>What you are not remembering is that the marines do not have to protect
>"entire chuncks of the Imperium". That is what the Imperial Guard do.
>Each Imperial planet has it's own army at least the size of our current
>armies combined(25 million+).
Which gets back to the point that Epic scale battles are piddling little
affairs.
>The space marines are elite forces that are
>usend when nessissary agaist especialy dangerous foes. Also war is on a
>much more personal and smaller scale in the 40k universe. This is seen
>when in the stories and text fluff as well as reflected in the games.
The games don't reflect the background at all. To read the stories, you
would think that each Space Marine was a god unto himself. In the current
edition of Epic, a stand of five Marines has only a +2 CAF advantage over a
stand of Guardsmen, better morale, and no chain of command rules. (Yet).
I understand why they didn't make Space Marines into little demigods (Squad
Adonai mops up the 4th regiment, and starts in on the 2nd. Squad Littonius
charges the 8th regiment. And my commander charges the 4th and 9th...),
but I think they should have toned down the background to bring it at least
a little more in line. Going by their game stats, Marines are not so good
that a million of them could be used as any sort of elite force.
War should not be on a much more personal and smaller scale in the 40K
universe than in real life. It should be grim and dehumanizing. (My
opinion, obviously). If you've got planetary armies of 25 million+ men,
if you've got hive worlds with populations of 200 billion, you've got a
whole universe of malicious foes, and your motto is "In the grim darkness
of the far future there is only war," then the whole scale has already been
set up to make war a vast, faceless affair - my kind of fight.
At any rate, I don't see how war in the 40K universe could be any more
personal, or on a smaller scale, than the American Civil War, which was my
original example. And how can invading Tyranid swarms and ravening Ork
Hordes be so polite as to adhere to these guidelines of limited warfare?
To use the American Civil War again, if you gave all the casualties from
Gettysburg bolters (that is, 50,000 troops), and then turned a 20,000 point
Tyranid swarm on them (about 1000-1500 troops), the 'Nids would be
outnumbered by 3-5 to 1. And that was back in the 1860's, in only one
battle, in a single war, confined to just one nation (USA), on one planet
(Earth). General Lee didn't have a battle-barge back then, and I bet he
would have known how his Titans were armed in any battle he was supervising.
If Epic battles are supposed to be large-scale conflicts, and Marines are
in fact good enough to number in the millions, then should I be upset
whenever I get 300 Marines downed in a 3000 point game? That's nearly a
third of the peacetime Chapter strength. I just killed 0.03% (one
thirty-thousandth) of all the Marines extant in the entire galaxy! (Using
the generous estimation of a tenfold Chapter size during wartime).
Admittedly, not all of those casualties are deaths, but I imagine that
recovery rates can be pretty horrid whenever the Tyranids win.
Granted, I don't want to paint up five million little tiny men to play a
game Space Marine, I'm just saying that the rationale of a commander up in
a battle-barge not worrying about what his Titans are armed with is a wee
bit silly considering the minscule scope of an Epic battle.
Also, I wouldn't use the background stories to conclude that war is
personal in the 40K world: the reason no one writes stories about
faceless, meaningless conflicts is because they come across as faceless and
meaningless (i.e., boring). It's still possible that the GW game
designers' idea of a war is the Chechen engagement, or the Persian Gulf
War; if so, then all I can offer up ,after this entire spiel, is a big fat
raspberry:
Ttttthhppppbbbbbbt.
Howard
Received on Sat Mar 01 1997 - 01:12:38 UTC
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