Sup Veeky Forums, have some thoughts

I would rather terminator armor was +1 save, being able to take it's save against anything save melta and D weapons while still failing on a 1.
Drop the price of a land raider, and increase the passernger count to hold a full sqquad.

I don't think space marines need to be buffed, other armies just need to be balanced.

everyone points at marines and is like "lol t4 3+ save fuck you guyssssss" yet most alien armies can outshoot marines at least 3/4 to 1.

ill use eldar as an example here, lets say 20 guardians get into a fire fight with 10 marines. lets say they both get to shoot at each other simultaneously to avoid complications on who is attacking etc.

10 marines fire 10 bolters, lets give them rapid fire too, so thats 20 bolter shots. with a bs of 4 that means on average 10-15 shots should hit, and 5-7 shots should wound.

eldar fire back with 40 catapult shots, bs 4 so 20-30 hit, 10-15 wound.

anyone who has played 40k can attest that its a numbers game, the player who can put the most dice on the table is going to have an advantage. now eldar would die without armour saves to bolter fire, so we can assume that 20 bolter shots on average would kill 5-7 guardians outright.

with the armour saves marines get 10-15 catapult wounds would kill 3-6 marines on average.

so with completely average rolls, 30-60% of the marine squad dies vs 25-35% of the guardian squad. after 2-3 rounds of this its not surprising to see that the marines have been almost wiped out.

Now this is just basic troop weapons, we know that alien armies field much heavier guns, marines do too but the alien armies have the numbers to quell that firepower, marines simply do not.

the problem with the game as it stands is marines don't have the capability to win battles of attrition. if you want to win as space marines you basically need to be a drop pod army or some cheesy ass speeder/bike army, where as with alien armies you can pretty much field whatever you want and have success.

Marines as they stand are a good list, the other armies just need to be tweaked.

Yes, and those humans are rare as fuck, user. Just because there is an exception and a human can take on a space marine in terms of raw combat (disragarding physical strength) doesn't make all of space marines needless.

>Old fluff was the you went scout ->tactical -> Dev or Ass, depending on inclination.

How old? Because Tactical being the last stage and scout and dev being the first two was in the codex like 18 years ago.

>as it stands is marines don't have the capability to win battles of attrition

it's almost like it mirrors the fluff or something

Except the human is typically a heroic individual of great skill to do that.

Hell, Storm of Iron has the very human castellan of the fortress pushing a veteran Iron Warriors captain on the back foot in a sword fight. Fluff supports it.

have you read the fluff? theres countless stories of marines holding out against all odds, vastly outnumbered and still being able to defend. that doesn't happen in game ever.

Except they can, and have.
They are shocktroopers, but they can dig in and hold ground.

This 'discrepancy' is in many cases overstated. The power of Space Marines are all over the place in the various codices and novels. In addition to this most factions grunts usually do better in their fluff than they do on the tabletop.

Lets look at the basic Marine. He is an absolute beast as a standard foot soldier. He has the accuracy of a veteran warrior and hand to hand skills only the most practiced and vicious humans ever achieve. He has the physique matched only by a handful of other humans and can survive vicious wounds.

He is equipped with an expensive and incredibly violent weapon which causes grievous wounds, blows through the most common types of body armor in the galaxy as if it wasn't there. He wears armor which can protect him from anything short of anti tank weaponry and offers good but not perfect protection against small arms fire.

He is supported by his chapter of up to 999 more like him. In addition to this is the various command staff, space marines even more vicious than he is, various integrated ground, air and orbital support as well as a well equipped army of serfs who will man his fortresses and space ships.

Black library supports whatever shit the author feels like, it doesn't make it logical or reasonable.

It's like basing your assumptions about history on movie sword fights.

A space marine is, before he is even chosen to be recruited, far, far more physically capable than an imperial guard officer.

Space marine recruits are Conan or olympic athlete types, the physical cream of the crop of their entire planet.

Random imperial guard officer who has not even lived as long as a tactical marine being more dangerous in a fight is purely a game design choice and complete retardation fluff-wise.

Except, you know, all the bajillion stories of marines holding thing X for years and years despite overwhelming odds, or fighting gruelling guerilla wars when cut off from support and winning.

How do you mean a +1 save? As in only AP 1 ignores the save? I thought about that but I think that the strength to toughness fits more fluff-wise. The toughness increase is to make them more durable against small-arms fire rather while keeping them weak to AP2 weapons that are designed to wreck armour.

It's fluffy for armour to get melted by plasma or a meltagun to the chest, but it's less fluffy when a bunch of guardsmen can shoot down a termie squad.

That's the spirit I'm going for. Obviously there'll the rare exception of a standard human being more powerful than a Marine, but with the updated stats, the differences between a Space Marine and a Guardsman become clear.

Just above sums up how I see things. I'm not saying OP super saiyan movie marines, just ones that can punch their way through a squad of ordinary men, which is something they struggle to do at the moment.

then you play a game and he dies in 1 round of shooting to something thats out of his range to fire back. he marches across the field and loses 3/4 of his squad to heavy weapon fire, he charges and dies in overwatch.

While I agree space marines feel underpowered compared to the fluff I'm pretty certain a major reason was every faction becoming made of giant ap2 super murder shit over the last few years.

exactly this.

3+ armour saves and t4 would actually be decent if every army didn't have ridiculous firepower.once you get a str 6 ap 2 gun, everything might as well be toughness 1 with no armour.

You miss my point. I am talking about their stats as is. They are a head and shoulders above the stats of regular humans and most alien basic troops. They are reflective of their increased abilities. On the table top when people are killing marines they are usually bringing out weapons that could wipe out tanks.

There isn't much fluff which says a squad of space marines wouldn't be halved if a battle cannon round landed in the middle of them.

The issue is as I see it is that people assume the average 40k match is reflective of a typical skirmish. To me it seems more like parts of a pitched battle. It is why we see so many valuable or almost irreplaceable gear being blown away and the 'victor' losing over half his forces in many cases.

Undoubtedly, but it's simpler to just alter one army rather than weaken all the others. I'm thinking cures rather than symptoms.

Artillery and heavy weapons do most of the killing in war.

no they don't lol. soldiers do most of the killing.

I don't want the other armies to be weak, I just think they should be tweaked so they aren't as overwhelming.

for example the lance rule should be looked at. space marines advantage with tanks is their armour value, thats it. and the lance rule takes this away entirely. almost no aliens have armour value higher than 13 so its basically just a fuck you marine weapon, which I suppose makes sense that it exists but in game play its just overpowered. marines don't have anything that counters the speed of alien tanks, so why should they get stuff that counters the armour of marine tanks.

Oh yeah sorry I forgot there is a real history for 40k. It's all fluff friend.

There are also plenty of codex examples of human heroes killing marines in personal combat. They are rare but that's the point isn't it?

And yeah they hold out against grueling odds. Or get bitch smacked by a scemeing sorcerer. Or counter ambushed by blue space faggots and anihilated. Or any of the other several hundred times they have had there super-human balls stomped by an average adversary. It's all fluff.

I think you might be missing mine. For the most part, the Space Marine statline is perfect for what it is. I have no issues with them being wiped out by a tank, that only makes sense. The only things I've changed regarding how tough Marines are is Terminator armour, which needs buffs because they're meant to be nigh-indestructible, but aren't.

Most of my changes are based on the amount of damage a standard marine can do, not how much they can take.

Yeah, it's meant to be at the heat of battle, all the best gear getting used, I understand that. I just don't think the Marine army, as it stands, reflects how they are represented in the fluff. They're meant to be elite, heavy shock troops that use primarily tacs/devs/assaults, but the way the current codex is built there is next to no reason to actually do that because those squads aren't effective at their roles or are effective but in unintended ways. An standout example of what I mean is Assault Squads, which in the fluff are jetpack melee dudes that jump in and fuck shit up and they're set up to be that. But instead they get used as jumpy/mounted special weapons platforms and there's no reason not to use them as such.

I've had some thoughts on that to be honest. The simplest is to give vehicles an invulnerable save depending on the armour value. Starting at 11 which gives 6+ and 14 gives a 3+. Then you still have the ability to get behind a tank and blast its weak point. Might not be enough though.

I've been toying with making 40k play more like an actual wargame, tossing in more fluffy rules for the armies is somehting I've been working on. I'm liking these so far and may toss this into my codex

>Fluff Marines
That's easy.
WS10 BS10 S10 T10 W10 I10 A10 Ld10
Boltgun: S7 AP1 Salvo 5/10
Chainsword: SD AP2

Glad you like my ideas man. Any thoughts on point costs?

UPPPP the point costs on space marines.

I try to play fluffy cadian IG and drop about 200 points per squad on Vets. You think thats crazy, but when the vets are in cover and suddenly have a 3+ save in shitty ruins and 2+ in better cover+ night fighting along with hostshot volley guns, people serious the fuck up real fast after orders come down.

So with fluffy Space Marines you have to up the points cost. The problem is other cheese units in other armies are fucking cheap. Take the tau. I stopped seeing hammer heads because Supremecy suits and riptides are so cheap compared to what you have to spend on hammer heads to output the same damage its nuts.

Though when you start to remove the core rules and supplement more tactical flow based rules the Meta vanishes because its no longer meta

Points were always going up, I just don't know the extent. In my mind, a combat squad of barebones Marines should be massacre a min squad of vets. But I'm pretty sure the mathhammer at the moment shows that whoever shoots first should have the advantage.

That should change. Marines should win that fight 4/5 without fail, but the points should reflect that.

I was thinking baseline 100-120 points for a Marine Tac squad of five boys I think this more than accounts for the increased attacks and bolter upgrades, though I would throw in the Veteran Sergeant upgrade in for free.

I'd also like to adopt the cheaper marine buying from HH. Make the cost of buying the extra 5 marines for a full squad cheaper than buying a new squad to help alleviate the MSU spam that's rampant.

So, roughly 100 for the base squad, 180 for a full-manned squad with no upgrades, with 220 for a ten-man footslogging squad. But, I don't know if that would be underpowered in the current meta, so I'm quite unsure about it.

something along those lines so 250 for a decently kitted 10 man squad.

I also play with activation phase instead of normal turn order so whoever gets turn 1 doesn't automatically win the game, it improves the gameflow greatly. The only hickup so far is someone thinking they have 20 warp storms because they askweded "once per shooting phase" to once per every time something shoots

The problem is the entire structure of the marine army doesn't fit the TT and fluff at the same time. You don't send 100 space marines to go kill an army of around 250 guardsmen or similar amounts of troops, and taking obscene casualties in that battle would be humiliating. Space Marines need to become purely Elite choices, with their main infantry becoming serfs.

Make tacticals

Ws5_Bs5_S5_T5_I4_A2_LD8 with a 3+ invul save.

Terminators have 1+ to toughness and strength. They have a 2+ Invul save and 5+ FNP.

In exchange, space marine units have their points cost tripled and would fill an elite choice in the old FOC choice, and an army will only have like, thirty space marines max.

The main unit of Space Marine armies becomes Serfs. Serfs have stats similar to Veteran Guardsmen, but don't have heavy weapon teams. The average space marine army will have three squads of marines max, with the rest being filled out by vehicles or serfs.

Marines are fine as is, Brother Nobody (the standard tactical marine) is cannon fodder in the fluff. The unstoppable killing machines are named characters, captains ect... and those guys are already pretty beefy.

No they aren't retard, literally every space marine is named outside of the Horus Heresy. Besides the fluff is full of unamed Space Marines fighting back impossible odds, like a random scout squad that put down a planetary rebellion in 24 hours or when the Abyssal Cleansed hundreds of daemon world IN THE WARP. Writing tropes an argument does not make.

There aren't enough examples of Serfs fighting alongside marines to justify them being the main bulk of the fighting force. The statline you have there is more overpowered than I'd like as well.

I'm not aiming for a completely fluff-accurate force, just more fluff-respectful. The main idea is to iron out the niggling little bits that don't make sense (a marine throwing the same amount of punches as a guardsman, the bolter having nothing to reflect its explosive nature) while still keeping the structure of the codex similar enough to the real deal codex to allow a list to be applicable in both, albeit a 500 point list of my changes being roughly the equivalent of a 750 Codex:SM army.

Then you re-write the fluff to include serfs. Either the fluff needs to be brought in line with the tabletop, or the tabletop needs to reflect the fluff. At this point the gaping difference between the two is fucking ridiculous, as they might as well be wholly different entities from different franchises.

The problem is hat a fluff-friendly force would have 10-20 space marines versus a force of 100-200, say, guardsmen, and similar forces like that.

The rules set of 40k doesn't support that at all. Unless they're sitting on a half-dozen wounds with 2+/2+/FNP and Eternal Warrior, and even then they'll never kill anything their points cost.

The only reasonable way to do it would be to have Imperial Guard and Space Marines in the same faction, with the SM being elites and HQ choices while the Guard does 80% of the work. Which, depending on your interpretation of fluff, might be totally accurate.

>Spess Muhreens deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that. etc...

Have you ever seen the "Movie Space Marines" stats? I think it came out of an old White Dwarf.

Thats how it would work in the real world application of 40k wrfare. Just Sm would operate as an independent detachment, rather than an elite detachment.

But everyone throws a shitfit when you try to import real world functions into 40k. There a difference between something not working because its stupid, and something not working because its literally cannot work that way. Like 5k man IG regiments that die in stalingrad numbers all the time? That would mean a regiment would be entirely expired in one month of fighting.

Its stupid, it could happen, but on an average scale thats simply unsustainable on millions of worlds with millions of cities. Mankind literally would not have the numbers to support it. Then again GW cannot into numbers in any imagination

That defeats the purpose of trying to reflect the fluff in the first place. If you really want your marine force to have a combat serfs, ally in Imperial Guard and model them in your Marine colours.

Well at 1000 points, I think 20 marines that still carried the weight of the army would be great. At that point, in an all infantry guard army, you could probably squeeze in about 100 dudes with no other tanks and what have you, and you'd probably have a decent chance. That's still 5-1 which is as close to fluffy numbers without it getting ridiculous.

Maybe giving Space Marines Fear by default could help, to represent how terrifying it is to just watch what a Space Marine can do. I remember reading a piece of fluff about how the space marines are so big and so fast that it just fucks with the human mind. That would make them more effective and less vulnerable to swarms.

That gave me the initial idea really. I thought the idea of something between that and the current Codex would be really cool.

Doesn't mean that it's not the sci-fi futuristic satire that it's made out to be. There's a difference between bringing it into the real world and bringing the game into the fluff.

desu the current battle rules probably fit 'real world' in a decent way - in terms of how squishy to tough things are and what kinds of units get brought, it makes sense on a certain level. You don't bring infantry when the other person's bringing giant infantry-killing robots, that sort of thing. The problem being asked here isn't that, but rather the problem of making it match the fluff - In the fluff, in the actual stories of the world that we're given, you should be able to throw 10 space marines at almost anything and guarantee that it'll wind up dead. Throw 100 marines and you can subjugate the planet.

It's stupid, but at least it could be consistent. Their power level now is more consistent with their origins in Rogue Trader as mere humans in power armor with good training who work as space cops, instead of the superhuman monks they're fluffed as now.

Uh, humanity does have the numbers to sustain it daily. The population of mankind in 40k is measured in the quadrillions. There are trillions of imperial guardsmen. Millions is pocket change.

In one of the Eisenhorn books they talk about how battles where like a million dudes charge are happening less and less, and even then they happened rarely, in massive-scale engagements. Not every battle on 40K has millions of dudes in the fight.

>The problem is the entire structure of the marine army doesn't fit the TT and fluff at the same time. You don't send 100 space marines to go kill an army of around 250 guardsmen or similar amounts of troops, and taking obscene casualties in that battle would be humiliating. Space Marines need to become purely Elite choices, with their main infantry becoming serfs.
With weird unique formations, rather than the standard force-org-chart being the gold standard, this is fully possible. Heck, you don't even need the serfs: just a bunch of all-elite formations.

The point is that you shouldn't be fielding any more than twenty or thirty space marines outside of apocalypse.

Then I guess that's something that formationhammer is doing right, because the standard seems to be a few units and heavy choices buffed with redonkulus formation bonuses.

But they aren't. The average formation typically has fifty marines or more, and that's not counting the ones in vehicles.

Nah, your standard Space Marine has always been plain garbage on the table top. The tactical tax.

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Marines suffer because GW never really updates them. They're the four squad which means they're never very good at anything, and the bolter is is pretty lame too.
They need the capability to deal more damage and not just act as ablative wounds for the missile launcher and grav gun.

I did a changelist, give it a read and you'll see the power level I'm thinking.

see
The Movie Marine list, made for shits and giggles, is now LOW POWERED.
I want you to think about that for a minute.

Fucking marinefags...

Marines are just fine statted as they are. To say they are as good as the "Fluff" is ridiculous. The the only official fluff (GW codexes and game books) Marines die all the time. They get ripped to shreds by Tyranids. They get splattered by daemons. They get outmaneuvered and shot to all fuck by Tau.

They're just fine as they are.

I've actually tried this a few times, me or a friend play Guard or Tau or something in a pre-set scenario vs space marines or chaos space marines (eg. marines ambushing a Tau armoured column or chaos space marines assaulting an Imperial Guard position). We tend to go a bit rules lite and kind of wing it but the rules for the actual units are
>Marine vehicles are all BS 5
>Marine vehicles all get +1 AV on all sides
>All bolter weapons are +1 strength
>Add +1 WS, BS, S, T, W, I, and A to all marine models
>Dreadnoughts are WS and BS 6 as are chaos chosen
>Sternguard and Vanguard vets are BS and WS 6 respectively
>Terminators and chaos terminators can choose WS or BS 6
>Terminator armour provides +1 toughness
>Triple the cost of all marine models
Ends up pretty neat, terminators for example are generally
WS:6 BS:5 S:5 T:6 W:2 I:5 A:3
and cost 120 points each. Also the opponents are allowed to target units in assault with shooting although any misses count as hitting allied forces.

Overall it is unbalanced as hell but its a lot simpler than making a full codex and still fun as shit. Its fun seeing a squad of plasma vets line up in front of three marines who already lost the other two members of their squad and desperately firing to bring the marines down. Its fun seeing five marines hack their way through a blob of guardsmen or a lone space marine captain absorbing a volley of battlesuit fire and then ripping the battlesuits apart. Also makes guardsmen and Tau standing up to marines much more epic. A Lord Commissar challenges a chaos space marine to single combat so he can hold him in place long enough for artillery to land on his own position, a Tau commander holds off a space marine for an entire round of an assault allowing a group of battlesuits to shoot the distracted marine in the back.

>Marines are just fine statted as they are
You do realize that until recently, SM were a mid tier army AT BEST, being bottom of the barrel for much of the early life?
It wasn't until 5e that they became competitive.
Meanwhile, Eldar have ALWAYS been at the top of the heap, Tau have almost always been mid or higher.

The Black Library is perfectly canon retard, no matter how assmad you are about it. There's no distinction between the Black Library and GW- the BL is just their publishing branch and produces the Codices too you mong.

Also the most OP examples of space marines ARE FROM THE FUCKING CODICES.

I swear I'm the only fucking person who reads the entirety of codices.

bump

Problem is that, fluff wise, that very rare peak human should still get BTFO by a Space Marine. Top tier technology and cybernetics could bridge the strength and toughness gap in some cases, but the only not-Space-Marine humans who could hope to match them in skill are Inquisitors who've lived and fought for a century or more.

Nigga Tactical being last is like 5th edition fluff
It was changed in 6th

Space marines=basically Doomguy on steroids

fucking take the picture captcha

Dow: Soulstorm intro.webm

This. marinefags are such babies. If any other army had an entire thread to whining about shit like this it would get laughed off the board.

Gunna need to do some tinkering to SOB points costs too in that case. As SOB use a lot of the same weapons.

>this is implying that The Doom Marine is inferior to a space marine.
>The man who literally stayed behind in hell to punish the demons eternally for killing his pet rabbit.
>So fucking METAL was this man that the demons eventually just had to trap him, and seal him away for all eternity. (Or so they hoped)

The Marine is the infinitely more bad-ass version of Draigo. He Could take on a goddamn chapter master in single combat.

initiative rolls befor each turn ?

No more like Activate a unit move/shoot/assault with it then the next player activated. And it goes through until each unit has moved and the turn ends