With the release of the latest wave of Ultramarines models, there are now 100 different units in the Space Marine army list. This isn't counting out of production Legends units, nor the two Forge World models still legal in tournament Warhammer 40k, nor the five Space Marine Chapters with their own codex supplements. The second biggest army list, the Aeldari, has just 67 units, giving Marines players 50% more choice than the nearest competition. How can the game sustain a single army with so much more variety than its rivals?
It's very easy to understand why the Marines get so many models - they're incredibly popular. Games Workshop has always been a miniature company first and a gaming company second, and if people buy Space Marines, it makes perfect sense to respond by inventing new Space Marines to sell. But Warhammer 40,000 is a wargame that people play and designers must make rules for, and in that context, the Marines' bloated range feels like an error.
Most obviously, this is a real feel-bad milestone for other factions. The Space Marine range is twice the size of the Necrons; larger than all three of the Genestealer Cults, Leagues of Votann, and T'au Empire put together.
Now to be quite specific, there are 81 units in the core Marines army that can be taken by any force, plus 19 units and characters that come from one of six mutually exclusive Chapters. The range is slightly inflated by the way units are split up into datasheets - if GW brought back points costs for individual armaments, some unit entries based on common vehicle chassis could be collapsed back together. But presumably, the same would happen to other army lists as well.
One problem with a vast army list is shrinking design space. Space Marines have just about every kind of unit except for horde infantry - how can the designers add new units to the list without outcompeting existing units or straying into other factions' identities? We've seen this problem with the new Victrix Guard - they're more survivable than the tankiest infantry unit in the Adeptus Custodes, and comparable in melee damage output to the best units in the Blood Angels.
There's a multiplication risk, too - the wider a range, the greater the possibility of finding overpowered interactions between units. I think there's a sign of this in the the sign-ups for the Warhammer 40k World Championships. The generic Gladius Taskforce detachment was the most popular Marine detachment, including among melee-centric Black Templars players, since it offers its buffs even-handedly - ideal for players to pick the best models from across the entire faction.
I can see one way to make the Marines army list more manageable, though it feels pretty radical: lock certain units to specific detachments. This is actually already at work for the Genestealer Cults. Though the basic GSC range only contains 24 units, it gets access to an additional 13 Tyranid units while using the Final Day Detachment, or 47 Astra Militarum units when using the Brood Brother Militia Detachment. It may not feel like the faction has a total of 84 units (not least because more than half are printed in the Astra Militarum codex), but strictly speaking, it does.
I'm not saying GW should approach the Marines this way, but it could. Suppose the core Marines' list contained the units found in a regular frontline battle company - then a First Company detachment would open access to all Terminator units, a Combined Arms Taskforce could provide a balanced but incomplete selection of additional units, and so on.
This would create firewalls between units so the designers don't have to worry about how they function together, and regular competitive players could treat the detachments more like subfactions in their own right with their own army lists.
Taking it as written that Games Workshop is never going to slow down the production of new Space Marines, how would you deal with the Space Marines unit bloat? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the Wargamer Discord community.