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or is it a mixture of 30k and 40k marines

I would assume its mostly 30k marines though that fell to Chaos

It's more than that. There's also chaos space marines that they themselves recruit via geneseed implantation. That's why CSM so often raid loyalist geneseed stores. I would say that there's still a majority that are from the Heresy era, but a substantial amount are either renegades or relatively recent recruits.

Depends on the chapter.
Most of the Thousand Sons don’t actually exist - All is dust! Is an irony because they’re (depending on the author) warp dust, animated armour or illusions.

Who knows!

Whilst the Legions were colossal, they also suffered horrific casualties during the Siege of Terra, and the subsequent Scouring.

What level of casualties that inflicted, we don’t really know. But crucially it seems fairly unlikely they’d have had a great deal of time to recover Geneseed in the aftermath.

Since then, they’ve also had to deal with degradation of their Geneseed (likely more pronounced than their loyalist Brothers, because wibbly warpy tends to do that), and some Legions not being even remotely equipped or interested in harvesting Geneseed from the fallen, or giving medical aid to fallen Brothers.

But since then, fresh Traitors have come in dribs and drabs. Individual here, squad there, very occasionally an entire Chapter - and even then, likely the remains of a Chapter, once they’ve done their own little Calth.

Factor in wibbly-warpy-timey-wimey, and I don’t think there’s any way of knowing for sure.

Probably not, the Lords of Silence novel said the majority of the current Death Guard were "new."

As organizations, the word bearers, black legion, thousand sons and death guard absolutely DWARF imperial marines in size. Those legions possess as many marines (post Terra) as the all of the loyalist chapters in total....each. We don't know much about the remaining strengths of Iron Warriors and Emps Children and of course, the world eaters are broken.


There are ALOT of chaos marines. Now factor in all of the random warbands and renegade bands (red corsairs) and the loyalist marines are outnumbered at least 15 to 1...and that is being modest.


I would say, and I have little backing for it other than reading a lot of chaos lore and owning all the chaos dexs, that the amount of HH vets are different from outfit to outfit and is very hard to pin down.


Id say the following, once more without concrete evidence.

DG is probably 75-85% vets.

Black Legion is probably 30-40%.

Word Bearers is probably 50%

Thousand Sons is probably the legion with the least , id wager fully half of thier sorcs are not vets but newer inducties. And rubrics dont count.


Without more fluff I couldnt even begin to answer for the other outfits.
But think of it this way, the amount of HH vets in the forces of chaos probably outnumber ALL of the loyalist marines by 8-9 to 1. Im not sure GW intended this but going by the force distribution charts in the respective chaos dexs this is the round about numbers id feel safe putting to pen.

There are about 1Mio. Loyalist Marines. (a thousand Chapters with 1000 Marines each). Death Guard is probably the second largest Legion with about 300000. Black Legion should be bigger. WE and emperor's children hardly exist or are extremely fractured. Tables numbers seem very exaggerated to me.

We don't know how many are new, the Codizes implied a lot of 30K Marines in 3rd Edition, less so in 5/6th. Lords of Silence basically has only parts of the leadership as original Marines, the others being Renegades or their own creations.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
There are about 1Mio. Loyalist Marines. (a thousand Chapters with 1000 Marines each). Death Guard is probably the second largest Legion with about 300000. Black Legion should be bigger. WE and emperor's children hardly exist or are extremely fractured. Tables numbers seem very exaggerated to me.

We don't know how many are new, the Codizes implied a lot of 30K Marines in 3rd Edition, less so in 5/6th. Lords of Silence basically has only parts of the leadership as original Marines, the others being Renegades or their own creations.

While I still protest that I have no concrete numbers (because they dont exist for everything outside of 1ksons and DG) I would say im closer to the actual numbers than I am off. Ill break out my DG and 1ksons codex when I can and do the math, as they actually have numbers in them. Im not even going to try to imagine the numbers of the Alpha Legion and Nightlords.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Table wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
There are about 1Mio. Loyalist Marines. (a thousand Chapters with 1000 Marines each). Death Guard is probably the second largest Legion with about 300000. Black Legion should be bigger. WE and emperor's children hardly exist or are extremely fractured. Tables numbers seem very exaggerated to me.

We don't know how many are new, the Codizes implied a lot of 30K Marines in 3rd Edition, less so in 5/6th. Lords of Silence basically has only parts of the leadership as original Marines, the others being Renegades or their own creations.

While I still protest that I have no concrete numbers (because they dont exist for everything outside of 1ksons and DG) I would say im closer to the actual numbers than I am off. Ill break out my DG and 1ksons codex when I can and do the math, as they actually have numbers in them. Im not even going to try to imagine the numbers of the Alpha Legion and Nightlords.

But really we should focus on the amount of veterans chaos has as is the question of the thread, I only bring up total numbers in conjunction with that.

You know that the Black Legion was one of the most populous legion with only 170k marines MAX at the time of Istvaan III and the Death Guard 100k, don't you ?
They simply can't have three time their max number now.
Source: The Horus Heresy, Betrayal. War dispositions chapter.
Chaos marines are probably less numerous than the imperial ones, simply because the Imperium can make new ones more easily than Chaos, and they rarely fight each other (compared to chaos ones).

Well, it depends. The black legion was originally devastated following the clone shenanigans, but they've spent time absorbing warbands and groups from renegade chapters and legions. So they could have grown.

Hard numbers for the present circumstances are impossible to determine, however.

Animus wrote:
Probably not, the Lords of Silence novel said the majority of the current Death Guard were "new."

further more codex death guard says the death guard actually have MORE marines then they did in the heresy era.

The Word Bearers trilogy by Anthony Reynolds (which is a great trilogy) continually refers to the veteran Word Bearers and makes literally no mention of any of them created after The Horus Heresy. That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but it reinforces the idea that the Word Bearers use daemons and cultists as shock troops, funneling them into the enemy guns/minefields to take the casualties, before the Word Bearers themselves actually make the killing blow. Thus, whilst we've lost a lot of brothers in the intervening years, I believe the majority of the legion would still comprise of veterans (of the long war).

That said, you've got entire renegade chapters out there like Crimson Slaughter and so on, those are entirely post Heresy Space Marines.

I would assume that the majority are probably newer marines. All the traitor legions to heavy casualties throughout the Heresy and then in the after math of the siege likely took a lot more. Account for that and most of the legions fracturing to various degrees, the only large ones I would expect is the black legion (Abbadon can pull in a lot of favors and id suspect large portions of the BL are drawn from other sources), deathguard (new plague marines don't seem that hard to make) and maybe the Word Bearers.

Also factoring into this question may be, whilst many traitor Legions in the eye/maelstrom may not have a well-functioning apothecarion Detachment compared to Loyalist chapters, they will have more free reign to experiment with implantation processes and may have faster turnaround rates than loyalists because of less stringent/exacting standards.

For instance we have the Daemonculaba device that the Iron Warriors use in Dead Sun, Black Sky that is essentially a monterousky warped human female that can give birth essentially to fully grown space marines just minus the training, and their skin... just an example but if the Iron Warriors can do it I don’t see why Legions with more daemonic patronage couldn’t do something similar.

No. It would be absurd to think the traitor legions would still have enough numbers now to be a threat in the way they are, without replenishing their numbers after the heresy.

The traitor legions are all capable of making new recruits, except for the thousand sons.

robbienw wrote:
No. It would be absurd to think the traitor legions would still have enough numbers now to be a threat in the way they are, without replenishing their numbers after the heresy.

The traitor legions are all capable of making new recruits, except for the thousand sons.

The Thousand Sons actually can and sometimes do make new Rubrics, though that's more often done by cabals independent of Magnus (the Black Legion-aligned Sons of the Cyclops for example). They also take on apprentice psykers as "proper" Thousand Sons recruits. Though those usually don't work out and end up as Helbrutes instead, lel.

 Arachnofiend wrote:

robbienw wrote:
No. It would be absurd to think the traitor legions would still have enough numbers now to be a threat in the way they are, without replenishing their numbers after the heresy.

The traitor legions are all capable of making new recruits, except for the thousand sons.

The Thousand Sons actually can and sometimes do make new Rubrics, though that's more often done by cabals independent of Magnus (the Black Legion-aligned Sons of the Cyclops for example). They also take on apprentice psykers as "proper" Thousand Sons recruits. Though those usually don't work out and end up as Helbrutes instead, lel.

Interesting, I did not know this. I guess this is described in the Ahriman book series?

It's something that was mentioned in old CSM codexes. It might be outdated information since it's from the same time period when Ahriman didn't feel bad about the Rubric, but I think it's cool so I'm sticking with it.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
It's something that was mentioned in old CSM codexes.

I have to ask for citation.

Quite a few series - Ahriman trilogy and the Bill King Space Wolf trilogy - have previously 'smashed' and 'killed' rubricae spirits getting reimbued back into fresh armour, but I don't think I recall 'new' rubricae.

YOu can add the black legion series to that list.

Khayon mentions recruitments, as in new astartes made from geneseed and all the difficulties that come with it, among the nine legions.

Fun fact the black legion still has Horus' corpse for harvest purposes.

 Earth127 wrote:
Fun fact the black legion still has Horus' corpse for harvest purposes.

I'm pretty sure they destroyed Horus' corpse after they caught up with Bile after he stole it.

FWIW, the Emperors Children were never particularly numerous to begin with. IIRC, pre-Fulgrim contact there was only two hundred of them.

So, never particularly numerous, then the Heresy happened, then Skalathrax... so there's probably not many of the 30k EC left around.

My Slaanesh CSM army is planned to top-out at 51 PA minis and two of them are going to be OG EC and even then, I think that's unrealistically high.