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Whats with the near endless (it feels like) stream of Space Marine Lieutenants being issued?

Is it because they can be wedged into any SM army? Or is there an evil underlying conspiracy from GW. That if they keep giving us SM Lts, then we will feel guilted into playing Marines?

Maybe some enterprising individual will think of an army list based around SM Lieutenants.

Because sculpting a Space Marine Lt is a good way to test new GW sculptors. It used to be Captains before there were Lieutenants.

It's a bit like the question of why there are so many Cryptek sculpts relative to most other character models.

It's probably a mixture of Marines being the number one range, and therefore being featured in the most box sets etc. and being expected to shift more units; and it being easier to justify having multiple Luitenants than multiple Captains in a collection.

Well, that sounds like a question from 2017... I don’t think there have been that many new Lieutenants since about 9th edition/2020?

Edit: Probably still more than any other faction got in characters, but that's just GWs Marineproblem.

Last one I can think of is the Lieutenant with Combi-weapon from Leviathan - which means we've actually gone a whole year without a new Lieutenant.

If you want an over-abundance of leaders look at Soulblight - even without a bunch of Cursed City models its till got an insane ratio of leaders to troops.


The core reason GW does a lot of leaders is that they are small. Small sprue, lower investment; but they ARE a new model. This means they can spark some interest in an army with a new release, but without the same investment as troops require. It's also something they can easily phase in and out of production more easily.

Phase a core troop out and it creates a gap in the army; phase one of 10-20 leader models out and its instantly a gap filled by other leaders.

It's in contrast to the old days when GW mostly did big army updates and left armies with very little attention, new releases, for a long while. That led to "oh they are going to squat that army" comments and led to lower and lower sales which meant spending even more to bring them back up.



As for why Marines; Marines sell the most by far so they get more attention. GW has been a lot better over the last years; Kirby era was peak "invest into our best seller" phase.

That explains why it feels like every person that's had a speaking role in a Horus heresy novel has a miniature released.

Never really thought about it that way.

A lot of the Lieutenant models are already using assets and mods from other models. I think a lot of it is the "Look, Malibu Stacy has a new hat" to keep the hype train rolling for their cash-cow army.

A fair number were also Event/Anniversary Exclusives. One-off collectors pieces, something a little bit fancy to attract sales.

And as Dear Leader of Facebook’s Premier Loot Group? Sales they did attract.

I'd guess the monopose nature of models these days has something to do with it. The simplest way for most people to customize their army is to swap the leader.

 techsoldaten wrote:
I'd guess the monopose nature of models these days has something to do with it. The simplest way for most people to customize their army is to swap the leader.

It's lucky then that only space marine players like to customise their army by swapping leaders...

If this article is to be believed, there are 16 Space Marine Lieutenant models (15 plus the not included Black Templars Castellan). Of those 16 there are:

5 Generic Tacticus Armour

5 Chapter-specific (Black Templar, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, & Titus the Ultramarine)

3 Phobos Armour

3 Limited Edition

It looks a little less insane when outlined this way. Imagine if they were all Space Marine Captains

 alextroy wrote:
If this article is to be believed, there are 16 Space Marine Lieutenant models (15 plus the not included Black Templars Castellan). Of those 16 there are:

5 Generic Tacticus Armour

5 Chapter-specific (Black Templar, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, & Titus the Ultramarine)

3 Phobos Armour

3 Limited Edition

It looks a little less insane when outlined this way. Imagine if they were all Space Marine Captains

It's still a lot.
Like, that's 2/3rds the count of the Dark Eldar Index. (Not including FW/Legends, but including Named Characters.)

I have a feeling that if we dig a little we can find another couple Lieutenants hiding in the warp.

Probably because people keep buying them.

My purely anecdotal experience.
I bought 8 of the "Space marine" boardgames on clearance at Target, mostly because I wanted the game boards and thought it might be fun to own some tyranids. I made all my money back simply by putting 6 of the Lt. Titus figures up on Ebay. They sold within hours of being posted and most were bought by folks across the ocean.

My very small sample size indicates that perhaps a fair number of folks in Europe are collecting Space Marine Lt. figures...

My personal guess is that when 8th edition was originally going to be more of an End Times reset, with more of a focus on monopose units, the plan was to release special models for the wargear options. You buy the generic Intercessor kit, but GW would sell the models with Power Swords and the like as upgrades. When that plan fell though, the special weapon models got repurposed into Lts.

Actually I think we had it confirmed in one of the interviews that they were basically demo-models that new designers make to show that they can sculpt GW style and with their scales, aesthetics and so forth.

So they just wound up having a load of models ready-designed from that process and put them into production

Tygre wrote:
Because sculpting a Space Marine Lt is a good way to test new GW sculptors. It used to be Captains before there were Lieutenants.

They used to do a lot of veteran sergeant miniatures as well, which occasionally filled the same role as a lieutenant. Also loads of chaplain sculpts over the years, which were the direct 2nd in command for a company.

 alextroy wrote:
If this article is to be believed, there are 16 Space Marine Lieutenant models (15 plus the not included Black Templars Castellan). Of those 16 there are:

5 Generic Tacticus Armour

5 Chapter-specific (Black Templar, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, & Titus the Ultramarine)

3 Phobos Armour

3 Limited Edition

It looks a little less insane when outlined this way. Imagine if they were all Space Marine Captains

So SMs "only" have 16 Lieutenants.

You realise that DE have just 32 units in their entire codex?

 vipoid wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
If this article is to be believed, there are 16 Space Marine Lieutenant models (15 plus the not included Black Templars Castellan). Of those 16 there are:

5 Generic Tacticus Armour

5 Chapter-specific (Black Templar, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, & Titus the Ultramarine)

3 Phobos Armour

3 Limited Edition

It looks a little less insane when outlined this way. Imagine if they were all Space Marine Captains

So SMs "only" have 16 Lieutenants.

You realise that DE have just 32 units in their entire codex?

At least your army isn't the same four models with with different arms.

The joy of Knights.

Daughters of Khaine have 10 kits.

3 are duel build and the cauldron can build a few things; but still only 10 kits

Fyreslayers technically have 1 more but most of them are leaders (they have 2 troop kits and that's it).


So yeah Space Marines literally have more command models in just the lieutenant line than several Age of Sigmar armies.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:
Last one I can think of is the Lieutenant with Combi-weapon from Leviathan - which means we've actually gone a whole year without a new Lieutenant.

The Marine leader in the new Kill Team boxes set is effectively a new Lieutenant model I think, although arguably its just a monopose version of the currently available one.

 alextroy wrote:
If this article is to be believed, there are 16 Space Marine Lieutenant models (15 plus the not included Black Templars Castellan). Of those 16 there are:

5 Generic Tacticus Armour

5 Chapter-specific (Black Templar, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, & Titus the Ultramarine)

3 Phobos Armour

3 Limited Edition

It looks a little less insane when outlined this way. Imagine if they were all Space Marine Captains

What is annoying about this, that most of these are just basically the same thing. We actually need more lieutenants, as there are a lot of roles that are not covered. There needs to be a gravis lieutenant, biker lieutenant, jump pack lieutenant and a terminator lieutenant. But instead they keep redoing the tacticus lieutenants that we already have way too many of.

The Gravis Lt is the Apothecary.

 LunarSol wrote:
The Gravis Lt is the Apothecary.

Functionally, yes.

But for us lore monkeys who want to do things like organize companies and have appropriate command staff for themed collections it’s not the same.

 Overread wrote:
Actually I think we had it confirmed in one of the interviews that they were basically demo-models that new designers make to show that they can sculpt GW style and with their scales, aesthetics and so forth.

So they just wound up having a load of models ready-designed from that process and put them into production

I have my doubts about that. It's orders of magnitude more expensive to put a plastic model into production (tooling, etc) than to design one. GW is not putting lieutenant miniatures into production just because they have some good sculpts ready to go. I'm sure GW has scads of great sculpts in the hopper, many of which will never see the light of day.

I personally think the explanation for the multiplicity of Lt Models is likely as simple as Space Marine characters sell well to collectors of space marine models and space marine collectors are likely the largest portion of GW collectors. So, there's really no reason not to keep making them as long as they continue to sell.

I think the answer is really simple, they sell. That's it they know people buy them so there's next to no risk at all for GW in this.

...And the poster boy army will always be the target of giveaways and promos.

The following will never be said inside a Warhammer store:

"Look, Mommy, the nice store clerk gave me a free Bloodthirster Daemon!"

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
...And the poster boy army will always be the target of giveaways and promos.

The following will never be said inside a Warhammer store:

"Look, Mommy, the nice store clerk gave me a free Bloodthirster Daemon!"

Hi I'd like to know which store is your local cause... if they are giving away free Marine Models of equivalent price to the Bloodthirster I'm down for that!



Though somewhat ironically GW has done a LOT of free models which aren't Marines. Their "model of the month" is pretty diverse.