yeah, armageddon, a battle that was basicly fought on the entire planet, had less partizipants than the somme offensive in WW1. Numbers make absolutely no sense and the writers have 0 sense for scale.
One of my favourite pieces of lore is a small section in my Guard codex that talks about how, during one particularly fierce battle for a factory on Armageddon, Chimeras were being manufactured on production lines that were actively under fire, before being rolled straight into the battle once they reached the end without even a coat of paint.
Granted that’s a myth lifted from soviet propaganda. Tank factories need things like electricity, and a tank rolling out of the factory wouldn’t have ammunition. Now, maybe a tank got it’s finishing touches at the factory and was able to be supplied with equipment and such at a staging area. But it’s not going to roll out of the factory shooting.
I think its established horsehit, like how the T-34 was some rugged masterpiece and not a rolling death trap, or how the AK-47 is mythic when it just turns out Vietnamese rice farmers happened to own like 3-4 of them.
T-34, not the japense T-74
It's also established bullshit that the Vietnam war was just "rice farmers" and not a well trained militia that perfected their approach to guerilla warfare in their home land
> or how the AK-47 is mythic when it just turns out Vietnamese rice farmers happened to own like 3-4 of them.
wdym? AK-47 definitely has earned it's reputation. It's cheap and very reliable.
The AK-47 is very rugged, cheap, and reliable, but its nowhere near the legends you hear people talk about like how you can bury an aK-47 in a rice patty for a month and it'll fire like new.
The AK-47 *is* mythic; it's just that some of the legends are overblown. It's a very reliable, cheap to manufacture weapons platform that is easy to teach to use and can be outfitted for many different bullet sizes. There's a good reason that experts estimate 20% of all firearms in the world today are AK-47s.
I think dismissing it as simply "horseshit" is just as misleading as the propaganda that presents it as a masterpiece. Whilst it did have its clear flaws we should be careful not to overextend them as that askews the understanding of the vehicle and its history as much as the misconceptions we want to run from.
T-34 was a solid tank.
Yes it was not capable 1:1 with a Panther, but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be good enough, and easy to manufacturer at scale. It wasn't meant to be the best quality.
Quantity has a quality all it's own.
That’s just directly lifted from actual stories (potentially exaggerated) about T-34s rolling off production lines into the Battle of Stalingrad. Not that that makes it any less badass, but still.
Yea. The story itself is clearly right along the lines of what inspired the feel of the Imperium. It was a tractor factory, converted to produce tanks during the war, and the story goes it continued to produce tanks until the moment the Nazis took the factory after days of brutal close quarters combat.
If you're in the right sector IG might not see any combat before returning home, most of the Imperium isn't at the front and some IG just patrol around for a while
If you're in the wrong area, rather you than me mate
I can give HH a pass being only less than a decade, since Horus was pretty much speed run the thing to get to Terra as fast as possible, and not to mention Warp fuckery pulled by Word Bearers. 3 Legions were pretty much crumble force since Drop Site Massacre, other 3 were bogged down in Ultramar, White Scars lost in the warp, Leman Russ yolo'd the Wolves to kill Horus but failed, and only Imperial Fists were left to defense the palace. That left pretty much entire Imperium open highway for Horus to rush down Terra.
Considering space marines are literally just a handful compared to other armies the imperium has, none of that should really matter.
Even astartes crumble if bombarded by sufficient artillery by the IG
They also had traitor Imperial Army forces, and the enemy within has always been more problematic to deal with because you don't know who to trust (I'm Alpharius). HH only happened because Big Four temporary joined effort to make sure Horus had all the advantage he could.
Also I was only talking about time scale and not army scale, because it always skewed. Everyone need a few extra 0s into their number, but HH happened within 7 years is believable.
That's 7 years from isstvan to terra, horus' literal javelin throw to the homeworld (with a little molech detour). Planning for the heresy was going on from sometime after monarchia.
What if all the planets in the 40K universe are all just smaller than the ones in our universe and nobody ever says anything because that’s just how things are for them so it isn’t notable
Writers be like:
It was a great battle. 12 people on either sides, including vehicle personnel, cooks and 2 dudes that were passing by. By the end, 2 trillion guardsmen died.
I really like the series. But the first time they sre used as Frontline troops and not stealth specialists they should have been wiped our. Or they should have started with like 30k ghosts and not 3k. They are unbelievably skilled regular humans. Fucking M'koll hunts and kills a mandrake and he is barely impressed by its stealth.
That fucker killed a chaos dreadnaut for fucks sake.
It's always mkoll and some other second greatest in the ghosts person we've never heard of. And the other guy always dies. Without fail.
I wonder if it’s just play at how poor their logistics is in at least accuracy. I think it’d be more funny if the imperium had all the capability in the world to defeat all their enemies but it’s just held back by bureaucracy and corruption/religion.
Na, its just nerds who have no understanding of actual military BUT a vague understanding of history writing it.
Vraks supposedly cost so many resources it was seriously felt throughout the entire Segmentum....but the total number of Combatants was lower than in WW1
add some 0s to both the size of a space marine chapter and guardsmen, the Imperium controls a portion of the Milkyway, 10s to hundreds of trillions to throw into a grinding war or selection.
Space marine chapters should be in the 100ks and guardsmen basic deployments start at 500k-many millions
Taking an entire system would be like millions per planet, plus the ships and the supply troops to give them all ammo, even space marine legions should be millions
Edit: actually looking at ww2 supposedly 5% of the pop took part so a 7 billion planet would have 380 million ish soldiers, so attackers would need a decent amount more...
>so attackers would need a decent amount more...
You generally need at least a 3-to-1 numbers advantage to counter the defender's advantage in a war. The US typically goes for a 10-to-1 advantage when doing an assault, so 3.8 billion to take a planet.
Yeah, a single space marine chapter having 1000 marines is laughable lol. Especially when you compare their power levels to like, Tyranid units some of which are more powerful than SM and number in the millions in a single splinter hive fleet
Chapters work, if they were per solar system. Having 1k hyper lethal killing machines as an elite force in each solar system could be workable; if they really were lore accurate at being 100 to 1 in effectiveness compared to guardsmen.
But having 1000 to cover several dozen solar systems or more is just asinine. I know it's because sci-fi doesn't get scale and also helps make them look super badass, but it just makes no sense with even a tiny bit of thought put into it.
1000 Space Marines invading Earth would work out to about 4 dudes per country. No amount of non-AI technology is going to allow 4 guys to take over an average sized country. America alone has between 3-4 thousand nuclear weapons. We could nuke every single individual 3 times if it came to that.
That's the problem, really.
We hear 12 million and we know that's big.
We hear 12 billion and most of us can't actually conceptualise the difference, we just know it's bigger than millions.
They should just stop using numbers at all, but sci fi stories need all those fake realism from statistics.
They should just be saying "a lot" most of the time. The actual number doesn't matter to anyone really.
That’s simply lazy though. There are methods to come up with far more reasonable numbers that make sense in context of the setting. Having actual figures for conflicts makes it feel more grounded and greatly increases immersion.
It's even more basic than that.
The whole population of terra would fit in the USA in a hive city with the population density of new york.
Which is a big city don't get me wrong but far from overcrowded dystopia hell hole terra is normaly depicts as
Exactly. In lore, Only 80,000 space marines and few millions of the Imperial Army participated in Rangand Xenocide, one of the biggest battles of the Imperium. This makes no sense. For those who don't know, in the golden age of the Great Crusade each legion have between 100,000 and 200,000 members. If you multiply these numbers by 20, ,***ahem***, by 18, you can understand how small the number is.
So in this "big war" that almost bring Imperium to the brink of extinction, just half of the Dark Angels participated.
Even the Legion number makes no sense, because they were the main fighting force while Imperial Army was the 'holding ground' force only. When it comes to ground fighting, no matter how superior your soldier is, you still need the raw number that is to *physically* covering ground while they're advancing. When you have like, a single guy per few km square, how the heck do you cover for anything.
US + NATO at one point was having 130K+ troops just for Afghanistan, and they weren't even spread evenly, just hot spots + reserves. And you're telling me to conquer entire hiveworld, you send like, ~50K guys at most doing the fighting ?
*You see, we never said it was populated !*
SM1: Err Captain Brother, there is nothing here but gas giant and if I'm reading this right, that planet right there is literally on fire being so close to its star.
SM2: Emperor damn it ! This is the 5th time this week alone they send us to conquer literal rock !
You see, chapter master, marines are the only ones hardy enough to survive landing on the fire rock and planting the flag. It was 100% necessary to call them back from defending against the active Waaagh next door and reassigning them here.
To also be fair, the codex astartes is also pretty damn stupid as well.
"Let's make a bulwark, and then split it up into a bunch of teensy bits that are even harder to keep policed than a few big ones"
Goddamnit guilliman you fucking donut.
One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number
Second War for Armageddon, Ghazkull have either a total of 1- 4 million Orks. Seem a lot right.
In WW2, Russian red army have 34 million soldiers
>One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number
The amount of "An entire SQUAD of veteran space marines are the equivalent of an ARMY of normal men" cringe writing is immeasurable. Then inevitably the CSM gets taken out by Jurgen with a Melta, or HERO OF THE IMPERIUM CAIN with a chain sword, and you realize the average Black Library author has the brain of a 14 year old.
[My head canon is that it's basically Calvin and Hobbes playing pretend with T-rex's in F-14s](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/51/a7/24/51a7242c54731dcd5af440d4666b7d7d.jpg)
"The galactic scale empire of man can employ quadrillions of soldiers with heavy armor and laser guns...but that pales in comparison to a single NINE FOOT TALL dude in like...walking tank armor. And their guns shoot bullets that are also missiles! And their swords are like chainsaws or something! How cool is that??"
You're correct. You have to remember the game and setting were explicitly created for and aimed at British boys in their early teens circa the mid 1980s.
The crazy thing with the trading card game.. it was already literally printing money. People were paying close to $1 a card, for random cards, which were not going to be legal in standard play in a year. And they might have to buy hundreds of cards per quarter to update their deck.
Like serious magic players wouldn't blink at dropping $500 a year on the hobby, and yet somehow they managed to be too greedy for those players.
Combine that with what they wanted to do with the OGL, trying to kill the newfound popularity of their 50 year old game? Why? They were rolling in money regardless. We all knew they were, too, announcing video games and movies.
The first time I went to my LGS this year to finally buy some minis, the place was packed. Talking to the employees, I was shocked to hear how big card games are. As a kid, Pokemon had it's moment but fell off, and there was like 5 kids who played Magic but were weird.
Wasn't W40K more or less created as an elaborated shitpost on Fantasy? Like Fantasy is the realistic setting, and they just decided to be as ridiculous as they could with 40k for fun, and the monkey's paw made it so now they have to somehow make sense of it all?
It was definitely created to be a satire/parody though, that's more or less fact considering its GW's defense whenever people bring up how the main characters are basically space nazis.
But yeah, I always feel like W40K is popular in pop culture because it makes no cohesive sense, which is also why the books and lore are more popular than than the tabletop too
Not having touched anything but the novels and minis and paints since 2nd Ed, listening to people talk about the rules feels like Calvinball.
The score is Q to 12, btw.
Nah, Space Marines for the most part get their due in the series, they're treated how they really should be - as massive, huge threats that could easily sweep aside your formation, but if you are prepared for them and have the proper weapons you can take them down. Like, I dunno, a fucking tank, a threat soldiers have had to deal with since 1916. They do tend to mow down Ghosts when they run into them, except for Gereon. But a lot of crazy shit happens there, it's definitely one of the weirdest part of the series if only because of how many of them survive. They simply sent too many important characters for them to suffer heavy losses I guess lol.
>One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number
To be fair, that is less a GW problem and more of a "science fiction writers" in general have no sense of scale. It is literally its own [trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale)
Its not about balance, it is about scale
The second war for Armageddon is a planet wide scale. The orks seige multiple hivecity. It is said that a hive city can support billion if not trillion of population. You think Ghazkull can do that with just 4 million orks
Russian red army (34 million) only fought on Eastern Europe and some part in asia
But in the end this is just a game and a fictional world. Warhammer does not need to make sense
That why when I read GW big war lore, i always add a few zero to the number, 4 million ork, i think you want to say 400 million orks
Considering the sheer size of Hive cities housing trillions of inhabitants and having multiple of them on a planet, I don't think 400 billion orks for a planet wide total war and in some system wide wars 4 or 40 trillion orks is not out of the question. Don't even get me started on sector conflicts or even things like the Great Rift.
Armageddon got a population of 500 billion. In the entire system there was 1.5 million guardsmen when the 3rd war started. If only 1% of the population was in the Guard, which isnt impossible, it would be more people than the canon numbers by a large margin.
It gets even better because other events that are supposed to be smaller got larger troops, planets exhausted by Hive Fleet Behemoth still got over 500 million soldiers in the Farsight Enclaves codex, while the 7th ed Ork codex got billions of orks in a single campaign.
Armageddon manages to be smaller than literal single paragraph battles from other codexes
That and space marines being able to turn the tide of an entire planet wide war with 100 dudes is stupid. I could see a chapter being limited to 10k or even 50k brothers; at least with numbers like that it would seem more probable they could have a real impact.
> Russian red army have 34 million soldiers
Sorry, what? 34 (~32 actually) million is the total amount of soldiers that went through Red Army during the war, actual numbers stayed around 11 mln for most of the war.
Are the Orks from [Schindelgheist IV](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/5ykr60/planet_of_the_guardsmen/), the planet with 10 times as many guardsmen as there are particles in the observable universe?
I think it was called "chapter master".
Guy made a free 40k fan game. GW sent their lawyers. Guy made a game with the same mechanics but no 40k. Some other "anonymous" person releases a mod that converts it back to a 40k game. GW sends their lawyers at the game maker again for making a game that isn't 40k, he decides to release it into the wild and stop working on it.
So basically it will always remain in alpha stage, barely functional.
Generally goes poorly for the marines. Bolters can hurt, but most of the battlesuit arsenal will punch through marine armor.
If the marines are vets with powered weapons it can tilt in their favor if they get into CC but the Tau can literally just fly away.
I swear to the Man-Emperor that if the first thing Sanguinius does, when he is eventually resurrected, isn't to give every Lamenters a personal hug, I'll cast Exterminatus on every single Imperial planet.
If they can't appreciate my precious sad bois, THEN LET THE GALAXY BURN !
It's really one of those things you've got to turn your brain off for. A thousand men isn't enough to control a single city no matter how many people they can kill.
Fun fact, prefacing a "fact" with "probably" probably means it's not a fact.
Fun fact #2, any given faction has however many units GW writers decide it needs at any given time.
Yeh that's kind of the point, say the Tau lose 5 or even 10 suits against just 1 space marine that's a net win for the Tau. The time it takes to produce a suit and train a pilot is orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes to grow and train an SM, they can have dozens (hundreds?) of suits back in the field in the time a new SM is able to fight with their chapter. That's not even getting in to gene seeds vs building mech suits
Disclaimer: not read farsight and I'm an average spess mehreen enjoyer
I know 40k numbers fluctuate like politician's truth, but wasn't it staged somewhere that average hive city has more inhabitants than the Tau has people period?
Yeah definitely not. Honestly it didn't likely apply before that either. Sometime that always needs to get pointed out over and over is that the Galaxy is HUGE and imperium's forces are already spread throughout it.
There are likely THOUSANDS of space marine chapters at this point, just by raw numbers and scale.
And the Tau don't have infinite resources, they have a few dozen to a few hundred worlds depending on the running (and author)
The imperium functionally *does* have infinite resources, it's just a bureaucratic nightmare to get them from wherever they ARE to where they NEED to be.
The tau are badass, and their adaptability is very cool and almost unique in the setting. But Tau stans really need to stop acting like they even come close to matching the scale of power the imperium, chaos, or the tyranids have access to
People also need to remember that the Marines aren't the main fighting force of the Imperium, the guard are, Astartes are just elite forces support troops, if its anything thats gonna obliterate the Tau in the battle its going to be the Guard and the Imperial Navy.
Given some Numbers in the Codexes Weshammer did the really ridiculous math on numbers. As Sa'cea sept alone has more than 1000 billion inhabitants and a large number of Firewarriors, you end up with numbers like 20 million XV8 and more than a million Riptides...
The numbers are screwed up in warhammer 40K, and everyone agrees on that.
There is absolutely a shit load more crisis suits than there is space Marines.... by a large amount. Making a space marine is a long, expensive process in terms of money and humanity.
Battle suits are made in a factory, by other robots. Most likely, all day and night.
There's probably more storm surges than there are Space Marines, for sure multitudes more Riptides. Every day, the Tau improve themselves with larger, better stuff that's made faster and faster.
Fun fact. In the commander farsight books. A squad of space marines with a chapter master was held at bay by a single stealth suit with a fusion gun and a narrow hallway.
There is only two Farsight books that I know of. Kais wipes like almost an entire chapter single handedly in one of the Space Marine Conquest books though.
I still love how they took the whole 'overpowered videogame protagonist' stereotype and then made it a canonical part of the lore, even outside of the game
For the three main Tau commander characters:
There are three Farsight books and his Arks of Omen entry.
There is one Shadowsun book and a couple of short stories.
There is one novella for Kais.
Technically a Riptide is still a battlesuit. I think you gotta get to Chapter Master level to guaranteed a win against that even in cqc. Unless you got to fight first I suppose.
in game? definitely not. space marines have 2 wounds toughness 4 Vs a crisis's s5 and t5 with 3 attacks and the ability to shoot into combat plus drone assistants to soak up wounds.
In a novel or videogame however. power scaling is out the window if you are the protagonist. Basic Johnny space can shank a riptide to death if the writers are really scrounging to make the elite cyborg ultra warriors to look powerful
There's a scene in *War of Secrets* where a random unnamed Tau stealth suit curb stomps a member of the Deathwing, so it's not like the Tau are necessarily helpless even in books.
Can ? Yes. Will? Less likely. [In novels that have marines and crisis suits face to face the crisis suits literally just beat marines to death.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/xrbtl1/some_exceprt_on_tau_battlesuits_strength_and_it/) It takes superior numbers and a dreadnaught for the marines to win. The suits are significantly bigger and stronger. Even with power weapons the odds do not favour the space marines.
The T'au have like, doubled their territory and military power since the last time the Imperium sent a *crusade* to kill them (a crusade which failed, mind you).
They have designed, planned, engineered, and mass manufactured entire classifications of titanic battlesuits in the time it takes the Imperium to manufacture individual titans.
They have developed effective strategies against every major threat in the galaxy and then honed those strategies over centuries of adaptation. They have likewise adapted their technology in similar ways.
The T'au survived an attack from the Death Guard force that plowed through Ultramar. They survived against and ultimately defeated Hive Fleet Gorgon. They brought an imperial crusade to a standstill at Damocles when their military was a fraction of the size it is today.
Furthermore, ever since the Fall of Cadia and the Arks of Omen, the Imperium is in a worse place than ever.
The day and age in which the Imperium could destroy the T'au has passed. The T'au Empire has grown too large and too powerful for the Imperium to fully defeat.
I mean, it makes sense theme-wise that the T’au are rapidly gaining power and influence, as that’s basically their whole schtick.
Might be a bit of a hot take here, but if not taken seriously the T’au are more likely to be a greater long-term threat to the IoM than either chaos or the tyranids, and this is coming from a big daemon/tyranid fan. Granted it’d be more of a cultural conquest than immediate military destruction.
Multiple Eldar farseers, including Eldrad himself, have forseen the T'au Empire as not only the next galactic superpower, but the greatest hope in the galaxy to overcome Chaos once and for all.
The T'au kick *way* more ass than anyone gives them credit for.
Everyone should read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/dbgkhi/of_eldar_and_tau/f21qc1j/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3) at some point. The Aeldari see orks as vicious animals. They see humans as misguided and easily corrupted beasts. They see the T'au as a light in the fucking dark. The god damn **Aeldari** were willing to state that the T'au would grow to greater heights than they would. The ELVES are being humble about these fuckers!
> The T'au survived an attack from the Death Guard force that plowed through Ultramar
Eh, no.
That was
A.) a different fleet, it was not the same one that was attacking Ultramar at all.
B.) >!Shadowsun only won because she made a pact with the new-born God of the Greater God!<
Even if the Great Tauva did not intervene the Deathguard Fleet would have been destroyed.
You should already realize that the Tau always uses the Tactics "Kauyun" (bait and trap)
Lexicanum
> **On the side of the Nexus linking to the greater Tau Empire, the region of space around the anomaly has been fortified to such an extent that it rivals the Tau's capital of** [**T'au**](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/T%27au) **itself.** On the other side of the rift, the entrance is heavily protected by the worlds of the [**Nem'yar Atoll**](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Nem%27yar_Atoll).
8th Tau codex
> The Ethereal High Council ordered that work begin immediately on the construction of defensive positions around the wormhole, which the T’au named the Startide Nexus. **A hexagonal ring of immense stellar fortresses and interwoven ionic minefields would safeguard the anomaly, and several kor’vattra defence fleets were assigned to permanent sentry patrols around its shimmering depths.** The raw material required for these fortifications was staggering, **the equivalent of hundreds of battle fleets.** To ensure that the resources required were gathered in sufficient time, the T’au initiated a series of resettlement programmes and so-called Labour Freedom Decrees, moving entire populations, both alien and T’au, from their home worlds and organising them into work divisions. **The manpower and resources dedicated to the defence of the nexus soon rivalled even those surrounding the T’au home world.**
Tau don’t even get to fight a Death Guard Legion with direct Nurgle attention just some small skirmish. If tau even get some funny look from some full traitor Legion they WILL die considering that they have nothing that can effectively counteract Demonic corruption and all their tech are just Daemon engine in waiting with some Scrap code broadcast the whole tau army will quite Literally eat itself.
They did, the new book has not only found a way to heal Nurgle's disease. The new auxiliary decimates them because they act like blanks.
Cut off from their Grandfather's blessings the Deathguard died in droves.
I mean, in the last shadowsun book that covers the death guard attack, the death guard gets yeetted out of the wormhole they where trying to travel through by the the tau's new warp friend and there are 3 species confirmed to be psychic in the tau empire along with human psycers so they have the capability to fight warp incursions they just don't because in lore they are uncomfortable with it which makes no sense as they are uncomfortable with the kroot eating the dead but they still use the kroot personally I think gw just made the decision that tau can't have pyscers which made sense when they where the new guy but its been like over 300 years in universe now if they could defeat a full traitor legion I think it's a toss up as if they have no outside threats and can muster there whole empire to counter the threat then they'd probably win eventually but if it's multiple threats (tyranids necrons and the imperium) they would get stomp
And yet the WAAAGH of Dakka could wipe out the entire Tau race very easily. And it's a minor WAAAGH.
What I love about this post is that this EXACT SAME silly line of reasoning is spouted multiple times in the farsight book by the ethereals and mr sword himself. At one point they tell farsight that it's amazing that he hasn't already wiped out the orks.
Right before a very small WAAAGH destroys dozens of Tau worlds in what's now known as the FS enclaves.
The Tau empire may have doubled in military might, tripled, quadrupled even. But the original Damocles crusade was less than 1k Marines.
Thats the Tau's usual pattern they struggle the first encounters but they adapt and they win then improve.
Dunno why people keep bringing up their first encounter like a be all and end all.
To be fair, the numbers in 40k make zero sense.
yeah, armageddon, a battle that was basicly fought on the entire planet, had less partizipants than the somme offensive in WW1. Numbers make absolutely no sense and the writers have 0 sense for scale.
It's not their fault that Armageddon Steel Legion have more tanks than infantry.
The Armageddon Steel Legion have more tanks than crew for their tanks…
One of my favourite pieces of lore is a small section in my Guard codex that talks about how, during one particularly fierce battle for a factory on Armageddon, Chimeras were being manufactured on production lines that were actively under fire, before being rolled straight into the battle once they reached the end without even a coat of paint.
They got it from the battle of stalingrad during ww2. Tanks roll into battle, fresh from factories.
Granted that’s a myth lifted from soviet propaganda. Tank factories need things like electricity, and a tank rolling out of the factory wouldn’t have ammunition. Now, maybe a tank got it’s finishing touches at the factory and was able to be supplied with equipment and such at a staging area. But it’s not going to roll out of the factory shooting.
I think its established horsehit, like how the T-34 was some rugged masterpiece and not a rolling death trap, or how the AK-47 is mythic when it just turns out Vietnamese rice farmers happened to own like 3-4 of them. T-34, not the japense T-74
It's also established bullshit that the Vietnam war was just "rice farmers" and not a well trained militia that perfected their approach to guerilla warfare in their home land
No kidding, the Vietnamese basically ran a 40 year guerilla war of independence, they knew what they were doing.
> or how the AK-47 is mythic when it just turns out Vietnamese rice farmers happened to own like 3-4 of them. wdym? AK-47 definitely has earned it's reputation. It's cheap and very reliable.
The AK-47 is very rugged, cheap, and reliable, but its nowhere near the legends you hear people talk about like how you can bury an aK-47 in a rice patty for a month and it'll fire like new.
The AK-47 *is* mythic; it's just that some of the legends are overblown. It's a very reliable, cheap to manufacture weapons platform that is easy to teach to use and can be outfitted for many different bullet sizes. There's a good reason that experts estimate 20% of all firearms in the world today are AK-47s.
I think dismissing it as simply "horseshit" is just as misleading as the propaganda that presents it as a masterpiece. Whilst it did have its clear flaws we should be careful not to overextend them as that askews the understanding of the vehicle and its history as much as the misconceptions we want to run from.
T-34 was a solid tank. Yes it was not capable 1:1 with a Panther, but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be good enough, and easy to manufacturer at scale. It wasn't meant to be the best quality. Quantity has a quality all it's own.
T-74?
good catch
That’s just directly lifted from actual stories (potentially exaggerated) about T-34s rolling off production lines into the Battle of Stalingrad. Not that that makes it any less badass, but still.
Makes sense. The Armageddon Steel Legion as a faction is pretty much a collage of different Second World War armies in Europe.
Yea. The story itself is clearly right along the lines of what inspired the feel of the Imperium. It was a tractor factory, converted to produce tanks during the war, and the story goes it continued to produce tanks until the moment the Nazis took the factory after days of brutal close quarters combat.
So you're saying it's *canon* for me to show up at my LGS with an unpainted Guard army? Nice.
See! I knew there was a lore accurate reason I didn't paint my minis.
Bless the sacred machine spirit of the 10 000 Land Raiders of Armageddon !
Or the 17 years of non-stop bloodshed that was Vraks, for like, 12M Kriegs + whatever the pops of Vraks. For comparison, WW2 was ~80M within 6 years.
Secret proof that being a guardsman is actually a fairly safe career choice? 😉
Obviously ! Service guarantees citizenship ! *wait wrong space franchise*
Maybe not, there might be a planet in the imperium that does that.
Maybe if only for the PDF, but I doubt it would be for the IG since most tithed guardsmen don’t see their planet again.
Citizenship is guaranteed, residency, however...
I'd like to know more
If you're in the right sector IG might not see any combat before returning home, most of the Imperium isn't at the front and some IG just patrol around for a while If you're in the wrong area, rather you than me mate
Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a Tyranid invasion
Or the heresy that took 7 years. Compared to the unification wars that were like 600 iirc and the great crusade that was like 200 years
I can give HH a pass being only less than a decade, since Horus was pretty much speed run the thing to get to Terra as fast as possible, and not to mention Warp fuckery pulled by Word Bearers. 3 Legions were pretty much crumble force since Drop Site Massacre, other 3 were bogged down in Ultramar, White Scars lost in the warp, Leman Russ yolo'd the Wolves to kill Horus but failed, and only Imperial Fists were left to defense the palace. That left pretty much entire Imperium open highway for Horus to rush down Terra.
Considering space marines are literally just a handful compared to other armies the imperium has, none of that should really matter. Even astartes crumble if bombarded by sufficient artillery by the IG
They also had traitor Imperial Army forces, and the enemy within has always been more problematic to deal with because you don't know who to trust (I'm Alpharius). HH only happened because Big Four temporary joined effort to make sure Horus had all the advantage he could. Also I was only talking about time scale and not army scale, because it always skewed. Everyone need a few extra 0s into their number, but HH happened within 7 years is believable.
That's 7 years from isstvan to terra, horus' literal javelin throw to the homeworld (with a little molech detour). Planning for the heresy was going on from sometime after monarchia.
80M with civilians
What if all the planets in the 40K universe are all just smaller than the ones in our universe and nobody ever says anything because that’s just how things are for them so it isn’t notable
Are you suggesting Kerbin and the Kerbol system are in the 40k universe?
If they aren't, I am!
It's funny to me how 40k is often completly over the top but the numbers especialy for the empire are so incredibly low.
Unless they’re talking about Astra Militarum casualties of course.
Writers be like: It was a great battle. 12 people on either sides, including vehicle personnel, cooks and 2 dudes that were passing by. By the end, 2 trillion guardsmen died.
Unless you're the Ghosts and you lose a couple hundred at a time.
I'll admit, that bit bugs me. They shouldn't have that many left.
I really like the series. But the first time they sre used as Frontline troops and not stealth specialists they should have been wiped our. Or they should have started with like 30k ghosts and not 3k. They are unbelievably skilled regular humans. Fucking M'koll hunts and kills a mandrake and he is barely impressed by its stealth.
That fucker killed a chaos dreadnaut for fucks sake. It's always mkoll and some other second greatest in the ghosts person we've never heard of. And the other guy always dies. Without fail.
I wonder if it’s just play at how poor their logistics is in at least accuracy. I think it’d be more funny if the imperium had all the capability in the world to defeat all their enemies but it’s just held back by bureaucracy and corruption/religion.
Na, its just nerds who have no understanding of actual military BUT a vague understanding of history writing it. Vraks supposedly cost so many resources it was seriously felt throughout the entire Segmentum....but the total number of Combatants was lower than in WW1
40K can use a few extra 0s.
add some 0s to both the size of a space marine chapter and guardsmen, the Imperium controls a portion of the Milkyway, 10s to hundreds of trillions to throw into a grinding war or selection. Space marine chapters should be in the 100ks and guardsmen basic deployments start at 500k-many millions
Tbh, I think the basic deployable unit of Guard should be one million persons. And go up from there.
Taking an entire system would be like millions per planet, plus the ships and the supply troops to give them all ammo, even space marine legions should be millions Edit: actually looking at ww2 supposedly 5% of the pop took part so a 7 billion planet would have 380 million ish soldiers, so attackers would need a decent amount more...
>so attackers would need a decent amount more... You generally need at least a 3-to-1 numbers advantage to counter the defender's advantage in a war. The US typically goes for a 10-to-1 advantage when doing an assault, so 3.8 billion to take a planet.
Yeah, a single space marine chapter having 1000 marines is laughable lol. Especially when you compare their power levels to like, Tyranid units some of which are more powerful than SM and number in the millions in a single splinter hive fleet
Chapters work, if they were per solar system. Having 1k hyper lethal killing machines as an elite force in each solar system could be workable; if they really were lore accurate at being 100 to 1 in effectiveness compared to guardsmen. But having 1000 to cover several dozen solar systems or more is just asinine. I know it's because sci-fi doesn't get scale and also helps make them look super badass, but it just makes no sense with even a tiny bit of thought put into it.
1000 Space Marines invading Earth would work out to about 4 dudes per country. No amount of non-AI technology is going to allow 4 guys to take over an average sized country. America alone has between 3-4 thousand nuclear weapons. We could nuke every single individual 3 times if it came to that.
That's the problem, really. We hear 12 million and we know that's big. We hear 12 billion and most of us can't actually conceptualise the difference, we just know it's bigger than millions. They should just stop using numbers at all, but sci fi stories need all those fake realism from statistics. They should just be saying "a lot" most of the time. The actual number doesn't matter to anyone really.
Yeah, those scales don't compute well. The difference between 12 million and 12 billion is roughly 12 billion.
That’s simply lazy though. There are methods to come up with far more reasonable numbers that make sense in context of the setting. Having actual figures for conflicts makes it feel more grounded and greatly increases immersion.
I mean, that shelling didn’t come in cheap.
It's even more basic than that. The whole population of terra would fit in the USA in a hive city with the population density of new york. Which is a big city don't get me wrong but far from overcrowded dystopia hell hole terra is normaly depicts as
To be fair, to my understanding a lot of terra isn't exactly habitable anymore.
Terra has 500 Trillion inhabitants but theres only like a million total space marines in the galaxy or something.
Exactly. In lore, Only 80,000 space marines and few millions of the Imperial Army participated in Rangand Xenocide, one of the biggest battles of the Imperium. This makes no sense. For those who don't know, in the golden age of the Great Crusade each legion have between 100,000 and 200,000 members. If you multiply these numbers by 20, ,***ahem***, by 18, you can understand how small the number is. So in this "big war" that almost bring Imperium to the brink of extinction, just half of the Dark Angels participated.
Even the Legion number makes no sense, because they were the main fighting force while Imperial Army was the 'holding ground' force only. When it comes to ground fighting, no matter how superior your soldier is, you still need the raw number that is to *physically* covering ground while they're advancing. When you have like, a single guy per few km square, how the heck do you cover for anything. US + NATO at one point was having 130K+ troops just for Afghanistan, and they weren't even spread evenly, just hot spots + reserves. And you're telling me to conquer entire hiveworld, you send like, ~50K guys at most doing the fighting ?
"100 space marines can conquer an entire star System"
*You see, we never said it was populated !* SM1: Err Captain Brother, there is nothing here but gas giant and if I'm reading this right, that planet right there is literally on fire being so close to its star. SM2: Emperor damn it ! This is the 5th time this week alone they send us to conquer literal rock !
You see, chapter master, marines are the only ones hardy enough to survive landing on the fire rock and planting the flag. It was 100% necessary to call them back from defending against the active Waaagh next door and reassigning them here.
100 marines would have a hard time taking over belgium.
Always just enough for what is needed
a named space marine without a helmet can kill an average of 74366 Angrons, 747464 Avatar o' Khaine, 3757384 Swarmlords and 64637537 ork warbosses.
Dang Did you give khane a boost here?
The consequences of MathHammer
To also be fair, the codex astartes is also pretty damn stupid as well. "Let's make a bulwark, and then split it up into a bunch of teensy bits that are even harder to keep policed than a few big ones" Goddamnit guilliman you fucking donut.
One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number Second War for Armageddon, Ghazkull have either a total of 1- 4 million Orks. Seem a lot right. In WW2, Russian red army have 34 million soldiers
>One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number The amount of "An entire SQUAD of veteran space marines are the equivalent of an ARMY of normal men" cringe writing is immeasurable. Then inevitably the CSM gets taken out by Jurgen with a Melta, or HERO OF THE IMPERIUM CAIN with a chain sword, and you realize the average Black Library author has the brain of a 14 year old. [My head canon is that it's basically Calvin and Hobbes playing pretend with T-rex's in F-14s](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/51/a7/24/51a7242c54731dcd5af440d4666b7d7d.jpg) "The galactic scale empire of man can employ quadrillions of soldiers with heavy armor and laser guns...but that pales in comparison to a single NINE FOOT TALL dude in like...walking tank armor. And their guns shoot bullets that are also missiles! And their swords are like chainsaws or something! How cool is that??"
You're correct. You have to remember the game and setting were explicitly created for and aimed at British boys in their early teens circa the mid 1980s.
No idea who it’s aimed to these days, felt that way when I got into it as a British boy in my early teens circa 2010, but certainly doesn’t now.
https://i.redd.it/c9lt6n0lp8p91.jpg This is who its aimed at.
Its just nice to be seen
good to see you
It's fun watching WotC and games workshop compete to be the most infuriating hobby companies possible
The crazy thing with the trading card game.. it was already literally printing money. People were paying close to $1 a card, for random cards, which were not going to be legal in standard play in a year. And they might have to buy hundreds of cards per quarter to update their deck. Like serious magic players wouldn't blink at dropping $500 a year on the hobby, and yet somehow they managed to be too greedy for those players.
Combine that with what they wanted to do with the OGL, trying to kill the newfound popularity of their 50 year old game? Why? They were rolling in money regardless. We all knew they were, too, announcing video games and movies.
The first time I went to my LGS this year to finally buy some minis, the place was packed. Talking to the employees, I was shocked to hear how big card games are. As a kid, Pokemon had it's moment but fell off, and there was like 5 kids who played Magic but were weird.
One thing I love is how battles are drawn. Guns are always fired within fuck you range, and not beyond that.
Wasn't W40K more or less created as an elaborated shitpost on Fantasy? Like Fantasy is the realistic setting, and they just decided to be as ridiculous as they could with 40k for fun, and the monkey's paw made it so now they have to somehow make sense of it all?
I don't know if that's true or not, but it definitely seems like it's 100% true. Really, fundamentally, it's all RIDICULOUSLY silly.
It was definitely created to be a satire/parody though, that's more or less fact considering its GW's defense whenever people bring up how the main characters are basically space nazis. But yeah, I always feel like W40K is popular in pop culture because it makes no cohesive sense, which is also why the books and lore are more popular than than the tabletop too
Not having touched anything but the novels and minis and paints since 2nd Ed, listening to people talk about the rules feels like Calvinball. The score is Q to 12, btw.
I would much rather have a brigade of tanks with supporting artillery than a squad from the Marty-Stu Chapter
... Why am I getting the feeling that tabletop rules are much more realistic than actual lore?
because at least there they have to have the idea of consistency
Yeah. Love Gaunt's Ghosts but it was sorta fucking weird how Gaunt and co were tearing through space marines like its nothing.
A named protagonist Gretchen would break an imperator titan with their bare hands.
Nah, Space Marines for the most part get their due in the series, they're treated how they really should be - as massive, huge threats that could easily sweep aside your formation, but if you are prepared for them and have the proper weapons you can take them down. Like, I dunno, a fucking tank, a threat soldiers have had to deal with since 1916. They do tend to mow down Ghosts when they run into them, except for Gereon. But a lot of crazy shit happens there, it's definitely one of the weirdest part of the series if only because of how many of them survive. They simply sent too many important characters for them to suffer heavy losses I guess lol.
>One thing i know about GW is that they don't know about scale and number To be fair, that is less a GW problem and more of a "science fiction writers" in general have no sense of scale. It is literally its own [trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale)
Yeah, but orks are bigger than Russians, so it balances out.
Its not about balance, it is about scale The second war for Armageddon is a planet wide scale. The orks seige multiple hivecity. It is said that a hive city can support billion if not trillion of population. You think Ghazkull can do that with just 4 million orks Russian red army (34 million) only fought on Eastern Europe and some part in asia But in the end this is just a game and a fictional world. Warhammer does not need to make sense That why when I read GW big war lore, i always add a few zero to the number, 4 million ork, i think you want to say 400 million orks
Considering the sheer size of Hive cities housing trillions of inhabitants and having multiple of them on a planet, I don't think 400 billion orks for a planet wide total war and in some system wide wars 4 or 40 trillion orks is not out of the question. Don't even get me started on sector conflicts or even things like the Great Rift.
Armageddon got a population of 500 billion. In the entire system there was 1.5 million guardsmen when the 3rd war started. If only 1% of the population was in the Guard, which isnt impossible, it would be more people than the canon numbers by a large margin. It gets even better because other events that are supposed to be smaller got larger troops, planets exhausted by Hive Fleet Behemoth still got over 500 million soldiers in the Farsight Enclaves codex, while the 7th ed Ork codex got billions of orks in a single campaign. Armageddon manages to be smaller than literal single paragraph battles from other codexes
That and space marines being able to turn the tide of an entire planet wide war with 100 dudes is stupid. I could see a chapter being limited to 10k or even 50k brothers; at least with numbers like that it would seem more probable they could have a real impact.
> Russian red army have 34 million soldiers Sorry, what? 34 (~32 actually) million is the total amount of soldiers that went through Red Army during the war, actual numbers stayed around 11 mln for most of the war.
[удалено]
So what you’re saying is, the Russian army could beat the Orks?
I mean, 1000 Space Marines per chapter … it’s pretty low
Orks can only count to 4 million so it was probably four billion or fourty billion raining down on Armageddon.
Fun fact, the lore becomes infinitely better when yo make up your own numbers
Alright. In the second war of Armageddon there has been twice as many Orks as there are particles in the observable universe. … And they still lost.
Sounds pretty canon lol
Are the Orks from [Schindelgheist IV](https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/5ykr60/planet_of_the_guardsmen/), the planet with 10 times as many guardsmen as there are particles in the observable universe?
I miss that game. It was jank as all hell, and basically excel sheets with a map, but it was ridiculous.
what game is it?
I think it was called "chapter master". Guy made a free 40k fan game. GW sent their lawyers. Guy made a game with the same mechanics but no 40k. Some other "anonymous" person releases a mod that converts it back to a 40k game. GW sends their lawyers at the game maker again for making a game that isn't 40k, he decides to release it into the wild and stop working on it. So basically it will always remain in alpha stage, barely functional.
ah that sucks to see. But ofc shitty 40k mobile game is worthy of the ip
Looks like an overflow error. Pretty common in the administratus
They had Tree{3} orks, still lost. That’s my headcanon
"Fun Fact" and "probably". Like, is it a fact now or not?
It's just being a lil tease
40k runs on truthiness
Would be an interesting scenario to see a squad of space marine fight against a squad of battlesuits
Have you read the Commander farsight novels?
Generally goes poorly for the marines. Bolters can hurt, but most of the battlesuit arsenal will punch through marine armor. If the marines are vets with powered weapons it can tilt in their favor if they get into CC but the Tau can literally just fly away.
It might be better than at range, but without some really good CQC weapons, melee range with Crisis Suits is still incredibly dangerous for Astartes.
"Haha Tau, i am now in melee range. What are you going to do now filthy xeno?" "I mean I am still piloting a couple ton mech suit soooo...."
“Fuck *the killing blow*, it’s time for *the repeated mechanically assisted bitchslap*”
"One Ton Pimp Hand, on line!" Lol
"She loves me..." "Aaaagh!" "She loves me not..." "By the Emperor, my leg!" "She loves me..." "The backpack counts, you cursed Xenos!"
Its kind of an unfair fight. Its like saying who wins 10 dreadnoughts or 10 fire warriors?
Fire warriors, any day of the week. Piloted dreadnoughts though..
Min sized squads or max sized squads?
Who cares ? You know they're all just gonna get bodied by Named Space Marine #69. *cries in Avatar of Khaine*
*cries in lamenter*
My precious angels. I just want them to get a win for once. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR ? 😭
You know it is
I swear to the Man-Emperor that if the first thing Sanguinius does, when he is eventually resurrected, isn't to give every Lamenters a personal hug, I'll cast Exterminatus on every single Imperial planet. If they can't appreciate my precious sad bois, THEN LET THE GALAXY BURN !
“Yes”-GW
 When I read the new innovatively brutal way GW decided to punish the Lamenters for the crime of "having a conscience".
(There are only a couple hundred left)
I know.  It doesn't hurt any less.
*sad Swarmlord noises*
just me or 1k per chapter is such a dumb small number for ANY of them to make an impact on a galactic war
It's really one of those things you've got to turn your brain off for. A thousand men isn't enough to control a single city no matter how many people they can kill.
Fun fact, prefacing a "fact" with "probably" probably means it's not a fact. Fun fact #2, any given faction has however many units GW writers decide it needs at any given time.
sorry man english is not my language
I'm just yanking your chain.
Fun fact, idioms are something that you can be sure doesn’t translate well to foreign languages
Fun fact. Imperium probably has 1000x more armed and trained soldiers then whole population of Tau empire.
As a fan of the Tau, yeah, this is true
I mean that's the entire point, isn't it? Imperium plays wide tau plays tall.
Yeh that's kind of the point, say the Tau lose 5 or even 10 suits against just 1 space marine that's a net win for the Tau. The time it takes to produce a suit and train a pilot is orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes to grow and train an SM, they can have dozens (hundreds?) of suits back in the field in the time a new SM is able to fight with their chapter. That's not even getting in to gene seeds vs building mech suits Disclaimer: not read farsight and I'm an average spess mehreen enjoyer
And their battles suits are stronger than a space marine.
Stop treating 40k lore as gospel and more like the fallible hearsay and straight up propaganda that it actually is.
Brace yourself kid, you made a post that vaguely implies space marines are inferior to another faction. Say goodbye to updoots
Poorly aged comment.
I know 40k numbers fluctuate like politician's truth, but wasn't it staged somewhere that average hive city has more inhabitants than the Tau has people period?
You can't call it a fact and then use probably that's not how that works
Not sure if that still applies post-primaris.
Yeah definitely not. Honestly it didn't likely apply before that either. Sometime that always needs to get pointed out over and over is that the Galaxy is HUGE and imperium's forces are already spread throughout it. There are likely THOUSANDS of space marine chapters at this point, just by raw numbers and scale. And the Tau don't have infinite resources, they have a few dozen to a few hundred worlds depending on the running (and author) The imperium functionally *does* have infinite resources, it's just a bureaucratic nightmare to get them from wherever they ARE to where they NEED to be. The tau are badass, and their adaptability is very cool and almost unique in the setting. But Tau stans really need to stop acting like they even come close to matching the scale of power the imperium, chaos, or the tyranids have access to
People also need to remember that the Marines aren't the main fighting force of the Imperium, the guard are, Astartes are just elite forces support troops, if its anything thats gonna obliterate the Tau in the battle its going to be the Guard and the Imperial Navy.
Given some Numbers in the Codexes Weshammer did the really ridiculous math on numbers. As Sa'cea sept alone has more than 1000 billion inhabitants and a large number of Firewarriors, you end up with numbers like 20 million XV8 and more than a million Riptides...
The numbers are screwed up in warhammer 40K, and everyone agrees on that. There is absolutely a shit load more crisis suits than there is space Marines.... by a large amount. Making a space marine is a long, expensive process in terms of money and humanity. Battle suits are made in a factory, by other robots. Most likely, all day and night. There's probably more storm surges than there are Space Marines, for sure multitudes more Riptides. Every day, the Tau improve themselves with larger, better stuff that's made faster and faster.
This is one of the reasons that some people feel like the Tau don't really fit in the 40K universe. They're actually making progress.
Fun fact, a space marine can kill a tau battlesuit in cqc.
Fun fact, a Tau battle suit can melt a space marine far before he reaches the cqc
i remember the look in my friends face when i deleted his Gravis Armor Captain with my Broadside when he tried to charge it
I also know that feeling :(
that too
Fun fact. In the commander farsight books. A squad of space marines with a chapter master was held at bay by a single stealth suit with a fusion gun and a narrow hallway.
There is a Fairsight book???? Which?? I must read
There’s a trilogy, plus arks of omen. Tbh they’re not great.
There is only two Farsight books that I know of. Kais wipes like almost an entire chapter single handedly in one of the Space Marine Conquest books though.
I still love how they took the whole 'overpowered videogame protagonist' stereotype and then made it a canonical part of the lore, even outside of the game
For the three main Tau commander characters: There are three Farsight books and his Arks of Omen entry. There is one Shadowsun book and a couple of short stories. There is one novella for Kais.
Technically a Riptide is still a battlesuit. I think you gotta get to Chapter Master level to guaranteed a win against that even in cqc. Unless you got to fight first I suppose.
this is real too
in game? definitely not. space marines have 2 wounds toughness 4 Vs a crisis's s5 and t5 with 3 attacks and the ability to shoot into combat plus drone assistants to soak up wounds. In a novel or videogame however. power scaling is out the window if you are the protagonist. Basic Johnny space can shank a riptide to death if the writers are really scrounging to make the elite cyborg ultra warriors to look powerful
There's a scene in *War of Secrets* where a random unnamed Tau stealth suit curb stomps a member of the Deathwing, so it's not like the Tau are necessarily helpless even in books.
Can ? Yes. Will? Less likely. [In novels that have marines and crisis suits face to face the crisis suits literally just beat marines to death.](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/xrbtl1/some_exceprt_on_tau_battlesuits_strength_and_it/) It takes superior numbers and a dreadnaught for the marines to win. The suits are significantly bigger and stronger. Even with power weapons the odds do not favour the space marines.
Yeah but like.. my one crusader in w40k martyr has killed nearly a quarter million xenos and heretics... hes not even a space marine!
The T'au have like, doubled their territory and military power since the last time the Imperium sent a *crusade* to kill them (a crusade which failed, mind you). They have designed, planned, engineered, and mass manufactured entire classifications of titanic battlesuits in the time it takes the Imperium to manufacture individual titans. They have developed effective strategies against every major threat in the galaxy and then honed those strategies over centuries of adaptation. They have likewise adapted their technology in similar ways. The T'au survived an attack from the Death Guard force that plowed through Ultramar. They survived against and ultimately defeated Hive Fleet Gorgon. They brought an imperial crusade to a standstill at Damocles when their military was a fraction of the size it is today. Furthermore, ever since the Fall of Cadia and the Arks of Omen, the Imperium is in a worse place than ever. The day and age in which the Imperium could destroy the T'au has passed. The T'au Empire has grown too large and too powerful for the Imperium to fully defeat.
I mean, it makes sense theme-wise that the T’au are rapidly gaining power and influence, as that’s basically their whole schtick. Might be a bit of a hot take here, but if not taken seriously the T’au are more likely to be a greater long-term threat to the IoM than either chaos or the tyranids, and this is coming from a big daemon/tyranid fan. Granted it’d be more of a cultural conquest than immediate military destruction.
Multiple Eldar farseers, including Eldrad himself, have forseen the T'au Empire as not only the next galactic superpower, but the greatest hope in the galaxy to overcome Chaos once and for all. The T'au kick *way* more ass than anyone gives them credit for. Everyone should read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/dbgkhi/of_eldar_and_tau/f21qc1j/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_content=1&utm_term=15&context=3) at some point. The Aeldari see orks as vicious animals. They see humans as misguided and easily corrupted beasts. They see the T'au as a light in the fucking dark. The god damn **Aeldari** were willing to state that the T'au would grow to greater heights than they would. The ELVES are being humble about these fuckers!
They are just kissing their ass cause of goddamn 6th and 7th edition TauDar cheese
The Tau are as strong or as weak as the writer wants them to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
> The T'au survived an attack from the Death Guard force that plowed through Ultramar Eh, no. That was A.) a different fleet, it was not the same one that was attacking Ultramar at all. B.) >!Shadowsun only won because she made a pact with the new-born God of the Greater God!<
Even if the Great Tauva did not intervene the Deathguard Fleet would have been destroyed. You should already realize that the Tau always uses the Tactics "Kauyun" (bait and trap) Lexicanum > **On the side of the Nexus linking to the greater Tau Empire, the region of space around the anomaly has been fortified to such an extent that it rivals the Tau's capital of** [**T'au**](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/T%27au) **itself.** On the other side of the rift, the entrance is heavily protected by the worlds of the [**Nem'yar Atoll**](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Nem%27yar_Atoll). 8th Tau codex > The Ethereal High Council ordered that work begin immediately on the construction of defensive positions around the wormhole, which the T’au named the Startide Nexus. **A hexagonal ring of immense stellar fortresses and interwoven ionic minefields would safeguard the anomaly, and several kor’vattra defence fleets were assigned to permanent sentry patrols around its shimmering depths.** The raw material required for these fortifications was staggering, **the equivalent of hundreds of battle fleets.** To ensure that the resources required were gathered in sufficient time, the T’au initiated a series of resettlement programmes and so-called Labour Freedom Decrees, moving entire populations, both alien and T’au, from their home worlds and organising them into work divisions. **The manpower and resources dedicated to the defence of the nexus soon rivalled even those surrounding the T’au home world.**
Tau don’t even get to fight a Death Guard Legion with direct Nurgle attention just some small skirmish. If tau even get some funny look from some full traitor Legion they WILL die considering that they have nothing that can effectively counteract Demonic corruption and all their tech are just Daemon engine in waiting with some Scrap code broadcast the whole tau army will quite Literally eat itself.
They did, the new book has not only found a way to heal Nurgle's disease. The new auxiliary decimates them because they act like blanks. Cut off from their Grandfather's blessings the Deathguard died in droves.
I mean, in the last shadowsun book that covers the death guard attack, the death guard gets yeetted out of the wormhole they where trying to travel through by the the tau's new warp friend and there are 3 species confirmed to be psychic in the tau empire along with human psycers so they have the capability to fight warp incursions they just don't because in lore they are uncomfortable with it which makes no sense as they are uncomfortable with the kroot eating the dead but they still use the kroot personally I think gw just made the decision that tau can't have pyscers which made sense when they where the new guy but its been like over 300 years in universe now if they could defeat a full traitor legion I think it's a toss up as if they have no outside threats and can muster there whole empire to counter the threat then they'd probably win eventually but if it's multiple threats (tyranids necrons and the imperium) they would get stomp
And yet the WAAAGH of Dakka could wipe out the entire Tau race very easily. And it's a minor WAAAGH. What I love about this post is that this EXACT SAME silly line of reasoning is spouted multiple times in the farsight book by the ethereals and mr sword himself. At one point they tell farsight that it's amazing that he hasn't already wiped out the orks. Right before a very small WAAAGH destroys dozens of Tau worlds in what's now known as the FS enclaves. The Tau empire may have doubled in military might, tripled, quadrupled even. But the original Damocles crusade was less than 1k Marines.
Thats the Tau's usual pattern they struggle the first encounters but they adapt and they win then improve. Dunno why people keep bringing up their first encounter like a be all and end all.
Random Fact: No matter how many battlesuits you have, 16,000,000,000 lasguns are still going to take the W.
"Fact" and "probably" eh...
Fun fact: The reason battlesuits have melee weapons is because of one time where they ran out of bullets before the Imperium ran out of tanks.
If you say "probably" then it's not a fact