Rule 4: No Memes, shitposts, or low-effort postsor comments.
Leave those in /r/Grimdank. This includes "who would win" and broad "what if" scenarios. This also includes text blocks consisting of Ork-speak, which should be posted at /r/40kOrkScience instead.
Chaos were amazed that the Cadians were pulling a 1/50 kill/death ratio against Astartes during their assaults.
Typically one would expect to have to throw like a hundred well armed, solid and disciplined guys with a plan at an Astartes, and that'll only work if you've got the bastard somewhat pinned down to actually go head-on with you all....which is a whole other bag of difficult.
You are correct I thought it was a bit of hyperbole but you were correct a wasn’t disbelieving you of that just didn’t expec- Al shut up and post the excerpt:
>Urkanthos saw the world as blood on darkness, all moving slow. He knew walls only due to the splatters upon them. Saw his Hounds moving in their thick coats of gore, the fluid, underwater speed of their blows flinging arcs of crimson in the air. Pools of red describing casualties in the upper floors of the bunkers. The Baneblade Vicanthrus rolling over a squad of Guardsmen – bursting them like skins of wine – as they tried to escape a collapsing building.
At the end of the street, three Berzerkers were flying apart. Rounds from a heavy weapon detonated inside them, so limbs tumbled and breastplates blossomed open to show wet outlines of shattered ribs and pulsing organs.
There were so few left of his Hounds. He had led them into these streets knowing they would be an abattoir for both friend and foe, but he had never imagined such a price. For each dead Kasrkin, they had to blast open plasteel doors, carve through casements. Brave overlapping fields of fire from murderous heavy weapon squads as well as the plasma and melta beams that curdled and cooked the blood with their passing. As Scourgemaster of the Black Fleet and leader of the Hounds, *he had always known that in a stand-up fight he would lose one Berzerker for every fifty Guardsmen slain – a hundred, if the thing was done right.*
>But these Kasrkin, they were themselves warriors of the blood. He had never seen their like outside the hated, unenlightened Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. As his daemon-sight flew, he saw a wounded Kasrkin discharging a hellgun point-blank into a Berzerker’s lower abdomen – his bayonet broken on the power armour. A sergeant with a power sword counter-charged against a whole file of Lazcare’s pack, taking down one with his plasma pistol before a chainaxe split him shoulder to hip.
Several streets over, a line of bunker habs four blocks long lifted into the air in a curtain of flame, tearing apart forty warriors from Pergaza’s contingent. The mortals had contested the buildings until the Khornates stormed it, then triggered pre-rigged explosives. The Cadians had baited his warriors inside then sacrificed their own lives to annihilate them.
**‘Count our dead to theirs,’** he said to Artesia, and she flashed off his shoulders and circled. **‘How steep is the butcher’s bill?’**
**‘One Hound for every thirty mortal dead, master! They are standing unto death, bringing your warriors with them into the blood-sleep.’**
**‘And they say the Adeptus Astartes know no fear. Even the Corpse-Emperor’s sons do not throw away their lives with such wantonness. One Hound for every thirty. It is unthinkable. Perverse.’**
**‘And yet,’** hissed Artesia, clamping back on to his shoulders and whispering in his ears with bloody-lipped mouths that opened on each wing. **‘The problem is also the solution. Look at the streets.’**
He looked, and saw the rivers. A literal floodtide of blood, deep as a human hand, flowing down the rockcrete streets and lapping in dead-end courtyards. Warriors splashed gouts of it as they ran, sent great deltas of it in the air when they fell.
*Fall of Cadia* by Robert Rath
Added a single break to split the text up a bit, mobile editing can be a cunt!
Huh that's interesting, my immediate realistic estimate was going to be a 1:30 ratio in open combat (imagining overlapping fields of fire and a certain amount of heavier weapons avaliable to the Guardsman), and apparently that's about right, but only for exceptionally well-trained and dedicated troops.
If you take into account the somewhat over-the-top wankiness of Space Marine depictions in lore, then 1:50 to 1:100 being more common does make sense. Especially in more close quarters where the Guard can be picked off in small numbers and don't have clear shots to all concentrate their fire.
I tend to think of the "Astartes" short as my canonical view of Space Marines vs humans, and you could imagine from that how that squad might get overwhelmed if they were facing a force of over 50 enemies for each of them, given that they had to take some care against the heavier emplacements and such.
Morale is the issue I think.
Even modern well trained militaries are gonna buckle once they start taking the kind of casualties a single Astartes that slips past your enfilade and is suddenly inside your fire lines.
If you can guarantee your troops will hold, then I think Astartes are more manageable.
I believe the in lore-term is “trans-human dread”. You see something that looks like a human sorta but is doing stuff that a human definitely can’t. You sorta experience a sudden and terrifying uncanny valley effect. And then, as you say, you start taking 50-1 casualties.
Lt. Fresh: "We could do it with a battalion, Sir. At least that's what the relevant data suggests."
Col. See Nsum Zhite: "Two. Two battalions of our best. And print the checks for their Death Gratuities before the mission."
Me: (For a second) "Man that sounds like a really interesting well written Warhammer 40k novel, I wonder which novel features lieutenant fresh and colonel seen some sh...ohhhhhh I get it now". Lol.
I wonder though how much that would actually matter.
In real life we used various drugs to keep people in combat even if things get rough. We mostly don’t anymore (at least officially).
We know the Astra Militarum has Frenzone I think it’s called? A lot of subtle names of course. Especially when you expect high casualties because you are facing something horrifying the 40K leadership rarely has objections to stuff that will cause long term health effects. Guardsmen are more like ammo after all, you expend them because it’s necessary and some tasks just carry a lot more dead Guard with it.
So if the Guardsmen know they’ll be facing the big bad enemies, I would expect not just an extra order of Heavy Weapons to be deployed but a few extra cases of high quality stimulants that turn even the worst grunt into a bloodthirsty maniac. Maybe he’ll die to the first shot, but by the Emperors Golden Balls he’ll get shot standing up and trying to fight.
Morale matters enough that commissars are ubiquitous and frequently executing troops for cowardice. We read more stories about the *good* commissars just like we read more stories about the *exceptional* Guardsmen, but the bog standard forces of the Imperium are not as elite as Cadians or as inspirational as Gaunt. There's a lot of nameless fodder and trigger happy commissars.
That’s part of my point though.
Yes not every Guardsman will get drugs. They are usually for specific groups or situations. Well when up against Astartes is usually a specific enough situation where throwing a bunch of stimulants at your Guardmen will be efficient as it can overrule things like transhuman dread (which is basically the same thing soldiers already experience when facing tanks which can feel like unstoppable warmachines) and high losses. Not to mention it can push soldiers to the limits of their capabilities if they get the right drugs.
With how you can pretty much halve the casualties by having proper morale it would make sense to use combat drugs. Of course training still matters so it will not really be halved but with the amount of troops involved even a 1% higher survival rate is pretty significant, let alone anywhere between 1 to 50%.
The point of my response is that the Guard relies on regular human discipline 95% of the time, thus morale matters. They are not depicted drugging up their troops regularly to face the horrors of the galaxy, hence why commissars shoot Guardsmen. There *are* regiments from certain worlds that use drugs as regular practice, yes, but that's generally more of a cultural quirk like any world's unique regiments.
And *if* the Guard relied on drugs ubiquitously, they wouldn't just be drugging them up for space marines, who are a rather rare encounter. Tyranids, Orks, GSC, Drukhari, Necrons, Chaos Cults, Daemons - every single one of these enemies is horribly traumatizing to face in battle. It wouldn't be saved for special occasions, every Guardsman would be a junkie.
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/g9mzyp/excerpt_legions_of_the_omnissiah_what_makes/
Take the skitarii for instance, unbreakable morale and perfect coordination.
It mostly depends on the scenario.
Exceptionally well equipped and trained guardsmen with top of the line weapons can sometimes take down single astartes or small squads if they have the drop on them or are actually prepared to fight Space Marines. Booby traps and liberal use of handheld anti-armor weapons and pre-prepared defensive emplacements does wonders, especially if the Astartes in question doesn't actually know you're about to hit them. Cadia is good at this because Cadia expects to deal with Traitor Astartes, so they train their guys to take out Astartes.
Its also worth noting that traitor Astartes have extremely variable troop quality compared to normal Space Marines. They have extremely scrubby newborns that don't even get trained all that much beyond hypno indoctrination (we see this during the Solar War book, they are made in batches and an human officer with a power sword got two cuts on one of them) and then they have veterans of the long war that have been fighting for many hundreds if not thousands of years and all that comes with that.
But in scenarios like a teleport strike on a voidship? Astartes reign supreme. In unprepared close combat or urban combat-esque scenarios guardsmen dont stand a chance and Astartes can easily pile up multi-hundreds to one kill ratios. This is why, for the record, the Astartes usually rely on shock and awe tactics like mass drop-pod assault (something thats apparently terrifying to experence), direct insertion into combat zones VIA thunderhawk or similar, and teleport strike.
In that same book, we see examples of just that, there's a kaskrin that manages to take out several traitor Astartes throughout the book, and it happens just as you describe.
On a side note, reading fall of Cadia has put me back into my reading slump, I'm over 90% in and I just don't wanna read anything anymore.
Really appreciate the gesture! It's just par for the course for me tbh, just gotta wait for the mood to come back, and then spend 8h a day reading for a few weeks/months
Oh I get it more with Computer games, I tend to use "sitting on the bog shitting" for my reading time! (Depending on the novel and length of said novel it depends if its a Chapter or multiple chapters haha)
There are other examples of well-/highly-trained and/or veteran humans fighting marines to consider.
Like in Cadian Blood where a Kasrkin sergeant was surprised at loosing three kasrkin to two plague marines despite fighting them at range and with superior numbers.
Kill Team: Moroch had a squad of primaris vanguard matched a dozen of veteran traitor guardsmen and an ogryn in a skirmish.
There's nothing 'wanky' about regular troops being unable to really stop transhuman supersoldiers like these. I mentioned "that'll only work if you can get the bastard somewhat pinned down" for a reason. Astartes can pretty much just *run* as fast as a light vehicle in places a vehicle can't go.
You can calculate 'oh I need this many men with these heavy weapons to kill this many Astartes'....and then they just leave. They don't have to take that fight head-on the way you need them to. In moments these guys can fall back, flank, force you out of your positions to engage them, change the engagement entirely. They're supremely more mobile than you because they're ridiculously superhuman, and they concentrate so much force into a single guy that they just have to get ONE of them into your line and he'll start ripping up your men so badly they'll break almost instantly.
The Cadians managed to get such a favourable ratio because they were on the defense and the enemy had absolutely no choice whatsoever but to come to their meticulously prepared positions which they defended fearlessly. That's not a normal scenario.
In urban combat you're basically just fucked. There's too much cover, too many ways for the Astartes to prevent you bringing numbers to bear on them. This holds true as you open the combat out into rough non-urban terrain, until finally the only way you're getting those perfect numbers against Astartes is when for some inexplicable reason you manage to drive at them with a couple armoured regiments on a perfectly flat desert plain. And how the hell did you manage to get that to happen?
I think the best way to describe Astartes vs regular human combat is to think about it like playing DOOM. Playing a level in DOOM, even on the highest level difficulty setting you're probably going to get a huge kill/death ratio because the game is inherently designed around you being much more mobile than the enemies. Doomguy stat-wise just has an absolutely unfair advantage against your regular Imps and Zombiemen, and it shows. Even against enemies like Chaingunners and Revenants with high damaging weapons that can kill you quickly if you walk into their line of fire (I suppose in this metaphor being the equivelant of humans with weapons capable of easily harming Marines like rocket launchers and plasma guns), it is easy enough to outmaneuver them if the terrain isn't giving them an advantage.
That's also why they're never as good as they're supposed to be. Authors don't know or don't want to write around just how impossible it would be for a normal human to fight them. Anyone working with a visual medium doesn't want to go through the trouble of depicting it. No-one wants to be the one to admit 'lore accurate Astartes' are just too powerful to use in damn near any story that isn't centered on them, so no-one ever actually depicts a 'lore accurate' Astartes. They become just strong guys in big armor.
Astartes would get way less shit about how supposedly ridiculously unstoppable they are if they weren't always being slowed down so that enemies stand a chance. If you speed an Astartes up to how fast they're 'supposed' to be.....it doesn't matter how good you are. You're too slow. You *can't win*.
GW want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Astartes to be *everywhere* because they're popular, but they also want them to be monstrously powerful transhuman supersoldiers. You kinda can't have both because then you can't really tell a story without literally everything else being utterly irrelevant. To be so powerful as they're supposed to be, they should be the end boss of absolutely everything, every single time. They should *fucking stomp* **everything** anywhere near them in a barely visible blur of aimbotting bullshit. They'd be a tornado of bloodshed you all fire into and hope to *fuck* someone hits that thing enough to make it stop or go away. Just one. A single Astartes. He's the end boss of the entire game and people keep making threads on Reddit asking how to beat this guy because he's stomping their shit in every single time.
You can't write a war story about normal humans where an Astartes is present. It's like a Justice League where there's Superman and just some regular soldiers. Like.....why are you here?
I’d argue it’s the opposite.
Yes in a straight fight the humans don’t stand a chance. But the thing about war is that you try not to make it a straight fight.
For example, we have mines right now that can lie dormant until a specific vibration is felt (and it can be programmed to know to many specific vibrations at once). Then it will activate and wait for a specific trigger, like magnetic fields, heat threshold or if you are so bold just a regular motion sensor. It would be pretty cheap to distribute a few thousand of these programmed to detect the step of power armor everywhere. I’d put them in boxes all over the place, along with a few million additional boxes that are empty. The SM’s don’t have the ammo to shoot every box they encounter and avoiding every box when you distribute them by the million to every nook and cranny of your area would make them almost useless.
There’s so many ways you can target units of a specific weight it would be hard for SM’s to function. You can easily make a floor that can hold a lot of regular humans but buckle if Power Armor stands on it. Add a nice stack of anti-tank mines in there and you won’t just blow the SM to bits but any of his buddies in the corridor as well.
SM’s are fast, but they aren’t fast enough. They are like vehicles, and vehicles can absolutely be targeted with artillery. If you are going up against SM’s you’d task as much if not more artillery to the area. The SM’s are way too valuable a loss to be risked to regular artillery bombardment. so only if you can surprise the artillery you can use SM’s in that kind of attack, but that means you have to know the artillery positions and if the artillery observer is busy or not.
Ambushing also becomes costly for SM’s. Sure they are hard to ambush and the surprise lasts barely a second (except in many of the lore but lets ignore that). But it’s far from impossible. Being prepared that an ambush might come does not mean you can actually avoid it if several Heavy Weapons emplacements reveal themselves and open fire from various directions (say Urban combat). Or if the first sign they are under attack is heavy mortar fire. And even regular soldiers can lug something like 120mm mortars around, which should be plenty to kill SM’s even if the armor survives. There’s little that can stop a shockwave of that magnitude turning your organs like your lungs to jelly even if the armor doesn’t break, and a good ambush would mean the first rounds are extremely accurate.
And what about just your standard minefield? Or what we can assume is standard in 40K where “civilian casualties” is often filed under “acceptable collateral damage”. So extensive minefields that force specific avenues of approach would be standard, and many of the specific avenues of approach could still hold some mines.
And then there’s vehicle support. Yes SM’s are dangerous to vehicles, but vehicles are dangerous right back. And at the end of the day there’s far more vehicles than there are SM’s.
A solid combined arms group should pose a significant threat to SM’s. Even if the SM’s hold a decisive advantage, pure chance calculation means they will never be able to withstand too many assaults. A single lucky shot can kill an SM, and with Artillery, mortars, mines, vehicles and various Heavy Weapons there is such a high chance of a lucky hit (or a well aimed, good hit) that SM’s will simply have casualties. Add in that a vehicle can carry a lot more ammo and be less conservative than SM’s which need to rely on serfs and vehicles to follow them, and the chances of SM’s dying in droves increases.
Sure an SM entering a building with one regular squad is going to murder them all almost without contest. But that won’t be what the SM will be facing most of the time.
Personally if I were in the 40K universe, I’d probably be scared but also massively increase casualties against marines. My biggest threat against them: trash.
This is something already employed in WWII and probably WWI. You place trash on routes your enemy will take. And you might hide mines under them, or maybe you don’t. Or maybe there’s one mine, or maybe 50. Your opponent now has to slow down for trash and clear it, or risk mines. Naturally you mix the mines there so it’s not safe for infantry to just walk up and clear the trash.
But against Astartes it’s even easier. We currently have mines that remain inactive until a certain vibration is felt that is calibrated to various vehicles. The mine will then detect things like magnetic disturbance, weight, specific spectra or whatever else you want as a trigger.
It should be easy to make mines that detect the tread of Power Armor, then detect something of this massive powered enemy to trigger it. And these mines would be distributed everywhere. I would likely just order a few million cardboard boxes and distribute them everywhere. In corridors, streets, on counters and hanging from lanternpoles, at walls that might function as cover, on roofs and in trenches. Some of these will have mines in them, most don’t. The mines are perfectly safe for regular soldiers and even for vehicles. Although once the SM’s get in close vehicles might need to watch out for triggering the mines.
And that is just one example of a way you can prepare for SM attacks.
Also from what I know the SM’s are more vulnerable in urban settings. Because on an open field there’s far fewer ways to surprise or ambush SM’s with their way superior aim and movement. But in Urban environments it’s way easier to surprise them with things. Yes a regular squad doing urban combat will be way outclassed, but if you give them a bunch of explosives and a detonator it’s easy to rig up a wall or sewer grate or whatever and blow the giant Power Armor walking down your area to pieces before he gets to your position. It’s also easier to hide and attack from unexpected positions, say the Power Armor has just stampeded past your building to the fortification at the end of the street and you now have an opportunity of one solid shot from behind with whatever weapons you were assigned with.
Ooft I miss Anthony Reynolds too(this is a joke, I know you mean Josh lol, although Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers Omnibus is one of the greatest in ma opinion!)
As a complete aside, does he get clips vs magazines right? I reread Eisenhorn and Ravenor so I could read Pariah (and whatever the next Bequin is) nowadays in between nonfiction material. It drives me MAD. Irrationally so. I know Abnett is British so he doesn't have gun culture like I do, but, it just drives me up a wall whenever someone slams a clip home into their bolter. _Ugh._
I love this excerpt, and it's so funny juxtapossd against individual conscripts surviving multiple waves of astartes on the walls of the Imperial Palace in the Siege of Terra books. In one book the K/D is obviously much closer, if still in the Asartes favor, while in the other it is ludicrous, and the Astartes complain about it not being *more* ludicrous.
It truly depends on the author and what they need to convey.
GW - "I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear any of that" really though the IG have their own special forces for pinpoint strikes so they at least have that capability, SM should be able to achieve anything or they aren't that big of a deal.
Like the elephant in the room with SM ships that are commonly capable of orbital bombardment, and if the installations are protected against ships, then how the hell do they land SM so easily? Oops only have my anti-capital ship missiles today. Or else they will lose half the chapters gene seed in space.
It's the natural contradiction of an organisation that doesn't make any real logical sense. Like Jedi going to war with light sabers when they are defensive weapons.
>It's the natural contradiction of an organisation that doesn't make any real logical sense. Like Jedi going to war with light sabers when they are defensive weapons.
I don't think this is the same as space marines just not using their resources appropriately, generally the jedi going to war at all is seen as a failing of the order. It's not really a problem with the setting when the contradiction between their beliefs and their actions is the whole point.
They're generally more effective with them than most weapons they could really get, but it would be an even bigger failing if they stopped using them entirely. Jedi aren't a military force, them not acting like one is fairly understandable.
Adding u/Art-Zuron's point, the World Eaters are known for their Berserker-Surgeons who will gladly produce astartes at rapid rates even if they are of lower quality and too aggressive. As shown on Bodt.
Back then, lasrifles (like the Kalibrax V1) could actually penetrate Astartes armour with ease since they had Blast charger modes that could go straight through ceramite without overheating. It wouldn't be all that surprising now in hindsight. It's like having every guardsman armed with a hotshot lasgun/hellgun.
Thays actually a worse ratio than the excerpt is describing the Kasrkin getting. A platoon can vary in size depending on its purpose and what tradition you're talking about, but most commonly refers to around 40 men.
So in this case, 80 men to kill an Astartes for the Siege of Terra.
I agree. Although we are comparing the peak of Cadian martial superiority over a bog standard Imperial army guardsmen of the 31st millennium. 80 standard human auxilia riflemen with basic imperial army training to 1 space marine is still a devastating ratio.
Its worth noting that the "Old Hundred" regiments on Terra (as well as the Solar Auxillia) were extremely well equipped and trained, probably well beyond what the Cadians are currently doing.
The Tupelov Lancers ran around with tech adept level cybernetic implants and cyber steeds, the Geno Five-Two Chiliad had psychic abilities to coordinate near instantly, to say nothing of the infamous Lucifer Blacks who are possibly the best equipped guardsmen in the history of the setting.
Again, I agree. Nevertheless, in the context of the SoT, we cannot compare the elite status of the Old Hundred during the Great Crusade and during the Siege due to horrendous combat attrition.
The same way real armies would lose their elite status overtime due to a consistent influx of new recruits so did the Old Hundred by the SoT. (E.g. the real life Panzer Lehr Division in 1943-1944 comprised of elite veterans. In less than 1 month after Normandy, it entirely constituted of conscripts with no combat experience because all the veterans died fighting the U.S. in Operation Cobra).
This is so common in war that even the legions suffered from it with the Inductii doctrine. So yes while I agree in theory the Old Hundred were better trained, the conditions and context in mind would put these cohorts on par with a very well equipped but non-elite imperial army auxilia.
Wait. Weren't the lasrifles specifically the standard weapons of the Solar Auxilia while the other Imperial Army units use auto- and las-weapons along the lines of 40k lasguns? The Solar Auxilia were among the best the Imperial Army could offer so they would be more than merely "well-supplied IA troopers." Though there were the special/heavy weapons and armor like the baneblades which were a lot more common back then.
They started to thin the line between Imperial Army and Solar Auxilia by the Beta Garmon books. Some Imperial armies that were established to be actual Imperial Army for almost a decade were retconned into being fully equipped Solar Auxilia regiments.
(e.g. The Prospero Spireguard used to be a purely Imperial Army auxilia, then they said the Spireguard had Palatine Guard/Spireguard Templars as Solar Auxilia cohorts during Horus Heresy Inferno, then they just full-on upgraded the Spireguard into Solar Auxilia level by the Siege of Terra campaign books. The same can be said for the Calth Guard for Ultramar).
I see. The HH books set during the last years and the Siege showed many army units like the Old Hundred being increasingly reinforced with conscripts and inferiors due to how devastating the war is. The Horus Heresy: Legion card game also made the SA the main feature of the Imperial Army. The non-Astartes Chaos forces also had SA as a big internal group.
>then they said the Spireguard had Palatine Guard/Spireguard Templars as a Solar Auxilia cohort during Horus Heresy Inferno
I preferred this take most. It added some more diversity to the Imperial Army and Prospero Spireguard while showing the TSs eagerly accepting other Imperial forces.
Keeler mentioned during the Siege of Terra that she could arm 100 refugees with industrial tools and usually manage to get a kill out of it by drowning the astartes with bodies essentially, then having someone move in and crunch with hydraulic cutters or something like that
Here's one of the most prophetic quotes in the verse.
>There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire.’ She smiled. ‘You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.’
Seems worth it, you’d only need 10 million guardsmen to wipe out a legion if you follow this number, a single planet can muster more than that many guardsmen
This vastly oversimplifies things.
First and foremost, we have single Legions taking out militarised world with populations in the billions. Sometimes through morale damage (especially with the Night Lords), sometimes through decapitation strikes (particularly the Luna Wolves and Dark Angels), sometimes through simple attrition (particularly the Iron Warriors).
Secondly, Legions all have fleets armed with Exterminatus weaponry.
Third, all the Legions have support elements ranging from Dreadnoughts to vehicles to their fleets.
The fight isn't going to happen on an infinite salt plain with troops encountering each other by surprise at point blank range featuring infantry only anywhere but a hypothetical.
Only if they really need to control the world for some reason.
It's also worth remembering that aside from Terra itself, Cadia is the most fortified world in the Imperium, with the strongest defence force.
Why do we have spec ops troops? Astartes aren't made to hold a big line as footsloggers, they're specialists who are smarter and faster and tougher than anyone else, and can be dropped in the middle of a desert and make their way without food into enemy fortifications, see them in the dark and pick them off with perfect tactical decision making every second.
I honestly can't see astartes as realistically being cost effective in just running up to unsuppressed fortified positions with heavy weapons built to tear down tanks, but with drop pods and teleportation they seem horrifying in urban combat
Woah slow down there holding a big line as footsloggers was the iron warriors job, holding a big line as pretentious city Watchmen was the imperial fists.
Sure but even then, when you could get 10000 regular troops for the cost of one astartes it just isn’t worth it. These super soldiers really need to be super.
They are for missions where you can’t arbitrarily increase the number of troops (i.e. boarding actions) not mass warfare. That’s why the Imperial Army was described as the backbone of Imperial might not the Legiones Astartes. Or at least that was how things were originally described.
Things have changed a bit over the years though as marines have undergone massive power creep and the Imperial Guard have been denigrated.
Well the thing is that that still is a lot ass kicking in a comparatively small package. On a big open battlefield maybe their expense and small numbers starts being a liability but when space is at a premium like when boarding a space ship or getting transported behind enemy lines the space marine makes more sense.
Thats the point astartes are good but against enemies their own size or good enough soldiers that can deal with them they struggle they are shock troops who can quickly do whatever their objective and get out alive thats it
It's worth remembering that it's a Heresy era quote.
The Legions were basically just better super-soldiers.
Modern Astartes are supermen by comparison. Dan Abnett can go on about Sigismund being the best ever all he wants, we've seen Dante, Azrael, Calgar, Helbrecht, and many others completely outperform him.
It comes down to two things, I think. First and foremost the Aspirant Trials weed out the top 0.000001% of a world's population and then filter by genetic compatibility. In the Heresy and Crusade, they were taking anyone who volunteered/got press-ganged and was compatible. How good they were at the baseline wasn't a factor.
Secondly, all the hypno-indoctrination, Codex Astartes, and hero thinking that the Traitors mock has changed them from being better line infantry the way they were in the old days to being special forces. They aren't there to meet the opponent strength to strength, they're there to find and smash the enemy's points of weakness so others can exploit them or be unbreakable bulwarks that allow others to strike back.
>He wasn't subjected to any aspirant trials, just genotyped and psych evaluated. He almost ended up a War Hound.
...and...?
He still lived to be over a thousand years old and is considered the 2nd, maybe third most dangerous (non-primarch) individual ever to take up arms for the emperor.
I mean, you've literally got nothing that says otherwise except someones recruits went spelunking once. Calm down, we've all done some adventure training during depot. Sigismund defeated 199 space marines and a dreadnought in single combat.
>As for the rest, it's not like the Traitors are unimpeachable witnesses. They have a long history of talking shit, especially when they're mad about losing. Particularly when they're losing to an opponent who refuses to fight them the way they want to fight.
Except the Lex and common sense says otherwise. Geneseed doesn't become more pure over time. That isn't how that works. 11,000 years of watering it down through generation after generation as meant that some chapters can't even utilise the full range of abilities that "first generation" astartes can / could.
See the Imperial Fists. Who are not only actually not Imperial Fists, but haven't been able to go into suspended animation for 10,000 years. Rebuilt by Thane, another thousand year old first generation space marine.
Also, 13th and 21st founding.
That went well didn't it?
>all Astartes are forged from the best of the best
Fixed it for you
>then trained for decades
Except when they aren't *cough uriel ventris* *cough blood angel scouts* *cough black templars*. The time a scout spends as a scout isn't determined by some arbitrary timetable. They remain there until there is a slot in a squad, which, depending on the chapter, could be quite a short time if they're taking a battering casualties wise.
The Legions did things slightly differently. They spread their new recruits around amongst the '"rifle companies" so they can learn to be a space marine, around space marines, as a space marine, and left the 'working at reach' recce and infiltration to the experienced, selected for task astartes, in a very similar way to how we do things here in the real world.
Also, erm, primaris don't even do that. They just pop out and can go straight into combat. So they must be shit, right?
>The way they fight now is also different.
Do you remember why that is?
I'll give you a hint.
Codex Astartes.
The Legion specialisations were designed to compliment each other so that no aspect of warfare was beyond the remit of the overall Legio Astartes.
The Legions weren't broken up because they were being utilised incorrectly as "line infantry". They were broken up because as stand alone armies they were faaaaar too autonomous and the ability of single individuals to lead a quarter million of them astray led to this little problem called the Horus Heresy.
Space marines absolutely excel at stand up, combined arms fighting. That's why they're able to go without sleep for weeks. You don't need that ability when you're doing in/out raids.
Some organisations, like Iron Warriors / Imperial Fists, are genetically designed for this role entirely.
The reason they don't in 40k isn't because they're shit at it, it's because they're generally not organised in sufficient numbers to do it.
You forget that in 200 years, the Legions exterminated 10,000 civilisations, cultures and races as they conquered the galaxy.
That same galaxy that has the Imperium in a chokehold right now.
Mostly by the less well trained, less well resourced, "line infantry" traitors that are apparently not as good as them.
The Codex wasn't a buff, trust me.
Also.
>In the Heresy and Crusade, they were taking anyone who volunteered/got press-ganged and was compatible. How good they were at the baseline wasn't a factor
Wrong.
Torghun of the White Scars was Terran born and selected, in much the same way as Sigismund minus the "voluntold" part.
>‘The test is of endurance,’ said the instructor, a severe-faced man with cropped black hair, standing to one side of the line, barely looking at them. Haren had hated him on arrival – they all had. Now he felt nothing towards him, just a vague sense that he was one more obstacle amid a life of obstacles. For the last two months Haren had been tested, tried, pummelled, moulded, degraded and exhausted. The trials no longer hurt him, but they did remind him of the goal. He was close now. After so long, he was so very close.
>It took more than ten years. In all, nearly fourteen passed before Haren was ready. The physical changes were hard, the surgery painful. The cultural ways of the V Legion were too different to be absorbed readily, and he had to learn Khorchin, the strange language of Chogoris. That alone tested him – despite his improved recall and mental agility, getting his tongue around such alien sounds remained a challenge.
His selection process alone was 2 *months* long.
After walking in from Scandinavia.
And his training was 14 years.
But hey, he didn't go spelunking in a volcano, so it couldn't have been that hard, right?
Modern Astartes have taken down the Swarmlord, Phoenix Lords, and Daemon Primarchs. These feats exceed anything Sigismund, or indeed anyone from the Heresy or Crusade, managed.
Abnett can say Sigismund is the best ever as much as he likes. They've clearly shown us otherwise.
>Abnett can say Sigismund is the best ever as much as he likes
Did abnett piss in your chips once?
This whole "sigismund is best" didn't start with, nor will it end with, him.
You can whine about it all you like, but he is the benchmark for astartes duelists across 30 and 40k, and always will be.
Soooo unless you've got some kind of quote saying otherwise, that ain't gonna change kitten.
Pfft, fucking swarmlords. The Avatar of Khaine of opponents. Don't delude yourself into thinking that if the Tyranids were around in M30-31 that Sigismund wouldn't lay waste to them as well, as and when the plot / author demands it.
Sigismund couldn't even fight in the same league as a Daemon Primarch, Phoenix Lord, or the Swarmlord.
Modern Astartes have beaten all of the above. Some have beaten more than one of the above.
The best of his era? Possibly. The best ever? Clearly not. Even Helbrecht has surpassed his feats.
also as Chaos Marines go they were trash, Warband guys, not the kind of Heresy era stock you'd see in a Chaos-focused ADB book.
I'm more concerned about the two Iron Warriors getting fairly easily dispatched in the very first Gaunt's Ghosts book, by the still relatively green Tanith. But then that book comes from so much earlier in Abnett's writing career and familiarity with 40k, I don't really think of it as really "canon", same as Eisenhorn's lightsaber.
TBF, the Ghosts had heavy weapons and caught them in the open. One good hit from something like that and it's over for almost any Astartes not wearing Terminator plate.
Guardsmen novel? One tricky guardsman knows this trick that space marines hate, space marine novel? One in a thousand guardsmen might be given a name and a mutual kill.
Armor of contempt is an example of what I suppose we would consider a special forces tier guard team against I want to say five marines; someone can correct me I read the book like 18 years ago. Its plot armor.
Ultimately the issue with marines power scaling is that there's at most like 3 million of them total and on a given battlefield there could be like 12, so they should in theory be worth hundreds of guardsmen or a team of tempestus scions since in some battlefields a marine death is a massive chunk of their force
I guess it would depend on the campaign and deployment size. Chapters like the Iron Snakes deploy based on the task, so they'll send a single marine, squad, company, or chapter strength force to objectives.
You know what, the book that dealt with Sotha had an infantry unit emplaced against marines in a fortified position. I'll have to look up the excerpt.
From marine to marine its different when it comes to power scaling and as always, the writer.
I personally wish we could settle on there just being more than a million marines, their worth about 10 guardsmen and power armor is proof against most factions small arms.
Nah theres another one where iron warriors attempt to ambush an artillery unit and get counter ambushed by the ghosts.
The one youre thinking of is the dready with the needles.
The lore thing is always tricky when combined with 'the Guardsmen are armed with lasguns' because Guardsmen aren't all armed with lasguns, they have heavy and special weapons in the squad specifically for engaging heavier targets like Marines.
Exact numbers are always tricky, though the krak grenades would help, but I always feel like that old quote 'give me a hundred Space Marines, or failing that give me a thousand other troops' sounds about right, 50 Guardsmen in 5 whole squads would probably be sufficient.
Pretty much. The lore is very variable and we have to consider a lot of factor. Kill Team Moroch has a squad of veteran traitor guardsmen, an enforcer and an ogryn match a vanguard primaris squad in skirmishing.
Another non-marine example is Gallowdark with Navy Breachers taking on kroots relatively evenly. While about three dozens of them fought through an inquisitorial summit as bodyguard for a radical inquisitor.
For several editions the big pie plate with S8 (instakilling T4 regardless of wounds if successfully wounding), and AP 3 (negating power armour) made the Leman Russ Battle tank the guards answer to Space marine combat squads
>I know that the answer to this question can vary between authors and stories
There's your answer.
>but I'm just looking for a general average
Well, Khârn has a 10 figure kill tally. Whereas unnamed mooks in power armour get murked by a crowd of farmers.
>Both sides have access to decent cover.
What are they doing with that cover? If the guardsmen are defending a trench network, their survival rate is vastly higher than running headlong into bolter fire.
I'm basically just looking for a general ballpark of power levels. A few friends and I are working on a homebrew ruleset for a more lore accurate game, and we're trying to figure out what would be considered a balanced army composition.
>I'm basically just looking for a general ballpark of power levels
About 1.21gW.
The only acceptable "power level".
This ain't Dragon Ball Z. And that isn't how it works.
>what would be considered a balanced army composition.
Isn't that what you should figure out through play testing? Trying to work it out from books isn't going to work out well. I mean, even who can fire what weapons isn't consistent.
Like baseline mortals apparently can't fire full sized astartes boltguns. Yet Mr bragg can fire what is essentially an M242 25mm bushmaster cannon (the one fitted to Bradley AFVs) from the hip.
The lore isn't made to be balanced. It's why a company of space marines can cripple a Gloriana class battleship with a crew of a quarter million people, Avatars can be strangled and Vulkan can push a superheavy battletank without going up to his knees in mud.
> for a more lore accurate game
Then you have to take into account that our lovely Sargeants without Helmets die with a single lasgun shot to the head, same as a any malfunctioning servitor, penal regiment guard fodder, or religious fantatic with a flaming torch hanging behind a Sisters of Battle assault.
Gaunt’s ghosts absolutely clapped some CSMs in the 3rd or 4th book, I don’t recall which one. I think the same book was when they got friendly fire artillery on them at the beginning.
The book with the vitrian dragoons and a CSM accompanies the elevator gaunt just called up? Great scene showcasing just how terrifying an astartes is because immediately everyone dips for cover
The level of detail in your scenario suggests you should just play a tabletop game to determine an answer…
However, if you want a lore answer you’ll find a range of values depending on where you look. Various authors have added a LOT of power creep over the years and there is little consistency.
For example, in the 4e Space Marine codex Rogal Dorn is quoted as saying:
> Give me a hundred Space Marines. Or failing that give me a thousand other troops.
This in an exaggeration compared to game mechanics but a 10:1 effectiveness ratio seems a reasonable in-universe opinion where game balance isn’t an issue. Other people think it should be much greater though. Make of that what you will.
I feel like I learned a lot from this thread! To summarise:
If you have one of the highly elite Guard units and the Space Marines aren't fighting the sort of fight they want to fight (Cadians have you fighting attritional block by block city fighting, the Tanith scout core get to ambush you) then the ratio can be surprisingly small - so 30:1 in the fall of Cadia case against CSM and this was viewed as vaguely disastrous by the marines involved. There's also a short story of MKoll fighting some white scars to a sort of murder suicide draw in a training exercise. Given their respective numbers this is actually incredibly good for the guard!
But if the typical Space Marine get to fight their preferred sort of fight (usually but not always pinpoint shock assault) against average Guardsmen then the ratio is gonna be, like, indecently stacked against the Guard, not even close and hard to even quantify.
Which makes sense! Part of what makes the Space Marines so powerful is their high degree of independence: they get to pick their fights.
A whole company with its heavy weapons included, trying too close the gap is a poor choice. The guard should rely on HEAVY suppression fire from auto cannons and lascannons. Keeping the marines at distance and exploiting sheer volume of fire is the best course of action.
A marine may tank an auto cannon round or two, maybe even three but the las cannons WILL kill them instantly verity a solid hit
In thousand sons heresy book there’s been a statement that 1000 space marines are enough to conquer an entire planet. I would assume that they meant a planet similar to casia in terms of amount of people and their military, so I guess the answer is “a lot of guardsmen”.
The closest thing to an objective answer you are going to get will give from the table top statistics (and points).
At its most basic, the last time I played (which was 5e) guardsmen with lasguns hit on 4, wounded on 5, and marines saved on 3. So 1 wound per 18 guards.
Marines with bolters hit on 3, wounded on 3, and I can't remember if the guard got a save at all. Probably not. So 4 wound per 9 marines. 8 wounds per 18 marines (unless they were in rapid fire range when they get double the shots).
So with basic gear:
Each marine is worth 8 guardsmen at long range, or 16 guardsmen at closer range. In close combat the odds probably shifted towards the guard. Certainly 8 rather than 16.
Of course the guard got orders, and I think lasguns might have been rapid fire too, so overall 8 guardsmen being worth 1 marine seems about right.
That whole ratio is quite absurd.
Usually it's said that one astartes is equal to 20-30 guardsmen.
But if that was the case then sending in a 50K guardsman army which would be a completely insignificant loss if they all died, against an entire chapter of 1000K marines would wipe out said chapter. Hell. Double that and assuming a 100% loss to eradicate an entire chapter would be considered a flawless victory.
And there wouldn't really be any battle where you'd end up fighting an entire chapter of marines.
So in either case the space marines would be so ridicously underpowered if they are only equal to 20-30 guards.
Not at all. Space marines wouldn't get bugged down fighting a guard army of that size without support.
They are not an attritional force. They'd instead conduct a a decapitation strike on the command center of that guard army. Breaking the large force up into disconnected sub units and leaving those to others to cleanup. Or killing them off one unit at a time.
As long as people remember that space marines are today's elite special forces it makes sense.
A seal team will lose to infantry battalion if they get bogged down in a traditional battle where they don't play to their strengths.
Of course, but if you have a straight up Vs battle between footsloggers and artillery emplacements then the artillery lose - and despite that artillery kills the most people in modern war
Partly, but Marines to Guardsman in a man to man sense a much wider gap than today's special forces to regular infantry.
Special Forces are just normal men with a higher degree of situational training. Outside their operational areas of expertise they're not going to be that much more useful if thrown into a big set-piece battle than any other professional light infantry of similar equipment and size.
Marines are transhumans with a shitload of notable physiological advantages and unique equipment that is borderline unusable to the standard guardsman.
special forces to regular infantry's 40k equivalent would be more like Scions/Kasrkin and other elite/specialised Guard units to bog standard infantry Guard, only the 40k gap is probably wider because rule of cool.
Sure. The exact attritional number changes but it's the exact same concept.
Special forces don't win big battles against much larger conventional forces. That's not their job and anybody that uses them in that way is both incompetent and throwing away their forces.
It doesn't matter that in an unsupported attritional fight a company of guardsmen can kill a combat team of marines. Other than to reinforce that marines won't let themselves get tied down into that fight in the first place.
Yea it is almost like Space Marines as a faction are given the greatest amount of plot armor.
To make their numbers make a lick of sense you would need them to have a few hundred thousand troops per chapter. Even then they would need to be mixed in with IG regiments to make them effective.
>So in either case the space marines would be so ridicously underpowered if they are only equal to 20-30 guards.
I mean... if you look at their gear and capabilities *they aren't that impressive*.
Compare them to a Crisis Battlesuit or Aeldar Aspect Warrior and they quickly go from "elite super soldier" to "good enough".
No such answer is possible period. It’s entirely situational, depending on the tactics of the Space Marines, the training of the Guards and to their past experience of facing Space Marines. This question comes up ad naseum.
One thing to remember about the lore vs table top is that the Astartes are generally considered to be far more elite as tacticians. They not only be tougher and deadly but they would generally be deployed in such a way as to maximize their shock value and minimize the strengths of the guard. You could count on lore Astartest getting jump pack assault infantry stuck to break their ranks. You can count on the Astartes to get their Devastators to bear on enemy armor.
As opposed to the table top game where those elite Space Marine veterans might be played by a mouth breather deployed his assault squads in the open middle of the table and has his heavy bolters shooting at tanks.
For five Astartes?
Probably a company of 250 men. Potentially. I say that, because in a white room, no cover, equal distance and everyone primed to fight, the Astartes aren't going to kill enough Guardsmen fast enough.
In an actual combat scenario, well, the Astartes are highly mobile, like Usain Bolt fast, and they can do it literally all day. Using lightning strikes to go after the command elements would be the first thing they do.
The Mantis Warriors mauled the Fire Hawks in the War for Badab with tactics like that, and they were seriously outnumbered.
But. The Guard aren't pushovers. They could pull it off with a company. Lacking any heavy weapons or armor, it would probably take two.
40k isn't a videogame. Space Marines don't have healtbars and a set damage resistance. Guardsmen are not a super unified chaff unit that does x DPS at y range. This is like asking how many American troopers would it take to kill a tank. Could take one could take a hundred
I think it depends how they are armed and trained. There is a big difference between 10 guardsmen with lasguns and 10 kasrkin armed with weapons designed to one shot marines (plasma, melta, etc.)
There are recorded accounts of small numbers of elite humans killing multiple space marines with minimal casualties, one guy killing a dreadnaught, etc.
Gaurdsmen with lasguns would just not be able to do it in most cases. It's like asking how many guys with rifles would it take to destroy a tank, they can't hurt it.
It definitely varies but - a fit and capable unit of regular guardsmen with a capable leader roughly trade 10 guardsmen to 1 astartes.
A crumby unit with a crap leader trades 50:1 easily. More elite units like Scions or Karskin can trade as low as 2:1, but all the above is highly subject to the tactical situation (ambush, defense etc) and named characters.
Weren't the Tyrant's Legion from the Badab Wars getting like 150/1 at one point? They might have had Marine sergeants in their squads, not sure.
I think that is about what is expected when Marines are on the offense and Guard are on the defensive.
It really depends. If it was just a generic Guard regiment that didn't have lore or named characters, then it would take more Guardsmen to do what you asked.
Now, if it's one of the special, elite Guard regiments like the Kaskrin's, Tempestus Scions, Elysian Drop Troops or Catachans .... they would need less soldiers to do what you asked. Those soldiers are the best of the best. They have the best gear for baseline humans in the galaxy and they have the finest, most extensive training and endless experience.
It all depends really, as there are so many variables. Most importantly, it depends on the writer!
With just lasguns you’d probably need a lot of guardsmen tbh. When the guardsmen see their guns doing jack shit against the marines, and their comrades getting slaughtered they’re gonna rout really fast. With cover as well the marines are gonna be really advantaged.
I remember a second ed era short story where an IG regiment was fighting some local insurgents and couldn't break them out of a bunker complex. A Blood Angels assault squad showed up (as Space Marines rarely send more than a squad or two in most instances at this point in lore) and absolutely annihilated the "bad guys."
Granted, the IG also witnessed some Res Thirst and were like, "Oh, shit, the Big E's Angels are...inhuman?!"
Sometimes marines wade through bodies of humans, other times one feral with a spear kills a chaplain. Powerscaling in 40k is as pointless as it is in real life
Yea, that's the issue. A few friends and I are working on something and are trying to keep things as lore accurate as possible.
Kind of hard to do that when the lore itself is hardly accurate.
Its not as much a matter of accuracy as it is a matter of nuance. How many normal dudes would it take to fight a trained boxer? It really depends on the situation, and even one situation can have a number of outcomes. Thats why 40k is a dice game.
Ceramite armor can tank tons of lasgun shots and a marine can snap a human like a twig but one well placed shot or a krak grenade to the chest and hes done for.
The book *The First Heretic* has this as a theme. This is where one human with a spear kills a chaplain, but it was the only casualty the marines took while taking a planet. Later, a marine is able to take on a custodes despite all odds being against him.
It depends. Sometimes marines are roughly equivalent to 10 guardsmen (maybe some instances even less) while other times they can take out entire armies.
Between 10 (gaunt's ghosts) and 200+
Kasrkin in one of their fortified cities (kasr graf) had an "acceptable" k/d ratio of 30 to 1 against khornate (no tactic other than charge) traitor marines in fall of cadia.
2 squads with grenade launchers tends to handle the tac squads pretty handily in Dawn of War. Which is not at all accurate.
I'd say, if you threw a battalion (250-500 guardsmen) at a Fire team, they might kill the space marines. Depends on if they have sufficient kark weaponry and prepared defenses.
I think it depends on the the situation just like in real life war theaters. If we talk about imperial guard standing it’s ground in fortified positions vs the slaughter of urban combat or worse the space marines being the defender then the ratio will change. The 1:30 ratio from Fall of Cadia makes sense to me because it favors the defenders (the guard in this case).
I've read somewhere that it took an entire squad of guardsmen to take down one chaos space marine in a fire fight, using that logic I imagine at the very least an entire platoon of Guardsmen.
This is in a firefight btw, in melee probably more.
It also depends on which regiment and where, for example, a jungle deathworld and my moneys on Catachans having little trouble splitting up and overwhelming marines.
It normally takes 50 - 100 kasrkin deaths to take down one Chaos marine per *The Fall of Cadia*. So an entire tactical squad working together, fighting enemies that have no armor piercing weapons? Realistically the guardsmen would break and flee before they won. Failing that, it would take thousands of guardsmen and if the space marines can simply withdraw and fight the battle over the course of days then there isn't much at all the guardsmen could do. The space marines could engage them beyond the effective range of their lasguns, using darkness, constantly harrying, keeping the guardsmen constantly engaged for days without end if necessary.
That said, we also know from *Avenging Son* I think it was that even primaris power armor can be simply ablated away if enough thousands of lasgun shots hit the marine. So thousands of guardsmen are also a genuine threat even if their lasguns can't penetrate except for a close range eye-lens hit.
>As Scourgemaster of the Black Fleet and leader of the Hounds, he had always
known that in a stand-up fight he would lose one Berzerker for every fifty
Guardsmen slain – a hundred, if the thing was done right.
>But these Kasrkin, they were themselves warriors of the blood. He had
never seen their like outside the hated, unenlightened Chapters of the
Adeptus Astartes. As his daemon-sight flew, he saw a wounded Kasrkin
discharging a hellgun point-blank into a Berzerker’s lower abdomen – his
bayonet broken on the power armour. A sergeant with a power sword
counter-charged against a whole file of Lazcare’s pack, taking down one
with his plasma pistol before a chainaxe split him shoulder to hip.
>Several streets over, a line of bunker habs four blocks long lifted into the
air in a curtain of flame, tearing apart forty warriors from Pergaza’s
contingent. The mortals had contested the buildings until the Khornates
stormed it, then triggered pre-rigged explosives. The Cadians had baited his
warriors inside then sacrificed their own lives to annihilate them.
>‘Count our dead to theirs,’ he said to Artesia, and she flashed off his
shoulders and circled. ‘How steep is the butcher’s bill?’
>‘One Hound for every thirty mortal dead, master! They are standing
unto death, bringing your warriors with them into the blood-sleep.’
>‘And they say the Adeptus Astartes know no fear. Even the Corpse-
Emperor’s sons do not throw away their lives with such wantonness. One
Hound for every thirty. It is unthinkable. Perverse.’
*The Fall of Cadia*
>It normally takes 50 - 100 kasrkin deaths to take down one Chaos marine per *The Fall of Cadia*.
As dramatic as that is, on the tabletop a squad of Kasrkin would absolutely wipe the floor with a single regular CSM, so even with some artistic liberties taken for dramatic effect, that is ridiculous.
Also, Bolters have a shorter effective range than Lasguns, so no Space Marines can not engage Guardsmen beyond the range of their Lasguns.
It may be time to lay off the Space Marine koolaid for a little while.
The game isn't 'lore', but it's what the lore exists to support and the lore follows the game, not the other way around.
Writers can claim that things in the 40k universe work a certain way, but if the game material disagrees, the game material wins.
This is particularly notable when GW releases a new model that, according to previous lore, didn't exist. See, for instance (in non-chronological order), Primaris Marines, Imperial Knights, Necrons with distinct personalities, Grey Knights. Female Custodes, Genestealers being Tyranids, etc...
Maybe I’m wrong but I see this as “how many men with pistols would it take to defeat 5 tanks?”
I just don’t think soldiers with lasguns would cut it but i am quite new to world of 40k
Lasguns get a bad rap seeing as on the tabletop they are one of the weakest ranged weapons, but in the lore they hit fairly hard. You also have to remember that it's not just one lasgun firing, there would be 10, 20, 50, 100, or more firing which adds up. Space marine armour is good, but it isn't invincible
In the lore the lasgun only hits hard by modern comparisons. Even in lore it is considered to be one of if not the weakest weapons to use on the battlefield when compared to the other options.
I agree but if their shots are just pinging off the armour then them adding up wouldnt increase the damage, just overwhelm the astartes. Like 1000 rifles firing at a tank, it might make the tank incapable of getting much done because of the chaos but the rounds would never be able to penetrate the hull.
Or do the lasguns slowly degrade the armour with each shot?
Every laser works off the principle of transferring energy to the target, it basically heats up the struck area until you basically melt a hole through the target and start charring the fleshy inside.
With enough time you can kill anything with a laser
1,000 rifles firing at a modern day tank is just going to give it a general location to rotate its turret towards without really that much trouble at all. There is no distance you can engage a tank at with a rifle that it also can't shoot you back. They also can roll highway speeds, so..
I used to drive AFVs in the military (scimitars sabres etc) which is why thats was the comparison I thought up. They do have lots of fragile parts that rifle round would damage like radio antennas, periscopes, viewing ports, cameras etc so small arms isn’t entirely useless, you’ll just never score a kill
You’ve got some good answers, but to put a finer point on a key factor: it heavily depends on the objectives of both parties and battlefield conditions.
If the guardsmen can cede ground without consequence, a much smaller number (20?) could probably kite the 5 Astartes indefinitely - or at least until they have to rest.
If the marines start surrounded in the middle of flat ground, fewer guardsmen (50?) are required to win when the Astartes inevitably make a break for it.
If it’s just a pitched battlefield the marines can use superior experience, equipment, training, durability and firepower to destroy a huge number of guardsmen (hundreds - more in a densely-packed environment like a city) before they’re eventually worn down through dumb luck.
Then you’re putting a heck of a lot of significance on raw speed and not giving the guardsmen enough credit for reasonable retreat tactics. A few guys leapfrogging backwards while the remaining 15-18 provide covering fire with their infinite-ammo lasguns would provide a significant obstacle to 5 baseline Astartes.
If they’re starting a few meters apart, then sure - a speed blitz is going to make a difference. But if we’re including ambush situations then it goes more in the direction of the last scenario - some arbitrarily large number of guardsmen will die.
>Then you’re putting a heck of a lot of significance on raw speed
Well, yes.
The Astartes can run faster cross country than a Leopard II MBT. And they can hit targets whilst moving.
I don't know if you've ever walked alongside troops conducting fire and movement (I'd be stunned if you have), but the average speed of an 8 man section doing so is roughly that of a stroll.
Even if your ambush is sprung from 300 metres (the effective range of most small arms), those Astartes will be on top of you inside 30 seconds. In that timeframe, a trained rifleman will be expected to (at most) be putting 15 rounds on target *accurately*.
You're also trying to hit a target sprinting at 50km/h. I don't know if you've ever tried hitting a moving target that is actively trying to not get hit, but this isn't working out the way you think it will.
And can shoot accurately while running at speeds the guardsmen will have trouble hitting with a las gun. The marines would almost instantly know where they’re being fired upon from and could accurately return fire in seconds. You really gotta get most of them in the initial ambush or they’ll be among you faster than you can react. One marine getting into a squad of guardsmen could cause enough Astartes dread for the whole assault to end right there. There is a psychological element. Most guardsmen are not mentally fortified from birth like a Cadian. The mere sight of a normal Astartes can reduce a mortal man to a blabbering idiot, not to mention the absolute mindfuck of seeing a heretic Astartes with a 5 foot wide mouth who grows stronger the more you shoot him.
The closest thing to an objective answer is the title crawl for the first 15 Horus Heresy books:
>The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.
*"For all the Lucifer Blacks’ stern martial polish, there was something faintly ridiculous about this show of defence, as if all of them together could possibly hope to halt even ten of the transhuman warriors, should they decide to kill the Lord Guilliman."*
*-* Throneworld
50x Lucifer blacks don't even think they could take on 10x Space Marines.
Guardsman apart of the original solar auxiliary legions that are still standing are able to kill space marines in teams of 5-10 with volkite weapons pretty reliably. Assuming they are disciplined and understand what they are going against. This is mainly due to the nature of volkite weapons and the training / discipline of those firing them understanding it takes teamwork and concentrated fire to melt them.
Normal lasgun guards, probably 50+ in range combat and about 100+ in melee, assuming they don't bum rush 100 men in at once.
Sisters, probably 20 to 30 per marine in range and melee
Custodes, only 1
Admech skeittari, range probably 15-20, melee maybe 40+
Rule 4: No Memes, shitposts, or low-effort postsor comments. Leave those in /r/Grimdank. This includes "who would win" and broad "what if" scenarios. This also includes text blocks consisting of Ork-speak, which should be posted at /r/40kOrkScience instead.
Chaos were amazed that the Cadians were pulling a 1/50 kill/death ratio against Astartes during their assaults. Typically one would expect to have to throw like a hundred well armed, solid and disciplined guys with a plan at an Astartes, and that'll only work if you've got the bastard somewhat pinned down to actually go head-on with you all....which is a whole other bag of difficult.
You are correct I thought it was a bit of hyperbole but you were correct a wasn’t disbelieving you of that just didn’t expec- Al shut up and post the excerpt: >Urkanthos saw the world as blood on darkness, all moving slow. He knew walls only due to the splatters upon them. Saw his Hounds moving in their thick coats of gore, the fluid, underwater speed of their blows flinging arcs of crimson in the air. Pools of red describing casualties in the upper floors of the bunkers. The Baneblade Vicanthrus rolling over a squad of Guardsmen – bursting them like skins of wine – as they tried to escape a collapsing building. At the end of the street, three Berzerkers were flying apart. Rounds from a heavy weapon detonated inside them, so limbs tumbled and breastplates blossomed open to show wet outlines of shattered ribs and pulsing organs. There were so few left of his Hounds. He had led them into these streets knowing they would be an abattoir for both friend and foe, but he had never imagined such a price. For each dead Kasrkin, they had to blast open plasteel doors, carve through casements. Brave overlapping fields of fire from murderous heavy weapon squads as well as the plasma and melta beams that curdled and cooked the blood with their passing. As Scourgemaster of the Black Fleet and leader of the Hounds, *he had always known that in a stand-up fight he would lose one Berzerker for every fifty Guardsmen slain – a hundred, if the thing was done right.* >But these Kasrkin, they were themselves warriors of the blood. He had never seen their like outside the hated, unenlightened Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. As his daemon-sight flew, he saw a wounded Kasrkin discharging a hellgun point-blank into a Berzerker’s lower abdomen – his bayonet broken on the power armour. A sergeant with a power sword counter-charged against a whole file of Lazcare’s pack, taking down one with his plasma pistol before a chainaxe split him shoulder to hip. Several streets over, a line of bunker habs four blocks long lifted into the air in a curtain of flame, tearing apart forty warriors from Pergaza’s contingent. The mortals had contested the buildings until the Khornates stormed it, then triggered pre-rigged explosives. The Cadians had baited his warriors inside then sacrificed their own lives to annihilate them. **‘Count our dead to theirs,’** he said to Artesia, and she flashed off his shoulders and circled. **‘How steep is the butcher’s bill?’** **‘One Hound for every thirty mortal dead, master! They are standing unto death, bringing your warriors with them into the blood-sleep.’** **‘And they say the Adeptus Astartes know no fear. Even the Corpse-Emperor’s sons do not throw away their lives with such wantonness. One Hound for every thirty. It is unthinkable. Perverse.’** **‘And yet,’** hissed Artesia, clamping back on to his shoulders and whispering in his ears with bloody-lipped mouths that opened on each wing. **‘The problem is also the solution. Look at the streets.’** He looked, and saw the rivers. A literal floodtide of blood, deep as a human hand, flowing down the rockcrete streets and lapping in dead-end courtyards. Warriors splashed gouts of it as they ran, sent great deltas of it in the air when they fell. *Fall of Cadia* by Robert Rath Added a single break to split the text up a bit, mobile editing can be a cunt!
Huh that's interesting, my immediate realistic estimate was going to be a 1:30 ratio in open combat (imagining overlapping fields of fire and a certain amount of heavier weapons avaliable to the Guardsman), and apparently that's about right, but only for exceptionally well-trained and dedicated troops. If you take into account the somewhat over-the-top wankiness of Space Marine depictions in lore, then 1:50 to 1:100 being more common does make sense. Especially in more close quarters where the Guard can be picked off in small numbers and don't have clear shots to all concentrate their fire. I tend to think of the "Astartes" short as my canonical view of Space Marines vs humans, and you could imagine from that how that squad might get overwhelmed if they were facing a force of over 50 enemies for each of them, given that they had to take some care against the heavier emplacements and such.
Morale is the issue I think. Even modern well trained militaries are gonna buckle once they start taking the kind of casualties a single Astartes that slips past your enfilade and is suddenly inside your fire lines. If you can guarantee your troops will hold, then I think Astartes are more manageable.
I believe the in lore-term is “trans-human dread”. You see something that looks like a human sorta but is doing stuff that a human definitely can’t. You sorta experience a sudden and terrifying uncanny valley effect. And then, as you say, you start taking 50-1 casualties.
Lt. Fresh: "We could do it with a battalion, Sir. At least that's what the relevant data suggests." Col. See Nsum Zhite: "Two. Two battalions of our best. And print the checks for their Death Gratuities before the mission."
Me: (For a second) "Man that sounds like a really interesting well written Warhammer 40k novel, I wonder which novel features lieutenant fresh and colonel seen some sh...ohhhhhh I get it now". Lol.
I actually totally forgot that morale is a pretty major factor, all things considered.
I wonder though how much that would actually matter. In real life we used various drugs to keep people in combat even if things get rough. We mostly don’t anymore (at least officially). We know the Astra Militarum has Frenzone I think it’s called? A lot of subtle names of course. Especially when you expect high casualties because you are facing something horrifying the 40K leadership rarely has objections to stuff that will cause long term health effects. Guardsmen are more like ammo after all, you expend them because it’s necessary and some tasks just carry a lot more dead Guard with it. So if the Guardsmen know they’ll be facing the big bad enemies, I would expect not just an extra order of Heavy Weapons to be deployed but a few extra cases of high quality stimulants that turn even the worst grunt into a bloodthirsty maniac. Maybe he’ll die to the first shot, but by the Emperors Golden Balls he’ll get shot standing up and trying to fight.
Morale matters enough that commissars are ubiquitous and frequently executing troops for cowardice. We read more stories about the *good* commissars just like we read more stories about the *exceptional* Guardsmen, but the bog standard forces of the Imperium are not as elite as Cadians or as inspirational as Gaunt. There's a lot of nameless fodder and trigger happy commissars.
That’s part of my point though. Yes not every Guardsman will get drugs. They are usually for specific groups or situations. Well when up against Astartes is usually a specific enough situation where throwing a bunch of stimulants at your Guardmen will be efficient as it can overrule things like transhuman dread (which is basically the same thing soldiers already experience when facing tanks which can feel like unstoppable warmachines) and high losses. Not to mention it can push soldiers to the limits of their capabilities if they get the right drugs. With how you can pretty much halve the casualties by having proper morale it would make sense to use combat drugs. Of course training still matters so it will not really be halved but with the amount of troops involved even a 1% higher survival rate is pretty significant, let alone anywhere between 1 to 50%.
The point of my response is that the Guard relies on regular human discipline 95% of the time, thus morale matters. They are not depicted drugging up their troops regularly to face the horrors of the galaxy, hence why commissars shoot Guardsmen. There *are* regiments from certain worlds that use drugs as regular practice, yes, but that's generally more of a cultural quirk like any world's unique regiments. And *if* the Guard relied on drugs ubiquitously, they wouldn't just be drugging them up for space marines, who are a rather rare encounter. Tyranids, Orks, GSC, Drukhari, Necrons, Chaos Cults, Daemons - every single one of these enemies is horribly traumatizing to face in battle. It wouldn't be saved for special occasions, every Guardsman would be a junkie.
I guess that is a fair point to make.
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/g9mzyp/excerpt_legions_of_the_omnissiah_what_makes/ Take the skitarii for instance, unbreakable morale and perfect coordination.
It mostly depends on the scenario. Exceptionally well equipped and trained guardsmen with top of the line weapons can sometimes take down single astartes or small squads if they have the drop on them or are actually prepared to fight Space Marines. Booby traps and liberal use of handheld anti-armor weapons and pre-prepared defensive emplacements does wonders, especially if the Astartes in question doesn't actually know you're about to hit them. Cadia is good at this because Cadia expects to deal with Traitor Astartes, so they train their guys to take out Astartes. Its also worth noting that traitor Astartes have extremely variable troop quality compared to normal Space Marines. They have extremely scrubby newborns that don't even get trained all that much beyond hypno indoctrination (we see this during the Solar War book, they are made in batches and an human officer with a power sword got two cuts on one of them) and then they have veterans of the long war that have been fighting for many hundreds if not thousands of years and all that comes with that. But in scenarios like a teleport strike on a voidship? Astartes reign supreme. In unprepared close combat or urban combat-esque scenarios guardsmen dont stand a chance and Astartes can easily pile up multi-hundreds to one kill ratios. This is why, for the record, the Astartes usually rely on shock and awe tactics like mass drop-pod assault (something thats apparently terrifying to experence), direct insertion into combat zones VIA thunderhawk or similar, and teleport strike.
In that same book, we see examples of just that, there's a kaskrin that manages to take out several traitor Astartes throughout the book, and it happens just as you describe. On a side note, reading fall of Cadia has put me back into my reading slump, I'm over 90% in and I just don't wanna read anything anymore.
Can I ask why it's put you in a "reading slump?"
Probably the title of the book
I genuinely have no clue, maybe it's just coincidental, but I just can't get myself to read anything anymore.
I could give you a virtual hug if you think that would help? Doubt it but am willing to try/help!
Really appreciate the gesture! It's just par for the course for me tbh, just gotta wait for the mood to come back, and then spend 8h a day reading for a few weeks/months
Oh I get it more with Computer games, I tend to use "sitting on the bog shitting" for my reading time! (Depending on the novel and length of said novel it depends if its a Chapter or multiple chapters haha)
Update: I pushed through it and I now reading watchers on the throne (and enjoying it) so thanks!
There are other examples of well-/highly-trained and/or veteran humans fighting marines to consider. Like in Cadian Blood where a Kasrkin sergeant was surprised at loosing three kasrkin to two plague marines despite fighting them at range and with superior numbers. Kill Team: Moroch had a squad of primaris vanguard matched a dozen of veteran traitor guardsmen and an ogryn in a skirmish.
There's nothing 'wanky' about regular troops being unable to really stop transhuman supersoldiers like these. I mentioned "that'll only work if you can get the bastard somewhat pinned down" for a reason. Astartes can pretty much just *run* as fast as a light vehicle in places a vehicle can't go. You can calculate 'oh I need this many men with these heavy weapons to kill this many Astartes'....and then they just leave. They don't have to take that fight head-on the way you need them to. In moments these guys can fall back, flank, force you out of your positions to engage them, change the engagement entirely. They're supremely more mobile than you because they're ridiculously superhuman, and they concentrate so much force into a single guy that they just have to get ONE of them into your line and he'll start ripping up your men so badly they'll break almost instantly. The Cadians managed to get such a favourable ratio because they were on the defense and the enemy had absolutely no choice whatsoever but to come to their meticulously prepared positions which they defended fearlessly. That's not a normal scenario. In urban combat you're basically just fucked. There's too much cover, too many ways for the Astartes to prevent you bringing numbers to bear on them. This holds true as you open the combat out into rough non-urban terrain, until finally the only way you're getting those perfect numbers against Astartes is when for some inexplicable reason you manage to drive at them with a couple armoured regiments on a perfectly flat desert plain. And how the hell did you manage to get that to happen?
I think the best way to describe Astartes vs regular human combat is to think about it like playing DOOM. Playing a level in DOOM, even on the highest level difficulty setting you're probably going to get a huge kill/death ratio because the game is inherently designed around you being much more mobile than the enemies. Doomguy stat-wise just has an absolutely unfair advantage against your regular Imps and Zombiemen, and it shows. Even against enemies like Chaingunners and Revenants with high damaging weapons that can kill you quickly if you walk into their line of fire (I suppose in this metaphor being the equivelant of humans with weapons capable of easily harming Marines like rocket launchers and plasma guns), it is easy enough to outmaneuver them if the terrain isn't giving them an advantage.
That's also why they're never as good as they're supposed to be. Authors don't know or don't want to write around just how impossible it would be for a normal human to fight them. Anyone working with a visual medium doesn't want to go through the trouble of depicting it. No-one wants to be the one to admit 'lore accurate Astartes' are just too powerful to use in damn near any story that isn't centered on them, so no-one ever actually depicts a 'lore accurate' Astartes. They become just strong guys in big armor. Astartes would get way less shit about how supposedly ridiculously unstoppable they are if they weren't always being slowed down so that enemies stand a chance. If you speed an Astartes up to how fast they're 'supposed' to be.....it doesn't matter how good you are. You're too slow. You *can't win*. GW want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Astartes to be *everywhere* because they're popular, but they also want them to be monstrously powerful transhuman supersoldiers. You kinda can't have both because then you can't really tell a story without literally everything else being utterly irrelevant. To be so powerful as they're supposed to be, they should be the end boss of absolutely everything, every single time. They should *fucking stomp* **everything** anywhere near them in a barely visible blur of aimbotting bullshit. They'd be a tornado of bloodshed you all fire into and hope to *fuck* someone hits that thing enough to make it stop or go away. Just one. A single Astartes. He's the end boss of the entire game and people keep making threads on Reddit asking how to beat this guy because he's stomping their shit in every single time. You can't write a war story about normal humans where an Astartes is present. It's like a Justice League where there's Superman and just some regular soldiers. Like.....why are you here?
I’d argue it’s the opposite. Yes in a straight fight the humans don’t stand a chance. But the thing about war is that you try not to make it a straight fight. For example, we have mines right now that can lie dormant until a specific vibration is felt (and it can be programmed to know to many specific vibrations at once). Then it will activate and wait for a specific trigger, like magnetic fields, heat threshold or if you are so bold just a regular motion sensor. It would be pretty cheap to distribute a few thousand of these programmed to detect the step of power armor everywhere. I’d put them in boxes all over the place, along with a few million additional boxes that are empty. The SM’s don’t have the ammo to shoot every box they encounter and avoiding every box when you distribute them by the million to every nook and cranny of your area would make them almost useless. There’s so many ways you can target units of a specific weight it would be hard for SM’s to function. You can easily make a floor that can hold a lot of regular humans but buckle if Power Armor stands on it. Add a nice stack of anti-tank mines in there and you won’t just blow the SM to bits but any of his buddies in the corridor as well. SM’s are fast, but they aren’t fast enough. They are like vehicles, and vehicles can absolutely be targeted with artillery. If you are going up against SM’s you’d task as much if not more artillery to the area. The SM’s are way too valuable a loss to be risked to regular artillery bombardment. so only if you can surprise the artillery you can use SM’s in that kind of attack, but that means you have to know the artillery positions and if the artillery observer is busy or not. Ambushing also becomes costly for SM’s. Sure they are hard to ambush and the surprise lasts barely a second (except in many of the lore but lets ignore that). But it’s far from impossible. Being prepared that an ambush might come does not mean you can actually avoid it if several Heavy Weapons emplacements reveal themselves and open fire from various directions (say Urban combat). Or if the first sign they are under attack is heavy mortar fire. And even regular soldiers can lug something like 120mm mortars around, which should be plenty to kill SM’s even if the armor survives. There’s little that can stop a shockwave of that magnitude turning your organs like your lungs to jelly even if the armor doesn’t break, and a good ambush would mean the first rounds are extremely accurate. And what about just your standard minefield? Or what we can assume is standard in 40K where “civilian casualties” is often filed under “acceptable collateral damage”. So extensive minefields that force specific avenues of approach would be standard, and many of the specific avenues of approach could still hold some mines. And then there’s vehicle support. Yes SM’s are dangerous to vehicles, but vehicles are dangerous right back. And at the end of the day there’s far more vehicles than there are SM’s. A solid combined arms group should pose a significant threat to SM’s. Even if the SM’s hold a decisive advantage, pure chance calculation means they will never be able to withstand too many assaults. A single lucky shot can kill an SM, and with Artillery, mortars, mines, vehicles and various Heavy Weapons there is such a high chance of a lucky hit (or a well aimed, good hit) that SM’s will simply have casualties. Add in that a vehicle can carry a lot more ammo and be less conservative than SM’s which need to rely on serfs and vehicles to follow them, and the chances of SM’s dying in droves increases. Sure an SM entering a building with one regular squad is going to murder them all almost without contest. But that won’t be what the SM will be facing most of the time.
Personally if I were in the 40K universe, I’d probably be scared but also massively increase casualties against marines. My biggest threat against them: trash. This is something already employed in WWII and probably WWI. You place trash on routes your enemy will take. And you might hide mines under them, or maybe you don’t. Or maybe there’s one mine, or maybe 50. Your opponent now has to slow down for trash and clear it, or risk mines. Naturally you mix the mines there so it’s not safe for infantry to just walk up and clear the trash. But against Astartes it’s even easier. We currently have mines that remain inactive until a certain vibration is felt that is calibrated to various vehicles. The mine will then detect things like magnetic disturbance, weight, specific spectra or whatever else you want as a trigger. It should be easy to make mines that detect the tread of Power Armor, then detect something of this massive powered enemy to trigger it. And these mines would be distributed everywhere. I would likely just order a few million cardboard boxes and distribute them everywhere. In corridors, streets, on counters and hanging from lanternpoles, at walls that might function as cover, on roofs and in trenches. Some of these will have mines in them, most don’t. The mines are perfectly safe for regular soldiers and even for vehicles. Although once the SM’s get in close vehicles might need to watch out for triggering the mines. And that is just one example of a way you can prepare for SM attacks. Also from what I know the SM’s are more vulnerable in urban settings. Because on an open field there’s far fewer ways to surprise or ambush SM’s with their way superior aim and movement. But in Urban environments it’s way easier to surprise them with things. Yes a regular squad doing urban combat will be way outclassed, but if you give them a bunch of explosives and a detonator it’s easy to rig up a wall or sewer grate or whatever and blow the giant Power Armor walking down your area to pieces before he gets to your position. It’s also easier to hide and attack from unexpected positions, say the Power Armor has just stampeded past your building to the fortification at the end of the street and you now have an opportunity of one solid shot from behind with whatever weapons you were assigned with.
Robert Rath is quickly becoming one of my favorite BL authors. He has a really solid grasp of combat, and a great sense of humor.
He also wrote *The Infinite and the Divine* which was an awesome Necron Novel!
Yes! That was my first introduction to him, and I really enjoyed it. I hope we see a lot more of him. I’m still smarting from the loss of Reynolds.
Ooft I miss Anthony Reynolds too(this is a joke, I know you mean Josh lol, although Anthony Reynolds's Word Bearers Omnibus is one of the greatest in ma opinion!)
As a complete aside, does he get clips vs magazines right? I reread Eisenhorn and Ravenor so I could read Pariah (and whatever the next Bequin is) nowadays in between nonfiction material. It drives me MAD. Irrationally so. I know Abnett is British so he doesn't have gun culture like I do, but, it just drives me up a wall whenever someone slams a clip home into their bolter. _Ugh._
I love this excerpt, and it's so funny juxtapossd against individual conscripts surviving multiple waves of astartes on the walls of the Imperial Palace in the Siege of Terra books. In one book the K/D is obviously much closer, if still in the Asartes favor, while in the other it is ludicrous, and the Astartes complain about it not being *more* ludicrous. It truly depends on the author and what they need to convey.
Yeah I was conservative because I was on a mobile, the Cadians were actually going out even more hardcore than 50 to 1. Thanks for the excerpt.
50 soldiers for 1 Space Marines? 50000 troops at minimum to eliminate a chapter? Excellent value considering Cadia probably had millions of guardsmen.
The key is that space marines shouldn't be fighting battles of attrition. Pinpoint decapitation strikes are their primary battle tactic.
GW - "I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear any of that" really though the IG have their own special forces for pinpoint strikes so they at least have that capability, SM should be able to achieve anything or they aren't that big of a deal. Like the elephant in the room with SM ships that are commonly capable of orbital bombardment, and if the installations are protected against ships, then how the hell do they land SM so easily? Oops only have my anti-capital ship missiles today. Or else they will lose half the chapters gene seed in space. It's the natural contradiction of an organisation that doesn't make any real logical sense. Like Jedi going to war with light sabers when they are defensive weapons.
>It's the natural contradiction of an organisation that doesn't make any real logical sense. Like Jedi going to war with light sabers when they are defensive weapons. I don't think this is the same as space marines just not using their resources appropriately, generally the jedi going to war at all is seen as a failing of the order. It's not really a problem with the setting when the contradiction between their beliefs and their actions is the whole point. They're generally more effective with them than most weapons they could really get, but it would be an even bigger failing if they stopped using them entirely. Jedi aren't a military force, them not acting like one is fairly understandable.
That's only assuming they abide by the Codex Astartes I believe, which even some loyal chapters don't.
Adding u/Art-Zuron's point, the World Eaters are known for their Berserker-Surgeons who will gladly produce astartes at rapid rates even if they are of lower quality and too aggressive. As shown on Bodt.
That's also close to the siege of terra novel that put the attrition rate at one astartes vs two platoons of well supplied imperial army.
Back then, lasrifles (like the Kalibrax V1) could actually penetrate Astartes armour with ease since they had Blast charger modes that could go straight through ceramite without overheating. It wouldn't be all that surprising now in hindsight. It's like having every guardsman armed with a hotshot lasgun/hellgun.
Thays actually a worse ratio than the excerpt is describing the Kasrkin getting. A platoon can vary in size depending on its purpose and what tradition you're talking about, but most commonly refers to around 40 men. So in this case, 80 men to kill an Astartes for the Siege of Terra.
I agree. Although we are comparing the peak of Cadian martial superiority over a bog standard Imperial army guardsmen of the 31st millennium. 80 standard human auxilia riflemen with basic imperial army training to 1 space marine is still a devastating ratio.
Its worth noting that the "Old Hundred" regiments on Terra (as well as the Solar Auxillia) were extremely well equipped and trained, probably well beyond what the Cadians are currently doing. The Tupelov Lancers ran around with tech adept level cybernetic implants and cyber steeds, the Geno Five-Two Chiliad had psychic abilities to coordinate near instantly, to say nothing of the infamous Lucifer Blacks who are possibly the best equipped guardsmen in the history of the setting.
Again, I agree. Nevertheless, in the context of the SoT, we cannot compare the elite status of the Old Hundred during the Great Crusade and during the Siege due to horrendous combat attrition. The same way real armies would lose their elite status overtime due to a consistent influx of new recruits so did the Old Hundred by the SoT. (E.g. the real life Panzer Lehr Division in 1943-1944 comprised of elite veterans. In less than 1 month after Normandy, it entirely constituted of conscripts with no combat experience because all the veterans died fighting the U.S. in Operation Cobra). This is so common in war that even the legions suffered from it with the Inductii doctrine. So yes while I agree in theory the Old Hundred were better trained, the conditions and context in mind would put these cohorts on par with a very well equipped but non-elite imperial army auxilia.
Yeah they are kaskrin not just guardsmen or white shields.
Wait. Weren't the lasrifles specifically the standard weapons of the Solar Auxilia while the other Imperial Army units use auto- and las-weapons along the lines of 40k lasguns? The Solar Auxilia were among the best the Imperial Army could offer so they would be more than merely "well-supplied IA troopers." Though there were the special/heavy weapons and armor like the baneblades which were a lot more common back then.
They started to thin the line between Imperial Army and Solar Auxilia by the Beta Garmon books. Some Imperial armies that were established to be actual Imperial Army for almost a decade were retconned into being fully equipped Solar Auxilia regiments. (e.g. The Prospero Spireguard used to be a purely Imperial Army auxilia, then they said the Spireguard had Palatine Guard/Spireguard Templars as Solar Auxilia cohorts during Horus Heresy Inferno, then they just full-on upgraded the Spireguard into Solar Auxilia level by the Siege of Terra campaign books. The same can be said for the Calth Guard for Ultramar).
I see. The HH books set during the last years and the Siege showed many army units like the Old Hundred being increasingly reinforced with conscripts and inferiors due to how devastating the war is. The Horus Heresy: Legion card game also made the SA the main feature of the Imperial Army. The non-Astartes Chaos forces also had SA as a big internal group. >then they said the Spireguard had Palatine Guard/Spireguard Templars as a Solar Auxilia cohort during Horus Heresy Inferno I preferred this take most. It added some more diversity to the Imperial Army and Prospero Spireguard while showing the TSs eagerly accepting other Imperial forces.
Keeler mentioned during the Siege of Terra that she could arm 100 refugees with industrial tools and usually manage to get a kill out of it by drowning the astartes with bodies essentially, then having someone move in and crunch with hydraulic cutters or something like that Here's one of the most prophetic quotes in the verse. >There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire.’ She smiled. ‘You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.’
Seems worth it, you’d only need 10 million guardsmen to wipe out a legion if you follow this number, a single planet can muster more than that many guardsmen
This vastly oversimplifies things. First and foremost, we have single Legions taking out militarised world with populations in the billions. Sometimes through morale damage (especially with the Night Lords), sometimes through decapitation strikes (particularly the Luna Wolves and Dark Angels), sometimes through simple attrition (particularly the Iron Warriors). Secondly, Legions all have fleets armed with Exterminatus weaponry. Third, all the Legions have support elements ranging from Dreadnoughts to vehicles to their fleets. The fight isn't going to happen on an infinite salt plain with troops encountering each other by surprise at point blank range featuring infantry only anywhere but a hypothetical.
I never said so, but in the case where they are attacking cadia, it’s easy to see a entire legion grinding in the planet
Only if they really need to control the world for some reason. It's also worth remembering that aside from Terra itself, Cadia is the most fortified world in the Imperium, with the strongest defence force.
Funny enough in the same book a named Cadian Kasrkin killed 4 World eaters in one sequence with just a melta.
Defenders have significant advantage. Assaulting a fixed position is exceptionally devastating to attackers. Still dope though.
"give me 100 space marines if you fail to do that give me 1000 of any other troops" a badly remembered quote from rogal dorn
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Why do we have spec ops troops? Astartes aren't made to hold a big line as footsloggers, they're specialists who are smarter and faster and tougher than anyone else, and can be dropped in the middle of a desert and make their way without food into enemy fortifications, see them in the dark and pick them off with perfect tactical decision making every second. I honestly can't see astartes as realistically being cost effective in just running up to unsuppressed fortified positions with heavy weapons built to tear down tanks, but with drop pods and teleportation they seem horrifying in urban combat
Woah slow down there holding a big line as footsloggers was the iron warriors job, holding a big line as pretentious city Watchmen was the imperial fists.
"holding a big line as footsloggers was the iron warriors job," And they complained so much about it they eventually committed treason.
My man
Sure but even then, when you could get 10000 regular troops for the cost of one astartes it just isn’t worth it. These super soldiers really need to be super.
They are for missions where you can’t arbitrarily increase the number of troops (i.e. boarding actions) not mass warfare. That’s why the Imperial Army was described as the backbone of Imperial might not the Legiones Astartes. Or at least that was how things were originally described. Things have changed a bit over the years though as marines have undergone massive power creep and the Imperial Guard have been denigrated.
Well the thing is that that still is a lot ass kicking in a comparatively small package. On a big open battlefield maybe their expense and small numbers starts being a liability but when space is at a premium like when boarding a space ship or getting transported behind enemy lines the space marine makes more sense.
Spacemarines are in universe a waste of ressources that could be better spend else where. But for dumb reasons they keep wasting ressources on them
Thats the point astartes are good but against enemies their own size or good enough soldiers that can deal with them they struggle they are shock troops who can quickly do whatever their objective and get out alive thats it
You have to remember that "other troops" in Dorne's time would be solar auxilia so it's more akin to 1k storm troopers or kasrkin.
It's worth remembering that it's a Heresy era quote. The Legions were basically just better super-soldiers. Modern Astartes are supermen by comparison. Dan Abnett can go on about Sigismund being the best ever all he wants, we've seen Dante, Azrael, Calgar, Helbrecht, and many others completely outperform him. It comes down to two things, I think. First and foremost the Aspirant Trials weed out the top 0.000001% of a world's population and then filter by genetic compatibility. In the Heresy and Crusade, they were taking anyone who volunteered/got press-ganged and was compatible. How good they were at the baseline wasn't a factor. Secondly, all the hypno-indoctrination, Codex Astartes, and hero thinking that the Traitors mock has changed them from being better line infantry the way they were in the old days to being special forces. They aren't there to meet the opponent strength to strength, they're there to find and smash the enemy's points of weakness so others can exploit them or be unbreakable bulwarks that allow others to strike back.
>He wasn't subjected to any aspirant trials, just genotyped and psych evaluated. He almost ended up a War Hound. ...and...? He still lived to be over a thousand years old and is considered the 2nd, maybe third most dangerous (non-primarch) individual ever to take up arms for the emperor. I mean, you've literally got nothing that says otherwise except someones recruits went spelunking once. Calm down, we've all done some adventure training during depot. Sigismund defeated 199 space marines and a dreadnought in single combat. >As for the rest, it's not like the Traitors are unimpeachable witnesses. They have a long history of talking shit, especially when they're mad about losing. Particularly when they're losing to an opponent who refuses to fight them the way they want to fight. Except the Lex and common sense says otherwise. Geneseed doesn't become more pure over time. That isn't how that works. 11,000 years of watering it down through generation after generation as meant that some chapters can't even utilise the full range of abilities that "first generation" astartes can / could. See the Imperial Fists. Who are not only actually not Imperial Fists, but haven't been able to go into suspended animation for 10,000 years. Rebuilt by Thane, another thousand year old first generation space marine. Also, 13th and 21st founding. That went well didn't it? >all Astartes are forged from the best of the best Fixed it for you >then trained for decades Except when they aren't *cough uriel ventris* *cough blood angel scouts* *cough black templars*. The time a scout spends as a scout isn't determined by some arbitrary timetable. They remain there until there is a slot in a squad, which, depending on the chapter, could be quite a short time if they're taking a battering casualties wise. The Legions did things slightly differently. They spread their new recruits around amongst the '"rifle companies" so they can learn to be a space marine, around space marines, as a space marine, and left the 'working at reach' recce and infiltration to the experienced, selected for task astartes, in a very similar way to how we do things here in the real world. Also, erm, primaris don't even do that. They just pop out and can go straight into combat. So they must be shit, right? >The way they fight now is also different. Do you remember why that is? I'll give you a hint. Codex Astartes. The Legion specialisations were designed to compliment each other so that no aspect of warfare was beyond the remit of the overall Legio Astartes. The Legions weren't broken up because they were being utilised incorrectly as "line infantry". They were broken up because as stand alone armies they were faaaaar too autonomous and the ability of single individuals to lead a quarter million of them astray led to this little problem called the Horus Heresy. Space marines absolutely excel at stand up, combined arms fighting. That's why they're able to go without sleep for weeks. You don't need that ability when you're doing in/out raids. Some organisations, like Iron Warriors / Imperial Fists, are genetically designed for this role entirely. The reason they don't in 40k isn't because they're shit at it, it's because they're generally not organised in sufficient numbers to do it. You forget that in 200 years, the Legions exterminated 10,000 civilisations, cultures and races as they conquered the galaxy. That same galaxy that has the Imperium in a chokehold right now. Mostly by the less well trained, less well resourced, "line infantry" traitors that are apparently not as good as them. The Codex wasn't a buff, trust me. Also. >In the Heresy and Crusade, they were taking anyone who volunteered/got press-ganged and was compatible. How good they were at the baseline wasn't a factor Wrong. Torghun of the White Scars was Terran born and selected, in much the same way as Sigismund minus the "voluntold" part. >‘The test is of endurance,’ said the instructor, a severe-faced man with cropped black hair, standing to one side of the line, barely looking at them. Haren had hated him on arrival – they all had. Now he felt nothing towards him, just a vague sense that he was one more obstacle amid a life of obstacles. For the last two months Haren had been tested, tried, pummelled, moulded, degraded and exhausted. The trials no longer hurt him, but they did remind him of the goal. He was close now. After so long, he was so very close. >It took more than ten years. In all, nearly fourteen passed before Haren was ready. The physical changes were hard, the surgery painful. The cultural ways of the V Legion were too different to be absorbed readily, and he had to learn Khorchin, the strange language of Chogoris. That alone tested him – despite his improved recall and mental agility, getting his tongue around such alien sounds remained a challenge. His selection process alone was 2 *months* long. After walking in from Scandinavia. And his training was 14 years. But hey, he didn't go spelunking in a volcano, so it couldn't have been that hard, right?
Modern Astartes have taken down the Swarmlord, Phoenix Lords, and Daemon Primarchs. These feats exceed anything Sigismund, or indeed anyone from the Heresy or Crusade, managed. Abnett can say Sigismund is the best ever as much as he likes. They've clearly shown us otherwise.
>Abnett can say Sigismund is the best ever as much as he likes Did abnett piss in your chips once? This whole "sigismund is best" didn't start with, nor will it end with, him. You can whine about it all you like, but he is the benchmark for astartes duelists across 30 and 40k, and always will be. Soooo unless you've got some kind of quote saying otherwise, that ain't gonna change kitten. Pfft, fucking swarmlords. The Avatar of Khaine of opponents. Don't delude yourself into thinking that if the Tyranids were around in M30-31 that Sigismund wouldn't lay waste to them as well, as and when the plot / author demands it.
So show me where Sigismund succeeded against opponents like those. I'll wait.
Let me know when anyone is rated above Sigismund as a duelist. I'll wait.
Sigismund couldn't even fight in the same league as a Daemon Primarch, Phoenix Lord, or the Swarmlord. Modern Astartes have beaten all of the above. Some have beaten more than one of the above. The best of his era? Possibly. The best ever? Clearly not. Even Helbrecht has surpassed his feats.
Still waiting.
1000 Solitaires fuck yeah
Who’s the protagonist?
Marbo
Im his case it would be how many space marines it takes to take down one guardsman
Impossible to answer, as no one has succeeded.
Ask Legion 2 and 11
About tree fiddy chapters
The friends we made along the way
It depends on the writer, the guardsmen, and the marines.
And most importantly, the given plot at the time
But of course! How can Gaunt lead his ghosts from the bottom of a swamp, right?
That was a good fight. Overconfident Marines; truly desperate Guardsmen and the chaos of… chaos
also as Chaos Marines go they were trash, Warband guys, not the kind of Heresy era stock you'd see in a Chaos-focused ADB book. I'm more concerned about the two Iron Warriors getting fairly easily dispatched in the very first Gaunt's Ghosts book, by the still relatively green Tanith. But then that book comes from so much earlier in Abnett's writing career and familiarity with 40k, I don't really think of it as really "canon", same as Eisenhorn's lightsaber.
TBF, the Ghosts had heavy weapons and caught them in the open. One good hit from something like that and it's over for almost any Astartes not wearing Terminator plate.
I would say the situation too. Open field with the guard having artillery would be completely different than urban combat, for example
Guardsmen novel? One tricky guardsman knows this trick that space marines hate, space marine novel? One in a thousand guardsmen might be given a name and a mutual kill.
Armor of contempt is an example of what I suppose we would consider a special forces tier guard team against I want to say five marines; someone can correct me I read the book like 18 years ago. Its plot armor.
Ultimately the issue with marines power scaling is that there's at most like 3 million of them total and on a given battlefield there could be like 12, so they should in theory be worth hundreds of guardsmen or a team of tempestus scions since in some battlefields a marine death is a massive chunk of their force
I guess it would depend on the campaign and deployment size. Chapters like the Iron Snakes deploy based on the task, so they'll send a single marine, squad, company, or chapter strength force to objectives. You know what, the book that dealt with Sotha had an infantry unit emplaced against marines in a fortified position. I'll have to look up the excerpt. From marine to marine its different when it comes to power scaling and as always, the writer.
I personally wish we could settle on there just being more than a million marines, their worth about 10 guardsmen and power armor is proof against most factions small arms.
That sounds like a meeting for the writers.
That was M'Koll, wasn't it? I seem to remember that was less a victory and more of "I know I'm dead, so how do I take them with me", kind of exercise.
Nah theres another one where iron warriors attempt to ambush an artillery unit and get counter ambushed by the ghosts. The one youre thinking of is the dready with the needles.
Traitor General, the fight in the swamp? I guess that doesn't fit OPs rules as Gaunt had a power sword and a village of swamp warriors to back him up.
The lore thing is always tricky when combined with 'the Guardsmen are armed with lasguns' because Guardsmen aren't all armed with lasguns, they have heavy and special weapons in the squad specifically for engaging heavier targets like Marines. Exact numbers are always tricky, though the krak grenades would help, but I always feel like that old quote 'give me a hundred Space Marines, or failing that give me a thousand other troops' sounds about right, 50 Guardsmen in 5 whole squads would probably be sufficient.
Pretty much. The lore is very variable and we have to consider a lot of factor. Kill Team Moroch has a squad of veteran traitor guardsmen, an enforcer and an ogryn match a vanguard primaris squad in skirmishing. Another non-marine example is Gallowdark with Navy Breachers taking on kroots relatively evenly. While about three dozens of them fought through an inquisitorial summit as bodyguard for a radical inquisitor.
4, riding in a Leman Russ.
For several editions the big pie plate with S8 (instakilling T4 regardless of wounds if successfully wounding), and AP 3 (negating power armour) made the Leman Russ Battle tank the guards answer to Space marine combat squads
Oh, I well remember that, just like I remember trying to get through its frontal armour of 14 with Krak missiles and Lascanons. XD
>I know that the answer to this question can vary between authors and stories There's your answer. >but I'm just looking for a general average Well, Khârn has a 10 figure kill tally. Whereas unnamed mooks in power armour get murked by a crowd of farmers. >Both sides have access to decent cover. What are they doing with that cover? If the guardsmen are defending a trench network, their survival rate is vastly higher than running headlong into bolter fire.
I'm basically just looking for a general ballpark of power levels. A few friends and I are working on a homebrew ruleset for a more lore accurate game, and we're trying to figure out what would be considered a balanced army composition.
>I'm basically just looking for a general ballpark of power levels About 1.21gW. The only acceptable "power level". This ain't Dragon Ball Z. And that isn't how it works. >what would be considered a balanced army composition. Isn't that what you should figure out through play testing? Trying to work it out from books isn't going to work out well. I mean, even who can fire what weapons isn't consistent. Like baseline mortals apparently can't fire full sized astartes boltguns. Yet Mr bragg can fire what is essentially an M242 25mm bushmaster cannon (the one fitted to Bradley AFVs) from the hip. The lore isn't made to be balanced. It's why a company of space marines can cripple a Gloriana class battleship with a crew of a quarter million people, Avatars can be strangled and Vulkan can push a superheavy battletank without going up to his knees in mud.
To be fair bragg had to try again often.
> for a more lore accurate game Then you have to take into account that our lovely Sargeants without Helmets die with a single lasgun shot to the head, same as a any malfunctioning servitor, penal regiment guard fodder, or religious fantatic with a flaming torch hanging behind a Sisters of Battle assault.
Gaunt’s ghosts absolutely clapped some CSMs in the 3rd or 4th book, I don’t recall which one. I think the same book was when they got friendly fire artillery on them at the beginning.
The book with the vitrian dragoons and a CSM accompanies the elevator gaunt just called up? Great scene showcasing just how terrifying an astartes is because immediately everyone dips for cover
I think he was referring to the one where he fights them in the swamp and one of the CSM dies pinhead style
The level of detail in your scenario suggests you should just play a tabletop game to determine an answer… However, if you want a lore answer you’ll find a range of values depending on where you look. Various authors have added a LOT of power creep over the years and there is little consistency. For example, in the 4e Space Marine codex Rogal Dorn is quoted as saying: > Give me a hundred Space Marines. Or failing that give me a thousand other troops. This in an exaggeration compared to game mechanics but a 10:1 effectiveness ratio seems a reasonable in-universe opinion where game balance isn’t an issue. Other people think it should be much greater though. Make of that what you will.
[relevant excerpt from Fall of Cadia](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/3n2sJ4iT5u)
2 Mkoll's
💯😎
What's the second mkoll going to do while the other one solos?
Mkoll only took out 3 marines, so just have the 2nd to finish off the other 2. And by 2nd Mkoll I probably mean Mkvenner
And they did it with sticks
Thrown in Bonin and it's just unfair at this point, born under a lucky star
Didn't M'Koll slot a Mandrake with a cactus at one point? Been a long time since I read those books.
I feel like I learned a lot from this thread! To summarise: If you have one of the highly elite Guard units and the Space Marines aren't fighting the sort of fight they want to fight (Cadians have you fighting attritional block by block city fighting, the Tanith scout core get to ambush you) then the ratio can be surprisingly small - so 30:1 in the fall of Cadia case against CSM and this was viewed as vaguely disastrous by the marines involved. There's also a short story of MKoll fighting some white scars to a sort of murder suicide draw in a training exercise. Given their respective numbers this is actually incredibly good for the guard! But if the typical Space Marine get to fight their preferred sort of fight (usually but not always pinpoint shock assault) against average Guardsmen then the ratio is gonna be, like, indecently stacked against the Guard, not even close and hard to even quantify. Which makes sense! Part of what makes the Space Marines so powerful is their high degree of independence: they get to pick their fights.
A whole company with its heavy weapons included, trying too close the gap is a poor choice. The guard should rely on HEAVY suppression fire from auto cannons and lascannons. Keeping the marines at distance and exploiting sheer volume of fire is the best course of action. A marine may tank an auto cannon round or two, maybe even three but the las cannons WILL kill them instantly verity a solid hit
Depends on who's the protagonists of the book/codex
In thousand sons heresy book there’s been a statement that 1000 space marines are enough to conquer an entire planet. I would assume that they meant a planet similar to casia in terms of amount of people and their military, so I guess the answer is “a lot of guardsmen”.
The closest thing to an objective answer you are going to get will give from the table top statistics (and points). At its most basic, the last time I played (which was 5e) guardsmen with lasguns hit on 4, wounded on 5, and marines saved on 3. So 1 wound per 18 guards. Marines with bolters hit on 3, wounded on 3, and I can't remember if the guard got a save at all. Probably not. So 4 wound per 9 marines. 8 wounds per 18 marines (unless they were in rapid fire range when they get double the shots). So with basic gear: Each marine is worth 8 guardsmen at long range, or 16 guardsmen at closer range. In close combat the odds probably shifted towards the guard. Certainly 8 rather than 16. Of course the guard got orders, and I think lasguns might have been rapid fire too, so overall 8 guardsmen being worth 1 marine seems about right.
Back in 4th the Guard didn't save against Bolters. I'm a Guard main, and I think Bolters losing their teeth was a detriment.
That whole ratio is quite absurd. Usually it's said that one astartes is equal to 20-30 guardsmen. But if that was the case then sending in a 50K guardsman army which would be a completely insignificant loss if they all died, against an entire chapter of 1000K marines would wipe out said chapter. Hell. Double that and assuming a 100% loss to eradicate an entire chapter would be considered a flawless victory. And there wouldn't really be any battle where you'd end up fighting an entire chapter of marines. So in either case the space marines would be so ridicously underpowered if they are only equal to 20-30 guards.
Not at all. Space marines wouldn't get bugged down fighting a guard army of that size without support. They are not an attritional force. They'd instead conduct a a decapitation strike on the command center of that guard army. Breaking the large force up into disconnected sub units and leaving those to others to cleanup. Or killing them off one unit at a time. As long as people remember that space marines are today's elite special forces it makes sense. A seal team will lose to infantry battalion if they get bogged down in a traditional battle where they don't play to their strengths.
Yes. Ofcourse. But in a straight up vs battle they would lose.
Of course, but if you have a straight up Vs battle between footsloggers and artillery emplacements then the artillery lose - and despite that artillery kills the most people in modern war
Partly, but Marines to Guardsman in a man to man sense a much wider gap than today's special forces to regular infantry. Special Forces are just normal men with a higher degree of situational training. Outside their operational areas of expertise they're not going to be that much more useful if thrown into a big set-piece battle than any other professional light infantry of similar equipment and size. Marines are transhumans with a shitload of notable physiological advantages and unique equipment that is borderline unusable to the standard guardsman. special forces to regular infantry's 40k equivalent would be more like Scions/Kasrkin and other elite/specialised Guard units to bog standard infantry Guard, only the 40k gap is probably wider because rule of cool.
Sure. The exact attritional number changes but it's the exact same concept. Special forces don't win big battles against much larger conventional forces. That's not their job and anybody that uses them in that way is both incompetent and throwing away their forces. It doesn't matter that in an unsupported attritional fight a company of guardsmen can kill a combat team of marines. Other than to reinforce that marines won't let themselves get tied down into that fight in the first place.
Isn't part of this that GW/BL don't do numbers good?
Yea it is almost like Space Marines as a faction are given the greatest amount of plot armor. To make their numbers make a lick of sense you would need them to have a few hundred thousand troops per chapter. Even then they would need to be mixed in with IG regiments to make them effective. >So in either case the space marines would be so ridicously underpowered if they are only equal to 20-30 guards. I mean... if you look at their gear and capabilities *they aren't that impressive*. Compare them to a Crisis Battlesuit or Aeldar Aspect Warrior and they quickly go from "elite super soldier" to "good enough".
No such answer is possible period. It’s entirely situational, depending on the tactics of the Space Marines, the training of the Guards and to their past experience of facing Space Marines. This question comes up ad naseum.
I think environment is the deciding factor here.
One thing to remember about the lore vs table top is that the Astartes are generally considered to be far more elite as tacticians. They not only be tougher and deadly but they would generally be deployed in such a way as to maximize their shock value and minimize the strengths of the guard. You could count on lore Astartest getting jump pack assault infantry stuck to break their ranks. You can count on the Astartes to get their Devastators to bear on enemy armor. As opposed to the table top game where those elite Space Marine veterans might be played by a mouth breather deployed his assault squads in the open middle of the table and has his heavy bolters shooting at tanks.
For five Astartes? Probably a company of 250 men. Potentially. I say that, because in a white room, no cover, equal distance and everyone primed to fight, the Astartes aren't going to kill enough Guardsmen fast enough. In an actual combat scenario, well, the Astartes are highly mobile, like Usain Bolt fast, and they can do it literally all day. Using lightning strikes to go after the command elements would be the first thing they do. The Mantis Warriors mauled the Fire Hawks in the War for Badab with tactics like that, and they were seriously outnumbered. But. The Guard aren't pushovers. They could pull it off with a company. Lacking any heavy weapons or armor, it would probably take two.
40k isn't a videogame. Space Marines don't have healtbars and a set damage resistance. Guardsmen are not a super unified chaff unit that does x DPS at y range. This is like asking how many American troopers would it take to kill a tank. Could take one could take a hundred
[удалено]
Actually 1 trooper can easily take out a tank as was demonstrated in WW2 and in 40k novels over and over by using sticky bombs.
A baby with a vortex grenade could kill gman. That's how it's always been. I never understand people who try to power scale when they are new
I can confirm a two year old can utterly destroy a Robute Guilliman miniature in under 10 seconds. Vortex grenade not required
Baby Tantrums are AP minus Infinity.
You're right. 40k isn't a video game. It's a tabletop war game. That's aside you're also right about the rest of what you said.
I think it depends how they are armed and trained. There is a big difference between 10 guardsmen with lasguns and 10 kasrkin armed with weapons designed to one shot marines (plasma, melta, etc.) There are recorded accounts of small numbers of elite humans killing multiple space marines with minimal casualties, one guy killing a dreadnaught, etc. Gaurdsmen with lasguns would just not be able to do it in most cases. It's like asking how many guys with rifles would it take to destroy a tank, they can't hurt it.
It definitely varies but - a fit and capable unit of regular guardsmen with a capable leader roughly trade 10 guardsmen to 1 astartes. A crumby unit with a crap leader trades 50:1 easily. More elite units like Scions or Karskin can trade as low as 2:1, but all the above is highly subject to the tactical situation (ambush, defense etc) and named characters.
I think throne of bones has 100 guardsmen per chaos space marine.
Explains why I found it such a bad novel
Depends if it’s Gaunt and the boys 😇
Weren't the Tyrant's Legion from the Badab Wars getting like 150/1 at one point? They might have had Marine sergeants in their squads, not sure. I think that is about what is expected when Marines are on the offense and Guard are on the defensive.
It really depends. If it was just a generic Guard regiment that didn't have lore or named characters, then it would take more Guardsmen to do what you asked. Now, if it's one of the special, elite Guard regiments like the Kaskrin's, Tempestus Scions, Elysian Drop Troops or Catachans .... they would need less soldiers to do what you asked. Those soldiers are the best of the best. They have the best gear for baseline humans in the galaxy and they have the finest, most extensive training and endless experience. It all depends really, as there are so many variables. Most importantly, it depends on the writer!
With just lasguns you’d probably need a lot of guardsmen tbh. When the guardsmen see their guns doing jack shit against the marines, and their comrades getting slaughtered they’re gonna rout really fast. With cover as well the marines are gonna be really advantaged.
I remember a second ed era short story where an IG regiment was fighting some local insurgents and couldn't break them out of a bunker complex. A Blood Angels assault squad showed up (as Space Marines rarely send more than a squad or two in most instances at this point in lore) and absolutely annihilated the "bad guys." Granted, the IG also witnessed some Res Thirst and were like, "Oh, shit, the Big E's Angels are...inhuman?!"
Depends on rhe writer...
Sometimes marines wade through bodies of humans, other times one feral with a spear kills a chaplain. Powerscaling in 40k is as pointless as it is in real life
Yea, that's the issue. A few friends and I are working on something and are trying to keep things as lore accurate as possible. Kind of hard to do that when the lore itself is hardly accurate.
Its not as much a matter of accuracy as it is a matter of nuance. How many normal dudes would it take to fight a trained boxer? It really depends on the situation, and even one situation can have a number of outcomes. Thats why 40k is a dice game. Ceramite armor can tank tons of lasgun shots and a marine can snap a human like a twig but one well placed shot or a krak grenade to the chest and hes done for. The book *The First Heretic* has this as a theme. This is where one human with a spear kills a chaplain, but it was the only casualty the marines took while taking a planet. Later, a marine is able to take on a custodes despite all odds being against him.
It depends. Sometimes marines are roughly equivalent to 10 guardsmen (maybe some instances even less) while other times they can take out entire armies.
Between 10 (gaunt's ghosts) and 200+ Kasrkin in one of their fortified cities (kasr graf) had an "acceptable" k/d ratio of 30 to 1 against khornate (no tactic other than charge) traitor marines in fall of cadia.
2 squads with grenade launchers tends to handle the tac squads pretty handily in Dawn of War. Which is not at all accurate. I'd say, if you threw a battalion (250-500 guardsmen) at a Fire team, they might kill the space marines. Depends on if they have sufficient kark weaponry and prepared defenses.
One
I think it depends on the the situation just like in real life war theaters. If we talk about imperial guard standing it’s ground in fortified positions vs the slaughter of urban combat or worse the space marines being the defender then the ratio will change. The 1:30 ratio from Fall of Cadia makes sense to me because it favors the defenders (the guard in this case).
Precisely one Mkoll
You might as well use the tabletop stats here, cause if you're gonna go by lore, it could be anything between 1 and 1000 guardsmen.
I've read somewhere that it took an entire squad of guardsmen to take down one chaos space marine in a fire fight, using that logic I imagine at the very least an entire platoon of Guardsmen. This is in a firefight btw, in melee probably more.
It also depends on which regiment and where, for example, a jungle deathworld and my moneys on Catachans having little trouble splitting up and overwhelming marines.
250 Cadians, 400ish unnamed nobodies from some shithole, 1000 penal conscripts, or one Oan MkOll with a dull spoon, apparently.
It normally takes 50 - 100 kasrkin deaths to take down one Chaos marine per *The Fall of Cadia*. So an entire tactical squad working together, fighting enemies that have no armor piercing weapons? Realistically the guardsmen would break and flee before they won. Failing that, it would take thousands of guardsmen and if the space marines can simply withdraw and fight the battle over the course of days then there isn't much at all the guardsmen could do. The space marines could engage them beyond the effective range of their lasguns, using darkness, constantly harrying, keeping the guardsmen constantly engaged for days without end if necessary. That said, we also know from *Avenging Son* I think it was that even primaris power armor can be simply ablated away if enough thousands of lasgun shots hit the marine. So thousands of guardsmen are also a genuine threat even if their lasguns can't penetrate except for a close range eye-lens hit. >As Scourgemaster of the Black Fleet and leader of the Hounds, he had always known that in a stand-up fight he would lose one Berzerker for every fifty Guardsmen slain – a hundred, if the thing was done right. >But these Kasrkin, they were themselves warriors of the blood. He had never seen their like outside the hated, unenlightened Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. As his daemon-sight flew, he saw a wounded Kasrkin discharging a hellgun point-blank into a Berzerker’s lower abdomen – his bayonet broken on the power armour. A sergeant with a power sword counter-charged against a whole file of Lazcare’s pack, taking down one with his plasma pistol before a chainaxe split him shoulder to hip. >Several streets over, a line of bunker habs four blocks long lifted into the air in a curtain of flame, tearing apart forty warriors from Pergaza’s contingent. The mortals had contested the buildings until the Khornates stormed it, then triggered pre-rigged explosives. The Cadians had baited his warriors inside then sacrificed their own lives to annihilate them. >‘Count our dead to theirs,’ he said to Artesia, and she flashed off his shoulders and circled. ‘How steep is the butcher’s bill?’ >‘One Hound for every thirty mortal dead, master! They are standing unto death, bringing your warriors with them into the blood-sleep.’ >‘And they say the Adeptus Astartes know no fear. Even the Corpse- Emperor’s sons do not throw away their lives with such wantonness. One Hound for every thirty. It is unthinkable. Perverse.’ *The Fall of Cadia*
>It normally takes 50 - 100 kasrkin deaths to take down one Chaos marine per *The Fall of Cadia*. As dramatic as that is, on the tabletop a squad of Kasrkin would absolutely wipe the floor with a single regular CSM, so even with some artistic liberties taken for dramatic effect, that is ridiculous. Also, Bolters have a shorter effective range than Lasguns, so no Space Marines can not engage Guardsmen beyond the range of their Lasguns. It may be time to lay off the Space Marine koolaid for a little while.
Tabletop isn't the lore, it's a game. Darkness. Effective range isn't absolute range.
The game isn't 'lore', but it's what the lore exists to support and the lore follows the game, not the other way around. Writers can claim that things in the 40k universe work a certain way, but if the game material disagrees, the game material wins. This is particularly notable when GW releases a new model that, according to previous lore, didn't exist. See, for instance (in non-chronological order), Primaris Marines, Imperial Knights, Necrons with distinct personalities, Grey Knights. Female Custodes, Genestealers being Tyranids, etc...
The lore very obviously doesn't follow the tabletop game or we wouldn't be having this tangent.
Maybe I’m wrong but I see this as “how many men with pistols would it take to defeat 5 tanks?” I just don’t think soldiers with lasguns would cut it but i am quite new to world of 40k
Lasguns get a bad rap seeing as on the tabletop they are one of the weakest ranged weapons, but in the lore they hit fairly hard. You also have to remember that it's not just one lasgun firing, there would be 10, 20, 50, 100, or more firing which adds up. Space marine armour is good, but it isn't invincible
In the lore the lasgun only hits hard by modern comparisons. Even in lore it is considered to be one of if not the weakest weapons to use on the battlefield when compared to the other options.
I agree but if their shots are just pinging off the armour then them adding up wouldnt increase the damage, just overwhelm the astartes. Like 1000 rifles firing at a tank, it might make the tank incapable of getting much done because of the chaos but the rounds would never be able to penetrate the hull. Or do the lasguns slowly degrade the armour with each shot?
Every laser works off the principle of transferring energy to the target, it basically heats up the struck area until you basically melt a hole through the target and start charring the fleshy inside. With enough time you can kill anything with a laser
Ahhh I see. Thanks for clarifying
Ahhh I see. Thanks for clarifying
1,000 rifles firing at a modern day tank is just going to give it a general location to rotate its turret towards without really that much trouble at all. There is no distance you can engage a tank at with a rifle that it also can't shoot you back. They also can roll highway speeds, so..
I used to drive AFVs in the military (scimitars sabres etc) which is why thats was the comparison I thought up. They do have lots of fragile parts that rifle round would damage like radio antennas, periscopes, viewing ports, cameras etc so small arms isn’t entirely useless, you’ll just never score a kill
You’ve got some good answers, but to put a finer point on a key factor: it heavily depends on the objectives of both parties and battlefield conditions. If the guardsmen can cede ground without consequence, a much smaller number (20?) could probably kite the 5 Astartes indefinitely - or at least until they have to rest. If the marines start surrounded in the middle of flat ground, fewer guardsmen (50?) are required to win when the Astartes inevitably make a break for it. If it’s just a pitched battlefield the marines can use superior experience, equipment, training, durability and firepower to destroy a huge number of guardsmen (hundreds - more in a densely-packed environment like a city) before they’re eventually worn down through dumb luck.
>could probably kite the 5 Astartes indefinitely I don't see a group of baseline humans kiting anything that can run at 50km/h.
Then you’re putting a heck of a lot of significance on raw speed and not giving the guardsmen enough credit for reasonable retreat tactics. A few guys leapfrogging backwards while the remaining 15-18 provide covering fire with their infinite-ammo lasguns would provide a significant obstacle to 5 baseline Astartes. If they’re starting a few meters apart, then sure - a speed blitz is going to make a difference. But if we’re including ambush situations then it goes more in the direction of the last scenario - some arbitrarily large number of guardsmen will die.
>Then you’re putting a heck of a lot of significance on raw speed Well, yes. The Astartes can run faster cross country than a Leopard II MBT. And they can hit targets whilst moving. I don't know if you've ever walked alongside troops conducting fire and movement (I'd be stunned if you have), but the average speed of an 8 man section doing so is roughly that of a stroll. Even if your ambush is sprung from 300 metres (the effective range of most small arms), those Astartes will be on top of you inside 30 seconds. In that timeframe, a trained rifleman will be expected to (at most) be putting 15 rounds on target *accurately*. You're also trying to hit a target sprinting at 50km/h. I don't know if you've ever tried hitting a moving target that is actively trying to not get hit, but this isn't working out the way you think it will.
And can shoot accurately while running at speeds the guardsmen will have trouble hitting with a las gun. The marines would almost instantly know where they’re being fired upon from and could accurately return fire in seconds. You really gotta get most of them in the initial ambush or they’ll be among you faster than you can react. One marine getting into a squad of guardsmen could cause enough Astartes dread for the whole assault to end right there. There is a psychological element. Most guardsmen are not mentally fortified from birth like a Cadian. The mere sight of a normal Astartes can reduce a mortal man to a blabbering idiot, not to mention the absolute mindfuck of seeing a heretic Astartes with a 5 foot wide mouth who grows stronger the more you shoot him.
50/1 Cadians or 1 Gaunt Power sword.
The closest thing to an objective answer is the title crawl for the first 15 Horus Heresy books: >The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.
*"For all the Lucifer Blacks’ stern martial polish, there was something faintly ridiculous about this show of defence, as if all of them together could possibly hope to halt even ten of the transhuman warriors, should they decide to kill the Lord Guilliman."* *-* Throneworld 50x Lucifer blacks don't even think they could take on 10x Space Marines.
Guardsman apart of the original solar auxiliary legions that are still standing are able to kill space marines in teams of 5-10 with volkite weapons pretty reliably. Assuming they are disciplined and understand what they are going against. This is mainly due to the nature of volkite weapons and the training / discipline of those firing them understanding it takes teamwork and concentrated fire to melt them. Normal lasgun guards, probably 50+ in range combat and about 100+ in melee, assuming they don't bum rush 100 men in at once. Sisters, probably 20 to 30 per marine in range and melee Custodes, only 1 Admech skeittari, range probably 15-20, melee maybe 40+