Are Space Marines being stuck at 1000 men per chapter frick with the scale of the setting? Major battles in 40k involve millions of combatants across entire planets and systems, but a few hundred to a thousand marines are supposed to make a difference?
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They're supposed to be nigh-invincible batmans who drop in on Joker while Gotham PD fights the goon army. But yes, they're often not depicted that way and a lot of things in 40k work much better if you don't think about it too hard and learn to just roll with it.
40k fluff blows the hardest when it loses sight of the fact it's backstory for miniature battles and not Asimov and Herbert anyway.
>but a few hundred to a thousand marines are supposed to make a difference?
Yes. They're that cool.
>but that's dumb!
Ok. Play something else.
>Settings are shit with numbers
News at 11. Reminder that many major lore battles in 40k have fewer combattants and fewer dead then real battles during WW2. Looking at you, Vraks
i like the nuBSG solution of real numbers with made up units.
>the fleet will consume 600,000JPs of water every week!
Those comparisons aren't between 40k battles and WW2 battles, they're between 40k battles and all of WW2
Numbers make perfect sense actually. It is said that Imperium holds million worlds, so ~10^6. Let's say that single digit percentage of them are agri-worlds, and, for simplicity, let's say that almost all nutrition Imperium start sthere, so total population this worlds can support is total population of IoM. These worlds don't tend to be technologically advanced, so let's say on average their food production is comparable to modern Earth, so each can support ~10^10 people. So the total population of Imperium is ~10^14.
Irl, even in most militarized countries with mandatory draft army size tends to be 1-2% of population at best, and decent amount of worlds hadn't seen armed conflict in centuries, so total count of PDF ~10^12. Guard is the elite of each world, so let's say single digit percent of PDF can get into guard. Total count of Guard ~10^10. Across thousands planets undergoing serious conflict, it's ~10^7 IG men on each planetary theatre. If most of them have support of a single marine chapter, it actually means that in every major conflict there is a space marine for every 10k normal humans, which makes perfect sense scale-wise to me, especially if you consider general difficulties associated with producing one.
The scale of warfare in 40k is screwed, but most sci-fi settings are. A million clones against billions of battle droids comes to mind.
I thought it was a trillion droids?
I think the problem is human minds, especially ones that aren't mathematicians, break down at that scale.
A billion is just an insane amount more than a million, despite people thinking both are big numbers. Then it gets worse the bigger you go.
As the saying goes, the difference between a million and a billion is roughly a billion.
I mean, none of us are mathematicians but we can easily see when the numbers make sense or are moronic. What's the writer's excuse? They're supposed to be smarter than us.
The excuse is you can buy and paint 100-1000 space marines. You can't buy and paint 1 million space marines.
And you can't buy millions of guardsmen/orks/tyranids either but their formations are always described that way.
>Major battles in 40k involve millions of combatants across entire planets and systems
That's a war, not a battle.
You don't need to kill everyone to win a war, just frick up their leadership, supplies, or other key assets. Regardless, taking 40k seriously is fricking stupid.
Space Marines make sense as hyper-elite shock troopers that are basically guaranteed to win individual battles, at which point the one million Marines is still stupid low but you can kind of see the logic.
The issue comes when they're depicted as high sustainability armies for constant conflict even though an Astartes would run out of Bolts in less than five minutes even if they had a bunch of reloads - 1 minute in a constant active firefight. It'd be logistically impossible for them to maintain momentum without an extremely rugged logistics chain with its own private military to protect it 24/7.
Every single space marine is supposed to be a super soldier like Samus, Doom Guy, Master Chief etc
They don't overpower entire enemy armies, they go on clear targets like any other super soldier protagonist. a squad of 5 to 10 marines is enough for any mission, a company of 100 marines is for an entire war across several planets. They never use all their 1000 marines.
To be fair 1000 Marines or more is relatively common for big, setting-defining battles (even before 7e and onwards consistently upped the scale) - though admittedly it's usually multiple different Chapters representing rather than a single unified Chapter.
Using 1000 marines was supposed to be only in conflicts that cover hundreds of planets to save trillions of lives, wars that cover areas bigger than most space settings.
>space marine is supposed to be a super soldier
They are not because their armor is not unbreakable. You could kill or at least wound one with a cannon, a missile or a high powered plasma rifle or any other heavy duty weapon.
Why is it so hard for 40kgays to admit that their franchise is moronic? By doing so the derp might actually get retconned.
>They are not because their armor is not unbreakable. You could kill or at least wound one with a cannon, a missile or a high powered plasma rifle or any other heavy duty weapon.
Any small alien or soldier can kill Samus, Master Chief and Doom Guy, but they always stop massive alien invasions by themselves by beating the bad guy or destroying a super weapon, that's what Space Marines do, they kill hundreds of aliens on their way and defeat the final boss.
Isn't Master Chief an actual mary sue because being "Lucky" is one of his actual traits?
If anything, Chief is the most tame one on the list considering most of his weapons are just modern day shit with a futuristic shell.
Kaldor Draigo killed thousands of demons by himself as an elder. Space Marines are pretty OP when they are not jobbing.
40kgays are the first to admit the setting is moronic. So what if the setting is moronic? Minis are still cool.
Could. If you hit them. With their legs that can run as fast as a jeep.
In the Battle of Armagheddon there were around 30+ chapters involved, many of which deployed all their companies to bolster the Imperial forces fighting the ork invasion. Aaah, 3rd edition, when 40k was a wargame with a semi coherent background, Space Marines weren't powerwanked into superheros and the lore wasnt used just to sell the latest figures. Good times.
>Exorcists
>12 companies
that's the one that has like 3 scout companies because they've got horrible attrition rates, right?
Yeah. Because they require Scouts to be possessed and exorcise themselves to gain chaos resistance/immunity like the Illuminati
very dumb, but still cool
Soldiers that are just a little bit better than Imperial Guardsmen but with better weapon and armor is already the Tempestus Scion and Sister of Battle job.
There is absolutely no way you can nerf Space Marines as no longer being superhuman one man armies without making them pointless.
Also funnily enough Captain America, possibly the most iconic supersoldier and a superhero started as just as a normal guy that was as fast and strong as a real life athlete until Marvel decided that was stupid and turned him into straight up superhuman.
This, they are the scapel to the hammer of the imperial guard.
>Major battles in 40k involve millions of combatants across entire planets and systems
Name one battle with such high numbers.
Any Tyranid fight, Armageddon, Cadia, probably Ryza, siege of terra . . . There’s a bunch.
The recent Battle of Oghram had billions of Tyranids eating billions of humans. Millions of tyranids alone were present in a single battle in the aquifers
Six millions orks were present in just ONE of the battles in Armaggedon
>muh six million
Gretchin propaganda
Typhus casually kills fricking billions of people in his invasions. He kills so many billions of people in his battles that he has "seven times seven times seven" Tallymen who are dedicated to cataloguing the amount of people he killed in his wars.
>"seven times seven times seven
Thats only 343
Terra canonically has QUADRILLIONS of people living on it, the siege of terra was responsible for death on such a hilarious scale it's hard to even put it into words.
Quadrillions of people on just one planet. Only ten thousand custards and only a thousand ultramarines/blood angels.
earth has 510million km2 of land once you drain the oceans
At 1 quadrillion people that gives a population density of 1.9 million per square km
The Kowloon Walled City had a population density of 1.3 million per square km
Which is totally possible, imagine something like bthis, but about double the height, covering all of Earth
Also it feels like the population of Terra gets more stupid every edition, it used to be hundreds of billions, then trillion now it's QUADRILLIONS
Because big numbers is bigger
Tbh i find this harder to believe, i get courscant as a concept is cool and all, but thats just too many people too densely packed, i cant imagine how they'd get enough water or dispose of waste of even organise food/essentials distribution.
Plus theres a lot of canonical inconsistency, like the polar fortresses which are obviously not in the middle of urban sprawl, imo we only truly know the state of terra as of 30k, and the imperial palace in 40k.
>Are Space Marines being stuck at 1000 men per chapter
Yes, 1000 men, or enlisted men. However officers are supernumeraries on the force org chart. Meaning that is a 1000 men plus the captains, fleet officers, plus the Chaplaincy, the command squads, vehicle crews, Armoury,Apothecarion,Librarium, and the dreads.
So there is a about 1200 of them.
The scale is that you can feasibly collect and paint a space marine company, or even a chapter if you go all in. Any other answer is autist cope trying to retrofit logic to a setting that has none.
A single company of Marines is enough to conquer an entire subsector. Pic related was enough to take over entire planets from Chaos during the Purge of Contqual BEFORE they got help from other Imperial forces. Sure they had some guard regiments and a few Titans who helped them, but it was the Iron Hands who did most of the work.
In fact, the Iron Hands actually got BETRAYED by their allies because the Guard general was butthurt that the Marines were doing all of the work.
In the end, the Iron Hands executed one-third of the entire subsectors population as punishment. That's just ONE company of marines performing genocide across an entire subsector just to teach a lesson.
>inb4 source it's not canon
Wrath of Iron novel. The campaign then got its own section in the Iron Hands Codex supplement, so it's 100% canon
Actual, literal in-universe propaganda.
If 100 marines could execute 1 person per marine per second, they would still take about 6,944 days to kill a billion people or about 19 years.
That's like one hive city, let alone a planet. Let alone a SUB-SECTOR.
Then they bombed the shit out of some of their hive cities or something. Or they ordered the humans to run concentration camps or draw lots to choose which among them got executed etc. Either way it's canon.
Or it's just propaganda giving the Iron Hands all the credit for what the Inquisition probably handled.
>Muh marines are so badass they ran a sub-sector holocaust with only 100 dudes!
Yeah it's an actual hit piece from in universe.
>every pro-Marine lore piece is just in-universe propaganda
Cope. Marines won at Maccrage, Damnos Orar's Sepluchre etc. Also a single Marine Chapter was enough to take on an entire Major Eldar Craftworld.
>Marines won at Maccrage
Macragge was only saved by Battlefleet Bakka managing to break the hive fleet in space before Macragge was overrun. It's a big part of the Armada expansion for the original BFG tabletop game.
> Also a single Marine Chapter was enough to take on an entire Major Eldar Craftworld.
And the gigantic Imperial Guardsmen army, and the y'know ENTIRE TITAN LEGION that was there too.
More anti-Marine cope. The Invaders fricking wiped out an entire Craftworld all by themselves.
>inb4 they got help from the legion of the damned!!
>The Invaders fricking wiped out an entire Craftworld all by themselves.
They wiped out a near death, previously unnamed craftworld that was already on the brink because of tyranids. The survivors of whom went to Alaitoc (who destroyed the Invaders attack on their own craftworld) and then proceeded to annihilate the Invader's own homeworld and force them into being a basic b***h fleet based chapter that then got wiped out when the Great Rift opened.
Even more Anti-Marine cope!
Marines have been present and integral to nearly every major battle in 40k.
Marine vs Marine (Horus Heresy & Imp vs Chaos Marines) conflicts have been the most important galaxy shaking events.
Marines were responsible for the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. Loyalist Marines are responsible for keeping the imperium alive for 10k years .Chaos Marines are responsible for fricking splitting the galaxy in half. The entire galaxy's fate is decided by MARINES.
People seem to forget the final boss and bane of the entire Galaxy and the fricking Immaterium is a regular ass Space Marine of the Luna Wolves.
Invaders are still around though.
>Or it's just propaganda giving the Iron Hands all the credit for what the Inquisition probably handled.
Imagine coping this hard on refusing that a piece of lore happened and argue with "Muh inlore Propaganda"
Large war zones either have a single chapter acting as incredibly elite special forces (never handling the overall brunt of the fighting) or have several chapters all working together in coordination, like on Vraks.
They make perfect sense at 1000 men per chapter, people just forget there are roughly 1000 chapters out there and that chapters work together in campaigns a lot.
Armageddon had a shitton of different chapters present, so did Cadia.
Marines can absolutely make the difference between success and defeat for the Imperium in major warzones, but it's because they are capable of incredible missions that have enormous consequences, like killing the enemy command structure or destroying planetary defenses.
They aren't literally out in the trenches killing a billion cultists each. They have their own limitations, and those limitations are especially true in space where a space marine strike cruiser is about equal to the cruiser of any other faction.
Epic 40k actually depicted this quite well. Marines in that are a finesse faction that require smart gameplay to make work.
30 Space Marines riding bikes and shooting people were enough to stop an entire invasion.
There is parts in the lore where one marine can conquer a planet let alone a squad of them.
Name a single time one marine conquered an entire planet by himself.
Just multiply the Chapter size by ten or fifty. Make Marine Chapters 10k - 50k Marines each. It's honestly still pretty small for the setting but much better than muh one hundred marines taking on an entire warzone
The narriative reason is that those few Space Marines are supposed to be able to do things that millions of men are not, like holding a fortress against insurmountable odds or assaulting and killing the enemy leaders.
When you play the tabletop game a marine counts for like 4 guardsmen (?? I have not played since the 90ies lol), but in the game universe they count for way more.
With the risk of sounding like an utter consoom s o y homosexual: a modern equivalent would be if the US had a force of men capable of killing Putin (I loathe comparing real life events with fictional ones but I think it's apt here).
But that's the enitre point of Rowboats Space Marine codex, withh marine chapters being only 1000 in men, there is a much smaller risk of secession and rebellion.
One million is way too many, you don't even need one 1000 super soldiers to save the day, you only need one.
The problems with 40k are numbers and unconsistency, some times marines are like Titus in their videogame with infinite respawn and sometimes they are just heavy armoured supersoldiers that can die from any anti tank.
Numbers are already pretty much discussed here, so nothing to add.
Also, to enjoy 40k you must suspend disbelief.
It's a pretty stupid setting ruled by teen cool and nothing more
Consider this OP:
If Space Marine Chapters were more than 1000 a piece, say 10000, then it would be 10x harder for you and your friends to collect the complete ADEPTUS ASTARTES ULTRA or similar. Don't you want to buy an entire chapter?
>Buy a single preowned prepainted tactical squad on ebay for $10
>Strip and then paint them in a custom scheme
>"Yeah, these guys are all that remain of my chapter the rest got exploded by orks"
And that's how you buy an entire chapter of space marines for $10
Checkmate GW
Big brain moment
That's what happened to the Crimson Fists. The sample battle in the Rogue Trader book had just a couple of squads being the only survivors from when their chapter base was destroyed by orks.
I mean it makes no sense. Imperium probably has almost as many imperial knights than space marines. And I reckon a single imperial knight makes a much bigger difference than a single space marine.
But we know the fluff.
Those are not the same thing at all, Imperial Knights are heavy machines, pretty much tanks. Space Marines are super soldiers.
It's like comparing Big Boss Clones to the number of Metal Gears
Primaris really help. They are stronger and faster than normal Marines.
It's a joke setting, meant to be ridiculous. Don't think about it too hard, it's not supposed to make sense.
40k hasn't been a joke setting for quite a long time anon
The only people who don't recognise the sillyness of 40k are GW corporate execs and their ideal easily influenced target customers - children and autistic adults who don't understand parody humour.
40k stopped being a parody since the 2nd edition
3e and 4e cranked the Kafka humour to maximum if you weren'ta brainlet. 40k got self-aware in a bad way and started taking itself too seriously in 5e going into 6e. Arguably the change started in 4e but no sooner. And even then shit like the Wolfdex throws into question how seriously the writers were taking it.
>40k stopped being a parody
Just lol. When will you autists realise.
Ah yes cause parodies release tons upon tons of books about events in the story that are mostly serious stories and other media like games where the plot is set completely straight.
there's a difference between satire and parody academically. It may not be parody butt it IS satire, It was then, has been admitted to be as much then and has been admitted to be as such now.
here, straight from fricking cliff's notes of all things
"A parody is a composition that imitates the style of another composition, normally for comic effect and often by applying that style to an outlandish or inappropriate subject. Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a perfect example of parody. Grahame-Smith took Jane Austen's text and introduced zombies into the storyline. Throughout the reworked novel, he maintained Austen's writing style, voice, and even much of the original storyline, creating a new work that is recognizable as being Jane Austen's but that definitely isn't.
A satire, on the other hand, is intended to do more than just entertain; it tries to improve humanity and its institutions. A satire is a literary work that tries to arouse the reader's disapproval of an object — a vice, an abuse, a faulty belief — by holding it up to ridicule. Satirists use euphemism, irony, exaggeration, and understatement to show, with a greater or lesser degree of levity, the follies of mankind and the paradoxes and idiocy that they can lead to.
Some great examples of satire include George Orwell's Animal Farm, which ridicules the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; Voltaire's Candide, which attacks the philosophy of Optimism; and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which satirizes the "high-class" tastes, social expectations, and popular philosophies of his time."
They're not serious stories. They're young adult light novels. Everything that GW does, including any fiction, revolves around selling toys to manchildren and whales. There's nothing else to it.
I can't COMPLETELY agree with you on that. Some of the writers do put solid effort in, but all the things that fee; really competent are self aware and somewhat satirical OR hard horror which has always been the realm of trash that ascends to notable work.
But I find a lot of the "serious" work feels tragically like older cape comic work. You get some Alan Moores in there who know the score but mostly it's just fun.
This is the equivalent of "why didn't Frodo ride the eagles to Mount Doom?"
Every single 40k player ever has joked about the low number of marines with his friends. I don't understand why anyone would think they've stumbled upon some massive revelation and make yet another thread about it instead of painting their minis.
>This is the equivalent of "why didn't Frodo ride the eagles to Mount Doom?"
no its not, there's an actual logical and reasonable explanation for why that didn't happen
Marines have no explanation
Not really. Scale issue equivalent was if somewhere in LotR it also casually mentioned Mount Doom is two kilometers away from Hobbiton.
The more you think about it the weirder it gets. I strongly suspect most people just headcanon it out.
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40k has always been capeshit. The fact that anyone in this thread thinks otherwise just means they need to be banned for being underage, because everyone should have realized that by the age of 15.
tbf that's only chapters that follow the codex astartes. Black templars dont give a shit about the codex and recruit anybody and everybody. They're perpetually at war so they're a relatively massive chapter that is always recruiting as they campaign through the galaxy in huge crusades.
they probably have really high casualty rates because of this. surprised nobody has brought them up. You don't need to have only 1k marines max per chapter, but most chapters follow this rule to be more flexible and managable and maintain coherency. Also in case another heresy type event or civil war. In Know no Fear the Ultramarines have like 30k marines, which was average for the legions back then.
as most people have said the fluff is so dogshit and inconsistent it's hard to find an example of marines being accurately portrayed. I don't even know where the baseline would be for space marine power level reference and comparison. In my opinion, the 2011 space marine game and the book Legion of the Dammed are fair potrayals.
>k the boss of this area coordinating all this shit is in this bunker
>10 marines go in and blast his shit, easily killing the 100 poor c**ts guarding it
>marines frick off, hit next command area
It's just this shit over and over and over again, completely disrupting and shitting up the enemy's formations to cripple them. This absolutely works against human enemies because random traitor fricks are a combination of poorly trained, poorly equipped and, if Chaos-worshipping, monstrously moronic. Xenos opponents don't run armies in the same way but also, in the case of Eldar, don't have endless gorillions of dudes when they attack/defend a place.
Yeah yeah I knowwww scale is fricking stupid and the few times they address it in-universe is kinda funny. I remember in one of the Tau books, the Tau are amazed by the hubris of some Space Marines landing right on top of their base with a few hundred guys. They get absolutely curb-stomped by those same Marines who butcher their basic dudes and the Tau think it's a huge frickup that they only killed a few dozen of them. The Space Marines, meanwhile, are impressed that the Tau even managed to do that much damage to them with basic guys. Plot armour swings massively one way or the other with both of those factions but the fact remains it's one of the few times that Marines seem to do something sensible, take reasonable losses while doing it and most of the actual fighting is done in the background by endless tides of meatshields. For all the shit the Tau books get, it's probably one of the most balanced depictions of Marines where they seem effective without being untouchable titans.
Space Marines are supposed to handle special operations, like killing high command or destroying supplies.
The dirty work is left to the imperial guard.
>Space Marines being stuck at 1000 men per chapter
this is why chaos is gonna win brothers. chaos space marines are not bound roboutes cringe codex
Who cares how many millions there are my Space Marine Squad killed their Space Marine ssquad thus winning the entire war.
You do realize multiple chapters can be involved at the same time, right?
No, millions of fighters are made of the imperial guard.
When Space Marines fight a war the call in most if not all successor chapters.
For example the Tyranid wars in Ultramare and Baal.
A lot of Chapters are also not codex compliant like the Space Wolves or Black Templar and hold Legion levels of manpower.
You need to understand just a squad of Marines is capable of conquering an entire solar system.
a squad? 7 to 14 soldiers and an nco...You're really over estimating them if you think a squad can conquer a solar system. Words have meanings, my friend
>but what about the scale!
>le scale!
>the trench warfare in space is unrealistic!
Anon who the frick cares about the scale this much when literally nothing in the setting is realistic? Warfare is getting gayer and gayer with the advancement of technology. When that warfare crosses into interplanetary levels that’s true times 1000.
It's a setting made purely to sell toys. It has no other merits.
That is not true, books and video games are also sold
>me on the way to the LGS knowing I can buy 1000 points of thousand sons for 180 dollars.
I feel for the marine players, after all this xeno collecting it's so wonderful to go for an elite army. It's really unfair to you marines and death guard players who deserve a functional, affordable, low model count army.
I blame Matticus Wardicus
Shut up
>Major battles in 40k involve millions of combatants across entire planets and systems
Do they?
More people did in the Eastern Front in WW1 than in many conflicts in 40K.
yes, it's illogical due to being arbitrary. yet perhaps it is strategically irrelevant. Loophole: chapters can work together however they want, right?. how you classify troop divisions within a military branch is administrative in nature and therefore irrelevant.
i was mid writing the above but then i Googled the fact that the maximum amount of chapters is 1000 as well. organization may not matter but why limit yourself? you could def cultivate way more space marines. imperium has 1mm systems / 1000 sm * 1000 ch = 1 sm per system???? bruh
The amount of chapters isn't limited to 1000, that's just how many there are believed to be (no one knows for certain because of how much of an administrative nightmare the imperium is) The high lords of Terra can approve the founding of as many chapters as they see fit but try not to make too many to avoid an HH 2.0
I think just saying "thousands of chapters" would be better than "around 1000 chapters", it's way more vague this way.
The amount of chapters is theoretically unlimited, 1,000 is a vague estimate, which may be right or wrong, may be total or extant, may be out of date or up to date.
To make a new chapter you need enough gene seed, materiel, and veterans from an existing chapter to start it off. The imperium doesnt just have unlimited gene-seed lying around. Founding a chapter also puts the primogenitor chapter temporarily under-strength, and it will take a long time for the new chapter to get to strength. They could do it much much faster if they were legions instead of each needing to build up independently, and you can blame guilliman for that.
Theres also form about preserving the balance of power and organising where theyre going to be based, which is why it usually happens in set foundings.
>chapter command
1 master
20-50 honour guard (27UM, 29BA)*
10-20 chaplains
10-20 apothecaries
10-40 librarians
>chapter armoury
30-50 techmarines
50ish tank crew (per spear of damnos)
>9 companies
9 captains
45-90 command squad
900 marines
>scout company
1 captain+5-10 command
10-20 sgts
80-100++ scouts
>garrisons
unknown, about 20 IF in Endeavour of Will.
multiple WC squads suggested in Dark Creed, unlikely more than 50.
30ish astral knights garrison
So likely 20-50
>Deathwatch
0-10
>Dreadnoughts
min 2 per company, max 7 per company (UM 9th), likely more not assigned, probably 20-70 per chapter
*I say max of 50 as m'kar seems to kill 30 in the UM book and the UM still have about 20 left after. Plus half a company seems the likely max for every non-company formation.
So really a full strength chapter should be around
1,220+20 dreads+80 scouts minimum,
or 1,420+80 dreads+100 scouts maximum.
Some chapters may have more chaplains and apothecaries, especially DA+BA ones. Others may have larger 1st companies e.g. crimson fists at 128, or DA.
*The UM have an honour company that the successors each contribute to but i thought that not worth mentioning.
>20-50 honour guard (27UM, 29BA)*
I'm pretty sure those Honor Guards are considered exceptionally large and a testament to the power of their chapters. Not on the low end of mid.
From the 5e Space Marine dex
Perhaps, but in the 3rd book of the ultramarines omnibus the word bearer demon prince kills about 30 honour guard, and there are still a dozen or so left afterwards, and i'm going off of the ultramarines as the archetypical full-strength codex chapter and bearing in mind that the dome of the primarch always has an honour guard present (until made redundant). So i think a maximum of 50 isnt unreasonable for a truly full strength chapter to reach. The crimson fists only had 4 before the event, but then again they had 128 in their 1st company, so it would've otherwise kind of evened out at 30ish imo. I'm going with 20 as that seems like a reasonable average minimum based on what we know, rather than what we dont know. But i get your point, perhaps a minimum of 5 honour guard, average of 20, maximum of 50? Its one of those few areas where a successful chapter can really show how well its doing.
None of the numbers in 40k (or any other setting for that matter) make any sense whatsoever. The writers aren't military professionals or historians nor do they give a shit about realism. They're looking to sell you a feeling and "band of superhuman heroes fighting desperate battles and emerging victorious" is the feel that they're looking to sell with space marines
Assuming there is some kind of WAR going on with the Imperials pushing back, having a rapid redeployment battalion of super soldiers that can hard win a key battle every few days across a planet is actually super useful.
But Space Marines aren't used like that because the writers are moronic, and the stories we read are when they have peer or near-peer adversaries because the writers aren't THAT moronic.
I'd like some stories that were not as much peer-to-peer fighting where the conflict of the story is the actual fighting, but a story where Space Marines show up in some place, and everything goes to plan and they just rek their opposition, and the conflict of the novel could be the concepts of transhumanism vs unmodified humans, what constitutes humanity, moral quandaries regarding an authroathive and stiffling empire and questions like that.
Like the Starship Troopers book, or Ernst Jüngers Storm of Steel.
They can deploy more than one chapter you know? And they abuse orbital supremacy a lot to drop-pod in. Thats how the really big scale battles usually go. Armageddon had at least 50 chapters and 30,000 marines present, and they worked alongside other combatants like titan legions, knight houses, mechaincus skitarii, the guard, PDF, and the navy. Fighting in chapter strength they're equal to a corps of guard on the field, but they're not immortal (see: celestial lions), they're better used as special forces most of the time. When present in smaller numbers they work as special forces/shock troopers, going for key targets and leaving the bulk of the fighting to the guard, they're particularly good in boarding actions and cqc, as opposed to having to fight armoured formations and getting bombed or shelled.
Some writers wank them off too much and have a single company conquering an entire world or fighting off an entire waagh. Most writers dont really appreciate how combined arms warfare works, or the scale they're writing on, except perhaps Dan Abnett. Realistically you'd need to hear about an air campaign, air defences, beacheads, supply depots, minefields, bunkers, artillery trains, armoured divisions, continent spanning campaigns, hive cities you could lose a chapter in etc, but this is sabotaged somewhat by bad authors having like 100 iron hands waltzing into a hive city and killing everyone because robot. The HH is kind of better for this as the legions work in the thousands and on e.g. istvaan III, you see how well defended a planetary capital actually would be. Abnett is good but doesnt usually involve space marines, the dark creed book is actually pretty good as it shows how the imperium reacts to threats promptly and as quickly as possible, but it still wanks off the word bearers too much.
I mean major battles way more than just 1 chapter of space marines involved and they aren't used as an occupying force, so no.
It's like claiming any spec ops force is pointless because of how few there are.
>Are Space Marines being stuck at 1000 men per chapter
A chapter as per the codex astartes has 1000 marines serving as infantry but this number ignores the command structure, aspirants, vehicle crews, Apothecaries, chaplains, techmarines, librarians, navy, logistics, menial, and miscellaneous serfs.
>Are Navy SEALS teams being stuck at 200 men frick with the scale of the setting? Major battles involve tens of thousands of combatants across countries, but a hundred or so men are supposed to make a difference?
Fricking moronic
This is often a problem with writing fiction that is really detached from our reality, writers often lose sight of scale and throw big numbers around thinking that is impressive by itself. Its not just 40k, altho its a big culprit ("millions" of orks aren't that relevant in a galaxy of that size, same for the size of the traitor legions. HP thinks it's impressive to have around a thousand wizards fight a world war, and we all know the story of how the 15 ovens working 24 hours a day cooked 6 million cookies.
Cortès took down the aztec empire with fewer men, now imagine you give him a thousand soldiers who can fight without sleeping, 2"3 foot tall, in amours strong has a tank, weapons with bullet the size of a fist, and have ships who can fire from the skies and produce the supplies for a long term engagement.
I think the way the marines where show was in Astartes.
Not really. Space Marines are supposed to be elite and highly mobile strike teams who get deployed to especially high stakes situations where the massed ranks of the Imperial Guard aren’t trusted to deal with it.
If anything, Space Marines being capped at low numbers helps the setting because the Imperium doesn’t seem to have a money problem and could just replace their entire Imperial Guard with Space Marines and then there’d not really be a setting any more.
>This thread again
All the cool things about 40k you could talk about, and you losers choose this tired topic?
people just love clearly wrong questions for some reason, it's another Eagles to Mordor, 40k is full of flaws even it's writers aknowledged but people would rather debate how many super soldiers should exist and how powerful they should be even though they know it's absolutely pointless and based on thier personal taste
You are supposed to make up your own dudes and not think that the ultramarines do all the fighting.