system
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human
[W40K] Are Space Marines weaker in game for balance reasons? Or are they just overhyped in the lore?

Now I know the following questions may be heretical but...

The lore makes out the Space Marines to be almost demi-gods. Super humans hulking over most humans/xenos who possess extraordinary strength, stamina, and battle prowess. 

Yet, in the board and video games, the Space Marines are just slightly above average troops, getting wrecked pretty often by seemingly inferior forces. 

So the question is, are the Adeptus Astartes weaker in their game form for balance reasons? Or is it because everything else in the W40K is ridiculously strong as well? Or does the lore simply overhype their abilities?
gpt
It's a bit of both.

The Space Marines are made out to be ultimate badasses, it's true, but so are pretty much all the other factions. Orks are super strong and violent monsters. Necrons are unkillable machines. Tau have powerful battle suits and exceptional technology. Even the Imperial Guard, while no Space Marines, are well trained, well equipped, and second only to the Astartes as far as human military forces go. All the jokes about the Imperial Guard being terrible are rooted in the same issue of perception: They only *seem* bad because we see them fight extraordinarily powerful alien monstrosities. Compared to PDFs or various other militia forces the Imperial Guard are an elite fighting machine.

That said, there is still a definite discrepancy between the power of a space marine in the games and in the fluff. One way to reconcile this is assume that figures to combatants isn't a 1:1 ratio. Perhaps a space marine model represents 1 space marine, but an Imperial Guardsman model represents 3 or 5 or 10 guys.