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It's pretty interesting moment. How space Marines impact outcome of imperium campaigns?
There is always 1000 times more guards of all kind in any campaign. Thousands of tanks, artillery and sentinels. Fleet. Titans. Do space marines really commit somehow to victory? Doesn't scions/Aquilons/kasrkins can't do same work way cheaper?
We definitely have lot of novels displaying what sm are unreplaceable. But it's sm selling novels. Logic logistic and economy say different.

What you think?

They are force multipliers. They act on strategically important small contained objectives with large rammifications. Like assassinations, communications disruptions, depot demolitions, power disruption etc.

Small targeted attacks that generate large knock on effects. That's the only real way they can fight. No amount of bolterporn power fantasy makes a marine anything other than a tough infantry soldier. They still have to work to their strengths to be effective.


If they are caught in a frontal assault, they will be steamrolled by virtually anything that outnumbers them.

I can give a common example. Planetary defenses. Things like city-sized void shields and surface to orbit missiles and gun batteries are extremely powerful and surprisingly common. Turns out you can get a lot of bang for your buck when your weapons and armor don't have to be mobile and can be plugged straight into a city's power grid.

Orbital supremacy is often what makes or breaks a war in 40k, and achieving it can often make victory a foregone conclusion. That's where space marines come in. There's only so many guardsmen you can squeeze into a physical space. A few squads of astartes would have no problem drop podding down, knocking out those orbital defenses and leaving the rest to the IG/IN. But they either never would've made it through or it would've taken substantially longer without astartes.

Since there's supposedly only about 1 Million Marines in the galaxy 99.9% of all battles will be fought by other imperial factions and Space Marines should hardly have any imüact on the overall setting and only appear on the most decisive battlefields.

However, actual fluff shows Marines everywhere and sometimes even in trench and siege warfare. Hence I'm of the opinion every chapter should be 1 Million Marines for that to make any sense. With one Billion in Marines you could put a small contingent of 1000 of them on every imperial Planet and use them as the Spec OPs they're shown as.

Currently you have the to me immersion breaking Situation where they are somehow a myth and somehow the most important imperial asset when they're by pure numbers more irrelevant than say, Tau Crisis suits, the elite of the smallest faction.

jareddm wrote:
I can give a common example. Planetary defenses. Things like city-sized void shields and surface to orbit missiles and gun batteries are extremely powerful and surprisingly common. Turns out you can get a lot of bang for your buck when your weapons and armor don't have to be mobile and can be plugged straight into a city's power grid.

Orbital supremacy is often what makes or breaks a war in 40k, and achieving it can often make victory a foregone conclusion. That's where space marines come in. There's only so many guardsmen you can squeeze into a physical space. A few squads of astartes would have no problem drop podding down, knocking out those orbital defenses and leaving the rest to the IG/IN. But they either never would've made it through or it would've taken substantially longer without astartes.

With some limitations, Vraks, for example, had far too many anti-orbital weapons for a Marine assault to succeed without crippling Marine losses, it specifically states so before the Siege starts. There's also a mention of something like that with Firestorm Nexuses smashing Flesh Tearers to bits in space/orbital, but that's from the Scion dex and it's kinda biased to make Scions look cooler (which is appreciated, if only for the role reversal)

Didn't Vraks still have the Dark Angels play a major roll in the opening stages of the war by capturing the spaceport though?