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Ok so it has been itching in the back of my mind for a while, i have heard so many variants of the strength of space marines, IE the whole to take a town send a marine, to take a city send a squad to take a planet send a company to wipe out a belief send a chapter.

Storys of 1 space marine taking on 100s of orks by him self and what not, But really how strong is a squad of space marines?

could they really take a whole city? I mean if they are lucky enough any thing can happen.

It really all depends on interpretations. Superhuman scions of demi-gods or modified soldiers. Take your pick.

If you read know no fear, it actually explains this quite well

There are two (three) different versions of Space Marines.


There is the game fluff version, where power armor is nigh invincible to small arms, is faster, stronger, and smarter than the average human being, and fights smart using strategies that exploit their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Those Space Marines can do most of the things you suggest above.

There are the game rules Space Marines, where Games Workshop needs to sell you dozens of them in order to be profitable, and is also making a competitive game where two evenly balanced armies fight a conventional stand up fight. Those Space Marines are dumbed down and their power dialed back for the purposes of A: making a profitable game, and B: Making a fair and interesting game. Those Marines can't do what you are asking about, lol. Remember, if Marines did what they were supposed to do on the tabletop, you'd only need like 15 of them, and your opponents would need to buy hundreds of models.

And then there are the Black Library fluff Space Marines who are exactly as strong or vulnerable as the story needs them to be at any given time.

A marine is the pinnicle of genetic engineering. His body is extremely resiliant. Their bones are made of extremely strong ceramic compounds, their blood clots almost immediatly, their body doesn't suffer from hydrostatic shock, they have a third lung(which also allows them to breath underwater), they have enhanced vision, hearing, and muscle mass. Plus more efficient red blood cells.

All that is combined with a brutal training course that has upwards of 80% failure(and failure almost always means death)

Plus a marine lives for far longer than a normal human. 6-700 years in fact. All of it spent in constant battle and training for battle.

Then the Marine wears incredibly durable Power Armor and wields highly advanced weapons.


So unless normal humans have specific weapons that can cut through even these mighty enhancements they IRL wouldn't stand a chance. If a marine were pitted against 1000 humans armed with modern firearms and the battle took place in a ruined city the Marine would utterly destroy the humans. They would need RPGs to even have a hope of cracking his armor. Not even grenades would be the best weapon to use.

OP: As you have mentioned, you have heard many different things about the strength of the Space Marines. There is no one version "truer" than the others; it all depends on which sources in particular you want to go by. The actual combat capabilities of the Astartes are shrouded behind a veil of glorified legends and tales of epic yet exceptional heroics. Adding to this confusion, this franchise does not enforce a truly uniform canon but rather grants considerable leeway to the various authors writing the licensed products, leading to numerous different interpretations of the Astartes, along with other assets of the setting. This in turn has led many fans to develop different ideas about the Space Marines as well, often drawing conclusions from all sorts of combinations of the various products. Everyone pretty much agrees that Space Marines are the best, it's just that there is a considerable controversy about how much better they are.

That is why you hear so many different things. And you will have to decide for yourself how you want the Space Marines to be in your perception of the setting.
My advise: Study all the material directly (rather than relying solely on fan hearsay or wiki editors), and then make your decision either based on a specific style of Astartes, or on how much you value one author or type of source over another.

Personally, I'm going with what Primarch Rogal Dorn has said: "Give me a hundred Space Marines. Or, failing that, give me a thousand other troops."

Veteran Sergeant wrote:There is the game fluff version, where power armor is nigh invincible to small arms, [...]

"Against most small arms the armour reduces the chance of injury by between 50-85%, and it provides some form of protection against all except the most powerful weapons encountered on the battlefields of the 41st millennium."
- game fluff

I would assume the ~85% range = lasguns. Which, coincidentally, fits quite well to the abstracted TT rules.

Also, how smart a Space Marine fights would seem to depend a lot on the Chapter, the doctrines taught by its officers and the stability of its geneseed. Much like how there are many different degrees of tactical acumen between the various regiments of the Imperial Guard as well.
As an example, there are a number of Chapters who seem to suffer from some sort of blood lust, so much so that they go into a mindless rage that would surely affect their cognitive abilities. We even have in-setting reports of Space Marines eating allied militia. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Chapters like the Ultramarines, who seem to value proper situational analysis and combat tactics a lot and have a reputation for producing great leaders.

Grey Templar wrote:Plus a marine lives for far longer than a normal human. 6-700 years in fact.

Small sidenote: the standard is 2-3 times as long as an average human being, at least according to the 6E rulebook.
40k fluff not having a high degree of consistency means that different sources will give different impressions, so I'm sure that "6-700 years" is also said somewhere.
Same about the multi-lung; I think I know where this bit about "breathing water" is from, but the original Index Astartes article on Space Marine organs did not confer such an ability as it talked about the capabilities of this particular implant.

In the end, it is all a matter of interpretation - coupled with our own personal preferences, including whether we lean more towards "gritty realism" or "shiny heroics".

A)depends on the squad. In urban fighting assault marines with jump pax will own the place, especially with a flamer.
B)in stories sm are real strength,in game they have 2 be scaled down

I did a little poll awhile back and most people pegged them between about 10 and 100 guardsmen. http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/391700.page

Space Marines in the fluff are bonafide rape trains.

&theyshallknownofear wrote:b)in stories sm are real strength,in game they have 2 be scaled down

I would say that, aside from stories depicting them with a great variety of "power levels" rather than following some uniform pattern, Space Marines are actually scaled up there, simply because people like to read about epic heroes kicking butt more than their favourite character being felled by a stray shrapnel or other such inglorious fates.
This applies to all protagonists in stories, not just Space Marines. I would say they are even more prone to a certain level of exaggeration, though, for "being the best" is a fairly big pillar of their identity as an army, and it is evident how most(?) fans would like them to be. The ongoing Astartes body height inflation (7 feet ... 8 feet ... 9 feet ... 11 feet) I see every so often is a small but notable side-effect of this tendency.

Note that I'm not at all saying that you are not supposed to think of your Space Marines as being that good ... just that you should not base such perception on a bunch of bolterporn novels as if they would offer "proof".
It is a matter of taste and preferences much more than some hypothetical evidence, for as Andy Hoare once commented, "there is no such objective truth".

It depends.
By Lynata, Grey Templar and Veteran Sergeant posts you can see how many things varying in the fluff when it comes to Astartes. I will post now what is 100% true about Astartes when the question of their strenght is asked:

- Nobody knows how many years can Astartes live because they all die sooner or later. Dante and several other Astartes ( Asmodai, Ludoldus ) showed us that that Astartes can live up 1.000 or even 2.500 years. GW never gave us answer for this, and it probably never will. But it's not far stretched either to assume that they are immortal, giving how their bodies were made to last and to be resilient to everything.

- Their armor ( especially Terminator armor ) is quite resilient and one of the best armor pieces in the galaxy. How strong it is depends on the fluff and who is writing it. Like Lynata said the armor is not that much good and it can be penetrated by concentrated fire, the most common knowledge is that joints are the weakest part and they can be penetrated in 1'st shot, then we have examples fro mUltramarines the Movie ( power armor get's cut by single hit from Chain Axe ) and Dawn of War II Retribution intro ( Terminator goes down from single plasma hit ).
On the other hand we have examples from fluff where their armor is resilient as hell. From being able to take direct hits from enemy MBT's and survive ( Dawn of War II ) to being able to take direct hit from Orbital Bombardment and survive even if everything around it got melted or blown away to oblivion ( Grey Knights 5'th edition codex ).
For armor I can say nothing for sure because it varies from source to source. But I can say for sure that it is resilient enough to survive the most severe punishments. And it probably require heavy weapons to be brought down.

-As for actual fighting strenght of Space Marine...that also vary as hell. But I can say this for sure, as Rogal Dorn said: one Space Marine is worth like 100 Guardsmen. And as we have seen in the fluff, one marine is worth even more if he is on a team. It's worth to the point where several teams of Astartes can destroy entire cities all by themselves.

-As for numerical superiority... that is probably the hardest thing to agree on usefulness. While GW fluff said that "you can take a chapter and destroy a civilization" there are many examples on how they can suffer massive casualties themselves ( Crimson Fists, Scytes of the Emperor, Ultramarines ), and needing more than 1.000 Marines to finish the job ( Macharian Heresy, Night of 1.000 rebellions ). Even with all of this said one Astartes chapter is very powerful, to the point that it can be more efficient and deal much grater damage than even the entire Imperial Guard army groups.

Conclusion: this fluff piece from GW should be enough to see how useful they actually are:

"Without the protection of the Imperium the Mankind would fall prey to countless threats that assail it. Without the protection of Space Marines the Imperial Guard would fail to defend Imperium form all enemies that are attacking it."

In short - Space Marines are the main reason why Imeprium is still standing, they are winning the battles that decided the war and they are getting in battle when most needed and against all odds they win it,. And giving the fact that they are called "Emperor Angels of Death" and raise moral sky-high whenever they appear they are pretty damn important part of Imperial war machine, if not the most important.

As others have said the power of a SM is all over the place. It is really up to you as a player/reader/GM to decide how powerful they really are.

Umm ... a small addition to the above, for I do not agree about some of those supposedly "100% true" points.

- Dante is said to be the oldest living Space Marine, and he clocks out at about 1.100 years. As mentioned in the 6E rulebook, a Space Marine, "provided he does not fall to battle, can easily live two to three times longer than a normal man, and sometimes far longer". The exceptions aside, even an average lifespan already implies that they obviously cannot be "immortal".

- I have provided Codex fluff about Astartes power armour sporting a protective rating of 50-85% against small arms. That's a fairly high chance to get injured for something that supposedly "survives the most severe punishments". It actually kinda reads as if you contradicted yourself in that paragraph, going from "not that much good" to "requiring heavy weapons to be brought down"..
Note also how the GK Codex actually says nothing about "direct hits from orbital bombardment", but just that the GKs on Sondheim V were within an area full of ruins that got bombarded. Considering the size of buildings in 40k, that means a lot of potential cover, though certainly amplified by power armour (more against the walls coming down around them rather than the actual ordinance, I imagine).

- The idea of a single Space Marine Chapter "dealing much greater damage than even entire Imperial Guard army groups" reeks of overhype. The Space Marines are surgical shock troops who rely on rapid (re)deployment and shock-and-awe tactics to overcome their foes, not with bringing more firepower than the friggin' Guard.
Which is why, coincidentally, one of the IG codices also notes that the Imperial Guard is called in when "a conflict is simply too large, the enemy too powerful or too well entrenched for local forces, ships or Space Marines to defeat".

The Space Marines certainly are more efficient, however. That's the entire point. The Guard is called in when this efficiency isn't enough - when you need to choke the enemy with numbers and ordinance. Both the Guard and the Space Marines are necessary and vital components of the Imperial war machine. Not just because Space Marines cannot deploy everywhere, but also because their style of warfare is often not up to the job.

Case in point: the ongoing conflict in Armageddon, now a war of attrition, where "many Space Marine Chapters withdrew, their lightning attack style of warfare of less relevance to this new stage of the war" (WD #281). On the other hand, "a 10.000 lightyear recruitment zone has been established around Armageddon, and every Imperial world in this area had their tithe of Imperial Guard regiments tripled" (WD #251).
This gets especially obvious when you compare the Force Disposition Chart from 721999.M41 with this one from after the Season of Fire, and note how the number of Guard regiments has increased dramatically, but the presence of Adeptus Astartes has notably decreased. And this is shortly before the Relictors, at that time the largest Chapter on the chart, departed, picking a fight with the Imperial Navy along the way.

At the end of the day, the Imperial Guard is way more important to the continueing existence of the Imperium than the Space Marines are. Starting with the very fact that the Space Marines are much too few to get even close to doing the Guard's job.

The Adeptus Astartes are, as someone else very accurately put it, a "force multiplier". Extremely useful to influence an ongoing campaign with surgical strikes or rapid area denial deployments. But if you want to wage a full-scale war, ... well, there's another army better suited for the task.


Note that I'm not putting this down as some sort of absolute gospel you'd have to adopt. Actually, I know that some non-GW material directly contradicts the stuff I said above. However, I'm merely doing this to give a perfect example of what I meant earlier, and to show that, as Marc Gascoigne once put it, "everything and nothing is true". There is no such thing as a 100% truth on this level of detail.

On Age, Humans in 40k can live 2 or 300 years with medical treatment. sometimes longer with the correct tech.

Yeah, I'm assuming "normal man" means the average guy from the street, not some juiced-up Inquisitor or whatever who regularly gets rejuvenat treatments.

Actually makes me wonder whether or not the average lifespan for the normal Imperial citizen may not be lower than it is in today's Western world, considering what a gakky place to live in the Imperium is on many worlds...
Though I have a feeling the authors were thinking of what we consider "normal lifespan" today, else they would have probably hinted at the difference. The rulebook's descriptions are an outsider's look at the setting, after all.

Yeah I would say Life span is all in what class of people you are. Noble men have long lifespans while scum prob be lucky to see 40. I was just bringing it up as SM living 3 or 400 years is neat and all ( most I say never make it due to ya know getting stabs, shot eaten) But its not something limited to Sm either.

It depends on the city, honestly.

Space Marines tend to be depicted in most if not all fluff as nigh-invulnerable juggernauts that can turn the tide of wars all on their own, but that fluff tends to be written in the form of what is effectively in-universe propaganda. All Codexes are written to plug their own army as the greatest and most terrible fighting force in the galaxy, which suggests to me that the true measure must be found somewhere between the tabletop rules and fluff written from someone else's perspective.

A Space Marine is very tough and nigh-invulnerable to small-arms fire; this much is commonly held to be true. A Space Marine is sufficiently well-trained and well-armed to make short work of run-of-the-mill heretics, this much is commonly held to be true. What this means in the context of war is something else entirely, given that they're seldom facing run-of-the-mill heretics or gangsters; if said Space Marines are going up against an indefensible city defended by rogue PDF troops with limited to no support, they'll probably squash it, but if they're facing a hardened position held by well-trained and well-armed renegade Guardsmen, they'll have a tougher time of it.

There's no absolute 'how powerful are these people, really?', given that it depends on the situation, the enemy, the battlefield, and a whole host of other things. Try watching the intro video for Dawn of War 2, it gives an interesting impression of a variety of Space Marines and Eldar playing rock-paper-scissors with different tactical scenarios; as armies, they may be about equal on some level, but individually it depends on the situation and the matchups to see who will come out on top.

@AnomanderRake I think youre evaluation is pretty accurate overall. I also agree with lynata the space marines are indeed a force multiplier and most wars could be won by IG all on their lonesome. However, they are still important in that with the amount of conflict the IOM gets itself into force multiplyers become increasingly essential.

Space marines... Lets see; An army of Captain Americas with the best armor and guns SHIELD can find them... Sounds about right.

 HerbaciousT wrote:
Space Marines in the fluff are bonafide rape trains.

hahahahahaha This

It depends on the squad. they are obviously beyond the level of how god mode the spartan 2s were made in the Halo books. But training and luck are everything. Life is all rolls of the dice gods. Even looking at the Alamo where 100 normal guys took out over 600 of the enemy from a defendable position. Its pretty amazing. Those were real people too, not the fictional mandollies we play with. Being in the military theres people who have been shot several times and still manage to save other marines. Humans are amazing with training and willpower. Now multiply that a billion fold and you have space marines ((ten billion fold and you have space wolves))

I think the horus heresy novels are the best example of a space marines power. Although if anyones read fulgrim about 10 marines and fulgrim kill hundreds of eldar including a wraithlord and an avatar suffering no casualties. I think that part was a fail. Lol.

 Lynata wrote:

Note that I'm not putting this down as some sort of absolute gospel you'd have to adopt. Actually, I know that some non-GW material directly contradicts the stuff I said above. However, I'm merely doing this to give a perfect example of what I meant earlier, and to show that, as Marc Gascoigne once put it, "everything and nothing is true". There is no such thing as a 100% truth on this level of detail.

Of course not... you have just showed how different things may be from the points I listed.
The fluff simply too much vary to show us how really powerful they are.

In one point they are gods of war and in the other they are dying from several Lasgun shots.

 Stonerhino wrote:
Space marines... Lets see; An army of Captain Americas with the best armor and guns SHIELD can find them... Sounds about right.

I'd liken them more to an army of Wolverines, with not quite as good healing abilities and no claws.

Some even have claws.

I'll see you some claws and raise you the hair.

Yeah, but the Black Dragons' claws aren't just items they equip. Those sucker grow out of their zygote-divergent bodies.

What counts as small arms fire? I would assume lasguns to start with, but what about shrunken cannons, pulse rifles, or rail rifles?

Shuriken weapons would likely be even less effective against power armor than las weapons.

It's difficult to categorize "small arms" in 40K because of the lack of common traits with modern firearms, but essentially anything that was single-man portable in terms of both weapon and ammunition, and any crew served weapon that fired a common shell with those weapons (heavy bolters, stubbers, etc), but not including crew served anti-vehicular weapons like las cannons or missile launchers.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
Shuriken weapons would likely be even less effective against power armor than las weapons.

It's difficult to categorize "small arms" in 40K because of the lack of common traits with modern firearms, but essentially anything that was single-man portable in terms of both weapon and ammunition, and any crew served weapon that fired a common shell with those weapons (heavy bolters, stubbers, etc), but not including crew served anti-vehicular weapons like las cannons or missile launchers.

Shuriken weapons have about the same ability to penetrate armour as boltguns. Boltguns are often shown to be somewhat effective ( especialy when used by loyalists against chaosmarines *cough*) against powerarmour.

I have seen some people argue that power armor is immune to bolt gun fire.