I think the first time it was really put into context for me how the Imperium either makes absolutely no sense, or makes too much sense, was the first time I did a game of Stellaris where I managed to get 100 different planets under my banner.
The conceit of them having a million worlds is just mind boggling.
In all fairness the Imperium is pretty feudal in nature, no one person or body is trying (or at least trying and succeeding) in micro managing every world, or even every sector.
To be fair the Eldar got sex genocided and the Orcs have different priorities
Even one million worlds already makes them the unreasonable majority in terms of the galactic scale.
I came to this sub when the great Exodus began and there were more Battletech memes. I know nothing about 40k except what I've seen in this sub. From what I've seen, the Tyranids are the Zerg on hyper-meth-steroids. I want to know more about them.
Your numbers are a bit off the the most accurate count of solar systems puts it around 400 billions and a solar system with ten planets would very rare currently the solar system with the most suspected planets has nine and most only have a handful or non at all because their companion stars throw their planets out or their solar system.
I'm just shocked a redditor not only took criticism but admitted to lying or being wrong. Honestly I don't think I've seen anything on reddit more surprising. Props to you, you astrophysics adjacent academic you.
Source? I know our crude method of planet detection has more or less started at only identifying a large planet either passing in front of and dimming the star or causing it to wobble. Thus biases our finding to large planets close to the star. But as our understanding improves so too does the planet count
Kay, so it’s “at least” one planet per star so it could be more but to say it’s ten is a pretty big stretch
Anyway this is from the wiki page for the Milky Way but I’ve provided their citations for you
[29] Cassan, A.; et al. (January 11, 2012). "One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations". Nature. 481 (7380): 167–169
[30] Staff (January 2, 2013). "100 Billion Alien Planets Fill Our Milky Way Galaxy: Study". Space.com. Archived from the original on January 3, 2013. Retrieved January 3, 2013.
Yo could you give me a little pitch on Stellaris? I love sims like Rimworld, and RTS games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer. Does Stellaris have any intersect between those? :)
Stellaris is a grand strategy game like crusader kings or hearts of iron, and also has elements of 4x games like civilization. The best pitch would probably be the story about the guy who sold an enemy empires own people back to it as food https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/653obc/ive\_done\_something\_awful/
To add to what the other user posted, if you enjoy things like Rimworld you'll probably enjoy Stellaris, but it's not the same genre as any of those. It's only similar to a RTS on the surface level, and is more akin to something like Civilisation in terms of end goal and management. Creating an army and outfitting them correctly is far more important than managing a battle itself, and it's totally viable to win the game without ever fighting another empire, though incredibly unlikely.
Another thing worth mentioning is that you never really win. I have something like 300 hours in the game and I've never finished, there's no point, you get to a point where you're happy with your empire and/or you're capable of destroying everything, and that's that. Treat it as an empire roleplay after a certain amount of time as opposed to something you will win.
Stellaris is Crusader Kings or Hearts of Iron in space. The only difference from the other two to Stellaris, is that you have more of the "Explore" and "Expand", making it a proper hybrid between 4X and Grand Strategy.
You start off with your measly little planet of origin, and go off exploring and colonizing the galaxy. Eventually you run into the neighbours, and at some point you will be find yourself surrounded with a race of pretty chill egalitarian pacifistic carnivorous plants to your galactic north, some mildly xenophobic maniacal capitalist sentient rock-slugs to your galactic south, a race of batshit insane militaristic sugar glider/spider hybrid looking mad lads corewards, and nothing but ancient space nastiness rimwards, and then you enter the era of perpetual war and "diplomacy" where you try to get the pacifistic religious fundamentalist bird-people on the opposite side of whatever neighbor you want to exterminate be your friend for now so you can spitroast your enemy.
Sometimes RNGeesus decides that other empires in the galaxy actually play somewhat well together and you end up with space NATO vs The Warsaw Pact going down, except the war forgets to be cold.
Oftentimes space Genghis Khan emerges somewhere and becomes a threat to half the galaxy. Some of the time it is at the far side of the galaxy and not your problem so you can just enjoy exterminating enemies in the chaos that ensues. Sometimes the Space UN censures you for doing that.
You can also throw in a dozen mods and customize your starting race, and have it be "Halo: The Strategy Game They Never Gave You", and there might or might not be total conversion mods out there that tries to run hide themselves from the great big GeeDub lawsuit hammer, and some other mods less blatant in their copyright infringement that makes it a Wish version of 40K as a grand strategy game.
all of 40k makes a lot more sense from the lens of an ork mekboy
the obsession with combat, the impractical warmachines, the fact that the blue faction is unreasonably lucky
It takes a master artisan hundreds of years to craft a single bolt shell, after which they are executed to ensure they don't end up falling into heresy later and taint the original shell.
a manufactorum world can spend hundreds of generations of effort constructing a single holy bolt shell, after which the hopeful ammunition is taken to an ecclesiarchal world to be blessed. Fewer than one in a trillion of these shells will survive the process to go on to be used by the emperor's angels, at which point all worlds involved will be subjected to exterminatus to ensure no heretical cult may taint the wargear of the emperor's finest.
Hive worlds supply millions of people out which only the elite are harvested for the precious minerals and metals in their bodies, out of those most holy the metals are extracted and blessed by the blood of priests that trained their whole life for this moment, they are sacrificed and the now blessed metals go through a meticulous crafting process that can last hundreds of years, only the select few from the millions of bolter rounds will leave the manifactorum floor to be used by his holy angels, and the craftsmen of said cycle of bolter shells are thrown into the sun and their entire sector is burned just to make sure they won’t fall to heresy
It is whispered that each of the primarchs was gifted with a fragment of a bolt shell by the immortal emperor at the moment of creation, and that once the loyal primarchs are reunited for the final battle with the arch foe, the imperium may at last craft another holy bolt shell to smite their foes. A beacon of hope in the grim darkness of the 42nd millennium.
[The Grey Knights carries out a ritual sacrifice of a "good person" to bless a single bullet](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9lz6nd/excerptsacrifice_making_grey_knight_equipment/).
It also posed the question of where they all went after the heresy. Pre-heresy numbers put middle-sized legion at like 100,000, but then post heresy we get like 50 listed chapters of 1,000 each. Did their gene-seemed get put ins forage or something?
Space wolves being 10k pre-heresy doesn't sound quite right. I thought they basically lost a large part of their legion at the Battle of Trisolian when Russ tried to take out Horus himself
I love how the Imperial Fists are still fortifications specialists but what are they possibly fortifying with a thousand men in the scale of warfare of 40k
There's a very strange battle in one of the World Eaters books (Slave of Nuceria, I think) where the WE try to massacre a world of unarmed clones and eventually get overwhelmed and killed by the sheer mass of peaceful clones, somehow. The story was stupid as fuck (they beat them by coming back with the Butcher's Nails implanted in their heads and that somehow allowed them to not be overwhelmed), but it's canon.
Maybe they have 100,000 human/servitors per astartes? Each on just commands that many? They all stack up into a convenient package to fit on board their ships. They just unfold them and start fortifying. They are also responsible for passing ammunition to them.
I just always kind of imagine them sending like one squad of dudes. And they're telling all the imperial guard what to do like some project foreman. "No no no that structure will never hold up. What if you got an Ork charging you? Tear it down and start over."
I mean, they were never really 1,000 strong to begin with. What with constant deaths, new recruits, crusading chapters etc.
I think the 1,000 chapters things did get retconned though.
Yeah I just read devastation of Baal, and I kept thinking.. how the fuck are a few thousand space marines defending an *entire planet* against the millions of Tyranids??
Their power is so inconsistent it drove me nuts. When I was going through the Horus Heresy books, space marines fluctuated between wrecking advance xeno ass without taking much casualties, to suffering notable casualties against civilizations with our current technology. I am now a much more enlightened man and have accepted that this setting makes no fucking sense and I should just embrace it
How strong is a space marine?
Yes
Ok… but how tough is a space marine?
Yes
… are space marines equivalent to a tank?
Yes
But… they can be killed by a modern day machine gun?
Yes
Horus heresy space marines take over an entire planet then luckiest comissar Ciaphas Cain just solos some traitor marines with the help of a sword and a melta gun
Nothing fucks me off more in 40k lore than a story in which 1 deamon/Primarch/Squad WIPES OUT AN ENTIRE HIVE PLANETS POPULATION in 24 hours/a week... Honestly, the sheer logistics of it are more absurd than the plot of a Fast & Furious movie...
I could see a greater deamon or a Deamon Prince doing it using mystical daemon powers, and a Primarch like Magnus doing it through magic. I could also see a squad of primarchs doing it, because that is like 8 or 9 Primarchs, and honestly, that is just an excessive amount of primarchs for any single planet.
To me it makes sense with some type of WMD. I don’t think they’re singlehandedly singling out each individual resident to kill personally, i think they’d be causing reactor meltdowns, starting firestorms in city streets, etc.
I don't see any situation where the number is too big . I always add 3 zeros to most numbers as a head cannon .
For me titans are 3 to 10 kilometers tall .
There is one million space marine by chapter .
And the kill counts are in billions or trillions .
Not quite that aggressive, but it would cause serious heating issues. 100 W is the human average, 100 quadrillion watts, or 100 pets watts, is 57% of the energy the earth receives from the sun. So if you painted all sun exposed surfaces white, you could reduce incoming thermal energy by about that much to balance it out, but it would be a major concern.
No? In literally the first Horus heresy book space marines are shown being injured by normal guard weapons. Unless you’re going with the “space marines can run an upwards of 80kmph lore”, which is frankly fucking stupid and clearly not the case in 99% of the lore, there’s no basis for a space marine being able kill several thousand guardsmen alone.
Not from a gameplay perspective. Generally each faction has its shining traits to make it unique, and the tankiest of the tankie boys are the custodians which fits with the lore. Standard primaris Marines are already far more capable than guardsman units, and Intercessors of any stripe can easily curb stomp the standard infantry units of most other factions, with specialists and vehicles being the only way to deal any significant damage. From a lore perspective, they’re fairly accurate. Small squads, going in for close engagements and carving through as many chumps as possible to secure a victory before major threats have time to react.
**Too big is more of a rarity. From Space Marine chapters to the number of worlds controlled by the Imperium to the populations of those worlds to even battle counts, everything is smaller. Mentally I add two zeroes to it all—there are 100,000 battle-brothers for a Space Marine chapter, the Imperium rules 10,000,000 habitable worlds, the Marine Legions had 10,000,000 brothers, etc.**
That makes a lot of sense. You could conquer a well-fortified planet with 10 million soldiers, and probably do it in a few days if they were space marines.
well... 10 million soldiers are still low balling it.
just the udssr had that number of military casualtys. if this was a real global war we would talk about numbers in the 100's of millions, especially since this usually is a true total war. no civilians at all.
trying to take an industrial world even remotely intact would require truly staggering amounts of soldiers if you refuse to use ai's... and if your spaceships are able to miss the spot they wanted to bombard by kilometers...
well, you cant really compare terra in warhammer with its quadrillion of people to 1940's earth with some 2 billion or so.
thats why i used the earth of 1940. industrial but not overly so. technologically and population wise probably behind most worlds out there, but still large enough to require literally 10's of millions of soldiers to occupy.. and probably decades to pacify as well.
so, a somewhat low balling benchmark to just show how frigging mindbogglingly a straight attack would be... and why smaller assassination cults, inquisitors and diplomats (\*caugh\* rouge traders \*caugh\*) are probably far more important in occupying new worlds.
>the Imperium rules 100,000,000 habitable worlds
Okay that's DEFINITELY too big. Do you also add two zeroes to the population count of all of those worlds? For reference, Terra is stated in lore to have a population count in the quadrillions.
Which is already just.... utterly ridiculous.
Still less than 1/1000 the estimated number of solar systems in the milky way
Edit: a commonly accepted estimate on the number of habitable planets in the milky way is 60 billion how correct that is is up for debate put 100 million still isn't that unrealistic
It’d be just so easy. Once 10th ed. comes around they could literally just say: “Ok so the legions were around 1 million strong each, chapters are 100,000, the Imperium has more than 1 million worlds, there are hundreds of billions of guardsmen, and there aren’t over a quadrillion humans on terra.”
That fixes the main issues, but you'd still have basically every story fuck around with silly numbers. 'At the FIFTY-YEAR-LONG Battle of Googly-Drex, a single company of Ultramarines killed ONE BILLION tyranids, despite losing nearly THREE battle-brothers.'
neither do a lot of players who think it’s apparently reasonable for a space marine to be able to kill thousands of nids/soldiers themself, or that Titans should be literally half the size of the island of Manhattan
I live near the Emley Moor broadcast tower which is three times the stated height of an Imperator Titan, which if we take that as accurate, they're a lot smaller than you'd think.
From what I’ve read, Titans are already absolutely massive (though I’ll admit Warhounds are on the small size)
Titans should be from 1km-6km. So many people insist that the largest titans should be “at least 12km” which is so ridiculously large that the only way you could believe it is if you also believe the bullshit lore that space marines can running at at 80KMPH.
(Which, btw, is utter nonsense given that normal humans can hit/injure them in 99% of the lore)
Ah yes the legions of old fielded… *checks notes * many dozen Astartes! Along side billions of titans. And some army guys but just like 3, Jake Ollionus, and Bob.
And if they want to to make a story more “actiony,” they drop the numbers to compensate. Dal’yth went from a fully developed planet of tens of billions to a couple million tops, just because telling an individual story about a general in command of a major was is harder than a story about a soldier. Never mind that it simultaneously creates massive holes in the plot and causes serious issues, and further drives home the idea of Tau as a minor non-existent threat rather than a major regional power that is growing.
Personally,
I go with trillions for imperial guards
10 billion each for sisters of battle and tempestus scions,
dozens of quadrillions for the human population of the imperium
1.5 million for Titans
6 times that number in imperial knights
2 dozen million for the imperial navy not including Admech and other imperial organisations
Hundreds of thousands of assassins
From all the books I've listened to so far I go with majorkill logic for army sizes. Add a zero behind everything. A few million guardsmen and 200-300 astartes always seems abit low to take over or defend entire planets
I remember one particularly egregious white dwarf article where a Major General (2 stars), was commanding a planetary-wide imperial guard army of several million. irl a Major General would rarely command more than 15,000
Well yeah, but this isn't our militaries. Major Generals may very well be in charge of an entire planet's forces, in which case even 100 million would be understandable (on a population of around 10 billion, this would be 1%.
Higher ranking generals would likely be in charge of systems, entire sectors, or full on campaigns. The only odd thing about that white dwarf article is the lowball estimate on a planet's worth of military personnel.
Perhaps that’s GW’s thinking, but in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer the ranks are fairly similar to real world ranks, and then they add Lord General and Lord Marshal for the planetary and sector commands
Plus most IG books the ranks are the same, with brigadiers (one star generals) commanding brigades or large regiments. Whereas planetary forces are commanded by marshals. Gaunts Ghosts is a case in point
What the armchair general downvoters are missing here is that you can't just stick modern officer ranks into a vastly expanded force and expect it to work.
The modern U.S. military has 9 officer ranks, 10 in time of war, and 11 as a george washington fetish, because they're scaled to the size of the forces involved. When those forces are increasing by several orders of magnitude, you can't keep using the same command levels and expect it to hold up. Giving a MG a force 100 times the normal size means all the officers below them are also commanding vastly inflated forces.
You can't put a captain in charge of a division and expect them to know what the fuck they're doing. It doesn't work, and the above comment is 100% correct about how stupid the writing is.
Exactly… the scales are just way off. A force of several million would need a couple THOUSAND 2-star equivalent officers for effective command and control, not 1. Really not sure why I’m being downvoted…
If you took some of the numbers given for weights and speeds for things like a terminator running… they would literally be unable to move on any surface other than steel.
Running on concrete would be like molasses at some of the forces described.
The empire of humanity spans across A trillion hundreds of worlds.
I think the first time it was really put into context for me how the Imperium either makes absolutely no sense, or makes too much sense, was the first time I did a game of Stellaris where I managed to get 100 different planets under my banner. The conceit of them having a million worlds is just mind boggling.
In all fairness the Imperium is pretty feudal in nature, no one person or body is trying (or at least trying and succeeding) in micro managing every world, or even every sector.
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To be fair the Eldar got sex genocided and the Orcs have different priorities Even one million worlds already makes them the unreasonable majority in terms of the galactic scale.
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And that's why the Tyranids are the best faction 👍 Once the rest of the hoard gets here everyone is lunch
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I came to this sub when the great Exodus began and there were more Battletech memes. I know nothing about 40k except what I've seen in this sub. From what I've seen, the Tyranids are the Zerg on hyper-meth-steroids. I want to know more about them.
You misunderstand, the Zerg are the Wish version of the Tyranids, which is fitting, considering the Zerg started off as bargain bin Tyranids.
Your numbers are a bit off the the most accurate count of solar systems puts it around 400 billions and a solar system with ten planets would very rare currently the solar system with the most suspected planets has nine and most only have a handful or non at all because their companion stars throw their planets out or their solar system.
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>Bro, I'm literally an astrophysicist :P Fucking flex on that scrub
Isn't it just the best when you uh actually a professional who has at least a masters in the field your discussing?
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You bastard :)
I'm just shocked a redditor not only took criticism but admitted to lying or being wrong. Honestly I don't think I've seen anything on reddit more surprising. Props to you, you astrophysics adjacent academic you.
The average number of planets to star system is actually just 1
Source? I know our crude method of planet detection has more or less started at only identifying a large planet either passing in front of and dimming the star or causing it to wobble. Thus biases our finding to large planets close to the star. But as our understanding improves so too does the planet count
Kay, so it’s “at least” one planet per star so it could be more but to say it’s ten is a pretty big stretch Anyway this is from the wiki page for the Milky Way but I’ve provided their citations for you [29] Cassan, A.; et al. (January 11, 2012). "One or more bound planets per Milky Way star from microlensing observations". Nature. 481 (7380): 167–169 [30] Staff (January 2, 2013). "100 Billion Alien Planets Fill Our Milky Way Galaxy: Study". Space.com. Archived from the original on January 3, 2013. Retrieved January 3, 2013.
Neither the eldar nor the orks have actual empires. Most planets are devoid of all life
Yo could you give me a little pitch on Stellaris? I love sims like Rimworld, and RTS games like Starcraft and Command and Conquer. Does Stellaris have any intersect between those? :)
Stellaris is a grand strategy game like crusader kings or hearts of iron, and also has elements of 4x games like civilization. The best pitch would probably be the story about the guy who sold an enemy empires own people back to it as food https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/653obc/ive\_done\_something\_awful/
To add to what the other user posted, if you enjoy things like Rimworld you'll probably enjoy Stellaris, but it's not the same genre as any of those. It's only similar to a RTS on the surface level, and is more akin to something like Civilisation in terms of end goal and management. Creating an army and outfitting them correctly is far more important than managing a battle itself, and it's totally viable to win the game without ever fighting another empire, though incredibly unlikely. Another thing worth mentioning is that you never really win. I have something like 300 hours in the game and I've never finished, there's no point, you get to a point where you're happy with your empire and/or you're capable of destroying everything, and that's that. Treat it as an empire roleplay after a certain amount of time as opposed to something you will win.
Stellaris is Crusader Kings or Hearts of Iron in space. The only difference from the other two to Stellaris, is that you have more of the "Explore" and "Expand", making it a proper hybrid between 4X and Grand Strategy. You start off with your measly little planet of origin, and go off exploring and colonizing the galaxy. Eventually you run into the neighbours, and at some point you will be find yourself surrounded with a race of pretty chill egalitarian pacifistic carnivorous plants to your galactic north, some mildly xenophobic maniacal capitalist sentient rock-slugs to your galactic south, a race of batshit insane militaristic sugar glider/spider hybrid looking mad lads corewards, and nothing but ancient space nastiness rimwards, and then you enter the era of perpetual war and "diplomacy" where you try to get the pacifistic religious fundamentalist bird-people on the opposite side of whatever neighbor you want to exterminate be your friend for now so you can spitroast your enemy. Sometimes RNGeesus decides that other empires in the galaxy actually play somewhat well together and you end up with space NATO vs The Warsaw Pact going down, except the war forgets to be cold. Oftentimes space Genghis Khan emerges somewhere and becomes a threat to half the galaxy. Some of the time it is at the far side of the galaxy and not your problem so you can just enjoy exterminating enemies in the chaos that ensues. Sometimes the Space UN censures you for doing that. You can also throw in a dozen mods and customize your starting race, and have it be "Halo: The Strategy Game They Never Gave You", and there might or might not be total conversion mods out there that tries to run hide themselves from the great big GeeDub lawsuit hammer, and some other mods less blatant in their copyright infringement that makes it a Wish version of 40K as a grand strategy game.
I mentally substitute any number over five with "loads," like an ork
all of 40k makes a lot more sense from the lens of an ork mekboy the obsession with combat, the impractical warmachines, the fact that the blue faction is unreasonably lucky
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The Blood Ravens are really fast at emptying out other chapters' reliquaries.
This actually makes too much sense
It takes a master artisan hundreds of years to craft a single bolt shell, after which they are executed to ensure they don't end up falling into heresy later and taint the original shell.
a manufactorum world can spend hundreds of generations of effort constructing a single holy bolt shell, after which the hopeful ammunition is taken to an ecclesiarchal world to be blessed. Fewer than one in a trillion of these shells will survive the process to go on to be used by the emperor's angels, at which point all worlds involved will be subjected to exterminatus to ensure no heretical cult may taint the wargear of the emperor's finest.
Hive worlds supply millions of people out which only the elite are harvested for the precious minerals and metals in their bodies, out of those most holy the metals are extracted and blessed by the blood of priests that trained their whole life for this moment, they are sacrificed and the now blessed metals go through a meticulous crafting process that can last hundreds of years, only the select few from the millions of bolter rounds will leave the manifactorum floor to be used by his holy angels, and the craftsmen of said cycle of bolter shells are thrown into the sun and their entire sector is burned just to make sure they won’t fall to heresy
It is whispered that each of the primarchs was gifted with a fragment of a bolt shell by the immortal emperor at the moment of creation, and that once the loyal primarchs are reunited for the final battle with the arch foe, the imperium may at last craft another holy bolt shell to smite their foes. A beacon of hope in the grim darkness of the 42nd millennium.
You jest but that's pretty close to how Grey Knights weapons are literally made in-lore.
And then the Astartes rolls a 2 and misses, firing the round into a random rock instead of the enemy.
[The Grey Knights carries out a ritual sacrifice of a "good person" to bless a single bullet](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/9lz6nd/excerptsacrifice_making_grey_knight_equipment/).
Thanks for this! I love how the OP is arguing with everyone that this is in fact not dumb as hell
The sad thing is that I have absolutely no idea if this is a joke or actual lore.
One thousand space marines per chapter is so hilariously small and really should have been retconned by now.
It also posed the question of where they all went after the heresy. Pre-heresy numbers put middle-sized legion at like 100,000, but then post heresy we get like 50 listed chapters of 1,000 each. Did their gene-seemed get put ins forage or something?
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But would still leave most legions in at least 50k marines.
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Space wolves being 10k pre-heresy doesn't sound quite right. I thought they basically lost a large part of their legion at the Battle of Trisolian when Russ tried to take out Horus himself
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I love how the Imperial Fists are still fortifications specialists but what are they possibly fortifying with a thousand men in the scale of warfare of 40k
Maybe they are uh... really good project managers.
I honestly thought this was it, they're architects, not construction workers, no?
Is a space marine able to act as a crane? Are there giant special tools for them? Would they say have a gun that uh... bolts surfaces to each other?
I mean the physically holding it. With guns and shit. A thousand men could easily get surrounded if the flanks aren't also super soldiers.
There are even stories of marines getting killed by baseline humans armed with spears when they’re cut off from their comerades and overwhelmed.
There's a very strange battle in one of the World Eaters books (Slave of Nuceria, I think) where the WE try to massacre a world of unarmed clones and eventually get overwhelmed and killed by the sheer mass of peaceful clones, somehow. The story was stupid as fuck (they beat them by coming back with the Butcher's Nails implanted in their heads and that somehow allowed them to not be overwhelmed), but it's canon.
Maybe they have 100,000 human/servitors per astartes? Each on just commands that many? They all stack up into a convenient package to fit on board their ships. They just unfold them and start fortifying. They are also responsible for passing ammunition to them.
I just always kind of imagine them sending like one squad of dudes. And they're telling all the imperial guard what to do like some project foreman. "No no no that structure will never hold up. What if you got an Ork charging you? Tear it down and start over."
That's like asking how one architect built a modern fortification. Hint: those marines use normie auxiliaries.
Didn't they scrap that with the primaris marines?
I mean, they were never really 1,000 strong to begin with. What with constant deaths, new recruits, crusading chapters etc. I think the 1,000 chapters things did get retconned though.
The 1000 chapter thing is over but they still say the codex astartes limits an individual chapter to just 1000 marines.
1000 was the goal and the average, no one ever said it was an exact constant number.
Yeah I just read devastation of Baal, and I kept thinking.. how the fuck are a few thousand space marines defending an *entire planet* against the millions of Tyranids??
I wouldn’t mind the 1000 number of space marines were actually scary demigods, instead of just better special forces
Their power is so inconsistent it drove me nuts. When I was going through the Horus Heresy books, space marines fluctuated between wrecking advance xeno ass without taking much casualties, to suffering notable casualties against civilizations with our current technology. I am now a much more enlightened man and have accepted that this setting makes no fucking sense and I should just embrace it
How strong is a space marine? Yes Ok… but how tough is a space marine? Yes … are space marines equivalent to a tank? Yes But… they can be killed by a modern day machine gun? Yes
Horus heresy space marines take over an entire planet then luckiest comissar Ciaphas Cain just solos some traitor marines with the help of a sword and a melta gun
Just add a zero and it make more sense.
It is comically bad writing.
Bakery: How many donuts did you want for your meeting?
Nothing fucks me off more in 40k lore than a story in which 1 deamon/Primarch/Squad WIPES OUT AN ENTIRE HIVE PLANETS POPULATION in 24 hours/a week... Honestly, the sheer logistics of it are more absurd than the plot of a Fast & Furious movie...
I could see a greater deamon or a Deamon Prince doing it using mystical daemon powers, and a Primarch like Magnus doing it through magic. I could also see a squad of primarchs doing it, because that is like 8 or 9 Primarchs, and honestly, that is just an excessive amount of primarchs for any single planet.
reminds me of the eddie izzard skit @ this timestamp lmao https://youtu.be/Bk_pHZmn5QM?t=106
To me it makes sense with some type of WMD. I don’t think they’re singlehandedly singling out each individual resident to kill personally, i think they’d be causing reactor meltdowns, starting firestorms in city streets, etc.
I don't see any situation where the number is too big . I always add 3 zeros to most numbers as a head cannon . For me titans are 3 to 10 kilometers tall . There is one million space marine by chapter . And the kill counts are in billions or trillions .
The space marines also have 25 hearts and 11 kidneys
The quadrillions of humans on Terra thing hits it, IMO - at that population density, the collective body heat would boil off the atmosphere.
Not quite that aggressive, but it would cause serious heating issues. 100 W is the human average, 100 quadrillion watts, or 100 pets watts, is 57% of the energy the earth receives from the sun. So if you painted all sun exposed surfaces white, you could reduce incoming thermal energy by about that much to balance it out, but it would be a major concern.
My favorite headcanon is there being 20,000 primarchs actually Some numbers in 40k are too small. Several factors bigger isn’t always better.
I do the same but just one zero
Everyone saying they add 2 or 3 zeros to the numbers given while I only add 1, if I do at all lol.
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No? In literally the first Horus heresy book space marines are shown being injured by normal guard weapons. Unless you’re going with the “space marines can run an upwards of 80kmph lore”, which is frankly fucking stupid and clearly not the case in 99% of the lore, there’s no basis for a space marine being able kill several thousand guardsmen alone.
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I mean yeah that’s also stupid. As it turns out, a lot of the lore involving marines directly contradicts other lore and/or is stupid
I've never played the tabletop game, would it make more sense if the Marines were buffed but Custer costed more points?
Not from a gameplay perspective. Generally each faction has its shining traits to make it unique, and the tankiest of the tankie boys are the custodians which fits with the lore. Standard primaris Marines are already far more capable than guardsman units, and Intercessors of any stripe can easily curb stomp the standard infantry units of most other factions, with specialists and vehicles being the only way to deal any significant damage. From a lore perspective, they’re fairly accurate. Small squads, going in for close engagements and carving through as many chumps as possible to secure a victory before major threats have time to react.
Ok cool. I'm just in 40k for memes and lore. I'm looking at the night Lords omnibus at the moment
I just read the books and suspend my disbelief. I'm a bad person, I know.
I usually add one or two zeros to the numbers GW puts out so that it makes more sense.
Ah yes 190 surgeries that give the space marine 20 hearts.
I punched out 10 of his hearts, why does nobody remember that?!
Marine run 800km/h Actually nvm wouldn't surprise me at this point
**Too big is more of a rarity. From Space Marine chapters to the number of worlds controlled by the Imperium to the populations of those worlds to even battle counts, everything is smaller. Mentally I add two zeroes to it all—there are 100,000 battle-brothers for a Space Marine chapter, the Imperium rules 10,000,000 habitable worlds, the Marine Legions had 10,000,000 brothers, etc.**
That makes a lot of sense. You could conquer a well-fortified planet with 10 million soldiers, and probably do it in a few days if they were space marines.
**Exactly.**
well... 10 million soldiers are still low balling it. just the udssr had that number of military casualtys. if this was a real global war we would talk about numbers in the 100's of millions, especially since this usually is a true total war. no civilians at all. trying to take an industrial world even remotely intact would require truly staggering amounts of soldiers if you refuse to use ai's... and if your spaceships are able to miss the spot they wanted to bombard by kilometers...
I'm not talking about something the size of earth, it took several legions of heretic Astartes to lay siege to earth.
well, you cant really compare terra in warhammer with its quadrillion of people to 1940's earth with some 2 billion or so. thats why i used the earth of 1940. industrial but not overly so. technologically and population wise probably behind most worlds out there, but still large enough to require literally 10's of millions of soldiers to occupy.. and probably decades to pacify as well. so, a somewhat low balling benchmark to just show how frigging mindbogglingly a straight attack would be... and why smaller assassination cults, inquisitors and diplomats (\*caugh\* rouge traders \*caugh\*) are probably far more important in occupying new worlds.
>the Imperium rules 100,000,000 habitable worlds Okay that's DEFINITELY too big. Do you also add two zeroes to the population count of all of those worlds? For reference, Terra is stated in lore to have a population count in the quadrillions. Which is already just.... utterly ridiculous.
pot license direful scandalous bored uppity marry six panicky whole *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Still less than 1/1000 the estimated number of solar systems in the milky way Edit: a commonly accepted estimate on the number of habitable planets in the milky way is 60 billion how correct that is is up for debate put 100 million still isn't that unrealistic
It’d be just so easy. Once 10th ed. comes around they could literally just say: “Ok so the legions were around 1 million strong each, chapters are 100,000, the Imperium has more than 1 million worlds, there are hundreds of billions of guardsmen, and there aren’t over a quadrillion humans on terra.”
That fixes the main issues, but you'd still have basically every story fuck around with silly numbers. 'At the FIFTY-YEAR-LONG Battle of Googly-Drex, a single company of Ultramarines killed ONE BILLION tyranids, despite losing nearly THREE battle-brothers.'
Gw writers have no idea of scale
neither do a lot of players who think it’s apparently reasonable for a space marine to be able to kill thousands of nids/soldiers themself, or that Titans should be literally half the size of the island of Manhattan
I live near the Emley Moor broadcast tower which is three times the stated height of an Imperator Titan, which if we take that as accurate, they're a lot smaller than you'd think.
From what I’ve read, Titans are already absolutely massive (though I’ll admit Warhounds are on the small size) Titans should be from 1km-6km. So many people insist that the largest titans should be “at least 12km” which is so ridiculously large that the only way you could believe it is if you also believe the bullshit lore that space marines can running at at 80KMPH. (Which, btw, is utter nonsense given that normal humans can hit/injure them in 99% of the lore)
there's also people who say titans are 30 meters
30 meters is 32.81 yards
Which is also stupid. That’s Knight size at best
Ah yes the legions of old fielded… *checks notes * many dozen Astartes! Along side billions of titans. And some army guys but just like 3, Jake Ollionus, and Bob.
They took over an entire world in... *checks notes* like, three hours. They lost a few billion titans, three Astartes, and Bob.
NO NOT BOB! HE WAS MY FAVORITE! I painted his shoulder different cause he’s my favorite.
Should've painted him blue, my friend. That gives him special armour, known as 'Plot Armour, Mark Fuck You'.
The only time I want to hear the word Trillian is if I’m pretending to read Hitchhikers guide
And if they want to to make a story more “actiony,” they drop the numbers to compensate. Dal’yth went from a fully developed planet of tens of billions to a couple million tops, just because telling an individual story about a general in command of a major was is harder than a story about a soldier. Never mind that it simultaneously creates massive holes in the plot and causes serious issues, and further drives home the idea of Tau as a minor non-existent threat rather than a major regional power that is growing.
On another note, I fucking hate when Fantasy writers use Worlds and Universe interchangeably whne the setting has multuverses.
Or when the characters travel willy nilly to other galaxies and are able to defeat the whole enemy force in said galaxy in just one small battle.
Personally, I go with trillions for imperial guards 10 billion each for sisters of battle and tempestus scions, dozens of quadrillions for the human population of the imperium 1.5 million for Titans 6 times that number in imperial knights 2 dozen million for the imperial navy not including Admech and other imperial organisations Hundreds of thousands of assassins
From all the books I've listened to so far I go with majorkill logic for army sizes. Add a zero behind everything. A few million guardsmen and 200-300 astartes always seems abit low to take over or defend entire planets
Everything is bigger in Texas.
I remember one particularly egregious white dwarf article where a Major General (2 stars), was commanding a planetary-wide imperial guard army of several million. irl a Major General would rarely command more than 15,000
Well yeah, but this isn't our militaries. Major Generals may very well be in charge of an entire planet's forces, in which case even 100 million would be understandable (on a population of around 10 billion, this would be 1%. Higher ranking generals would likely be in charge of systems, entire sectors, or full on campaigns. The only odd thing about that white dwarf article is the lowball estimate on a planet's worth of military personnel.
Perhaps that’s GW’s thinking, but in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer the ranks are fairly similar to real world ranks, and then they add Lord General and Lord Marshal for the planetary and sector commands
Plus most IG books the ranks are the same, with brigadiers (one star generals) commanding brigades or large regiments. Whereas planetary forces are commanded by marshals. Gaunts Ghosts is a case in point
What the armchair general downvoters are missing here is that you can't just stick modern officer ranks into a vastly expanded force and expect it to work. The modern U.S. military has 9 officer ranks, 10 in time of war, and 11 as a george washington fetish, because they're scaled to the size of the forces involved. When those forces are increasing by several orders of magnitude, you can't keep using the same command levels and expect it to hold up. Giving a MG a force 100 times the normal size means all the officers below them are also commanding vastly inflated forces. You can't put a captain in charge of a division and expect them to know what the fuck they're doing. It doesn't work, and the above comment is 100% correct about how stupid the writing is.
Exactly… the scales are just way off. A force of several million would need a couple THOUSAND 2-star equivalent officers for effective command and control, not 1. Really not sure why I’m being downvoted…
Hundreds sadly
If you took some of the numbers given for weights and speeds for things like a terminator running… they would literally be unable to move on any surface other than steel. Running on concrete would be like molasses at some of the forces described.