about making display pieces but in 90% of the time folks just stretch the legs and they look horrible lol, its one of those conversions that if not done perfectly just destroys your work imo.

So is NMM or freehand work. Both are very good techniques in the right hands. There's a learning curve to everything, if they're not screwing up your models, leave them alone.

Personally I think it looks cool to have a Marine actually tower over a human figure. GWs scales are just idiotic. Look at Infinity models in comparison. People say they are "tiny" but they are actually just to-scale and don't have giant hands,heads,weapons. A SM compared to a normal human Infinity model stacks up like it should but not to a Guardsman.

lliu wrote:
Do Solar Auxilia receive implants?

Wouldn't have a clue, mate. I'm not well versed in the Solar Auxilia. They are 30k era though so they very well could have had anything done to them.


And if you want to get technical, then the SolAux aren't even Imperial Guardsmen. So they don't count anyway.

 Snrub wrote:

 Gantoris wrote:
You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants,

Uh.... No. Care to provide a source on that? Outside of the Mechanicus based Skitarii and probably some inquisitorial based troops I think you'll find that this just isn't the case.

they are not supposed to just be your average joe.

Yes. Yes they are.


If memory serves me right then some troops like the Kasrkin do receive minor cybernetic upgrades. Kasrkin are far from basic troops though.

Ive been consuming a lot of lore lately and cant quite recall the exact source im thinking of, to be clear tho im not suggesting that they have huge amounts of work done or are anywhere near the superhuman level Space Marines are on. The line im thinking of bassically just says that while in transit/training they get some basic genetic enhancements ect. I mean its not a huge stretch to imagine a quick regime of testosterone and other gak like that we could do now if we wanted to make murderous nutters, these are disposable troops so would be cheap of course but point is they aint just citizens pulled of the street and dropped into a fight 1 week later.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:

 Gantoris wrote:
You have to remember that the guard do benefit from some light genetic manipulation and cybernetic implants, they are not supposed to just be your average joe. I agree a marine would be bigger mostly thanks to the armor but not by the amount people seem to assume.

I agree with you about making display pieces but in 90% of the time folks just stretch the legs and they look horrible lol, its one of those conversions that if not done perfectly just destroys your work imo.

So is NMM or freehand work. Both are very good techniques in the right hands. There's a learning curve to everything, if they're not screwing up your models, leave them alone.

Personally I think it looks cool to have a Marine actually tower over a human figure. GWs scales are just idiotic. Look at Infinity models in comparison. People say they are "tiny" but they are actually just to-scale and don't have giant hands,heads,weapons. A SM compared to a normal human Infinity model stacks up like it should but not to a Guardsman.

I do agree that marines should be a little bigger than IG if was 100% accurate but by making marines bigger you spoil the scale a lot more vs everything but guard and the difference with guard is somewhat exagerated by folks imo.

Pictures don't lie.

Hah, it is hard to look at Guardsmen as anything other than deformed mutants after painting any Infinity humans! Good job I went 3rd party with my Guard even before I started on Infinity, otherwise there would be many, many regrets!

As for the enhancement of IG, I can see them getting (in some cases, not all) immunisation packages, maybe in some regiments some kind of steroids or such, but certainly nothing to make them any bigger than an average guy pulled off the street and given a Lasgun.

It's hard to go back to anything GW after playing Infinity, Para.

So you think its unlikely they would be given loads of testosterone and steroids during training? It seems logical to me that they all look like body builders when they get of the transport ships, why wouldn't they have cheap enhancements made in training. No one cares about the long term health of these guys, whatever is easy and gives a small advantage would be done.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
GW has always had a sort of "Comic Book" exaggerated style.

 Gantoris wrote:
So you think its unlikely they would be given loads of testosterone and steroids during training? It seems logical to me that they all look like body builders when they get of the transport ships, why wouldn't they have cheap enhancements made in training. No one cares about the long term health of these guys, whatever is easy and gives a small advantage would be done.

Unlikley asthe average 'trainting' a Guardsman gets consists of learning which of the of Lasgun to hold and to do what the Commissar says. Likewise, once they hit the battlefield they job, typically is to hold a line by shooting anything that moves, do what they're told, and catch a bullet/bolt/shuriken/lasround for the guy behind them, and buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive.

In other words, as little expense as possible will be spared per Guardsmen, they are just useful alive as bullet-catchers and dead as sandbags. Not saying there aren't regiments that do more training, enhancement or whatever, but it is certainly not the norm.

My understanding of the process is they are grabbed from the world of origin and put in massive barges for transit. They are stuck on these barges for a long time as they go where needed and this serves as the training center. They are defiantly cannon fodder but they are not just untrained muppets as you suggest, they would be no different from a modern infantry soldier in terms of training.

Any cheap way to make them more effective like drugs would be on the table because in the grimdark world no one cares about long term health issue.

I think using smaller IG minis is a better solution than ruining the scale of marines tho if this is really bothersome, but i love the GW IG :(.

The term that used to be bandied around was 'Art-scale' which i think is more befitting of the results people are going for. E.g. akin to the artwork of the 40k source books.

De-squat a marine and he's a tall dude, even without giving him terminator legs and torso. The issue is that doing so is immensely difficult.

Ultimately GW don't have any fixed reference for scale, for something to be in something else will be out of scale.

Guardsman as seen above are a great example as for them to be a sensible reference point (hypothetically a good choice as we know what an unaugmented human looks like) almost everything else is to small. Because of the inconsistencies of scale, how big a model is becomes more about which dudes you want to emphasize. Do your terminators get lost in the masses.....add more mass.

I always thought it one of the worst parts of the current GW art direction, once everyone is huge, hulking and covered in bling then nobody is. If you want a marine to look huge stand him next to someone small.

Its not really the currant art direction tbh, like i said they have always had a Comic Book feel. If anything its gotten less cartoonish recently, thats good or bad depending on your taste.

The crux of my argument tho is that Space Marines are more or less to scale with every other faction other than IG (and other straight humans like SoB i guess) and there isn't as big a gap there as people seem to think. When you truescale your minis for tabletop (i do see the value sometimes for display) you achieve the opposite results by breaking scale with everything else.

The Space Marine miniatures are perfectly in scale, they are not the issue. People should be making truescale Guardsmen instead of Space Marines.

Get the gal vorbak models from forge world and then tell me that massive marines dont look better

Massive gretchins would look better than normal gretchins, this is hardly the point.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
The Space Marine miniatures are perfectly in scale, they are not the issue. People should be making truescale Guardsmen instead of Space Marines.

Its called Forgeworld

well il judge that when i see an upscaled grot. Marines are supposed to be massive and imposing. Regular marine models have massive heads, huge chests, no abdomens, tiny legs and half size upper arms. Not to mention their weapons are massively overchunked. True scaling just gives them that more proportionate look, and the added size makes them ideal for special characters. Im a fan

Just imagine the glory of a 50 foot grot

Marines look amazingly cool and the proportions are fine :(, the only way they could look better is if they all went back to being beakies! 9 times out of 10 when people truescale marines they end up looking like spindly legged freaks.

What you are calling dis proportioned is the deliberate Comic Book/Cartooney style thats a hallmark of Games Workshop.

AFAIK Imperial Guard are just conscripted out of ordinary citizenry (40,000 years in the future mind you). Hence, the untold billions in numbers, that they have no idea how many IG there actually are, and that deaths are meaningless because there are untold billions more to fill the ranks.

I suppose, you are right in that if you took everything other than IG out, Space Marines would be the correct scale. Therefore, the solution would be to shrink Imperial Guard

Yeah but i don't think the scale difference between IG and SM is as big as people think it is so ultimately you do more harm than good stretching Marines, smaller Guard is defiantly the way to go if this is a huge problem for someone. And i still don't agree IG are just utterly green hopeless civilians, they are cannon fodder for sure but they are trained and equipped en-route over a decent amount of time. And it really isn't much of a stretch to think they probably get performance enhancing drugs, steroids and testosterone during this period because it would be a very cheap way to increase performance of your ground army. This explains perfectly the chunky body builder look of GW imperial guard and further negates the problem with height vs Space Marines.

Games Workshop proportions are horribly out of true which is why so many truescale models looks weird, they exaggerate the already deformed Games Workshop models and highlight the problems they have.

The scale of the models is all over the shop with the Death Cultist models being some of the more accurate Games Workshop models, and compare them to a regular figure and they are tiny. At 28mm scale, your average human should stand 28mm high (some do take this to the eye level only but it is better to have it to head height and you see this with many 32mm scale miniatures (which, whilst much taller than a Games Workshop figure have far thinner limbs, and bodies, smaller heads et cetera) and this would represent an average 5'9" human. If we were to say a Space Marine was 7' precisely that would require a model 34mm tall.

If you were to make a scale miniature of an 8' Space Marine, a not unreasonable size based on the background, then the model would be 38mm tall, considerably bigger than your average human character.

Mostly you will find that human and Space Marine models are 30mm tall. Eldar models suffer by being too short, Tau too tall and only orks, who stand about 6' are accurately portrayed.

You can see the problem with human figures with this image:



This is an unarmoured and armoured Space Marine I made a long while ago at 54mm scale. You can see how the Marine looks (a smidge under 7' tall the model is 66mm where Artemis is, according to Jes Goodwin, supposedly 67mm tall, downscaled from a 7' 6" drawing) next to a regular human and then how Games Workshop's heroically scaled 54mm Marine looks in comparison.




I don't say my own models are perfect by any stretch but they are fairly accurate scale figures, not heroic, and I think they do serve to show how Games Workshop figures differ enormously from what would be an accurate scale miniature. But then they don't make scale miniatures they make wargames models and making a space marine bigger is a lot easier than making a guardsman smaller.

Gogsnik that's outstanding putty work m8 well done, i sort of disagree and agree with you and you have helped me to understand better why people think they need to do truescale marines.

What you see as "deformed" about what GW call "Heroic" scale is just what ive been referring to as "Comic Book" style, they are deliberately cartoonish miniatures. These were designed by people inspired by 70s and 80s Saturday Morning Cartoons and comics like 2000AD, this inspiration is still clear today despite being somewhat toned down recently. I suspect this is a similar effect to how some folks reacted to WoW graphics, they just cant stand the cartoon style. Truescaling is a doomed attempt to alter a stylistic choice, it will never work well because it throws out all the proportions and breaks the overall "look".

I don't disagree, the heroic style is just that and ordinarily I don't think it's a problem at all and the minis are what they are, although, even when I was only 9 or so I always thought Marines were too small. Ultimately, those 'truescale' models that work the best , find a way to make a bigger heroic scale model, rather than a to-scale model.

For instance, these are what a properly to-scale Space Marine would look like, with accurate, human normal proportions (you can see these in the artwork occasionally).



And some artwork along the same lines:



Despite being highly accurate they look very strange but, super tall humans do look kinda strange.



Unlike a more heroic 'truescale' which looks less weird because it conforms more closely to the Games Workshop style.

These pics are some of the better Truescale marines ive seen although i think in the first pic they are slightly to skinny overall. The image of a human you linked isn't a good comparison, that man suffered from gigantism and his body was not proportioned properly at all. He died young like all people with that condition because his body couldn't support his height of almost 9 freaking feet!

The bottom Marine is extremely impressive but no matter how good it is the fact still remains that compared to every other faction except IG the original scale is best.

 Gantoris wrote:
My understanding of the process is they are grabbed from the world of origin and put in massive barges for transit. They are stuck on these barges for a long time as they go where needed and this serves as the training center. They are defiantly cannon fodder but they are not just untrained muppets as you suggest, they would be no different from a modern infantry soldier in terms of training.

Any cheap way to make them more effective like drugs would be on the table because in the grimdark world no one cares about long term health issue.

you need to read the book fifteen hours its called that cause its the average lifespan of a guardsmen from enlistment to death its a great read and portrays what its really like to be in the guard