Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Doesn't matter. Bugs could have easily destroyed those forts from orbit. There aren't enough marines in the entire imperium to stop that many Nids. It was ridiculous and BA should all be dead and deleted as a faction.

Maybe the Chapter fortress has sufficient shielding. Tyranids are not known for their orbital bombardments. And only so many at once can attack at once. At the Battle of Rorkes Drift a company of British soldiers managed to fight off 4000ish Zulu warriors. At Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters. Its just their relief came from Khorne is the contentious part. Fortifications and higher skill levels were all multipliers in the Blood Angels favour. And it was barely enough.

If any Tyranid main attack on a Space Marine homeworld is enough to eliminate them then we wouldn't have any Ultramarines.

Martel I don't know why you want to eliminate the Blood Angels as a playable faction so badly. A faction you apparently play too.

With the topic of realism; certain aspects are not modelled well. For example suppressing fire is absent.

 amanita wrote:
In a wargame, for me it's a matter of striking an acceptable balance between realism and playable abstraction. This varies greatly from one's tastes to another. To argue that realism isn't critical to a wargame isn't any more accurate than saying that it's required.

For my playing group and me, the current edition is unacceptably abstract to the point that some of the abstractions aren't even attempting to mimic any real tactical effect. It's more of a glorified board game, which can be very engrossing and even challenging but it doesn't have the same appeal for me. If I'm going to paint soldiers and their equipment in a discernible manner and put them on a table depicting possible terrain, no matter how fantastical it may seem, then I want to have rules that reflect proper interaction between all those elements depicted. As others stated, the immersion comes from a common sense approach to how things might interact in a plausible and consistent way. This is not abrogated by the fact that the game has hooligan fungus soccer thugs fighting magical space elves and genetic super soldiers! This is merely the facade of the setting, not a justification for poorly written or incomplete rules.

There is nothing at all wrong with enjoying this edition for what it is, but I'd caution anyone saying that GW's financial success validates the game as a decent wargame. To me it is not, hence we've developed our own ruleset. Not everyone can (nor should) put in that kind of extra work, but for me it justifies all the other effort poured into it.

Neither position is incorrect; it may simply boil down to what you individually want out of this game.

I think that the popularity of a wargame is an indicator of how well the designers have struck the balance between detail/playability. There are other factors, to be sure, but its hard to argue with success! I am sure that there are plenty of "perfect" wargames that don't get played. Having said that I agree with the theme of your post. It's cool that you have a cohesive group that has worked out its own rules to bring the 40K universe to life for you! Some of my historical wargaming friends are tinkerers with games systems (FOW/TY for instance). The results don't always pan out, but the ride is fun! As a D&D DM I make stuff up on the fly to suite the mood/moment.

What 40K provides, though, is a lingua franca to allow gamers from different communities to have a game.

Tygre wrote:
Maybe the Chapter fortress has sufficient shielding. Tyranids are not known for their orbital bombardments. And only so many at once can attack at once. At the Battle of Rorkes Drift a company of British soldiers managed to fight off 4000ish Zulu warriors. At Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters. Its just their relief came from Khorne is the contentious part. Fortifications and higher skill levels were all multipliers in the Blood Angels favour. And it was barely enough.

If any Tyranid main attack on a Space Marine homeworld is enough to eliminate them then we wouldn't have any Ultramarines.

Martel I don't know why you want to eliminate the Blood Angels as a playable faction so badly. A faction you apparently play too.

With the topic of realism; certain aspects are not modelled well. For example suppressing fire is absent.

it's a sunk cost fallacy, Martel dearly wants to start another faction but can't justify it unless the blood angels die.

not sure why he doesn't just sell his current collection to support buying into another table top game or something.

Tygre wrote:
MAt Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters.

Except you're talking of a 27 to 1 ratio for Rorke Drift and a 12 to 1 for Thermopylae. All the BA with all their buddies were still likely outnumbered thousands to one.

Millions to one. Its an incomprehensible situation made light of because bolter porn.

The game needs less power armor. Get rid of the snowflake marines: kill all of them off.

I mean, I've said it before-Marines just don't make sense at ~1,000,000 bodies.

Even if they're off by a factor of ten and there are ~10,000,000 Marines, they still are too few in number to matter. Like, at all. GW should've just said something like this for Marine numbers:

Marines are a rare sight in the Imperium, being few in number relative to the trillions of Guardsmen. But, despite being a small proportion of the Imperium's numbers, their impact is outsize owing to their superior equipment, training, and bodies.

BrianDavion wrote:

Tygre wrote:
Maybe the Chapter fortress has sufficient shielding. Tyranids are not known for their orbital bombardments. And only so many at once can attack at once. At the Battle of Rorkes Drift a company of British soldiers managed to fight off 4000ish Zulu warriors. At Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters. Its just their relief came from Khorne is the contentious part. Fortifications and higher skill levels were all multipliers in the Blood Angels favour. And it was barely enough.

If any Tyranid main attack on a Space Marine homeworld is enough to eliminate them then we wouldn't have any Ultramarines.

Martel I don't know why you want to eliminate the Blood Angels as a playable faction so badly. A faction you apparently play too.

With the topic of realism; certain aspects are not modelled well. For example suppressing fire is absent.

it's a sunk cost fallacy, Martel dearly wants to start another faction but can't justify it unless the blood angels die.

not sure why he doesn't just sell his current collection to support buying into another table top game or something.

So many old marines that its easy to justify. Its basically worthless at this point. I have six predator hulls for instance.

 Bobthehero wrote:

Tygre wrote:
MAt Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters.

Except you're talking of a 27 to 1 ratio for Rorke Drift and a 12 to 1 for Thermopylae. All the BA with all their buddies were still likely outnumbered thousands to one.

The British and the Greeks didn't have nuclear arsenals.

OK - if you can't take Black Library then I guess stop reading Black Library and just play the game? If you can't take the game then, well, don't play the game?

If a hobby doesn't make you happy and you persist then its not a hobby. Its a problem.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:

Tygre wrote:
MAt Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters.

Except you're talking of a 27 to 1 ratio for Rorke Drift and a 12 to 1 for Thermopylae. All the BA with all their buddies were still likely outnumbered thousands to one.

The British and the Greeks didn't have nuclear arsenals.

No, but they had comparable technology compared to their aggressors. Not the same, need-be, but similar.

Marines don't really have an advantage over Tyranids. A Gaunt or Gant is far worse than a Marine, but better than a Guardsman. A Warrior is, at least, on par with a Marine, and there's a LOT of them.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:

Tygre wrote:
MAt Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters.

Except you're talking of a 27 to 1 ratio for Rorke Drift and a 12 to 1 for Thermopylae. All the BA with all their buddies were still likely outnumbered thousands to one.

The British and the Greeks didn't have nuclear arsenals.

No, but they had comparable technology compared to their aggressors. Not the same, need-be, but similar.

Marines don't really have an advantage over Tyranids. A Gaunt or Gant is far worse than a Marine, but better than a Guardsman. A Warrior is, at least, on par with a Marine, and there's a LOT of them.

As a guy who also plays an army of Warriors, a Warrior is definitely better than a marine. But when it come to high tech conflicts, the ratio of meat-bags per side is basically irrelevant.

What sort of defences can be deployed by a Chapters home planet? It's not like marines lining up on their fortress walls and firing bolters at oncoming hordes will be their primary means of defence. They should be airbursting nukes over their defense fields. If they are doing something like that, a billion to one ratio can be meaningless, if they aren't doing something like that the writers are dumb.

I'd like to know what the details of the conflict are.

The so-called 'fluff' is filled with rather unlikely events, including back-flipping terminators and grey knights who party in the warp because they are just that badazz, but I typically take this to be imperial propaganda, pulp literature pushed out at a rapid pace to bolster flagging morale and to keep the fantasy-minded on the same page, pro-empire against the creepie crawlies that hunt us to harm us. Of course, these stories are overblown, hyperbolic, un-realistic because they are fictions that tear at the fabric of believability. On purpose.
This has nothing to do with the actual wargame, and less to do with what really (probably) happened.
Necrons did not actually high-five marines, rather they sped away with a single finger outstretched but the smiley face was pasted on afterWARDs to keep the kiddies at home happy and dancing for the victory, for the moment.

As for realism on the tabletop, the consensus seems clear that more is better with a few holdouts for a very expensive card/board game that is gameable and therefore 'competitive' in a way that an actual battlefield is not. Most respondents seem interested in approximating an 'actual' albeit fantastic battlefield as well as possible to allow for battles to be enacted at the scale intended.

This brings me to another question - How willing are we to discount realism in order to get so many, and so many large, models on the table?

My preference would be for 40k to inhabit the place between Kill Team and Apoc, and Apoc to inhabot the place between 40k and Epic. So, 1000 points in 8th edition model equivalents, seems maximal. Ideally, this would involve a return of a movement stat, with most movement much less than 6", of a decent overwatch mechanic, of more realistic terrain and cover interactions, less killy shooting for the most part, and many many fewer heavy weapons. In the original bacjground with the failing empire, failing eldar, sometimes wonky chaos tricks, and rising subfactions like Tau and Nids, super weapons and super high=tech super killy stuff was all at a premium and there was a lot less of it. Some of this can be put down to the fact that plastic moulds were not ready for GW to produce lots of super pretty big models like knights, but this was part of the background for 40k and it helped to tone down the killiness at range and balance the killiness at CC distances with pistols and melta bombs and so on. I can remember so many times that the drama ramped up because the only way to kill that tank was with a melta bomb, or to take position somehow behind the tank... now, that is all gone, and we just spam railguns and mega meltas. People have to roll so many dice, they just use their phones. Something important was lost, imho, and realism on the tabletop was part of it.

I'm personally willing to have a bunch of superheavies on the table becauae the table itself is very abstracted. Weapon ranges are waaaay out of scale with the models, and theres no way a 6" inch move represents only the "in world" length of a Rhino.

 JNAProductions wrote:
I mean, I've said it before-Marines just don't make sense at ~1,000,000 bodies.

Even if they're off by a factor of ten and there are ~10,000,000 Marines, they still are too few in number to matter. Like, at all. GW should've just said something like this for Marine numbers:

Marines are a rare sight in the Imperium, being few in number relative to the trillions of Guardsmen. But, despite being a small proportion of the Imperium's numbers, their impact is outsize owing to their superior equipment, training, and bodies.

There's a fair amount of fluff that more or less says Space Marines don't matter, and it's the Imperial Guard that win the Imperium's wars. Marines are supposed to be the surgical strike element that are deployed when a one-week operation carried out by the best of the best can avoid years or decades of conventional siege.

This got screwed up by Black Library writing bolter porn novels about Marines destroying entire armies in pitched combat and singlehandedly engaging in protracted campaigns. It's like taking Navy SEALs, who are certainly able to affect the outcomes of entire conflicts despite their small numbers, and writing stories about 100-man SEAL teams fighting the entire militaries of foreign countries in open combat- of course in that context you'd conclude that there aren't enough SEALs to matter at all, and that their long recruitment program couldn't possibly replenish their casualties.

Marines work fine in a Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Dirty Dozen, or Black Hawk Down kind of narrative, where their small numbers don't strain the plausibility of their feats. It's when they get treated as regular infantry that they start to have problems.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I'm personally willing to have a bunch of superheavies on the table becauae the table itself is very abstracted. Weapon ranges are waaaay out of scale with the models, and theres no way a 6" inch move represents only the "in world" length of a Rhino.

That is fine for a larger scale low rez game like an Epic Apoc where you remove entire squads with a single large blast...
40k proper should see one superheavy on a side max and for a narrative, kill the tank sort of mission...
At least, that is the 40K that I would like to play, rather than listen to the roar of dice hoses spraying all over the table for an hour while someone gets tabled in two turns of macro cannonry.

 Bobthehero wrote:

Tygre wrote:
MAt Thermopylae 6000ish Greeks held off for days 70,000+ Persians. It was a siege, and in a siege the goal is to hold off the foe long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And they managed that, but with heavy casualties. Along with the planets PDF, the Chapters Serfs, and their successor Chapters.

Except you're talking of a 27 to 1 ratio for Rorke Drift and a 12 to 1 for Thermopylae. All the BA with all their buddies were still likely outnumbered thousands to one.

It seems to me that you can improve the ratio by improving arms and armour. So somebody armed with a machine gun shooting what are effectively rockets at an incredible rate can do a lot more damage alone than a Spartan. Especially when the thing they're shooting at just runs and stabs.

Not enough. A billion is a such a huge number, and Nids probably had more than that.

 jeff white wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I'm personally willing to have a bunch of superheavies on the table becauae the table itself is very abstracted. Weapon ranges are waaaay out of scale with the models, and theres no way a 6" inch move represents only the "in world" length of a Rhino.

That is fine for a larger scale low rez game like an Epic Apoc where you remove entire squads with a single large blast...
40k proper should see one superheavy on a side max and for a narrative, kill the tank sort of mission...
At least, that is the 40K that I would like to play, rather than listen to the roar of dice hoses spraying all over the table for an hour while someone gets tabled in two turns of macro cannonry.

i mean, at this point armies are getting tabled just as quickly by basic space marines now.

Who knew, throwing on free AP, reroll to hit, shoot twice reroll to wound double damage nonsense on everyone leads to games being short and unsatisfying?

At this point, Apoc gives you a more fun small-scale game. Even with "Removing whole squads at once" your stuff dies way, way slower.

One thing I must congratulate GW on is how their handwave for the more odd theoretical physics ie. FTL and wormholes is certainly more nuanced and interesting than most scifi where those things are taken as granted without consideration for their implications.

As to should Blood Angels still exist, no. It really waters down Tyranids and the setting as a whole to allow some space marines and khorne to just lmao the largest hive fleet out of existence.

Alkaline_Hound wrote:
One thing I must congratulate GW on is how their handwave for the more odd theoretical physics ie. FTL and wormholes is certainly more nuanced and interesting than most scifi where those things are taken as granted without consideration for their implications.

As to should Blood Angels still exist, no. It really waters down Tyranids and the setting as a whole to allow some space marines and khorne to just lmao the largest hive fleet out of existence.

it was a TENDRIL of the largest hive fleet. A TENDRIL. and if the IoM winning any victories agaisnt hive fleet tendrils is a problem, then I'd argue the problem is with the Tyranids not the marines.

A very large tendril. Tyranids are supposed to be an ever encroaching end of the world scenario, so they should be almost never beaten in battle by anything other than exterminatus. If you don't like a setting with such features I would recommend checking out other less fatalistic and grimdark settings.

BrianDavion wrote:

Alkaline_Hound wrote:
One thing I must congratulate GW on is how their handwave for the more odd theoretical physics ie. FTL and wormholes is certainly more nuanced and interesting than most scifi where those things are taken as granted without consideration for their implications.

As to should Blood Angels still exist, no. It really waters down Tyranids and the setting as a whole to allow some space marines and khorne to just lmao the largest hive fleet out of existence.

it was a TENDRIL of the largest hive fleet. A TENDRIL. and if the IoM winning any victories agaisnt hive fleet tendrils is a problem, then I'd argue the problem is with the Tyranids not the marines.

IoM should not be able to beat a tendril with just marines.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Alkaline_Hound wrote:
A very large tendril. Tyranids are supposed to be an ever encroaching end of the world scenario, so they should be almost never beaten in battle by anything other than exterminatus. If you don't like a setting with such features I would recommend checking out other less fatalistic and grimdark settings.

Nah, the IG work fine. Fight numbers with numbers. There's nothing fatalistic about 40K b/c GW will always pump out the minis.

My argument about marines is this:

there are more plasma guns in the imperial guard than space marines in the imperium. VASTLY more. There are more lascannons, there are more missile launchers.

There are more ork nobz than there are space marines. There are more power klaws, more rokkit launchas, more kustom mega blastas and shokk attack guns than there are marines.

Basically the whole marines are badass thing makes no sense when they've got more anti tank weapons floating around than marines.

Because even with Ward levels of Wankitude, marines still die to lascannons to the face.

therefore the whole thing is stupid.

"Marines" includes guys with bolters, all the way up to fleet assets with biosphere annihilating weapons. (Strike Criusers can enact Exterminatus) It's not just 1000-odd guys running around unsupported. You dont measure the battle effectivness of a carrier fleet by counting the number of SEALs.

Their lore at least used to be about how very, very, very smart and fast they were at deploying their assets effectively. Sadly I don't hear so much about this anymore.

Hellebore wrote:
My argument about marines is this:

there are more plasma guns in the imperial guard than space marines in the imperium. VASTLY more. There are more lascannons, there are more missile launchers.

There are more ork nobz than there are space marines. There are more power klaws, more rokkit launchas, more kustom mega blastas and shokk attack guns than there are marines.

Basically the whole marines are badass thing makes no sense when they've got more anti tank weapons floating around than marines.

Because even with Ward levels of Wankitude, marines still die to lascannons to the face.

therefore the whole thing is stupid.

What they should have kept Marines at is concentration of firepower, toughness, and skill into a small space. For example, Terminators are meant to be maximum survivability in a small enough package to still fit through the tight corridors of a space hulk or starship. That makes Marines suitable for actual surgical strikes and special ops, where the enemy has no time or space to bring their heavier weapons to bear.

The problem is when GW starts writing Superman fantasies of having Marines acting like invincible line infantry on the open battlefield, instead of being buried under an avalanche of artillery and other enemy fire.

"where the enemy has no time or space to bring their heavier weapons to bear."

There's always room for plasma guns. That's the problem.

Martel732 wrote:
"where the enemy has no time or space to bring their heavier weapons to bear."

There's always room for plasma guns. That's the problem.

The prevalence of plasma weaponry on the tabletop is actually not representative of the supposed relative rarity of plasma weaponry in the background. Certainly the older editions of the IG portrayed grenade launchers and flamers as the more common special weapons.

So the idea would be that Marines teleport or drop down and chances are the enemy (such as a rebel human force) are not going to have ready plasma weapons on hand, and the Marines can complete their objective and get out before those troops with plasma weapons can be brought to bear, or the Marines can take them out as they trickle in.

There's still way more plasma guns than marines. And everyone knows the marines might be coming. They aren't exactly subtle. No one is going to be surprised by these guys.

Well, this may be the case about weaponry but then again not every injury is a casualty, marines and their armor likely survive being "killed" in-game often enough.

All of this is very much in-line with the realism discussion, but the realism that we might focus on is that which plays out on the tabletop during a game. I am in full agreement that the availability of super-killy guns should help to offset the relative squishiness of troops, especially marines.

The trouble for the in-game experience seems to be that the background regarding failing and falling tech across the galaxy, met with brute force and numbers in orks and nidz and also devious schemes of chaos, has been replaced with a general arms race that sells the new models I guess, the big new plastic ones that cost a fortune most especially, while doing damage to the game experience.

As a consequence, the in game experience does not seem to match the background, while the changes to the background to make room for new models (and often enough their flashy new trademarked guns) and more bigger shootier models have done some violence to the in game experience.