Will the Imperial Guard purpose ever change from "die until the Space Marines arrive and clean the mess"?

Lord Macharius. The Man who preferred to use Imperial Guard over Space Marines, because he could achieve more with the coherent, combined arms of the imp G than with a small number of elite marines.

I've always thought space marine chapters should be a million big, not a thousand.

The heresy legions a billion to ten billion big

Otherwise the enormous fleets they have, the battles, the planetary defences and conquests etc dont make any fucking sense

>The heresy legions a billion to ten billion big
I think you might wanna recheck that information out.

Yeh I've always wondered this myself.
I'd honestly also chalk part of it up to the chapters recruiting beyond their "limit" because I really doubt any chapter can really stay near 1000 when it takes a few hundred years just to produce 1 marine when whole companies get used up in some wars. The size of the individual companies gets really sketchy too when you consider how specific some of the examples that are given are.
>this many terminators at any given time
>this many vanguard and sternguard
>exactly this many tactical and devastator squads
>they all have vehicles
>by the way these vehicles are manned by space marines that aren't included in the very precise count from before
>also we aren't including the dozen or more techmarines needed bare minimum
>or the librarians
the list can just go on too.

I'd also be almost certain that chapters like the Space Wolves and Flesh Tearers hardly care about their chapter limits. The Black Templars the last time I'd read their codex canonically recruited far beyond the 1000. All in all I think GW just doesn't care about whether their lore makes sense and think the "1000 space mahreens" sounds cool.

As it is now, a whole chapter of space marines fits in a single Cobra Destroyer, one of those tiny escort ships.

And yet they have whole battlebarges, fortreses, planets etc...

S

I hope so

Well they're marines first and each have million of serfs and support personnel. It's better to think of them as war material than simple infantry.

GW should have given some actual models and rules to the serfs. After all, they do fight alongside the marines sometimes, for example, when defending a fortress-monastery.

That's another potential army list right there.

Wouldn't they just be part of the SM list?

Nah, they could be their own. But don't tell GW that.

They could have their own units with some SM characters as HQ's or specials.

They would, the same way some nurgle daemons are in the DG list.

Scalpel vs Hammer

Marines can move faster than Guard in a warzone, get in position, fight harder than an equal number of guard and last longer without a solid supply chain.

Imperial Guard bury the enemy in bodies, Lemen Russ shells and lasgun shots but need a lot of logistical support and aren't an agile force.

Who is the best guard regiment and why is it the Firstborn?

Better than the "Die until the Imperial Guard show up" of the PDF

I dont think scouts and command staff/librarians/techs count as the 1000. And the rules are relaxed with "crusading" chapters which is how the templars get around it. The Space Wolves dont even pretend to follow it.

Some chapters have more than a thousand, some even exploit a loophole in the codex that allows chapters on a crusade to have more marines by constantly crusading (the Black Templars, for example)

i get this same feel knowing I have to completely re-make my army

And he wept... Because he thought about all the places he had not kicked the ever loving shit out of.

>inb4 primaris guardsmen

Elysians

Cadia, 10,000 years of holding the line isn't something to scoff at. The planet broke before they did.

>t's a meme you d
Fluffwise they are usually the ones who come in AFTER the space marines to hold and secure a planet, because SMarines can take a planet, but they lack the permanent logistical structure to hold and secure it.

No not even, guard hold the planet, marines come in hit the strong points and then the guard keep fighting and mop up the enemy.

The space marines tip the odds back into the guards favour and then leave.
The marines also get the victory considered as theirs.

They will only stay if the threat is dire enough

don't worry, mortal, your contributions are valuable too. now take that sharpened pencil and charge the tau gunline there on the horizon.

Is there ever a Time Where a PDF actually competently fights and repels a serious invasion force by themselves? It seems like they literally exist to job.

>sharpened pencil
D-did we run out of flashlights?

Current loyalist space marines are just leftovers from that one time most of them ran off and turned traitor.The reason they're allowed to roam around and do their own thing without having to answer to Imperial Command, the Inquisition or even the High Lords is because they're functionally worthless.

Look at it this way user. They typical war in the 40k universe is fought with tens or even hundreds millions of soldiers on each side. War machines of impossible power and planetary bombardments are a common event. And that's without even counting the war in the stars, which is fought by hundreds of vast ships crewed by thousands of men and women each.

The largest number of space marines deployed at any one time, barring the occasional exception like the Black Templars, the Minotaurs or those legion-building Ultramarines, is a company. One hundred warriors. And often they don't even bother with that, rolling around with a dozen space marines on one ship.

You know what happens if a handful of oversized dudes in strikingly obvious powered armour drop unsupported right into the middle of enemy territory? They get overrun. Even if you kill a tyranid for every bolt you fire there's still more than enough to swarm you when you run out.

What's the typical space marine strat? Find an enemy, deepstrike into their critical locations, kill everybody, then what? Hoof it across miles and miles of enemy territory to get back to the safety of Imperial lines where they can call in a shuttle to pick them up safely, then get transferred back to the fleet to do it again. And that's assuming their fleet is even still there and hasn't eaten a half-dozen melta torpedoes.

Guardsmen fight in every war the imperium is involved with. They are the emperor's aegis. Space marines are just a bunch of over-hyped prima donnas who show up to take all the credit.

Numerical figures don't really matter in soft science fiction

If they did, how would they lament?

Fuckin motivating.

Given the most recent lore, not even the Ultramarines adhere to the 1000-marine limit anymore, it's more a case of the understrength marine chapters being able to accomplish anything at all when realistically they're barely large enough to constitute a single unit, much less hold a planet.

>marines are the useless tards of the setting and chapter masters are the tard wranglers
neat

>Guardfags pretending to be relevant

Marines are the guys that show up to handle things that guard can't. Yes, in most cases it goes as you described, but sometimes due to circumstances the guard can't send in tanks or call artillery strikes and sending mans in would result in prohibitively large losses. Or when the environment itself is too much for the guard to deploy a large enough force. Then the space marines go in.
TLDR Guard win wars, Spess Muhreens win battles the guard can't win, that's their whole purpose.

Well, sometimes the Space Marines just don't show up, so they got that going for them.

If the IG could handle everything by themselves there is no reason for the SM to ever exist.

Playing Imps is great, you get to shit on every other faction when you win a battle.

>My warriors are forged in a thousand battles, equipped with the best shit ever ...

Gets shit on by my regular ass dudes

>t. Xenos player

The guard are the real heroes.

Kind of like cultists, I'd assume. But I've always s liked the idea of having an allied IG platoon that is painted and converted to resemble their chapter. Like, Smurfs would have tacticool serfs, White Scars would have some feral worlders, Salamanders would have a "Don't hurt my babies!" Attitude about their serfs, while the irons hands would spend them like ammunition

"Of course not, but we just don't want you dropping yours when you get sho.....uhhhh.....shoooown how comically bad the Tau are at shooting, you'd probably just start laughing uncontrollably....now hurry along, before we run out of sharpened pencils

Space marines were extremely effective during the great crusade, when they fought as legions and formed the tip of the spear - their aim was to blitz planets and swiftly crush the enemy leadership. Their job was to conquer the galaxy, and they were highly effective. But war has changed. Now the imperium's main goal is not conquering more of the galaxy, but rather holding on to the planets they already control. Space marines are ill-suited to defense, as their small numbers mean they cannot be everywhere at once like the Guard can. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that the aim of Guilliman's Codex Astartes was to deliberately cripple the space marines as they were no longer needed.

I've always found Space Marines to be somewhat tragic - they're relics of a war long over, desperately trying to find a purpose in a changed galaxy. There's no doubt that a single space marine is easily worth ten or fifteen guardsmen. But a Leman Russ battle tank is worth fifty, and the tank is faster, cheaper and easier to produce.

>Stell gets shat on by retards born yesterday
>Or three-fingered smurfs with no depth perception
>Or literal animals

You aren't even shitty enough to be the bottom of the foodchain.

this

But sometimes there are places where a tank doesn't fit. For such times there are space marines.

Presumably all those times that books don't get written about because the PDF winning the day and not needing backup makes for a shitty story.

Yeah, so you bulldoze that place and replace it with good imperial trenches. It's your fucking planet. It's like a castle - as long as you aren't being invaded you've got nothing to do but sit around and build up an insane amount of defenses.

Will the Space Marines purpose ever change from "die untill the Primaris arrive and clean the mess"?

so long as nids and orks are a thing, not likely.

>Cool Russian stereotypes
>Fight out of duty rather than necessity or because they have lots of people
>Aren't edgy like Krieg
>Didn't become the bear equivalent to the space wolves
>Bear Skin hats and metal breastplates are a cool combination

>Implying they're anything more than food for nids and captives for chaos cults/d-eldar

Praetorian Guard

Robby G comes back and the only army that gets any improvements at all are the SMs. Elite guardsmen and officers still don't get powered armor, while Astrates have new genetic upgrades, new armor, weapons, and a complete reorganization that entails they get more marines in their chapter. It's not fair.

>when it takes a few hundred years just to produce 1 marine
It doesn't though. It takes 4-8.

>All in all I think GW just doesn't care about whether their lore makes sense and think the "1000 space mahreens" sounds cool.
Brilliant deduction.

There are literally millions of guardsmen for each space marines. It's just that GW is too busy wanking over the Primaris Marines to notice this fact.
It's like saying that the American army purpose is to die until Seal Team 6 arrive and clean the mess.

Tell that to Creed.

The main issue, for me, is that they use things like boarding torpedoes.

Let's say you fire a fuckload of boarding torpedoes at a city-sized enemy ship. Assuming you can fit, say, five Marines into each pod, you're firing about...Let's say, twenty boarding torpedoes?

If approximately three or four torpedoes are destroyed, the Chapter's lost 1% of it's strength without a single shot being fired! And that's not even taking into account the Marines that would actually be lost storming the ship.

Those numbers don't make sense at all. How does a Space Marine CHAPTER take a planet, when it barely has more men than a battalion?

The Man who preferred to use IG becuase they will not discuss him.

I think Primaris Marines cancompletely solve this problem.
Each chapter can have only 1000 Primaris Marines while also having millions of Manlet Marines taking the place of serfs.
Like the serfs they never get any models and never get mentioned as being important in any battle but at least old time players can still play their armies (using the IG rules)

...

The genestealers get found out and purged within the first generation

Th chaos cult is discovered before they recruit anyone close to the planetary governor

The diseased intruder is caught and quarantined before it spreads

The feral orks are defeated and the area napalmed to avoid the spread of their spores before they are too numerous

The tau diplomat is informed that his ship will be destroyed if he gets anywhere near Imperial space

The necromancy tomb is discovered underground and the governor institutes a planet wife directive to tip-toe everywhere from now on and that all floors will be thickly carpeted

The aeldari scout is seduced by the handsome PDF officer and decides she wont tell her craftworld that anything important is on the planet

A thousand people can't possibly save an entire planet.

>A thousand people can't possibly save an entire planet.
A thousand people can't, sure. But that's why the Emperor created Space Marines

And the Space Marines split themselves up into chapters of 1000 people each.

This.

They also include: "Flood the gap/foothold/weakness the Space Marines make."

This has always been their real purpose in the larger Imperial Doctrine. Space Marines hit X hard, Guard makes sure they can't recover from it.

The Spess Mehreens are Ultra-fast, Ultra-strong. Ultra-durable, Ultra-armed, Ultra-powerful and Ultra-protected by the EMPRAH

You don't need 1000 SM to save an entire planet, you only need one.

hahaha
just face it
your precious marines make no sense

Tau player hear, no dog in this fight, but there is always a place for special forces

Here* Sorry

Sorry everyone

The core issue isn´t anything in the fluff but the very concept of the setting: Horror. 40K is explicitly a setting where the imperiums most abundant and expendable resource is human life. Changing that would be like the warhammer fantasy -> age of sigmar change, where it switches the setting to mythical fantasy.

For Tanith and for the Emperor!

My comrade

Big pile of This. One Forge World, which doesn't have LOADS of troops for size because they can call on the Guard and Company to help, has tens of millions of Kataphrons (who are armed better than Marines, apparently) and billions of Skitarii, plus Myrmidons (one can beat an entire Marine squad according to Master of Mankind), Titans, Cybernetica and a bunch of other nonsense. You rank up a third of that tops and drop every marine in existence into it and they'll get annihilated in short order, and that's just the troops on one major Forge World out of hundreds.
Guard are the same, although usually a bit more spread out since the Mech doesn't need or want to cover anywhere near as many planets.
Lascannon or melta hits a Marine they almost certainly die, which means there's a rather sharp limit on what they can manage unsupported.

Same with Skitarii. Oh, you wiped out my entire melee force? That was 20 dime-a-million combat servitors, one low-ranked Lacarymaerta overseer priest and some random Dragoons that we didn't even notice losing, and you paid for them with the lives of a couple dozen priceless supersoldiers.

>wearing camo uniforms, not black
>Larkin a young guy instead of a scrawny old runt

not canon

Will the Chaos cultists purpose ever change from "die until the Chaos Space Marine arrive to clean up the mess?"

Will the CSM purpose ever change from "lose until they bother to summon Deamons to make a huge mess?"

>This thread

>horror
It's not very scary when humanity have three meter tall men who can spit acid.

I thought space marine candidates had to be picked as a child, spending time till they were around 20 or so gradually getting their gene-seed grown organs implemented into them and training, and then served as scouts until they were a hundred years old or so before they get their power armor.

4-8 gets you a scout, not a marine

>Tank crews so good they have a 4:1 kdr against eldar tanks that go 500 mphs

They would lament for having no reason to lament.

All of this analysis presents a universe that, really, has a pretty interesting duality.

You can essentially read 40k in two different ways.

You can take the fluff at face value, and the space marines are basically impossible. But they are impossibilities among all of the other impossibilities in the galaxy, like the enormous hive fleet tentacles and the elfdar planets and soulstones and chaos... anything. One space marine fighting orks for 40 years straight without dying, or 100 dudes taking a planet (winning the battle that decides the planetary rule) doesn't seem that crazy in a galaxy where green fungus men instinctively understand how to build technology and can literally will it to work when it shouldn't, and metal robot zombies are waking up every here and there to feed everyone to the gods they enslaved so things can go back to being quiet and they can go back to sleep.

It becomes more of a mythological setting than a scifi setting. Not even fantasy in space, because... fantasy USUALLY doesn't get that absurd.

Or, as you guys are doing, you can read it like all of the fluff is each faction's propaganda about itself. So all of the sudden, the eldar losing a single wailing whatever in a skirmish is a loss no matter how many they killed, and the necrons aren't actually undeadable forever, etc.

And then the space marines CAN'T actually take a planet with a company of guys, and they're only given credit for taking the planet (helping in the pivotal battle) because while they basically don't exist at scale the morale bonus they provide certainly does.

Hell, I wouldn't put it past the imperil to give credit for taking the planet to everyone who participated, knowing their logistics systems and info systems for everyone outside of the leadership are so fucked most people will only get one of the twelve or so different articles out anyway.

So the marines get to tell their homeworlds that they won, the guard get to write to their home planets, etc

Specifically these fuckers, who haven't had enough mention in lore over the last few years.

>three meters

They're seven feet, not ten

Why take sides? We're all brothers and servants of the mighty Emperor. We all share the same common enemies.

Yet they still keep winning, keep selling, and keep getting new models while Guardfags whine impotently that their only job is to fail miserably and die to show how tough the villain is/how cool the Space Marines are. And it will always be so.

>Those numbers don't make sense at all. How does a Space Marine CHAPTER take a planet, when it barely has more men than a battalion?
They drop in from orbit on top of the enemy commander and then kill them in a single lightning-fast attack.

With the ability of the defenders to coordinate their military's units destroyed with the decapitation of their command structure, the Imperial Guard then proceeds to mop up the remainders while the Space Marines leave to go to the next warzone.

having to drop onto the enemy instead of blasting them into oblivion from a artillery line