The Emperor was able to make 10,000 of these guys in like a century or two

The Emperor was able to make 10,000 of these guys in like a century or two

Why didn't he wait on the Great Crusade for a millennia or so and deploy hundreds of thousands of Custodes instead of Spezz Mahreens?

I feel like the Emperor was incredibly meticulous with the composition and organization of his empire. He wanted 10,000 custodes and hundreds of thousands of Space Marines so that it makes the former look more unique. Like having a piece of jewelry and having it made primarily out of silver and some gold even it would be worth much more if it was all gold.

Didn't have the time to wait. That's why he was so pushy on the Crusade with everyone - he wanted to get shit back together now now now!

Why did he want to get humanity united so fast? Because there was a point coming up where his sense of how the future would go became murky, and he wanted humanity to be ready as fuck for whatever might happen during that time, not as a bunch of squabbling planetary systems.

>Why don't I just use rockets instead of sending in the Infantry?
>Why don't we drop nukes on them instead of fighting them head on?
>Why can't we just firebomb them into oblivion from their air?
>Why don't we give every soldier a tank?

Because the Emperor wasn't the only being trying to unify the galaxy when the warp storms went poof.

It was probably more resource intensive

The biggest reason though is that the Emperor wanted an easy way to "deal" with space marines when/if the times comes. 1 million custodes would be quite impossible even for Big E to deal with.

Because Custodes are good, but they're still """"human"""" at the end of the day, and therefore can and will be killed when thrown up against certain things. You need bodies to buffer against these problems, which is why literally every successful military organization in the history of the human race has had tiered military systems.

On top are your hyper-elite forces that you trust with the absolute worst of missions. These are your Delta Force/SEALs, the guys who you call when you can only call one person (in this example, the two handle different areas of operation except when it's politically convenient for one to do the other groups job).

Then there are your hardened, veteran units. These are your Airborne/Rangers/Marine Force RECON/etc. They are units you can count on to fight hard and fight smart, but who are not necessarily the most skilled operators you have. They are usually either heavily-blooded "Line" units or units created for a special purpose (such as Airborne units).

Then are your line units. These are your "regular" forces, that are the backbone of your organization. While often reasonably competent, these troops are not the cream of the crop, and can typically only be relied upon to do the job they've been explicitly trained to do (an Armored Group isn't going to do very well if they're asked to perform scouting roles, and a Medical Corps can't be expected to hold a defensive position well).

At the bottom of the barrel are your reservists. These are either cadets or "part-time" soldiers, who have (or will) receive training, but simply lack the experience or skill to be effective on the battlefield. These units should only be used either as a last resort or to bolster less-threatened areas of the operation alongside veteran units, whose experience can rub off on or offset their ineffectiveness.

The new custodes index claims making a single custodes required more money than an entire chapter

I mean it's hyperbole but the point is obvious

Astartes are created to function as an army, Custoes are individuals. Despite being stronger one on one, a 10,000 marine army would wipe the floor with 10,000 Custodes.

Because most of warfare, especially occupation, is warm bodies standing and doing nothing.

Even if 10 elites can beat 10000 shit troops in a fight, you can do so much more with those 10000 that you won't even need to fight.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

You can make a chapter of marines in 50 years though.

He just didn't need them.

Space marines were already kicking everyone's asses.

Might as well save a buck. Otherwise he'd could have gone slow and steady while turtling to build up legions of primarch style or other emperor-like demigod superhumans instead, if the resistance to the great crusade was like a 100 times worse.

That was retconned.

One thousand custodes demolished the shit out of the thousand sons.

Also they murdered lots of chaos marines in the siege of terra and the webway war, and also kicked some thousand sons ass AGAIN on Luna during Rise of the Primarch.

Inferno states that the Custodes grew tot he level of 10,000 as the crusade went on, and that during the opening decades of the unification wars he only had the ability to create a few dozen, whereas he created thousands of thunder warriors.

Due to the disaster of the primarch project, time was of the essence if he was to reunite with his lost sons, and even without the primarchs he made tens of thousands of marines much faster than he could create custodes.

SO ultimately it comes down to speed and expense- the custodes are the perfect bodyguards and while they could have been built to be soldiers, it was more time efficient and economical to create space marines.

Read a fucking book you fucking fag.

The Marines are the sweet spot between Custodes and Guardsmen.

The Emperor needs to personally hand-craft every Custode. The Emperor made gene-seed, but that stuff self-propagates. The Legions were able to take care of their recruitment and replacement just fine. Lose one Custode, and the Emperor's spending however many years it takes for him to personally fashion the replacement. And while a Marine takes time too, they're something that an Apothecary can handle well enough to keep the Imperium in Marines.

And while the Marines aren't Custodes tier or Thunder Warrior tier, they're better than Guardsmen and essentially "good enough" to stomp on the necks of everyone they meet.

In the end, it's because they're only a bit better than Ultramarines for a much greater cost, and thus the funds went towards the expansion of the 13th.
That and there's not enough gold in the galaxy to create a whole army's worth of armour.

>wait on the Great Crusade for a millennia
>wait for 1 millennium while humanity was raped/violated/enslaved/oppressed/murderized by Eldar/Dark Eldar, Orks (Warlord Urlakk Urg of Ullanor says hi!), and the Ruinous Powers
>Ruinous Powers just scattered his 20 sons across the galaxy

Can ya really blame Big E for not waiting?

>making a custodes required money

>let's point plot holes in the universe of plot holes
>lmao I'm smart

40K doesnt make any sort of sense, let it go and accept it. It's never made sense.

>liquid gold synthol

So has anyone explained how Space Marines make a difference, despite being tiny in number? It's not like special forces won WW2 by themselves or were even necessary.

My understanding is that they hit strategic points and weaken enemies so that they will be easier to handle by the primary forces aka the guard.

This.

>live for 10s of thousands of years
>you're future vision is blurry coming up
>oh well, humanity seems to be pretty on-the-ball, I'm sure they'll manage
>thousands of years of dangling near the precipice of extinction that ends almost purely by chance
>the storm clears and you can see again
>but it's a limited window
and then
>DADDY WHY WON'T YOU GIVE ME ATTENTION

Yes, anyone has explained that before.

Because the entire setting is incidental. What you start with is bands of elite operators duking it out in close range, and build the setting from there. It doesn't matter that the premise gets absurd as the world grows, because it's the one thing you're not going to discard.