Has anyone really considered the power disparity between Space Marines and the Tau Cadre forces?

Has anyone really considered the power disparity between Space Marines and the Tau Cadre forces?

Sure by all accounts a single Space Marine is a far superior warrior than even the best of the Fire Caste but it doesnt take 100 years to train a Tau Firewarrior.

I know the lore and stories fluctuate to the demands of the time but a loss of even 10 marines is 10% of a single company, pretty significant since its rare for more than a few battle companies to be deployed.

Tau Weapons are clearly good against power armour, how can any Space Marine Chapter fight against the Tau and not require another 100 years of rebuilding?

Strategically how would they even fight the Tau? Highly mobile, mechanized, long range and with great anti air, few Chapters should be able to even keep up and purely close combat chapters ought to be damaged so hard they cant even continue fighting even if they manage to catch up.

Anyways Im curious how a Chapter would look like if they specialized in fighting the Tau

I mean I know this is just a drawn picture, but 4 marines probably just got killed there! How many hundreds of years of experience just got plasmed down the drain? Those guys probable have been in battles longer than those Tau have been alive.

I read about 60% of Blade of Damocles and basically marines get devastated on the initial landing. They fight back okay but Farsight and the other generals start telling the troops to equip plasma and melta on all the suits.

Even though marines get chopped in half or get arms blown off, they still crawl around and continue to fight, which amazes the Tau. After the marines are scattered from the drop zones, it turns into guerilla warfare, where specialized small teams like the one with Ventris and Sicarius get lucky and do infiltrate into the tech labs and do some Rambo shit.

In open warfare, the marines have to rely on their orbital ships and other human forces like the Imperial Guard and Titan legions to fight the entire Tau army. Marines can also bring plenty of tanks as well.

>Mass teleported terminators on command positions and important areas
>Space based naval boarding action and support
>Let the IG do the rest

Theres really no other logical reason to waste marines on an enemy that can trade so well man on tau. But then again we live in a universe where tank commanders wave chain saw swords around.

And in any case the 1000 marines per Chapter really needs to be revised into a more realistic number. 100,000 Marines per chapter sounds more reasonable. And would actually make sense why the would divide their forces into battle companies.

Yeah marines really make no sense when they usually go against armies of millions even if they are way better trained it just doesn't add up.
Against tyranids for example even if they were each killing a bid every second they would still get over run.
That's why I suppose they are more used to tip the balance in a fight by crushing the enemies leader ship while the imperial guard take the brunt of the fighting

Yes, Tau are probably the faction where it makes least sense for humans to send Marines in.

They have the raw numbers and war engines to crush tau, but marines do not. Tau are mobile, prefer not to hold ground and to hit and run, and have a shit ton of anti-marine firepower.

Killing the tau via attrition isn't hard, but marines are not for attrition.

Crunch marines have very little to do with fluff marines. Fluff marines against 5 fire warriors is something like three dead-eye shots that shatter the heads of the first three before they can even react, dodge a pulse rifle shot, shoot another right in the chest destroying it while runnig up to the last one and ripping his head off, sgrugging off the accidental shot recieved in the process.

Also, oftentimes if marines ended up in a prolonged battle with lines drawn and tanks deployed, that means they must have fucked something up royally in their favourite decepitation orbital strike.

I really can't stand Space Marines. Hate everything about them from the design to their ideology.
So my only conclusion is that those who write about them instead love those things and write stuff that doesn't make sense designed to show off those characteristics of the Space Marines.

>turns into guerilla warfare, where specialized small teams like the one with Ventris and Sicarius get lucky and do infiltrate into the tech labs and do some Rambo shit.

Really, this sort of shit is what Marines would be best for. They're basically the predator to a Tau.
>can see in the dark
>ultrafast reflexes
>can eviscerate you with their hands
>doesn't need to sleep for days
>recovers from wounds in days
>can eat nearly anything, including tau
>can absorb memories after eating tau
>will spit acid at you

A marine chapter can take on, a Tay cadre. Usually with a few companies. Raven Guard and White Scars seem to be the effective sorts against them.

However, when dealing with a whole invasion forces of Tau like we seen in the TSE, the Space Marines won't cut it alone. In Kauyon, the Tau were killing hundreds and wounding many more of marines in the INITIAL stages of the war for the planet of Prefectia. In the middle of the book, the Tau routed the Space Marines and it took the intervention of the Imperial Guard to prevent the marine retreat from turning into a whole scale massacre.

100k chapters makes no sense, Marines aren't supposed to be standing armies, they are elite special forces that do surgical strikes against the enemy.

Few things make any sense in 40k. Better just think about it purely on the rule of cool basis.

In this case, the IG with strong Inquisition support are far superior to dealing with the Tau.

There the Tau trade poorly for normal humans

But for your original question, its just wasnt thought out clearly enough

It was just an arbitrary number but when you have billions of guardsmen, many more times that PDF then a 100 million space marine count in the galaxy doesnt sound that far fetched to me.

>Asking about logistics
>In 40k

Just don't. This is a setting where chapters of marines ride conventional bikes in a setting where entire enemy factions have grav-tech.

Do you have any idea of the scale of 40k? At only a million in the galaxy, marines should have zero galactic relevance even as spec ops. Battles see billions of soldiers fight and that can be multiple simultaneous campaigns in one sector. Do you know how many Nids are on ONE hive shipe? Millions. Fucking millions.

I'm not a 40k player. Are there really only supposed to be 1000 space marines at a time?

Why not just leave them on earth to guard some cool looking statues or some shit at that point? They'd have to be the size of a large planet and ejaculate solar flares to be worth anything in the grand scheme of things.

>>will spit acid at you
Actually one of the Deathwatch stories including Tau was the first time ever I personally read about marines spitting acid. Some Gue'vesa leader was going to talk to captive marine and before she could even say about anything, the marine just spat glob of acid on her face haha. So yes thats a thing sometimes.

I'm going to need a sauce on that.

>they are elite special forces that do surgical strikes against the enemy.
That's what they do now. Back in the day they would conquer planets rather than defend them, they would topple empires, human and xenos alike, and would be the extinction of several alien species more terrible than what the Deathwatch faces in 40k, hell they even fought the Hrud and won. They would do what others couldn't

And they could take several chapters worth of casualties without breaking a sweat. The Iron Warriors, after multiple campaigns with 60% casualties on average still numbered 185 000 marines.

1000 marines PER CHAPTER.
There are countless Space Marine chapters in the galaxy, and when each marine can solo hundreds of soldiers, it's an apt amount.
The Adeptus Custodes are in charge of guarding statues and the Emperor's body on Terra, and they number only 300 but are far stronger than even regular marines.

Those are the Companions, user. The Emperor led 10 000 from his personal ship, the Bucephalos, against an ork warboss that was winning against Horus, Mortarion and Dorn. Only 3 Custodes died.

Also, there are about 1000 SM chapters, meaning there are about a million loyalist marines, and in 30k there were never more than 2 million of them.
The only countless armies are the IG, Orks and Nids.

this

Look at the numbers. In a planetary scale that are still spear tip forces.

Damocles book was utter shit. Apparently tau had fucking RIPTIDES before making first contact with Imperium, but none were used in battle, for reasons. So, the idiot who wrote this managed to contradict whole tau timeline, codex, and riptide fluff (where Riptide was late counter to IoM stuff). He also wrote the book in most idiotic possible way, like battles in game were fought on tabletop in 7th edition, marines dying by thousands, down down to idiocy where tau commander stands around doing NOTHING while space marine commander duels his sergeant in MELEE COMBAT and only shoots him when the assault phase ends.

That book was 200% tau wankery, with everything tau made before they even contacted IoM being better than any IoM technology, but also made tau mouth breathing morons where leader of the entire planetary defence is threatened with execution for pushing fucking reset button in his suit, as it's earth caste duty and fire warriors are forbidden from doing that. How such morons would design a lasgun, never mind whole suit, is beyond me. I have seen fanfics written by 12 year olds that were better written, sadly...

Pfff Space marines can Sweep advance entire systems.

I'm pretty sure my little space elf girl has killed an entire chapter worth of marines in close combat by now.

Of course she was pretty high at the time.

>and write stuff that doesn't make sense

The only ones who dont fit the setting are the tau.

This is why you dont insert other sci fi settings into warhammer.

Why do the Tau not fit the setting, again? Because Humanity is a bunch of backwards fuckwits every other race in the galaxy must be completely depressed and full of edgemo?

Because warhammer is essentially fantasy world war 2.

When you add the tau you've just added gundam to world war 2

The Tau only don't fit because of their recent pushing of giant mechs. Back when they were first introduced as a tiny fledgling empire with many different client races, I thought they were more interesting. They basically represented the countless tiny alien empires dotting the galaxy, too small to be a galactic threat, but were a regional one. They ruined that by basically turning them into mary sue mechs who never lose for long.

>Strategically how would they even fight the Tau?
Speartip to the command centre followed by quick recovery and redeployment. No standing engagements, no sweeping advances in rhinos, just dropping on something important, fucking it up chronic and getting out of there.

otherwise known as how space marines fight in fluff