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 Crimson wrote:

The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.

Doesn't it say "known" successor chapters to give DIY players more than enough room to play in the "unknown" successor chapters?

Breton wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

The same weirdness happens to lesser degree with the amount of second founding chapters of every legion. It is because IIRC legions were originally just 10 000 strong, and older fluff was written based on that. Legions got retconned to be much bigger at some point, but sizes or numbers of chapters that were split from them were not increased.

Doesn't it say "known" successor chapters to give DIY players more than enough room to play in the "unknown" successor chapters?

Yes, but over the years, people have developed an ever stronger idea that DIY chapters and anything DIY shouldn't really be there. That also is an issue with so mcuh more becoming known about the distant past.

Unless you are adopting late-season Game of Thrones offscreen cloning technology, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the bulk of Marines after the Horus Heresy are dead and so numbers should be a lot lower.

I guess question marks for the few chapters that never really did anything (looking at you Ultramarines.)

 Dolnikan wrote:

Yes, but over the years, people have developed an ever stronger idea that DIY chapters and anything DIY shouldn't really be there. That also is an issue with so mcuh more becoming known about the distant past.

*In your experience. In mine people are doing homebrew factions just as much as they were doing before.

And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.
Splinter forces like Blackshields, Shattered Legions and various bands of Loyalists from Traitor Legions were also commonplace and are ripe pickings for making up new Successors.
The Apocrypha of Davio attempted to track the Second Founding but failed.

 Gert wrote:

And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.

But that is only 23 000 marines for legion of hundreds of thousands strong that famously did not do that much fighting. It doesn't add up. Also, Salamanders had no successors as they were a small legion. Small, as only thousand when others were hundreds of thousands? And of course same issue with Space Wolves.

Hence why I put "hard" because the source for the 23 Chapters is from 2nd Edition.

And no, the XIIIth did not "famously do not that much fighting".
Calth lost the Legion half it's fighting number, then they took heavy losses during the Shadow Crusade including important recruiting and training worlds like Armatura. There was a period of relative calm during the Imperium Secundus but this was swiftly followed by the push to Terra and then the Scouring before the Second Fouding was initiated.
At no point am I saying that there should only be 23 Ultramarine Successors, I am saying that there is absolutely room to do so.

The Salamanders were one of the smallest Legions who then lost almost everything at the Dropsite Massacre and never had the chance to rebuild.
The Raven Guard at least got help from the Emperor and the Iron Hands weren't fully gathered for Isstvan V with the majority of their losses being from the more veteran Clans like the Avernii.
The Wolves lost a third of their Legion at Prospero then got jumped by Traitors all the way back to Terra before heading back out to try and gut the Sons of Horus before they reached the throneworld.

There are explanations for literally everything if you look further than memes and reddit posts.

 Gert wrote:
Hence why I put "hard" because the source for the 23 Chapters is from 2nd Edition.

And no, the XIIIth did not "famously do not that much fighting".
Calth lost the Legion half it's fighting number, then they took heavy losses during the Shadow Crusade including important recruiting and training worlds like Armatura. There was a period of relative calm during the Imperium Secundus but this was swiftly followed by the push to Terra and then the Scouring before the Second Fouding was initiated.
At no point am I saying that there should only be 23 Ultramarine Successors, I am saying that there is absolutely room to do so.

The Salamanders were one of the smallest Legions who then lost almost everything at the Dropsite Massacre and never had the chance to rebuild.
The Raven Guard at least got help from the Emperor and the Iron Hands weren't fully gathered for Isstvan V with the majority of their losses being from the more veteran Clans like the Avernii.
The Wolves lost a third of their Legion at Prospero then got jumped by Traitors all the way back to Terra before heading back out to try and gut the Sons of Horus before they reached the throneworld.

There are explanations for literally everything if you look further than memes and reddit posts.

No. it still doesn't quite add up. If legions are hundreds of thousands strong, it doesn't make sense that there are only couple of thousand remaining for the second founding. Like Wolves might have lost third, or even half, but it seems that there is only about 1% left for the second founding. And if ultras were split into 23 chapters, and were the most numerous, it means everyone else had way less remaining. This is a glitch caused by increasing the sizes of legions.

A decade of constant, brutal civil war between the most powerful armies humanity had to offer tends to result in a lot of killing.

It wasn't one fight and that's it for each Legion.

The Wolves also just didn't stick to the Codex so they can't be used as a marker.

And once again, we only know the named Chapters and at no point has GW ever said "These are the only 2nd Founding Chapters ever".

Under the assumption that there always existed a 1000 space marine chapters since the second founding (even if there only where 500 or 200), doesn't that result in a million marines?

Even if only 200 chapters where founded during the second founding, and each chapter was half strength, that's still a hundred thousand marines. Considering the immense attrition and losses mentioned by posters above, this might actually add up.

 Crimson wrote:

 Gert wrote:

And with regard to the Second Founding it has always been the case that there were "known" Chapters and many more unknown.
The only "hard" number we have for sure is that the Ultramarines apparently split into 23 Chapters, with only 18 accounted for.

But that is only 23 000 marines for legion of hundreds of thousands strong that famously did not do that much fighting. It doesn't add up. Also, Salamanders had no successors as they were a small legion. Small, as only thousand when others were hundreds of thousands? And of course same issue with Space Wolves.

Not fighting at Terra doesn't mean they didn't fight. They fought at Calth, they fought at Numeria, they fought a gauntlet of battles vs the Iron Warriors on the way to Terra.

Edit: They also did the bulk of the work after the Heresy keeping systems safe and compliant to buy time for the rest of the legions.

Not all Legions were huge. The Shattered ones were obviously small, but others were never large - Russ always had a midsized for example.

The "largest" loyalists were originally the Dark Angels who then lost a lot during the Crusade itself even before the Heresy (then lost a bunch on Caliban) It took a while into the Crusade for them to find Guilliman for the mature Primarch DNA plus his logistical gifts to really kick the Legion Recruiting into overdrive so the Ultras could pass the First.

With pretty much anything GW, don’t look too close at the numbers. Not only do they not make sense, but with the retcons and different perspectives, it’s hard to even compare apples to apples.

The 1,000 marine number refers to the line strength, not total manpower in a chapter. There is also the HQ and support elements, which can roughly double that. Although that’s been debated at length historically.

Numbers still don’t really add up.

They fixed the issues with Primaris Marines by just calling them the Unnumbered Sons.

Gulliman was able to make tons of new chapters, reinforce old one, etc.

"However, by the time of the Battle of Raukos, only twenty thousand of the Unnumbered Sons remained within the Crusade"

That's the only hard number we ever get.

And much like the midichlorians in Star Wars, this teaches us that not everything needs an explanation.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
They fixed the issues with Primaris Marines by just calling them the Unnumbered Sons.

Gulliman was able to make tons of new chapters, reinforce old one, etc.

"However, by the time of the Battle of Raukos, only twenty thousand of the Unnumbered Sons remained within the Crusade"

That's the only hard number we ever get.

And much like the midichlorians in Star Wars, this teaches us that not everything needs an explanation.

It also follows the pattern we usually get. When they give us a hard number, its not a Top End, its The Floor. The bottom

Oktoglokk wrote:
I miss when Space Marines were 2-2.15m tall, a suit of power armour weighed 114kg, and it reduced the chance of injury from smallarms by 50-85%.
Codex Angels of Death, 1996, page 8.

Absolutely 100%


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The numbers aspect is fundamentally flawed because it's artificial.

Even the genetic compatibility issue is meaningless in an empire as large as the imperium. If only 0.5% of the population is compatible, then the current male population of earth has 20 million suitable candidates....

The space wolves are relatively unique in that they recruit from a single planet with a very small human population (even the blood angels recruit from multiple moons - and their genetics ignore the limitations anyway).

Yet the wolves are actually larger than normal chapters and they're not exactly driving the human population of fenris to extinction keeping their numbers up, so I imagine the compatibility issue is nowhere near as severe as 0.5%.

The uniqueness of marines is partially based on their rarity, but that rarity is De Beers level faked.

So the Imperium in reality has an unlimited resource of marines that are uber in all aspects. If they were as powerful as they've been protagonisted to be, the imperium would be unstoppable.


They just keep churning their marines through, casualties mean nothing, so killing them is not tragic at all, and the imperium can make as many as they want.

You know it's funny, but there's really only one interpretation of all this that works: Space Marines have no significant impact on the Imperium's military power at all, and only still exist as a ceremonial throwback like the Swiss Guard. They're objects of cultural and religious reverence, not a real fighting force.

I mean they do still fight aliens and are individually very good at it, but it never affects the outcome of a war because there are so few of them. All of the real "elite shock troop" work is done by modern units like the Tempestus or Arbites, who number in the hundreds of billions. The Space Marines are deliberately kept irrelevant by the High Lords and the Emperor accepts this because he considers the Space Marines to be a failure, but he won't allow them to be totally destroyed because he feels responsible for them. The Space Marine chapters themselves are mostly deluded, convinced by hypno-indoctrination from childhood into believing that they're essential to humanity's survival. The few that see the truth often become rebels or turn to Chaos, but unless they escape to the Eye of Terror they're easily crushed by the Guard.

They're sci-fi Don Quixote.

This i like. Yes. Love this idea. I use that in my homebrew setting

Man I just read this entire thread thus far and it's given me a lot to think about in the setting of 40k, and solidified a lot of ideas that I've always sort of had about the setting but could never really put into words.

To me, Warhammer 40k has always been a better setting than a story. I believe that the idea was initially conceived as a setting in which you field your army in your battles with your lore, with a cool setting to place that lore into. Selling models was still the primary goal, but it was designed by nerds who wanted to see other nerds have a good time.

I no longer feel this is the case. Warhammer is now about selling models not only primarily, but almost unilaterally. Many of the books I've read post 7th (maybe earlier) have felt like "buy my models" books, the space marines are extremely epic because it makes people want to play them, they are protag level powerful because people want to play as the protags. As a consequence of this, GW has to continually increase the power of space marines to make the next threat even crazier than the one before to continue making new, stronger, better models to sell.

Conversely though, GW can't settle on a defined "number" for many things, as it would make minis harder to sell. as such, we end up in a weird zone where warhammer 40k has to be both more of a story and less of one at the same time

gonna set up a theoretical conflict here, with one billion guardsmen vs an equal number of chaff units like one billion cultists, something of that nature.

1: Space marine's "canonical power"

This is something that, as many many many people have said before, is so damn variable its hard to ever make any sort of concrete answer. Because of how grand the scale of 40k is, to make them feel at all elite the setting has to push this narrative that one marine is worth 100, 1000, even 10000 marines which makes them certainly feel like demigods, but puts them out of place when you realize that these battles are being fought by billions over a planet. even one marine being worth 10000 regular men is still means 100000 marines assuming that, like many books say, there are a billion guardsmen in any given large scale conflict. That cannot work while making each marine feel special, so you gotta switch it up.

I really like this idea pushed in pages, 5 to 6? of this thread that marines aren't special because they can take the same number of hits as 1000 men, its because they are smarter, faster, sneakier, and more tactical than 1000 men. they will succeed where uncountable fail, to infiltrate and take out critical targets. Unfortunately media likes to portray them tanking trucks running into them at full speed, so this image of them being infiltrators is rarely shown. which is a shame because it makes my next point way easier.


2: How many marines are there anyway?

to keep a company to 1000 marines in a conflict with 1 billion people that leaves 1 marine per 1 million people. if they WERE portrayed as expert high value target hunters, ironically 1000 would be a lot, flying around a planet to take out military experts actually ends up feeling very achievable with 1000 people in that context, but if they are frontline troops sent to shield guardsmen... then they feel completely outclassed. with 1000 people they can only be in so many places at once, again that's 1 marine per 1 million guards, and I dont even think "movie marines" have that kind of toughness.

So as said in previous posts, either there are a lot more marines per battle than previous suggested, or the battles they aren't nearly as influential to a battle as the lore suggests.

Numbers never make sense in 40k anyways though, so all of this is sort of a moot point.

3: Table Top representation

If we are going to compare "power levels" one thing I havent seen done yet is compare point costs. Lets break down a tac marine. in 10th ed a tac squad costs 140 points where a guard shock group is 65.

140/ 10 is 14, so a tac marine is worth 14 points, maybe a bit less if you think of the lieutenant model as being worth an extra point or so. 65/10 is 6.5, again maybe a bit less if the sergeant is worth a tiny bit more. this means that on the tabletop one marine is worth 2.3 guardsmen. I have no idea how you would balance this correctly, if we are going by "in universe" numbers then realistically one marine could take out all 10 guards by himself, should one marine then be worth 65 points?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I will say that either answer feels strange from a gameplay perspective.

Sorry for the long rant, it may be a bit disjointed.

Brickfix wrote:
Under the assumption that there always existed a 1000 space marine chapters since the second founding (even if there only where 500 or 200), doesn't that result in a million marines?

Even if only 200 chapters where founded during the second founding, and each chapter was half strength, that's still a hundred thousand marines. Considering the immense attrition and losses mentioned by posters above, this might actually add up.

As with all things, corporate changed that with one line in the 9th Edition Grey Knight's Rulebook.

At this time, the mighty Space Marine Legions were in the process of being separated into Chapters according to the precepts of the Codex Astartes. Much of the process of the Second Founding was being carried out at the direction of the newly formed Inquisition and was in turn overseen by those same lords who left Terra with Malcador some years earlier. It was a simple task for them to include the Grey Knights amongst the growing roster of Space Marine Chapters, bestowing upon them the designation Chapter 666 - an oddity, as at the time, there were barely four hundred Space Marine Chapters commissioned. Few other details ever became a matter of record, and most of these were erased form the archives within a century.

You're all arguing about 40+ years of constantly-changing canon/narrative and a healthy dose of Superman Syndrome, where the writers literally paint themselves into a corner and have to scramble to escape it. Couple that with GW's feeble attempts to produce anything even remotely resembling a balanced game for 22+ iterations of 40K/WFB, and WTF are we even talking about?

Trying to reconcile novels and fiction with table-top wargaming is an exercise in futility at the best, pure folly on the other end. Pick an edition of 40k. Realize that, if you show up at a competitive event, or even just a LGS for some random pick-up games, you're going to be facing a version of Space Marines/Chaos Space Marines 66%-75% of the time. They're cheap. They're in EVERY edition's boxed set. They're easy to paint. They're the "cool guys" in all the fiction. Back when I was active in the tournament scene, I knew I'd face 2 Marine armies at a RT event. 3+ at a GT, fighting them every battle at an RT of 4 times at a GT wasn't unexpected. Guess what? I geared my army to table Marine armies, and watched them whine and cry about how OP my list was as I did it.

I was far from alone. Every single non-Marine player did the same thing. So did every Marine player worth their salt, as they knew exactly who they'd be facing too. They'd cram as many Power Armor-ignoring weapons into their list as they possibly could, and try and delete their foes. The only crybabies were the people who thought Marines should win every fight, because they always win in the books over impossible odds, while wounded, For the Emperor!

Get over it already. No matter what they make Marines into, T4/2W/3+, T5/3W/2+/4++ Termies, whatever...they will always die on the tabletop like a troop of Campfire Girls because GW wants to sell their other armies also. So, every army will have the ability to obliterate Marines, if they choose to do so and field the appropriate minis. And because people know they're going to be facing Marines 50%+ of the time, they'll come geared to do so.

I mean, if we went by the fluff, no one would ever be able to stop the Tyranids or Orks except by Exterminatus or the incredible plot device of Space Marines! Eldar and Dark Eldar would appear from nowhere, table an enemy, and vanish again into the Webway. Necrons would awaken and scour their tomb-world clean. The only armies that would ever lose a battle would be the ever-faithful-yet-tragically-doomed Sisters, the IG, and the always naive Tau, the underdogs who never fail to battle back. Because that's how they're written.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.

 Kagetora wrote:


Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.

Bah. I played HH, and never once used a Marine...

But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.

And it's not just Warhammer, but BattleTech, etc. Because the entertainment is different, with different skills required to enjoy them.

The closest thing I can think of to link the two would be a choose your own adventure novel with dice rolling... like D&D used to do.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Kagetora wrote:


Otherwise, just go play 30K where everyone is a Marine and none of this matters. Fiction =/= Tabletop Balance. And it never will.

But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.

I disagree. They certainly could be the same. But the scenarios just tend to be different. 40k the game is built around evenly matched battles, while the fiction almost never is. The relarive power levels of units can be consistent accross both, they just don't play out the same because of the context.

But in 40k you can still get your narrative moments. 2-3 Marines assaulting into cover and clearing a room of 10 Cultists is/was totally a thing that could happen in the game, and that's a pretty common occurence in the fiction. The hero felling the monster with a final blow after his comrades have fallen in battle is likewise a total possibility. The only differences are that the dice may not be with you, and your opponent is also controlling their own Main Characters.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:


But you do have a point. A tabletop wargame and a piece of fiction should never be the same.

And it's not just Warhammer, but BattleTech, etc. Because the entertainment is different, with different skills required to enjoy them.

Writing fiction is hard. I belong to a writer's critique group, with published authors. I try my best to join in the fun, but I'll likely never be published or make a dime from my writing hobby.

At the same time, writing balanced tabletop wargame rules is hard. GW hasn't managed it yet, with the exception of "side games" that they fail to support and watch whither on the vine. The best examples usually come from rulesets where every "unique faction" is functionally the same, with different aesthetics to make a variety of players happy. Take a hard look at old games like original Mordheim/Necromunda, where the difference between gangs was a point of BS, WS, or maybe S or T. But at the start of the game, everyone was on an essentially even playing field. Ditto outside games like Wargods or Dark Age, where the differences were small and strategy/tactics actually matter.

40k? WFB? Fugeddaboutit. Balance between Aeldari, Orks, Tyranids, Tau, Space Marines, innumerable Chaos Factions, Imperial Guards/Agents/Sisters//Whatever? Every book has a hero/heroine. The narrative has to support that. Every game has to have a semblance of balance. The gameplay has to support that.

To expect those two things to intersect? Folly. Get over it already. In the fiction, a Space Marine will be an unstoppable 3m tall ceramite-armor coated killing machine who will suffer the worst wounds and still raise his sacred bolter in the Emperor's name to fire a final bolter round at the enemy, the catechism of his chapter whispered on his lips with his final breath.

On the tabletop, you'll pick him up when I deal a single 2W attack to his unit. Suck it, I'm doing the same thing to the ultra-incredible fictional god-units in my army when you roll your dice. You know, the Ork Nob who wades through Imperial units like he's walking in grass, or the Tyranid genesteler who just burst over a fortification to tear into the squishy flesh behind it, or the Aeldari Aspect Warrior who just danced around your hero like he was a clumsy child before slicing his head from his shoulders.

Fiction is fiction. The hero of the story is the hero. Go read books, or show up with miniatures and play a game. They are so far from the same as to not even be in the same zip code.