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I dunno about all that gak, a single Marine taking out a Tau army without a railgun killing him is insane IMO.

We don't know the details, maybe he killed half of them in close combat with Chainsword. And maybe Tau only had those Fire Warriors and few broadsides with no Railguns around. And maybe that was not an army but a strike force, medium-core strike force.

And I combined with Zeist because out there one marine was outnumbered by thousands of Tau and they still won against them,

I agree on ammunition, marine can carry how much again? 80 - 100 bolt shells?( 20 per clip if I remember correctly, and they would have few clips with them )

While I only flicked through 'Kill Team' , I do remember one scene in which a Deathwatch Marine takes out a Crisis suit (possibly more, I'm not sure), but it seemed pretty clear that without the Imperial Guard support he would've been taken down. He (in this scene, at least) attacked with the element of surprise (although his armour could withstand some burst cannon fire, so take that as you will (I think it was artificer armour)) while in a city, so there was nothing like an army they were directly fighting (again, in this particular scene).

Orkz is tougher, they dont need no stinking doo dads, bolt gunz, or electrik armors. They fight in leather vests with a slugga and choppa.

 Brother Captain Alexander wrote:
This is not that much OTT

It is the very fething definition of over the top.

Yeah the Guants ghosts last book goes OTT with Sm's as well, it has three more or less killing hundreds. Really the way i see it a single Sm alone might be worth 10 or 15 men, less if they are well trained and well geared. They will never go and take out whole cities with anything apporching effective defense.

Despite the fact that they pretty regularly do that in the fluff?

Hell, with how devastating Imperial Guard ordnance is, they likely would find that directly assaulting an Imperial Guard position to be almost suicide with their numbers, and they'd be FORCED to try a different route (IE ambush, drop pod assault, etc), because they'd be massacred otherwise.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Despite the fact that they pretty regularly do that in the fluff?

No, a single Marine does not regularly doe that in the lore. Stop making gak up.

Well it is a good thing that they typically do enter the battlefield past enemy lines to cut the heart out of the enemy, lol.

Yeah in lore they attack cities or small defensive position in groups of 20 or 100 or something. They do not send in groups of 1-3 on what would be insta death.

 Melissia wrote:
No, a single Marine does not regularly doe that in the lore. Stop making gak up.

I actually misread his post when I said that, most Marines are incapable of that alone, sure.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Well it is a good thing that they typically do enter the battlefield past enemy lines to cut the heart out of the enemy, lol.

It depends on the writer whether or not they do this. Many times, they make incompetent tactical decisions because the writer thought it sounded cool and just piled on the plot armor.

In a straight up fight, a competently led regiment of Imperial Guard will turn a few squads of Marines in to corpses (or bloody gore, depending on the regiment) quite quickly. The Marines' only hope to win is to make sure it never becomes a straight-up fight, and when written correctly, this is invariably the case. It doesn't matter if you're a marine or a guardsman if you're hit in the face with a krak grenade/missile, or a lascannon, or a meltagun, or anything else of that nature-- and killing a marine lowers the strength of an Astartes force far more than killing a dozen Guardsmen does for a regiment of Guard, making the enemy force that much easier to face off.

But a competently led (read: written) Marine force knows that, and tries to avoid it.

Brother Captain Alexander wrote:And I combined with Zeist because out there one marine was outnumbered by thousands of Tau and they still won against them

In the campaign, but not in the battle/s. The Codex specifically points out how the Marines used their mobility and shock strike capabilities to stike at lightly defended targets, gradually reducing the Tau force world by world and weakening critical positions elsewhere as the enemy commander had to reposition his forces. If they would have had a base of their own to defend, the campaign may well have ended differently.

Compare this to Armageddon, where, after the First Season of Fire, lots of Marine Chapters simply departed because the current stage of the war - basically lots of trench fighting - didn't suit them, the corresponding WD article specifically mentioning the Marines' inability to bring their mobility advantage to bear.

Brother Captain Alexander wrote:I agree on ammunition, marine can carry how much again? 80 - 100 bolt shells?( 20 per clip if I remember correctly, and they would have few clips with them )

20-30 rounds (at least as per the 3E rulebook), though I'm leaning towards assuming 30- for Marines and 20+ for normal people, as both the gun and the magazine will likely be a bit smaller, also missing out one or two of the optional gadgets and/or the reinforced housing.
The question is how many magazines would they carry ...

But it's safe to say that it wouldn't be that much. Both Marines and bolters are meant for quick and dirty up-close-in-your-face combat, overpowering the enemy in one quick stroke and then departing rather than getting bogged down in a prolonged fight where you run dry of ammo.

Hunterindarkness wrote:Yeah in lore they attack cities or small defensive position in groups of 20 or 100 or something.

And said 20-100 will usually go straight for the enemy leader in the hopes of disabling the opposing force from the head down, rather than slowly waltzing through the streets taking on thousands of defenders, like the Guard would do it. That's the best thing about the Space Marines, even more important than their augmentation and armour - they can simply circumvent an inconvenient obstacle.

But I suppose it also depends on the nature of the defenders - both how much the loss of leadership would affect them, as well as what their defensive capabilities (experience? equipment?) are. Plus, what Melissia said about the writers.

 Melissia wrote:

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Well it is a good thing that they typically do enter the battlefield past enemy lines to cut the heart out of the enemy, lol.

It depends on the writer whether or not they do this. Many times, they make incompetent tactical decisions because the writer thought it sounded cool and just piled on the plot armor.

In a straight up fight, a competently led regiment of Imperial Guard will turn a few squads of Marines in to corpses (or bloody gore, depending on the regiment) quite quickly. The Marines' only hope to win is to make sure it never becomes a straight-up fight, and when written correctly, this is invariably the case. It doesn't matter if you're a marine or a guardsman if you're hit in the face with a krak grenade/missile, or a lascannon, or a meltagun, or anything else of that nature-- and killing a marine lowers the strength of an Astartes force far more than killing a dozen Guardsmen does for a regiment of Guard, making the enemy force that much easier to face off.

But a competently led (read: written) Marine force knows that, and tries to avoid it.

Your stance appears pretty reliant on the notion that Marines would just footslog their way into battle, IMHO.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Your stance appears pretty reliant on the notion that Marines would just footslog their way into battle, IMHO.

Which might be a valid objection if Black Library's writers were as competent as you in commanding Space Marines.

With a few rare exceptions, BL writers are not very good at military anything.

 Melissia wrote:

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Your stance appears pretty reliant on the notion that Marines would just footslog their way into battle, IMHO.

Which might be a valid objection if Black Library's writers were as competent as you in commanding Space Marines.

With a few rare exceptions, BL writers are not very good at military anything.

This is true, most BL I have read the Sm battle plan is " Walk in a straight line into oncoming fire while being gods and then kill everything that moves as Gods need no tactics"

Well I guess it is a good thing I didn't bring up Black Library then.

I think it's at least partially the desire to show some over-the-top action where a couple dudes manage to pull off the impossible, like in every second Hollywood movie. A "proper" Marine assault might be regarded as boring in that it would be (a) over too fast and (b) not feel as if the heroes were actually challenged by those impossible odds the reader wants them to overcome.

It only becomes old if this is 90% of the novels we get to read, and dangerous if people begin to take that sort of stuff serious.

I dunno, I like the anticlimactic moments, but then again I found 8-bit Theater to be hilarious, so maybe there's something wrong with me.

In all honesty, this boils down to whomever is doing the writing more than anything else, and from what perspective. We have stories of Space Marines that are just big Guardsmen for all intents and purposes, and stories where the Space Marines are Demigods, nigh mythical divine entities of terrible power. That said, there's some baseline, and a lot of the stuff you read about Space Marine power level, like a single marine being able to slaughter a thousand modern troops in a city, is based on daydreams and fanwank and little else, even by GW's standards.

Now, if you start using general comparisons available in most codex fluff, it usually equates one Space Marine being equal to 10 to 12 guardsmen in a straight up fight. We have Rogal Dorn's quote about how many other troops he'd need without any Space Marines and the current C:SM to give us those numbers. That means, on average, a Space Marine chapter, massed for battle, is probably not much more than the equal of an Imperial Guard regiment or two, which isn't very impressive. SM's aren't invulnerable to small arms, they're just highly resistant to them, and they're certainly vulnerable to commonly issued infantry heavy/special weapons.



From any realistic standpoint, the Adeptus Astartes, in their entirety, has the military value of about 8 hours of galactic Imperial Guard recruiting given the codex available comparisons and numbers given for Space Marines and the Imperial Guard. The Space Marines could literally disappear and the Imperial Guard would absorb the loss of the military capability, force multilpliers, and reaction speed in a few weeks at worst.

There are *billions* of IG regiments. That means for each Space Marine Chapter, there are literally *thousands* of IG regiments, composed of anywhere from 5-100 thousand troops and dozens if not hundreds of armored fighting vehicles, and an accompanying Imperial Navy component of similar size. So for each Space Marine, you're really looking at several tens of millions of guardsmen and navy personnel for each Space Marine.

The Space Marines work because GW says they do. They always show up, somehow always know the enemy's entire order of battle, where all their command centers are located, and how best to engage them, without any sort of intelligence apparatus and are able to get that information before they even engage, and are always able to achieve insertion without any major hiccup, never run into any heavy ordnance that could swat them all despite it commonly being employed en-masse, and always manage to heroically vanquish the enemy, all without any nod or mention of logistics in any way, shape or form. Not to mention lacking any ability to hold extensive areas of ground, very small numbers of air and air defense assets, practically nonexistent artillery (the biggest killer in every conflict in recent human memory), or that casualties taken take decades to replace, etc. Outside of a Fantasy setting with lots of handwaving, they just don't work. But this is a Fantasy setting with lots of handwaving.




TL;DR 40k is Space Fantasy, not SciFi, and Space Marine power level is more depending on author and story viewpoint than anything else. Realistically, a Space Marine is probably equal to about a dozen normal soldiers, and an SM chapter equal to 1-2 Imperial Guard Regiments with accompanying Imperial Navy support, which is to say, negligible really.


EDIT: As a random note while typing this post, I just realized I think I actually own enough SM Terminators sitting on my hobby desk between Space Hulk, Dark Vengeance, and a few of the plastic terminators they gave out with White Dwarf a few years back, to field a legal decently sized Deathwing army...

The numbers that you're mentioning are irrelevant. The Space Marines work because they offer something that the Guard does not have and will never have: mobility. Outnumbering the Astartes a trillion to one is irrelevant when it takes the Guard over a year to even mobilize a task force to handle a threat (the Taros Campaign article notes that the ETA for how long it would take the Munitorum to assemble the required manpower and equipment necessary to take Taros was three years. The Lord General managed to do it in one, and that was, apparently, a massive surprise to everyone). Space Marines by comparison can mobilize and be taking the fight to the enemy in a matter of months. Having trillions more regiments than chapters means little when 95% of all the Guard regiments in the Galaxy are incapable of fighting daemons because they're regular human beings whose minds shatter when they look at a Nurgling, etc.

Anyone with a brain can see that Space Marines are utterly incapable of matching the Guard when it comes to conventional warfare, but then conventional warfare is not, and has never been, their role in the fighting. So pointing out that they can't do what the Guard do is pointless.

That aside, complaining about how how "unrealistic" their victories are is also pointless. The entire Imperium, from the Guard to the Astartes, fight as if warfare never evolved past World War 2. None of what they do "works" if you hold it under a realism microscope.

If that's your measuring stick, then the Eldar are really the only faction in the mythos who come close to fighting "realistically".

 Lynata wrote:
In the campaign, but not in the battle/s. The Codex specifically points out how the Marines used their mobility and shock strike capabilities to stike at lightly defended targets, gradually reducing the Tau force world by world and weakening critical positions elsewhere as the enemy commander had to reposition his forces. If they would have had a base of their own to defend, the campaign may well have ended differently.

Compare this to Armageddon, where, after the First Season of Fire, lots of Marine Chapters simply departed because the current stage of the war - basically lots of trench fighting - didn't suit them, the corresponding WD article specifically mentioning the Marines' inability to bring their mobility advantage to bear.

QFT, there is indeed a difference between Blitzkrieg and trench warfare. Every Marine can do a ton of damage when they are using their favorite tactics of fast lightning strikes and bleed out enemy very quickly. On Armageddon they pretty much had to hold the line against the Orks, and while I have no doubt that they killed thousands of Greenskins per Marine they suffered losses too because Orks are Orks.

But they still have their moments, like in the end of Taros campaign where a single company held and actually pushed back entire Tau army ( all with Manta ) that was more than enough to hold down tens of thousands of Guardsmen ( Guard numbered around 20 - 30.000 Guardsmen on Taros + 4 Titans, so around 100 Astartes did a job for all of them in the end ).

One theory I have is that SM can pick and choose their battles, so they only pick the ones they can win.

That and plot armor. Lots and lots of plot armor.

You know it's not just SM. Other fractions get their own plot armor when they are the MC.

No one like the Sm however, they have plot armor 50 meters thick and made of handwavium

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
No one like the Sm however, they have plot armor 50 meters thick and made of handwavium

As counter point I give you fire warrior. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Fire_Warrior#.UPbT62crOyI

nomotog wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
No one like the Sm however, they have plot armor 50 meters thick and made of handwavium

As counter point I give you fire warrior. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Fire_Warrior#.UPbT62crOyI

Space Marines have way more plot armor than that, especially collectively.

Although to be fair, I think that game's plot was just a dying nightmare of a fire warrior, myself.

 Melissia wrote:

nomotog wrote:

 Hunterindarkness wrote:
No one like the Sm however, they have plot armor 50 meters thick and made of handwavium

As counter point I give you fire warrior. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Fire_Warrior#.UPbT62crOyI

Space Marines have way more plot armor than that, especially collectively.

Although to be fair, I think that game's plot was just a dying nightmare of a fire warrior, myself.

Maybe collectively, but that's because they do so many books about the IoM and so few about everyone else.

More like, there's tons of books about Space Marines. The number of books about the Imperium of Man (IE, the actual society beyond its military) at best only marginally outnumbers the number of xenos based books.