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Obviously, the movie marines ruleset were clearly intended to be a non-serious joke.

But i've had some milage with using the new Tormentor statlines from the EC.

Better attacks, movement speed, toughness, armour save etc all clearly indicate them to be 'better than baseline human'.

You do realize the difference between a Tormentor and your average Space Marine is +1" M?

And?

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:
And?

Do you think that the main issue with Marines' representation is they're 1" too slow?

Exactly. You talked like the Tormentor Statline was so much better than the standard Marine Statline when it is literally the same except for +1" M. Even the weapons are exactly the same when you compare Tormentors to Tactical Marines.

 JNAProductions wrote:

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:
And?

Do you think that the main issue with Marines' representation is they're 1" too slow?

yes


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 alextroy wrote:
Exactly. You talked like the Tormentor Statline was so much better than the standard Marine Statline when it is literally the same except for +1" M. Even the weapons are exactly the same when you compare Tormentors to Tactical Marines.

and?

You literally said they had better attacks et al, so I can see why people would be confused by your suggestion. If you'd said 'use tormentors because they're 1" faster" then it would have made sense.

doesn't tormentos is a basicaly marine but overflowed with warp power? why in sake of God-Emperor basic marine should have same stats??

 kabaakaba wrote:
doesn't tormentos is a basicaly marine but overflowed with warp power? why in sake of God-Emperor basic marine should have same stats??

No. A Tormentor is a basic Emperor's Children Infantry.

Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy

 kabaakaba wrote:
Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy

Then do you think basic CSM Legionnaires should also be massively better than a Loyalist Marine?

It's a valid argument to make, but there should still be new inductees who aren't so powerful.

Why they should be? Bile creates them already modified compared to standard SM. it's a sm2 perspective, like there should be something less cool/powerful compared to sm, to beat to pulp. But lore wise(excluding plot armoured guys) sm dies as easy as imperial guards. Virtually any threat around are stronger. We know some guys do cool in necron tomb, but how many whiped whithout any notice? Calgar defended Macrage with a lot of dead, but hom many guards was there in a moment to allow SM do their things.

Is Bile hanging out with the EC again? Last I heard, he was a off working on personal projects rather than fostering close ties to his own legion.

Regardless, Bile is one guy with limited access to geneseed. He's not creating every chaos marine (EC or otherwise) that comes into existence in the modern era.

We see in plenty of books that there are CSM who are basically just on par with loyalist marines. Not every CSM is a warp-charged super marine loaded up with useful blessings. I don't know enough about the new EC units to say whether or not they're meant to be particularly super-charged compared to normal CSM.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 kabaakaba wrote:
Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy

Then do you think basic CSM Legionnaires should also be massively better than a Loyalist Marine?

It's a valid argument to make, but there should still be new inductees who aren't so powerful.

Part of me kind of likes the idea of aspiring champions and other chaos marine sergeants being notably more powerful than normal CSM. Give them the chaos version of the eldar exarch treatment. But that probably shouldn't be mandatory for all CSM.

I also think there's a case to be made for renegades/freshly fallen/just-not-that-chaos-y marines maybe using the loyalist marine book. Maybe even adding a "renegades" detachment to the marine book that gives you some light chaos elements to sprinkle onto your army.

I'm pretty sure the +1 Move is just the new "Mark of Slaanesh", since Init was removed. The norm was always for god-marked Chaos marines to get a slight buff over loyalists representing their blessing. Slaanesh is speed, Khorne attacks, Nurgle toughness, Tzeentch an invul.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 kabaakaba wrote:
Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy

Then do you think basic CSM Legionnaires should also be massively better than a Loyalist Marine?

It's a valid argument to make, but there should still be new inductees who aren't so powerful.

Plus If they're still a basic Legionary they're probably not garnering much favor from the Chaos Gods.

Breton wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

 kabaakaba wrote:
Yes, its a basic EC unit who lorewise is spacemarine imbued by warp energy

Then do you think basic CSM Legionnaires should also be massively better than a Loyalist Marine?

It's a valid argument to make, but there should still be new inductees who aren't so powerful.

Plus If they're still a basic Legionary they're probably not garnering much favor from the Chaos Gods.

Which is exactly the point if you're the Alpha Legion.

The tabletop doesn't represent the lore, in most cases. Hell, my last game was tau vs custodies. The custodies were wipped out to the man while the Tau lost 5 firewarriors.

Not lore accurate at all.

I dont think its possible to accurately represent any of the factions lore due to scale limitations of the tabletop. Epic is probably the only system that came close due to titans only being a few inches tall.

 Jayden63 wrote:
The tabletop doesn't represent the lore, in most cases. Hell, my last game was tau vs custodies. The custodies were wipped out to the man while the Tau lost 5 firewarriors.

Not lore accurate at all.

I dont think its possible to accurately represent any of the factions lore due to scale limitations of the tabletop. Epic is probably the only system that came close due to titans only being a few inches tall.

To me, lore isn't "This faction is stronger than that one so it should win."

Part of that is that no matter the odds, I'm kind of an any given Sunday kinda guy. There might be a 90% chance one army will win and another will lose- even 99%. That doesn't make it lore breaking when there's an upset. Ask Vlad how easy he thought Ukraine would be.

To me lore is "Who fights who, when, where, why and how."

Now don't get me wrong- the argument about scale is valid- you can't get the big picture with just 40k; you can plan your mission so that it reflects big picture- Orbital bombardments, terrain destruction from off-board Titan weapons, etc, but you would need Epic to fight it out rather than represent it with special rules. However, I think that the same can be said of Epic: it can't tell the whole story of a 40k war either- it has a bit of difficulty representing the spy-infiltrator stuff that's better left for Kill Team, and sometimes that stuff wins wars.

In order to accurately represent many wars in the 41 millennium, I think you have to use ALL of GW's games- BFG, Epic, 40k and KT. Some may be playable at one scale, more could be played using two... But some need it all.

Agreed Jake.

This idea of an objective powerscale misses the fact that no one fights battles on even terms. that's what strategy is for, you use it to only fight on your terms.

Custodes are entirely capable of being wiped out like that, it just requires a particular set of circumstances. 'Lore accurate' is my most hated phrase in 40k because it's used as this supposed objective measure when it's just as skewed as anything else, with the pretence of 'evidence'.


40k 'lore accurate' arguments are basically like looking at the physical strength of different olympic athletes and saying that power lifters should beat all other olympians at their sport because they're strongest. In a long distance shooting match tau defeat custodes because they have guns with a longer range. So saying that its lore accurate for tau to defeat custodes is no more or less accurate than the inverse.

Fan 'lore accuracy' statements take a single factoid about a faction, like custodes are better melee warriors, and then assume that any fight they go into will allow them to dominate in that field. Which is absurd. It's an argument from protagonism without admitting it. Lore accurate is a short cut for, the story revolves around the strengths of this faction and so they will always come out on top.

^ Just voicing my approval of the above.

+1

Maybe the Custodes were so overconfident in themselves that they mis-deployed into a Tau ambush, and brought short range scissors to the Tau's long range rock.

I always felt there was a strange incongruity between fans professing to like the gritty grimdark satirical setting, but also expressing a strong dislike any time their protagonist dudes overcommit, underestimate the enemy, are blinkered by their own dogma, self-sabotaging, or just plain lose a fight.

The notion that the game, around which all the fiction orbits and which all those books/games/animations/etc exist to sell, is not 'lore-accurate' is an odd one too.

Power scaling is just a huge problem with fandom in general. It demands a kind of predetermined storytelling that is completely at odds with the kind of narrative freedom that made the setting exciting in the first place. So many stories are overburndened by a need to justify themselves and it's created this awful expectation that every protagonist needs to be born special to have any value.

It also just creates this awful lack of nuance. Tyranids can be an unbeatable, galactic level threat that will inevitably consume the galaxy, but that doesn't mean they can't be defeated in small scale encounters. The whole point of the Imperium isn't that they're weak; its that their strength is unsustainable. They can stop a Tyranid incursion, but doing so costs the Imperium more than the Tyranids lose. The horror of the Nids isn't that they can't be stopped, its that they can make way more Gaunts than the Imperium can make bullets.

I think that GW have found a way to solve the Protagonism issue- not just for Marines, but for everyone: PVE.

The most recent Dwarf had two Space Marine specific minigames/ adapted rule sets that dialed Marine power up to BL bolter-porn levels, but it's not a big deal because those rules are designed for PVE scenarios.

If someone had to actually play the Tyrannid NPO's, they probably wouldn't have a whole lot of fun playing against the improved Marine profiles, but since they're NPO's, nobody cares.

Granted, this doesn't solve problems for 40k, and it doesn't address Marine ubiquity... But it does provide a release valve for players who LOVE Marines and want to recreate the kind of stuff that only ever happens in fiction.

I think it's a shame there's not more editorial control exercised on the book writers writing crazy stuff for Marines which is then taken as 100% inviolable truth by fans. The argument that the game is secondary to the books is bonkers to me - it was a game first, it remains a game, and the game is much more consistent through it's existence than the novels.

The rot has set in at the game level by now as well though, so I'm on a hiding to nothing complaining about it.

I don't understand the appeal of this powerscaling stuff at all. I always thought the Ork "Biggest Ork is the Leader" stuff was poking fun at this sort of thing, but the Imperium works on this logic now too and no one seems to think it's ridiculous. We've got Guard, then Firstborn, then Primaris, then Grey Knights, then Custodes, then Primarchs, and then the Emperor, not only increasing in power at each step but also increasing in physical size (still one of the most ludicrous aspects of the modern setting to me - I remember years ago there was a joke on Dakka Dakka to always exaggerate the height of Marines in any discussion, but that's essentially become the actual in universe truth now).

I suppose the game at it's heart is designed to appeal to nerdy teenage boys, and nerdy teenage boys grew up on a diet of shonen anime these days so it's much more in that direction. I grew up on 2000AD and that's why 40K seemed so easy for me to grasp as it was.

But I'm always baffled about how people with that sort of idea see the game and how they enjoy it that way, it's totally offputting to me. And I don't get how people who see the setting this way expect people who play the NPC factions to actually be having fun having their guys be mown down by the main characters in all the fiction and all their games?

I don't even mind reading books where the Imperium wins but I just want the antagonist factions to be properly scary along with it.

Beware the real xenos threat:

Imagine the world where books like gaunt's ghosts and last chancers became more popular than the space marine books, and imperial guard heroism led to guard squads being very powerful in the game hehe.

 Da Boss wrote:


But I'm always baffled about how people with that sort of idea see the game and how they enjoy it that way, it's totally offputting to me. And I don't get how people who see the setting this way expect people who play the NPC factions to actually be having fun having their guys be mown down by the main characters in all the fiction and all their games?
.

Fiction =/= how the game plays.

My opponents can like that thier SMs/GK/Custodes are THE premier badasses of the galaxy all day long in the lore.
But if they meet me for an actual game? They'll quickly learn that, wether I'm fielding Guard/non-SM Imperial/Chaos/or some Xenos, I'm not playing the "NPCs" they read about in their beloved novels....

As for whatever gak GW & the BL crank out that makes it seem non-SM forces are nothing more than hapless NPCs?
Doesn't affect me. Because I play the game & know there's all manner of perfectly viable forces.

I use NPC somewhat sarcastically because I get annoyed at the section of the fanbase and writers who treat non Imperial/Chaos factions that way.

Iirc there's no situations where guards kill bunch of csm solo. They are always outnumber them and have heavy weapon. Well, except mkoll, he is emperor in disguise...

And I think I absolutely need some sm squads to be NPC for my kill team games.

How tough can CSM really be? Didn't they lose a bunch of their forces to a single Tau Firewarrior?