Lore-wise why are 30k-era Astartes such trash compared to 40k-era Astartes?
You see a 5-10,000 strong 30k-era Astarte force struggling to do what a 40k-era Company sized force could easily pull off on their own with no backup.
Something like the Damnos incident would have likely wiped out half of the Ultramarine Legion.
30k-era Marines seem to come off as "slightly better IG Stormtroopers" rather than "Super Soldiers".
marines after the horus heresy are recruited, trained, mindfucked and armed better. possibly chapters use more serfs, servitors and automated stuff to focus better on the battles
mass-production and the high attrition rate of heresy-era campaigns meant that marines from that era never grew into the centuries-old badasses that 40k astartes are.
40k marines have to compensate their lackluster numbers with better gear and wayyyyy better training.
30K Legionnaires are just slightly better than the IG. They are conscripts. They have augmentations and nice equipment, but they are still conscripts who get deployed in mass assaults which inevitably have high attrition rates.
40K marines are special forces. They are carefully recruited and trained. They operate in ways which largely minimize losses, and don't take missions which require people to die in large numbers (that's what the guard is for).
Yet when 30k marine appear due warp fuckery in 40k they operate as good as 40k marines...it's like this setting made no fucking sense or something, but can't be it, right?
are you talking about veterans of the long war?
for the same reason that a demicompany will get BTFO by xenos, which then get soundly beaten by the surviving squad - its because most of them are redshirts whose only purpose is to die so that the heroes can seem better
Ninja rules, the more of something the worse it's. Make X 30k marines fight what X 40k marines fight and you'll see they're as good
Fluffwise Legion Marines ware actually better than 40k ones. They are supposed do be implanted with purer geneseed, "fresher" kinda, Also the technology was understood a lot better, this kinda shit.
Typical story inconsistency causes them to die in droves in HH books, becauyse if it would be realistic every invasion would be like when World Eaters and Word Bearers purged Nuceria.
Also, remember that stories are supposed to only talk about those moments that are worth remembering. All those star system civilisations crushed in one week of assault is borig.
But anyway yeah, inconsistency.
Because they knew fear.
Maybe not armed, but everything else. It's been covered in a few older sources of fluff how after the Heresy happened that Guilleman re-wrote the rules and procedures on recruitment to prevent the kind of bad seeds who caused most of the trouble in the first place from getting through the new system.
Best literary example is from the old Space Wolf novels, where they take Ragnar and subject him to a bunch of psychic visions, tempting him in various ways to see just how corruptible he may be.
While the first part of this is true, and a major reason why the Legions used more lax recruiting standards before the Heresy.
I would certainly think a 40k marine who's lived hundreds of years and had better, focused training would BTFO of the standard 30k marine who's probably been fighting for maybe a few decades and is essentially a step up from guardsmen in most cases as they could afford to use marines like guardsmen.
That said, I would like to see Imp Guard stories from 30k if there arn't any already.
Lore wise: they fought in much larger campaigns at the forefront of all stages of fighting instead of just the first spear thrust
Reality wise: more of them means they're more expendable
>Yet when 30k marine appear due warp fuckery in 40k they operate as good as 40k marines...it's like this setting made no fucking sense or something, but can't be it, right?
Those Space Marines are veterans of thousands of years of fighting and live in Space Hell, and are quite likely directly empowered by it, all while leading cutthroat bands of other Marines who will not hesitate to kill them at the first sign of weakness.
Those Marines are better, because they have had so much longer to gain experience and have far harsher lives, so only the strongest of the strong survive for any meaningful amount of time.
That said, recruitment and training of new Chaos Marines is a common problem for renegades/Legions, and often results in many sub-par recruits dying before a single decent recruit is able to be selected...to advance to the next brutal round of tests with better and better candidates he must compete with.
They didn't have the wisdom of the Codex Astartes to guide them
My understanding is that the 30k marines are used much more as a frontline meatgrinder force rather than the 'special forces' kind of deal from 40k. The great crusade was fantastically aggressive and brutal and they had the numbers to allow them to use these kind of brute force tactics with their best, leading to ridiculous attrition but similarly rapid results as they moved from world to world, conquering in the name of the Emperor.
CSM and 30k marines are weaker than 40k marines. The 30k marines that appeared in Fall of Cadia literally got wiped out before the Militarum Tempestus and Cadian 8th Kasrkin did.
The entire Great Crusade was about 160 years.
That's what? A pretty average career for your tactical marine? Much less dudes like Dante who've been fighting for 1000 years.
Add in that the 40k marines enemies are as deadly or deadlier (enemy marines for example), and that 30k Marines considered Orks and Eldar as dangerous foes, then it makes sense that your 40k Marine is trained better and more experienced.
Orks are the only 40k enemy that were deadlier in 30k
>The 30k marines that appeared in Fall of Cadia
Wait what
How about you fucking read Fall of Cadia faggot
Because the galaxy was tamed. The Beast shows us what orks used to be for example. Every major faction that could posed a major threat to the Imperium was wiped out minus a handle full.
>Orks and Eldar as dangerous foes
To be fair, as far as I can recall the only major space-faring factions besides humies at the time were the Orks and Panzee gits. And after Emps killed the Warboss at Ullanor, the Imperium treated the greenskins as nothing more than annoying vermin.
Right up until the WAAAGH! Beast happened in 32k which opened with the Orks showing up with a goddamn Ork Deff Star over Ardamantua and murdering the fuck out of the entire Imperial Fist chapter save for one guy. Granted, the chapter had been putting up with planet getting torn to hell by gravity storms for 6 weeks before getting massacred by the Orks, but that's beside the point.
>The Beast shows us what orks used to be for example.
Yeah, the Orks taking a page from Majora's Mask and parking a gigantic moon with a massive clockwork Ork face as a way to say "Oy humies! REMEMBER US?" was a great way of showing just how zoggin' terrifying the greenskin horde can be.
Hell, now that I think about the Orks are the only Xenos race that's ever parked an enemy fleet above Terra (not counting Horus of course!)
>Hell, now that I think about the Orks are the only Xenos race that's ever parked an enemy fleet above Terra
The best part is that almost everyone(In and out of universe) horrifically underestimates them.
>The best part is that almost everyone(In and out of universe) horrifically underestimates them.
The writers of The Beast Arises novels make it painfully clear how little the Imperium thinks of the Orks, since they keep walking into Ork ambush after Ork ambush over and over.
If Vulkan hadn't shown up to save the day back then the Imperium would've really been screwed. pre-40k Marines are like people who play games on the easiest difficulty suddenly getting dropped into a game at the maximum difficulty setting. It doesn't usually end well for them.
Also, I find the lack of art surrounding the 'Ork Attack Moon' scaring the ever-living fuck out of Terra' kinda depressing.
Did they ever explained that why AdMech thought teleporting Ullanor rather than destroying it was a good idea?
Haven't got to the last book in the series, but based on how they've acted so far...
They thought they could get more Ork tech if they kept Ullanor around and just renamed it Armageddon?
>30k marines are Skyrim players who pick up Dark Souls
I didn't know I needed art of this in my life.
Because if Ullanor wasn't destroyed it couldn't become Armageddon for maximum pottery. You don't think Orkz attack planets randomly do you? If you do, Black Library thinks you have another thing coming.
Okay, my knowledge of 40K lore is fledgling at best, but, WHAAAAAAAAAAT?!