Posts: 10
Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2016 1:24 pm
Location: Amersham
Re: Custodes; when did they become Super-Marines?
It also seems odd to me that there are (at most) a million marines - only equivalent to one marine per Imperial planet as memory serves. To put it another way, why doesn't the Imperium just collect together all the minor/major heroes from the Imperial Army, put them in powered armour and call them space marines? - it would save all that faffing around with psycho-surgery and would actually live up to the hype around them.
How do folks reconcile these different parts of 40K? Do you take it that the space marine stats have been toned-down for game balance?
My own take is that the space marine fluff is just Imperial propaganda. Maybe at the start of the Imperium the marine's training and genetic/surgical modification produced superhuman soldiers but after 10 thousand years of not really understanding how it works, the marines' enhancements give little or no benefit. They're just like good special forces now. The corollary is that there are more than a million of them (after all, with only 1 wound they have a habit of dying) - the Adeptus Terra has turned a blind eye to the limits on Chapter sizes since Chapters started to get wiped out too often.