Superheroic doesn't necesscerily mean easy. The last fight of Prototype involves leaping 100 feet in the air and throwing helicopters at a 15 foot mutant, but it isn't exactly easy, especially since there is a time limit on it before a nuke goes off.

Even Deathwatches rather anemic Space Marines can pick up an SUV and throw it at someone.

I expect to see grapple moves involving picking up a chaos marine and throwing him bodily through buildings.

Chase scenes that look like this:-

with Marines punching through reiforced walls without slowing down. Leaping off tall things and have the pavement shatter around you on impact.

Fights against mooks that look like this:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZYzsQhm9tU#t=2m44s

with Marines playing the role of Sauron, flinging clumps of mortals aside with every swing of their chainsword. Imagine the collateral damage caused when two Saurons have a punch up in a location with lots of destructable scenery!

Marine fights should topple buildings, fling buses on to hard to reach places and generate craters tens of feet deep.

Win or lose, the landscape will remember that a Marine fought here.

--

I don't feel it is to much to ask that Marines at least have a go at living up to their hype as the finest warriors in the universe, ultimate warriors able to take on a modern infantry division with ease. Yknow, Legendary.

So what's stopping them?

The errata has done nothing to marines' strength, toughness or armour.

Plus they can still massacre hordes of mooks. Yes, the new ROFs are completely stupid, so just use the old ones. The optional damage rules still allow a marine with a bolter to take off a point of magnitude from hordes of most troops without having to even pick up dice.

I don't feel Marines are sufficiently superior to other characters. Especially throne agents. Hell, if every inquitior has 4 throne agents there doesn't need to be many more than one inquisitor per five planets in the imperium before inqusition retinues become the premiere fighting force in the imperium.

++++++Small hordes of Fire Warriors (10-20 magnitude, representing a typical Team) are my preferred use for them - the Fire Drill Trait gives them an extra ranged attack each round, so a Mag 20 team puts out 3 attacks for 3d10+12 each, which is fairly nasty if you pair them with a Devilfish APC to deploy and extract them.++++++

See, that means that a planet earth sized and militarised to current levels is fielding two 20 mag hordes per Marine in existance. I assume six shots at 3d10+12 pen 4 is going to inconvenience most Marines pretty quickly.

And that is one small planet! Of Tau! A minor player on the universe stage! Fighting every Marine in existance gathered in one place! And there are 3 billion or so men and women on earth fit for millitary service (which I am rounding to 300 mag 20 hordes per each of one million Space Marines)! And in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war so most of them will have guns!

Cats and dogs, living togeather, MASS HYSTERIA!11!!!

I honestly don't know what this is meant to prove, AluminiumWolf. The rulebook itself says that Space Marines aren't line troops, they're meant for surgical strikes and overwhelming concentrations of power. They're not supposed to wade through an army of Firewarriors, they're supposed to hunt down the Etherial and his personal guards, massacre them and do as much damage behind the lines as possible before withdrawing for the next strike, leaving the entire Tau force leaderless and in disarray. If a Space Marine commander is charging all his troops at a huge army of the enemy on the open field, either something has gone wrong or he absolutely has no other choice.

As for Throne Agents in comparison to Space Marines, Ascension characters are supposed to be around the power level of Space Marines. Think of the Vindicare Assassin, who's training and genetic modification makes him, in fluff, superior to the average Space Marine. Think of a high ranking, militant, Magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus who would be protected by ancient technologies beyond the grasp of all but the greatest Techmarines and armed with estoteric and arcane weapons unknown outside the Mechanicus. He is no less powerful in fluff than a Space Marine, especially if he is a Secutor by virtue of extensive genetic and mechanical augmentation and the experience gained in a life-span rivaling or exceeding that of a Space Marine. But even this comparison is missing the point. An Inquisitor and his cell is not a military force, they are the Secret Police of the Imperium. For a real life example, a SWAT team may be more experienced in urban environments than a standard military infantry grunt. However, that does not mean that a SWAT team is suited to actual deployment in a battlefield because that is not their role and they are not trained as such. Sure, there are Inquisitors who focus on the martial aspects of their calling, but they are by no means the majority of the organization.

I feel certain that if all 1000 Marines of all 1000 chapters gathered together in one place they should be able to easly defeat a single, small, not mobilised for total war planets worth of Tau.

And they could; with orbital bombardments and surgical strikes and not charging blindly across a field where they know they are going to get shot to pieces because the Tau have the best ranged weapons in the galaxy except, perhaps in some cases, the Eldar.

Although looking back the optional enemy weapon stats do seem a tad ridiculous.

AluminiumWolf said:

That's assuming they all line up across an open field Napoleonic style and exchange volleys of bolter/pulse fire. Clearly that's not what the Codex Astartes demands in a situation like that. A single Marine chapter could probably cripple the armies of a Tau planet relatively easily given their fleet resources and concentration of force in surgical strikes. Whether they can occupy and pacify the planet afterwards is an open question, but then again that's why you don't use Marines as garrison troops, the Imperial Guard exist for a reason.

Disguise said:

Again while I don't particularly want to play in AW's games, he's got a definite point that some of the novel marine depictions have individual marines going up against whole hordes of 'lesser' creatures such as orks and dark eldar, essentially wading through them covering the ground with their corpses, not using orbital strikes or any of that nonsense.

I agree that some interpretations (including my own) are much closer to what you present.

@AW: But doesn't the stylized descriptions of mass destruction rely on the GM to provide? Is that really something the rules should be doing- figuring out if you make a crater or the building around you is riddled with so many holes it collapses when the fight is done? And if you want a system where your marines can blast through hordes without blinking, simply bump their stats a slight bit or use the RAW. IMHO, it's far easier to bump up than it is to bump down.

Charmander said:

Actually hordes have nothing to do with it. You see, hordes can be scaled freely by the GM at will. A mag 20 horde of Fire Warriors may represent 4 FIre Warriors or 400,000. The GM can use the (mag / #number of horde members) factor at whatever levels he sets in his game, he only needs to be true to himself. That's the neat thing about hordes.

The question is how tough master-tier enemies are in AW's games.

Alex

AluminiumWolf said:

I was with you, right until the last bit.And the rules *do* support that, so long as you have a GM who is capable of describing cinematic combat.

A Marine versus an infantry division goes rather too far, though. An infantry Coy; sure. But I think that you're estimating what several hundred anti-tank missiles can do.

AluminiumWolf said:

You are certain, but sadly wrong, because 1000000 people is not enough to occupy a planet.

What AW imagines is that quite simply that Space Marines cannot fail in their purpose. He want's them to be able to win all battles regardless of tactics.

By his reckoning, The Israel's couldn't have won the 6 day war, the Nazi's couldn't have take France in WW2, Agincourt couldn't have been won by the English, Rourkes Drift was impossible for the British Army because they were outnumbered and could die.

But the underdogs can win, better training, better leadership and can beat the odds, often reliably, even though the rest of stats say it should always go to one with more troops. And that's without the genetic advantages and power armour.

The point is that it is dangerous, they wouldn't be heroes if there was no danger, they'ed just be lucky to be Space Marines at and that would be the end of it. It's the difference between a Super Hero and Super Soldier. Yes it does mean they have to act like soldiers, which as far as I can see is part of the point of 40K, it's sci fi but it's Military Sci-Fi.

That doesn't mean that an SM isn't a tough mo-fo by these rules, they can a half dozen guys in melee with one swing (even with 1mag = 1 dude) and they can throw CSM's through walls, but in general you're probably better off shooting them.

Face Eater said:

It should be obvious that I favour a Space Fantasy approach with more in common with The Metabarons or 2000AD than the kind of military science fiction writen by American authors who have political views slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.

A large difference if that right wing mil scifi will likely spend a lot of time talking about how awesome the Space-US Armed Forces are and how noble their cause is*, while the other kind will spend more time just revelling in violence and probably being rather nihilistic about whether there is any point to said violence.

I think a key difference is that my 40k does not respect the core values of RWMSF - professionalism, discipline, ability to make hard decisions for the greater good.

Look, I think I'm trying to say it is more like Platoon or Apocalypse Now than We Were Soldiers.

*From a slightly skewed perspective - there is no problem in Right Wing Mil-Sy-Fy that can't be solved by finding the right crowd of librul protesters and firing anti-aircraft cannons in to it (I suppose they would argue the best way to deal with tea-baggers would be for the librul elite to start gunning them down at their rallies, only the ******* wouldn't have the guts to do what is necesscary. *******).

40K universe is about extremes, if it's a right-wing or a left-wing extreme... who knows? The Imperium preaches one thing and delivers another... Space Marines are bred, hypnotised, ensalved to make for super-human troops with delusions of near-godhood. Problem is, they are god-like compared to the other troops... so they are usually right.

And now you're one of them! You can preach about non-sense while eating brains and decimating anything not-human. You can feel good about it, every dead guy a martyr, every old dogma the truth.

Go forth, kick ass in the certainty that you are right and that if you fail, you're a hero!

Isidro

After checking out the new stats, and thinking for a while about them, I feel that they maybe went a little overboard with the nerfing, but overall they should work well. The heavy bolter in particular needed a nerfing, so that's good.

I will probably use these stats, but give bolters the possibility of full auto (with a RoF of 5). Not sure about the tyranid and tau weapons (they seem a tad too strong on a first reading, so it´s likely I´ll keep the stats in the main book). We'll see what happens with Daemon Hunter too, but it's likely weapons there will have the same treatment...

As for aluminumwolf... He's been defending supermarines here and in other fora ever since Deathwatch was announced, and probably before, so I've no idea why people still bother with him. He's zealous in his convictions, to the point where he won't accept that most people don't see marines the way he does.

AllenVanDaele said:

Quite possibly, I think they came it from both ends and really went to town on reducing the number of dice rolled, fair do's they want to speed up the game but it be enough with just the damage. At least for players.

AllenVanDaele said:

For the Nid and Tau weapons, as I see it, if it's a horde weapon it didn't need to change (some roll less dice which speeds things up) as they are only dangerous in hordes, of course they might have been thinking they some weapons needed changing to make them effective in smaller hordes, I don't know. People who play more will be able to tell me.

But I've always advocated a change for the Nid weapons that are used by elites and masters, as weapons that aren't going to get a horde bonus many of them couldn't hurt a marine at all which just mean't they never got used. It doesn't really make nid warriors any more powerful as they are still more dangerous in melee but previously they were only dangerous in melee which limited your encounters terribly.

And yes, I have been drawn into arguments that are quite beside the point, this is only about playability not background.

AllenVanDaele said:

Because we're not intolerant and don't need everyone to subscribe to the official party line?

Alex

Wait, there's an official party line? Why was I not informed of this?!

Brand said:

If there's a party I want to be there.

ak-73 said:

Thanks for calling me intolerant, Alex. Just what I needed to hear... ¬¬

My problem with him is not that I disagree with his points, but with how zealous he is about them, and how little he does to justify them. All I've seen him say, for the past... Year and a half? Here and in rpg.net is "Space Marines are not powerful enough". I would be cool with him having that stance, if he gave a more solid reasoning for that ("I think it conforms to the fluff better because this and that", "I find it more fun that way", "I like the feeling of heroism I get when I play such a marine", etc.), but the only thing I've seen is "they're not powerful enough. Marneus Calgar managed to best an Avatar in hand to hand, so a starting marine should be able to do that too", and when you say you disagree, and offer your reasons, all you get back is "no, man, your marines must be wusses if you play like that".

I am perfectly happy with him having his own opinions, what I'm not so keen on is to have discussions on game balance derailed by a single person's sense of how close to superman levels of power Space Marines should be. I feel it's a waste of time, and unproductive, hence my earlier comment. If you think that puts me in the party line enforcer camp, well, I'm sorry you see it that way, but please do not insult me based on a single, barely explained line.

AllenVanDaele said:

"...so I've no idea why people still bother with him."

If you dish out, you must be able to take in. Besides I didn't call you anything.

AllenVanDaele said:

I understand his reasoning though: if Marines are to make any difference in an Imperium of a million words, they must be super-awesome. If they can achieve what thousands of guards can't do, they must be better than in Deathwatch.

AllenVanDaele said:

See the start of my reply here.

Alex

ak-73 said:

That's where I would disagree, though. Marines in Deathwatch can already handle a whole dose of sh*t that guardsmen wouldn't even stand a chance against.

I'll have to get a look at MotX's rules about "epic level battles", but as far as I'm concerned, I can't see a whole squad of guardsmen getting the Stealers down without suffering a silly amount of losses...

Stormast said:

It really depends on the situation. Make a Genestealer charge a properly entrenched Guardsmen position and watch it get mowed down. Turn one loose quietly in the town where the Guardsmen are stationed and you'll have a lot of dead soldiers.

I see Space Marines (especially DW SMs) as far more versatile than any Guardsman and even deadlier than a group of them. If the mission is to hunt down a Genestealer infestation or take out a Hive Tyrant, give me SMs. If you want to defend a town from hordes of attacking Hormagaunts, I'd say a regiment of Guardsmen is more suited to the task. A few SMs might do the job, too, but they'd be nowhere as effective. Then again, it's just civilian casualties. Acceptable losses.

Stormast said:

Well, actually a magnitude 20+ Guardsman horde (using the guardsman profile on p.376) will do 8 damage on average per shot to a Purestrain Genestealer.

Since their gun are S/3/- and the Genestealer has 20 wounds, said Genestealer can die from 1 'salvo'. The Guardsman Horde will shoot 3 of those. Granted, the Genestealer can dodge, use cover, etc... but a relatively small horde of guardsman can definitly kill a Genestealer. Even in close combat, the guardsman will eventually overpower the Genestealer has it has no dodge/parry against them and lack any real way to damage Hordes.

And honestly... I've seen 1 Genestealer get a squad of 10 guardsman running after 1 round of CC on the Table top game, so if anything, the Genestealer isn't strong enough .