Chaos Marine Numbers

[Lord Sotek]

Well, at the current moment, the Heresy has not been fought to its conclusion... so it is possible that the Space Marine Legions were 80 to 100K strong and that due to the devastating losses of the Heresy they were left with minimal forces... as of yet the books obviously haven't taken us to anywhere where we can see what happened.  At this stage of the Heresy we can assume that the Salamanders, and Iron Hands are all but destroyed... with minimal Marines left to their chapter. 

The problem with comparing History to 40K is.. well, besides the obvious reality vs. science fiction.. is that what's written has to be taken as fact.  The books are told through the eyes of the ones that were in the Heresy, they're not 'assumed' ideas of what happened or leave anything to speculation because they're shown as 'this is what happened'.  I think this is what GW is doing because for too long they just never said anything about the Heresy save for a paragraph in the rulebooks.  The idea of this long story is great in my mind.. but I digress because this is falling off topic, my apologies.

The only thing in my mind that can happen is that we follow the Heresy to its completion to see what happens in the end.  It's entirely possible that we'll get to the end and almost EVERY Legion will become endangered.. which I think is still very plausible, even WITH 100K warriors to start.  I still think the best knowledge we have of the Heresy is being slowly but surely published...  I just find it hard to argue with it, but who knows.. maybe in the end everyone will be right... but like I said before... GW rarely cares what it's written before as they continue forward... so it really is almost an impossible question to answer...

How many?  Who knows?

Think about it. We all know our Space Marine lore more than well enough to know that the Codex Astartes was written to break up the surviving strength of the Legions into about-1000-marine-strong Chapters, right? This is, as 40k fluff goes, absolute rock solid certainty.

We also know that the event in which the Legions were first broken into chapters was the First Founding- Again, as solid a fact as you can get in 40k.

Here's the crucial bit- GW has provided us enough material that when you compile it we have a near completely locked-down list of the first founding, of exactly how many Chapters each Legion was broken into. Again, as 40k goes, this is basically incontrovertible fact.

Now, since we know effectively for a certainty that (especially at the First Founding) the Chapters created were a Codex-stipulated ~1000 marines strong (with one or two minor potential exceptions like the Black Templars, who might have been a couple times that), we can just about incontrovertibly figure out the sum of the loyal Legions' strengths at the close of the Horus Heresy.

I will not repeat the math for that here, because Wargamer already did that par excellence in his recent post.

Now.... We know the strengths of various legions at the close of the heresy. The most important thing in evaluating what "full strength" size makes sense is to compare the solidly-extrapolated "finishing" strengths with the stated relative size of each legion and the relative amount of casualties it's said to have taken.

When you do this, you end up with significantly more evidence that collectively indicates Legions of about 10k marines and Companies of 1,000 far, far more than it supports the idea of ten-thousand-marine-strong Grand Companies.

For instance, look at the chapters fluff has told us were at low strength or took particularly heavy casualties, and that fluff has also not told us were of greater than average strength. The Salamanders, who were never numerous and who got massacred at Istvaaan. The Dark Angels, who tore themselves apart in a clandestine civil war. The Raven Guard, who were plagued by horrific mutations in the geneseed that left them drastically understrength for much of the heresy.

Look at the numbers; these chapters were all left at 3000-4000 marines at the close of the Heresy. That's consistent enough to be worth noting.

Now, we were told that these chapters took heavy casualties somehow, but only the Salamanders are stated to have come close to being wiped out.

Considering this- If we assume a Legion to be approximately 10,000 marines, then these chapters took 60-70% casualties- slightly less to slightly more than two thirds their "standing" strength. That definitely fits "heavy casualties/heavily reduced strength."

If we assume that each Company is 10,000 marines so that a whole Legion was 100,000 Astartes, then with the stated legion strengths at the end, those chapters have instead  taken 96-97% casualties. That isn't "Heavy losses," that's "nigh-obliteration."

Finally, compare to the legions that fared better, and the point really hammers itself home. The Blood Angels aren't mentioned as having taken especially horrendous numerical losses by comparison to other legions. We know from the calculations that the Blood Angels were broken into 6 chapters at the First Founding and thus had roughly 6,000 marines at the end of the heresy.

If a Legion is 10,000 marines, this means they took 40% losses during the heresy, retaining 60% fighting strength. So they were bloodied, but emerged with a majority of their forces still intact.

If, however, a legion is 100,000 marines, the Blood Angels would have had to take 94% casualties in order to wind up with only 6,000 marines at the end of the Heresy. This would still be near-total obliteration compared to their "proper" strength, scarcely any better off than the chapters that were supposed to have taken particularly heavy losses. And we -know- the Blood Angels are not mentioned as one of those chapters.



Yes, the HH novels state the larger figure. But sci fi writers' lack of a sense of scale is legendary, and as we just saw, if you take what they say to be true, the numbers just don't stack up with how GW and those same authors themselves state the loyalist chapters fared. By contrast, the older, more established figure of an average Legion being 10,000 marines -does- result in numbers that make sense based on the sum of known material about the Horus Heresy and how loyal chapters were affected by it.

[DEF Knight]

I was under the impression the current number of space marines in the 41st millennium was supposed to be about a million. one thousand chapters of one thousand marines (weird variances like Wolves and Templar notwithstanding). A "thousand thousand worlds, overlooked by a thousand thousand space marines, yet somehow it is enough" or something to that effect.

Now obviously that's more poetry than anything, but I imagine that might be what they're shooting for

[Wargamer]

Yes, currently there are meant to be one million Space Marines. That said, you have to remember that we've had ten millennia of unending war between the Legions forming and now. Back then, when the Emperor made those 200,000 Marines (20 Legions, 10,000 Marines apiece) he was trying to build the Imperium, and essentially held one star system.

The idea of the Chapter division was not "there can never be more Marines than there used to be", but to ensure that if the rot set in again it could be contained and destroyed without burning the Imperium to the ground.

In addition, the Legions only recruited from their home worlds (or systems, in the case of the Ultramarines). Given that only a select few are worthy, one would assume that the Legions could only grow so much due to the constant attrition they would suffer in battle. Once the Chapters were formed and scattered, you effectively increase the recruitment rate by several orders of magnitude, allowing the Chapters to swell to a million-strong collective force from a paltry 30-odd thousand starting point.

But... I stress again... that quote about their being a million Space Marines does not mention timescale. We do not know how long it took for the Imperium to reach that 'thousand Chapters' benchmark; they certainly didn't hit it by the second founding! All the fluff for the Imperium stresses how things get worse and worse year on year, suggesting that the thousand Chapters are a direct response to that - because the old 'Legion Strength' forces are simply not enough to do the job anymore.


So, let me steer this back to the Chaos side...

Going back to the numbers I used earlier for the Loyalists, I'd estimate around 70,000 Marines is a good headcount for what was left of the Traitor Legions. Now, that said, there are suggestions that they did not get out of the fight lighty. For now, I'm going to give just one example...

World Eaters: Let's face it, it doesn't look like there are many World Eaters left.
They were at the forefront of the Siege of the Emperor's Palace, which is going to have been a bloody affair no matter how you slice it. After that, the Battle of Skalathrax, they ceased to exist as a Legion.
That battle is important. We know the entire Legion was there, and we know they were all amassed on a single front, sieging an Emperor's Children held city. The entire Legion was seemingly in a single camp, seeing as Kharn managed to drive the entire Legion out of their hiding holes and into a meatgrinder. Finally, in the aftermath of the conflict, the Legion suffered heavy losses (read: "most" of the Legion) and fragmented into Warbands.

So, let's break that down, shall we?

We don't know how big the World Eaters Legion was, but looking at the Imperials who fought in the Emperor's Palace, we have three guidelines for size: Blood Angels (6,000 strong), White Scars (5,000 strong) and Imperial Fists (about 3-4,000 strong... after the Iron Cage). This means we can reasonably assume a minimum 6,000 World Eaters survived the Siege (remember, they were winning until Horus died...) and an acceptable upper tier of around 10-12,000.

"Most" of the Legion died at Skalathrax, which could mean almost anything. Even being kind and saying 60% died, that gives us around 2,400 Marines remaining for the low-end estimate, and 4,000 to 4,800 for the high end.

That is still a very large force, where it ever unified... just nowhere near the mind-screwingly huge numbers that are now being implied.

[Lord Sotek]

I was under the impression the current number of space marines in the 41st millennium was supposed to be about a million. one thousand chapters of one thousand marines (weird variances like Wolves and Templar notwithstanding). A "thousand thousand worlds, overlooked by a thousand thousand space marines, yet somehow it is enough" or something to that effect.

Now obviously that's more poetry than anything, but I imagine that might be what they're shooting for