Guilliman changes the codex

>Guilliman changes the codex
>Chapters now have 10.000 marines.

How would that change their role in the imperium?

Lamenters are now even weaker and more pitiful by comparison to everyone else.

Should be a million a chapter/Legion and even then they'd still be rare as fuck.

>Making them Legion level

Nah. At best, Guilliman would go and force the AdMech to remove 3/4th of the red tape they have on their tech and outfit the marines with some GC/HH Legion equipment to make them more efficient.

Maybe at one point bring back some of the more Legion-themed units (Recon Squads, Breachers, and finally initiate his plan he had since the GC and give all Legions [now Chapters] their versions of Fullmentarus Terminators for real missile hailstorms).

For the first 200 years or so, all chapters would be seriously understrength compared to the new chapter standards, as they can't rush the production of new zygotes.

I can see some chapters reducing the instensity of their campaigns, barely involving themselves with the Imperium's wars until they get near 10.000 marines.

Other chapters will continue to be very active but that means they'll be continously understrength while being expected to achieve much more stuff than before.

All chapters would need to step up recruitment.
Finding candidates up to the standards for space marines might become difficult.
For those recruiting in Hiveworlds, that might not be a problem.
But for those recruiting on the much less inhabited savage worlds, they might have to lower their standards.

All said, while the change of codex rules might benefit the Imperium in the long term, it might put him in a very thigh spot for a century or two.

Everyone would be weaker than standard for some years, silly user

Not much? even if you allow 10.000 marines per chapter doesn't mean you can reach that number easily unless you start to fuse chapters into a single one. And that still keeps the total number of marines the same

Not that much really, chapters try to stay around the 1000(+) marines because that's them paying lip service to the codex, but seeing how fast some chapters can recover from annihilation or grow beyond codex level if they really want to, it would take some decades at most to have chapters reach the new required size.

This. Even in the great crusade when legions had many many recruiting worlds tithed to them, replacing losses still took time.

IIRC after a particularly bad campaign that saw the Blood Angels reduced to like 100 (active duty) Space Marines, they just locked themselves up on their homeworld for 50 years not doing shit until they got back to 1000 Space Marines.
And don't forget that the Raven Guard and the Salamanders have been trying to get to 1000 Space Marines since the end of the Horus Heresy and never even got there.

So yeah, good point.

>the Raven Guard and the Salamanders have been trying to get to 1000 Space Marines since the end of the Horus Heresy and never even got there.

There is really no excuse for this, since other chapters go on the brink of annihilation multiple times and get back to full strenght in a matter of decades at most.

Ravenguard have super shitty geneseed. Alot of their recruits probably end up turning into mutant monstrosities that need to be put down.
Salamanders are just lazy.

I think a lot of it has to do with implantation success rate and the raven guard also seem to have an operational tempo beyond that of even other space marine chapters.

I'd like to point out that the Raven Guard and the Salamanders have probably the most humane combat philosophies of all chapters.

They simply cannot sit back and recoup their losses while Imperials require assistance. Unlike say the Blood Angels, they cannot and will not lock themselves off from the galaxy to beef up their numbers. They just keep on fighting no matter what.

>How would that change their role in the imperium?
Very slowly

Just because you can have more marines doesn't mean you have enough geneseed to cover those numbers

>since other chapters go on the brink of annihilation multiple times and get back to full strenght in a matter of decades at most.
That means nothing, if you have geneseed for 1000 dudes that means you can recover those 1000, but that doesnt' mean you can suddenly make 10000

IIRC, Luther got it done to 3 years from 10. Not too long.

True, but you have two zygotes for every marine and it takes just some years for them to mature. You can farm them rather quickly if you want to, at that point the main bottleneck would be the number of recruits, their training and the time it takes for all organs to be transplanted, but even then you can set up a broader recuitment net from hive worlds and divert more manpower to training and screening.

If marines are meant to be special forces, not armies, how big should their numbers be for waging galactic war?

The bigger it gets, the more centralized command and authority become. The more potential for corruption and betrayal.

Depends on the size of the engagement, duh. Marines can affort to go around with such low numbers because most of the time taking a planet means controlling the only space port/city on the ground and that's it.

When shit really hits the fan marines either stay the fuck out like on vraks or many chapters get together to operate like on armageddon.

Rather than wait for chapters to expand their geneseed, wouldn't similar chapters (re-)unite?

Not all first founding are best buds with their successors. Blood angels had to go through a lot to overcome differences, but could manage. Imperial fists and dark angels are the best ones for that. Ultramarines have so many successors that some of them will surely do it; there's a chapter out there that basically acts as a giant backup for the ultras.

10x as many, at least. 1 million is ridiculously tiny for the scale of the galaxy and the conflicts they take place in. The kind of casualties they sustain also seem unsustainable for a chapter only 1000 in strength. Over the past few campaign books, the blood angels and space wolves are probably both down to less than 500, and the white scars and raven guard both got mauled pretty bad by the Tau.

Almost every space marine related story makes a lot more sense if you multiply their numbers by 10, try it out

Legion level was 100,000, a retcon from 10,000.

Should've been 1,000,000 each with 10k strong chapters. Would alleviate some scale issues.

Well, today's US Army is about 460,000 personnel, and Special Forces is about 33,000 (about half of that is support personnel). So a 14-to-1 ratio.

Of course the difference between a Space Marine and Imperial Guard is vastly greater than between Special Forces and Army, so let's add another 100-to-1 factor, for 1,400-to-1.

How many Imperial Guardsmen are there? We never see an exact figure (and they're so huge and spread out and constantly recruiting and dying maybe the Imperium doesn't HAVE that figure), but there are plenty of references to "countless billions". (Of course 40k is British so they might be a "long" 1^12 billion, but that's just insane so let's assume a "short" 1^9 billion.) "Countless" sounds like a lot more than a handful, so a safe Fermi estimate would be 100 billion, 1e11.

100 billion / 1400 = about 70 million Space Marines, amusingly just over the population of today's United Kingdom. At 10,000 marines / chapter that's 7,000 chapters -- at least more plausible than the 70,000 chapters you'd need with the current codex.

In short, no matter how super-powered Space Marines are, to be really useful you need a hell of a lot more of them.

Yeah, but on the other hand so many marines would still have some serious power that wouldn't be simply ignored.

That is if we ramp everything else ten times.

Shouldn't you compare SM to say, stormtroopers, rather than every guardsmen?

10,000 is just ludicrous. Five times that many died at Gettysburg in 1864.

Then for a long time the chapters that get along and would be happy to unite (Ultras successors) will enjoy a big population advantage over those that have to regrow the slow way.

But the theme is that there are way too many threats out there, so many in fact, that Space Marines can't possibly be expexted to take place in a battle. Your average Joe Guardsmen probably never sees a Space Marine in his lifetime.
At least that's what it should be.

The Blood Angels have a flawed but particularly reliable gene-seed; they augment it with a hypno-casque session (and the ugly Baal caterpillars spring forth at the end as beautiful space butterflies).

They also possess large stocks of gene-seed (because they have stable seed), either on Baal or at Mars thanks to tithing. Mars can also reproduce gene-seed rapidly by non-clonal means by using cloned, ideal host bodies, removing the gene-seed and culling as soon as that's ready.

Assuming 5 years maturation per set, starting from 10 clonal hosts with a 0% failure rate and producing 2 sets per host, it would take 35 years to completely seed a fresh Chapter for a new Founding from stored gene-seed (and you would also produce 128% of the necessary gene-seed, which would be handy for covering losses when implanting into real people).

Assuming the Blood Angels had more than 10 sets of chestpods to spunk, even with some fairly high failure rates they could still easily rebuild from 100 extant to 1000 in less than 50 years.

The RG and Salamanders presumably have extraordinary failure rates - the Salamanders in particular are said not to have any descendants, at least from official foundings, and to be continually under-strength. That may indicate severe rates of failure - or it may simply mean that they've lost one set of supermanballs and prefer not to remove the other until the brother is dead. Since nothing about horrific failures has been written about them, sterility or partial sterility of gene-seed is a likely cause for them being under-strength.

The RG may conversely have high reproduction rates but absurdly high failure rates, possibly one as a consequence of the other in a feedback loop, based on what we know of them officially.

While it might seem perverse, the difference between a 1% success rate and 10% is an order of magnitude expressed in terms of aspirants; it may be that they simply don't have sufficiently large Apothecarions to cope.

For Those We Cherish, We die in glory

The Raven Guard gene seed is so shit they require stocks from Terra for new aspirants. No idea what the Salamander's excuse is

What I think would be cool is that many Chapters, in their rush to get up to full strength as quickly as possible, fielded forces using whatever they could get their hands on.

Marines with old armor, volkite weapons, lighter-than-Scout armor, IG heavy weapons, or ancient equipment from decomissioned units like fielding new Destroyer Marines with rad missiles.


What I expect we'll get is that somehow every chapter in the galaxy found a way to become 900% more efficient in the trivial span of time needed to counter Chaos.

1000 marines has never made sense in this universe.

Dead tactical squad? Whoops that's 1% of the Chapter.

A company? 10% - Which according to the fluff is enough to quell an entire sector of planets, which is fucking stupid.

These people have no concept of scale, they cannot seem to fathom how large a planet is, let alone a solar system / sector

We have the ludicrous fluff Marines - 10 Space Marines (easily) secure an entire planet.

>Sargent Garius swung his chainsword and 300 Orks were cut in half
>He snap fired his bolt pistol and 600 Orks fell back dead

Marines, at the barest fucking minimum should be 10k - 100k would make more sense on a GALATIC scale.

There's an upper limit to the number of muhreens per chapter. But no real upper limit to the number of muhreen chapters there were.

So it wouldn't just be the 5th company of the Blood Barons fighting in the Shitstavus sector, but also complimented by the 4th company of the Green Goblins, the 6th and 2nd companies of the Ludicrous Towers, and support by the 3rd company of the Pickle Peckers

Well the INHERENT problem isn't one of scale itself but of infantry. No matter how badass a Space Marine is, he's still killing things only within basically line of sight (if SMs do a lot of killing beyond line of sight it sure doesn't show up much in the books or game, and hard to see how they'd have any advantage over a good tank), which means he's less useful than a vastly cheaper and lower tech thermonuclear bomb.

In a large scale, far tech future, infantry only retains the following uses:
>
But chainswords are awesome so we agree to suspend some disbelief.

>A company? 10% - Which according to the fluff is enough to quell an entire sector of planets, which is fucking stupid.

>sector gouvernor rebels against the Imperium
>entire company gets sent out to deal with this
>fight through his palace, kill everyone inside
>turn the gouvernor into paste, quite publicly
>"If anyone else wants to be a heretic again, you can now line up to a date with my powerfist or wait for an actual fighting force to turn this planet into a lifeless rock"
>gouvernor dead, rebels (hopefully) frightened enough from His angels
>better get ready for my 16 hour shift in the acid mines
I see how this could work, but also massively backfire.

It is even possible ? you need gene-seed to make marines rigth?
Gene seed come from primarch admited the most majority of chapter are ultramarines, we can figure guilliman can restore the stock.
But for the others, how they can manage this ?

Geneseed regrows in marines and so can expand exponentially. According to the Index Astartes, when a new chapter is ordered, the admech farm a single set into a full 1000 in about 55 years.

But the codex is literally perfect, why would he change it?

The only problem is the degenerate chapters that refuse to follow it.

Gene-seed is recovered from the Progenoid Glands, which are among the final implants.

One set rests in the neck, the other set is protected behind the ribs. The set in the neck is commonly removed immediately after maturation, and provides a 1:1 recovery rate.

Each progenoid gland, after it has matured within a marine's body for several years, can be used to grow the complete set of organs used in the creation of a Space Marine, including the further progenoid implants (which then mature within another body).

Part of the reason for the complexity of this process is (like the deliberate sterilization of marines) a design that deliberately prevents uncontrolled reproduction. Marines aren't meant to replace humans, just fight for them.

If a marine is killed and it's possible to recover his second progenoid, it grants his Chapter a 2:1 gene-seed recovery - for every 1 they put in, they get 2 back. If one is missing or non-functional (as is relatively common with certain other organs among some Chapters), that would severely reduce a Chapter's ability to reproduce.

However, with 2 per marine, applies. The Codex has traditionally limited most Chapters to 1,000 marines, but even those with less than perfect gene-seed and a small number of marines could easily exceed 1,000 in a relatively short space of time.

Starting with 1,000 marines and therefore 2,000 progenoids, you could end up with 128,000 in just 30 years - if none of them died and your gene-seed worked perfectly every time, and their progenoids were mature at 5 years. The Great Crusade appears to have worked on this basis - huge losses, but rapid recruitment.

What some anons have been missing about the 1,000,000 hard limit on marines set by the Codex is also laid to rest by this - the only problems start when whole Chapters are described as being composed of centuries-old warriors. In fact, most marines should be dead by 25 given the number of threats they face.

Seeing as it takes a couple dozen deaths for one successful black carapace treatment, it'd probably wipe the Imperium out.

>Well the INHERENT problem isn't one of scale itself but of infantry. No matter how badass a Space Marine is, he's still killing things only within basically line of sight
its both. 100 marines scouring a planet of millions of tyranids or orks makes no fucking sense, they can't be everywhere at once and they'd run out of bullets before they kill all the xenos. 10,000 of them, spread out across the world, setting up perfect killing zones and also getting skitarii or Guard support to mop up the fodder after they've killed all the leader beasts? that makes perfect sense.

This is why the real heavy lifters are the space fleets. Even the marine chapters need large fleets with capable firepower. The marines only go planetside when they can't accomplish their mission in orbit.

Marines are supposed to be bad motherfuckers and having even one marine can mean you gain or lose a world in some cases.

Unfortunately GW has horribly diluted this and now you have chapters chucking a thousand guys around like it ain't no thang.

This. The average Space Marine force should be a DW kill team, not a kilometer long battle theatre. But all the art is about marines until the eye can see at five yards from the enemy army.

Battle Companies used to be an Armageddon formation.

Nowadays they're not even a full army.

Thanks you loremaster.

Well now, how many chapter exist ?
Thousand ? How many fundation we have ?
if we have only the half, 500 chapter so actully 500 000 marines we can pass to 5 000 000 marines ?
How many marines they have during the great crusade ?

>Salamanders are just lazy.
I thought they retconned them being black

There are currently one thousand chapters. And a thousand chapters with a thousand marines puts the number of space marines as roughly the same as the number of loyalists in the Horus Heresy.

The logistics of growing a chapter are pretty silly. If it takes 10 years for the progenitor glands to mature, you just train marines for 10 years, keeing them safe until their glands are ready to be harvested, and then sending them to the front lines.

Assuming a chapter has 100 gene seed on hand, it would only take 8 decades to get up to 10000 marines, maybe 100 after failed implants and gene seed tax. Really depends on how many marines you can get from reproduction, with 2 being the max, but anywhere above 1 being sustainable. Even something as low as 1.25 has marines doubling their numbers every 5 years.

Never forget the basic premise of 40k: all previous knowledge can go down the drain within years. Probably even Geneseed.

My favorite loyalists just got a thousand times more terrifying.

Not sure their style could support that many Astartes.

The imperium may be a beurocratic nightmare, but I'm pretty sure they're not about to forget how they breed their super soldiers.

>I'm pretty sure they're not about to forget how they breed their super soldiers.
It is said most chapters do not fully understand how shit works and do it on ritual.

Doesn't that describe most of the Imperium's interaction with technology?