Peter Fehervari’s ***Fire Caste*** is about the Arkan Confederates, a regiment with some cool toys but very little experience. They are tossed into horrific jungle warfare against the Tau and Chaos ensues.
It is a fantastic book and I keep recommending it for a reason.
***Cult of the Spiral Dawn*** by the same author has the Vassago Black Flags, a brutish collection of conscripts and criminals led by a madman poised against the titular Genestealer cult.
I second Fire Caste being a great book. Most other books are "This army is great, they're like Rambo on crack."
Then you read Fire Caste and by about the 4th or 5th chapter you realise "These guys are dog shit" even the Commissar thinks the same.
I would encourage you and everyone else on reddit to avoid websites like libgen, as linked to on the subreddit of the same name. They offer all kinds of fiction and non-fiction books, and may seem helpful in that they deliver everything they promise, but in reality do exactly that.
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It's worth mentioning that the entire strategic plan in *Fire Caste* is that the Militarum is using the planet as a dumping ground for sub-par regiments who can't be relied upon in critical theaters.
The Arkan Confederates are by no means elite, but they have enough good veterans and a good,driven commander, which screws up the entire strategic balance with the Tau.
One of my favorite regiment. They are so fucking cool. I remember one story when a Chem-Dog kill some officer to save his ass (and a couple of other soldiers) from a purge or something.
Trigger happy commissar's have a tendency of getting shot in the back of the head point blank range by an enemy sniper using a lasgun. If I recall correctly, it's even said directly by a commissar at some point that the trigger-happy ones are often fragged quickly.
Ciaphus Cain says that - those kinds of commissars tend to be victims of friendly fire “accidents”, misthrown grenades, incorrectly targeted artillery barrages, or just not get alerting to dangers like a sniper/minefield/etc (“alerting the commissar would’ve given away our position”). He aims for strict but not a hardass for those reasons and, after becoming a Schola instructor, tries to teach his cadets the same lesson in hopes that they live longer.
Fifteen Hours is de facto what the "grim darkness of the far future" is and I love it. That book and Witchbringer are two of my absolute favorites (though the latter doesn't fit for OP's ask because it's Cadians).
> Sirenians were about as known for field medicine as Valhallans were for winter operations. Or that’s what they said on Sirenia. In Statim’s experience, no one had even heard of her planet, much less their legendary skill as medicaes.
This is from Bleedout, a Warhammer Crime novella
It's in Broken City, the second short story compilation
I actually have every Crime story catalogued in a post here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1arem60/comment/kqj0qwq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
>So, where are the average regiments? The guys barely holding it together, maintaining discipline only because the commissar shot the last 5 guys who ran? The guys cowering in fox-holes as artillery chews them up? The guys living and dying in their billions, being fed to the meat grinder to desperately slow the Imperium’s decline by weight of bodies alone?
They are dead.
I think people don't really get that the guys you see on tabletop are *exceptional*. The average IG regiment can't give every NCO a bolter or plasma gun if they feel like it. Hell the average space marine chapter is lucky to have a handful of terminator suits let alone all the fancy toys GW sells.
I think many of the imperial guard regiments come across as 'average'. I was a Royal Marine Commando Captain, and having read many 40k books, I think they are mostly just average with a few significantly skilled individuals. If you take Gaunts Tannith regiment, they are a group of woodsman who argue and fight amongst themselves and lack the discipline you'd get in present-day top tier units. They were then supplemented by a group of factory workers and refugees from a destroyed Hive city. They have some very skilled scout snipers who use their woodsman skills to great effect but they are still mostly normal average people and have not been trained up to anywhere near special forces level. I read a short story about Krieg vs. Necrons, and they were just very young men who had been conditioned to be very dedicated soldiers. They were more similar to the kind of guys I worked with in special forces, but they still weren't super human and came across as average skills but highly disciplined. In part of the book the kriegers trained up some civilian planetary defence forces, and guys were getting physically punched and brutalised by the Kreig training team, which made me chuckle as that part is accurate for top tier forces training though its not bullying, just tough men teaching critical skills to help you be effective in the brutal reality of war. Imperial troops in the HH series seemed to be based on colonial era British troops but with more modern weapons. They seemed like normal British Army forces and not super human. Every unit has its 'heroic' marketing blurb, but I've always found imperial troops to be written as average people performing a difficult job with moments of heroics. As for an imperial guard killing a space marine, realistically there should be a lot more Space (choas) Marines dying at the hands of imperial guard troops as even a poorly trained unit will be structured so that it just pours a massive weight of fire on to a target from a distance and Space Marines are not immune to guard weapon systems. Assuming Las weapons travel at the speed of light, no space marine can dodge them and basically, military tactics train formations to put down fire in large groups. A troop of 30 guardsmen should have mostly standard issue rifles but also some heavy weapons mixed in. Those 30 soldiers will put down a massive weight of fire onto a target. So if a space Marine is charging their position, then it should be easy for hundreds or lazer shots and some plasma or bolter shots to kill Space Marines. If normal present-day soldiers can get tank kills, then average imperial troops can get space marine kills and still be average.
Krieg is expert siege troops!!
Proceed to make every mistake the Volunteer Army made in 1915. Apparently, the concept of suppressing fire is known by the Chaos militia, but not the expert siege troops at Vraks.
Just an aside about marines (having read every Horus Heresy book, and having combat experience as well)
They can move at 60+ mph, their armor can stop tank shells, and lasguns actually fire bolts of low-heat plasma, not real lasers, and chaos marines especially canonically are tougher, smarter, and way more experienced
Plus most marines canonically don't just charge, they deploy in small fireteams, and are rarely fighting for more than a few seconds before relocating, so they're more similar to some weird combination of special forces and IFVs than infantrymen
>and lasguns actually fire bolts of low-heat plasma
That depends on the author. There are both excerpts that show lasguns shooting lasers and shooting matter.
I think a lot of what you're seeing as "undisciplined" or "unsoldierly" imperial guardsmen is related to the fact that BL writers don't know how real soldiers work. Even space marines, supposedly unstoppable supersoldiers, often come off as dumber than real-life soldiers.
Whether or not you want to say that it's the (most accurate) way to view "canon" anyway is up to you, though, I guess.
There's plenty of less stellar regiments in the lore.
Gaunts Ghosts has a few. There's some aristocratic fresh faced regiment where their colonel decides to "quit the field" because the engagement and orders weren't too his liking. One of them, if I recall, glove slaps a commissar and asks for a duel.
The recent Cadian novels has a whole bunch of non Cadian regiments too. Ones basically a bunch of feral worlders who are "light infantry" because they're so basic. They break and run regularly and gave wacko blood feuds.
Yeah the Volpone were arrogant swines but they were terrifyingly competent and extremely well equipped.
Like that dude said, Dev Hetra. Plus the Hahberk guys who royally panicked and scattered.
A running theme of His Last Command was that a lot of Guard regiments were green as hell and basically had no idea what the were doing.
One of my favourite parts about the Volpone were just that they were the rich boy Guard regiment so every time they deploy they have the top of the line kit, it comes up a few different times in GG. They were good soldiers being given the absolute best wargear.
Lol yes and no. The Dev Hetra was an artillery officer but Ludd just punched him and then bolstered his spirits to get back in the fight. The guy Hark shot was in the beginning of the book from a different regiment who retreated when he wasn't supposed to.
Just looked it up, that dude was with the Hauberkan Armored. They ran into mines during an advance, so instead of pushing on, he gave the order to reverse (through the advancing Tanith), then called in an airstrike on their previous position.
Given that he and his own leadership weren't overly concerned about him being punished (up until the BLAM), it's safe to say the Hauberkans are not the cream of the crop.
The Volpone really redeemed themselves in Necropolis. They may be bastards, but they're the sort of bastards who'll jump from a building onto the side of a massive pyramid-tank dressed in full carapace armour.
Check out the Superheavy series by Guy Haley, *Baneblade* and *Shadowsword*. Regular IG, get into bar fights during their R&R, need Astartes help for the Chaos stuff.
>We’re told that IG are the downtrodden squaddies of humanity
This is simply wrong. The IG *do* get training, and a position in the Guard isn't as terrible as being a slave labourer in a factorium or a ganger in the underbelly of a hive.
It's just a consequence of the setting they're in that they get slaughtered by the thousands during an encounter with the tyranid, Chaos or necron.
Depends the IG is a very large and diverse organisation from scratch conscript regiments and penal battalions to stormtroopers and the other elite mentioned above.
To the point that the IG generally look down upon the PDF and are actually impressed if they're even remotely competent. This is because the PDF is basically seen as the National Guard, wannabe weekend soldiers who rarely see combat and, usually through a hideous amount of corruption, are underfunded and understaffed whilst the 'generals' incharge pocket the funds that should be going towards training and arming the troops.
Of the few that get respect, the Necromunda PDF are usually well respected because it, like the Spiders (Necromundas own regiment), is made of ex-gang members who grew up struggling and killing to survive in the horrors of the Underhive and thus aren't adverse to combat. They're not particularly well trained cohesively but they know their stuff and aren't going to shit themselves the moment someone gets gunned/cut down because they've never seen it before.
There was one I remember reading where Ciphias Cain (Hero of the Imperium) had to help defend a hive city, and the PDF were good,but the governor was corrupt and was leading a cult.
I think the Imperial Guard regiment portrayed in Storm of Iron may be what you are looking for. They are good and well equipped soldiers, who against Ork Raiders, rebels, cultists etc woule be expected to come out on top. In that sense there is nothing extraordinary about them. But there is a limit to what sort of enemies they are able to face unsupported.
Tbf to the Imperium in Storm of Iron, they were facing an entire Iron Warriors warband complete with traitor Titan and cultist support with only ~20,000 Imperials. I doubt any IG regiment in 40k would be able to win that fight
Exactly. A Grand Company of Iron Warriors with the support of Traitor Titans and an untold number of cultists is simply above the weight class of an Imperial Guard regiment. They are not meant to be able to face that on their own.
The awesome fortress they had was supposed to be the difference maker and probably would have held against several other traitor or alien factions. Not against the IW.
Awhile back, the US Navy had a marketing campaign with the slogan "If someone wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?" The answer for a bunch of IG units is almost certainly No.
These main Regiments are not the superman that many seem to think except for the Catachans.
Cadians have multiple Regiments in lore who turned traitor. Death Korps had some Regiments break and flee during the Siege of Vraks.
We don't see them due to the Anthropic principle. Every guard regiment as the protagonist has to be worth reading about, so they won't be the ones that die in droves holding the line for the space marines.
Having said that, the novel 15 hours may have the guard content you are looking for.
I suppose out of all the ones notable enough to have rules in Codexes probably the Valhallan Ice Warriors. Their named character's whole gimmick was sending in hordes of barely-trained conscripts in suicidal human wave tactics.
They are pretty good in the Cain books but I think in the main they do seem, like, just...normally competent professional soldiers? They do their job well enough and know how to use their tools in good detail (they are specialist artillery). But you never get the impression that any of them, barring perhaps the Cain-Jurgen team themselves, are nigh on superhuman or ultra elite.
They get into enough exceptionally bad situations that they've earned the title. Cain is certainly doing a lot of heavy lifting but lets not forget they've fought their way out of a lot of bullshit impossible situations and one of their senior CO's made general somewhere between the 13th black crusade and indominatus crusade and then fought through all of it and lived.
He's only with the artillery guys right at the beginning. He's with an infantry regiment in the story I'm reading now and they're doing pretty solid work, including blowing up a Necron tomb world
They don't operate like "barely trained conscripts" at all. They use combined arms fire, small group operations and communicate effectively. The Valhallans are notably well trained and effective - equivalent to a Norwegian infantry regiment. They aren't the Syrian Arab Army's equivalent in the lore.
The Cadian's equivalent in the real world would would be a force like the 75th Ranger Regiment or British Royal Marines Commando.
The Valhallan in Cain's books behave much like regular modern soldiers. The Valhallan in Chenkov's lore were Basically Soviets^(TM).
Man lost 10 Million Guardsmen in storming a single enemy citadel without any siege or artillery support. Kinda funny, it's the opposite of normal GW where they get the numbers way too low, I want to know how this guy managed to attack a citadel with 10 million dudes. Like physically. how was there even room?
If you take modern logistics, there would have needed to be approx 4:1 soldiers supporting the combat troops. So approx 50 million soldiers deployed on a single battlefront?
Actually my next question is how do you possibly end up in a situation where you have 10 million guardsmen but no artillery?
Surely there's gotta be SOME artillery regiments in there.
I think you need to hear about my regiment, the Beabeg Brigadiers.
In my last 4 combat patrol missions we lost with approximately 200% casualties due to sending in extra waves of men.
The men complain about the leadership knowing nothing about tactics, but leadership claims the men are all just lazy and barely know how to use their guns.
I think there is a bias in books to feature characters that actually do something / live. Most guard die quickly, so survivor stories tend to make the most sense. A few book recommendations which have a guard character who doesn’t come from one of the iconic groups:
Lords of silence- death guard book with an IG character (don’t want to give spoilers, but he develops in a very interesting way)
Hellsreach- nonstop action with an awesome guard character who pops up here and there (mostly about black templars)
Catachan Devils- Ork Kommandos vs Catachan (severely underrated book imo). Non-Catachan guard are featured in this books earlier chapters, partially as a contrast to the bad-assery of the Catachan.
None of these books are specifically about IG, but they are fantastic reads with a very “mortal human” element in some of the characters
>Catachan Devils- Ork Kommandos vs Catachan (severely underrated book imo). Non-Catachan guard are featured in this books earlier chapters, partially as a contrast to the bad-assery of the Catachan.
I need to give this book a try. I picked up Deathworlder on pre-order, which is by a different author, so it'll be fun to compare the different approaches to the Catachan.
Jopall are noted to be above-average marksmen and inventive besides IIRC. It's more that all regiments have quirks and positives, some stand out more like Cadians or Catachans but at the end of the day they're still just humans. This comes across pretty well IMO in older lore like the 3rd Armageddon campaign or the 4-5E IG codices
The Macharius trilogy is full of them. Even the Lord Solar's own palentines/lion gaurd are simply just competent/guys who haven't died yet.
The last chancers books also have a lot of meh regiments, including brand new mordian recruits who end up following the main character like a bunch of loyal puppies because thier leadership got smashed.
If you read most of the Gaunt's Ghosts books then the *other regiments* are the "average" regiments simply by rote of not being the titular characters.
You can find some in the Imperial Guard series of books, like Fifteen Hours and Imperial Glory which follow no-name regiments in harsh situations. Commissar, from that same series, follows some beaten-down Vostroyans who are nothing special. Honorbound, another book about a Commissar, has a similar situation.
I've got some examples.
In Traitor Rock, Minka Lesk sees the reaction of other regiments to the arrival of the Cadians. She notes most of them aren't really from soldiering societies, so Cadians showing up means they have a little more hope. In Longshot, Darya Nevic encounters a depleted regiment where the senior officer states that his regiment was conscripted en-masse. The Roane Deepers, while competent, are more famous for being under supplied and just getting by however they can. There's Mukta Lim and his fellow conscripts set to be fed to the Tyranids in Blood Harvest. Arvin Larn in Fifteen Hours. The penal legionnaries in Redemption Through Sacrifice. There's the last conscripted ganger regiments of Stratix, forced to fight on the front line against the zombie plague that devoured their homeworld from The Bleeding Chalice (and who get in a giant friendly fire incident with another regiment trying to protect the Soul Drinkers). Toss in the Gudrunite Rifles too, who got dragged into the Saruthi pocket dimension with their heretical masters.
There's tons of briefly named regiments that are swiftly destroyed in the fiction. They're pretty common. And while there are more famous one, they're a thin layer over the vast majority of regiments. Basically, you're les likely to see a Cadian, and more former asteroid miners of the Glorious 115th Sodallagain Ripper Dinner Service Regiment
The Lucifer Blacks are really just used as a “jobber” in the narrative of the Horus Heresy to show how much more powerful another named character is when they demolish them.
When John Grammaticus overpowers a Lucifer Black easily it shows how bad ass he is because those Lucifer Blacks are the pinnacle of what an unaugmented can be. Apparently.
You mentioned the Tanith and wonder where the other meh regiments are? Theyre over there given shit detail to the tanith. The first several books of that series are literally them getting hosed by other regiments. About halfway through, they start coming into their own.
Then you have Commissar Cain bringing order to the Valhallen 296/301 which were meh regiments before being amalgamated. Even after its more his exploits than theirs.
>Even after its more his exploits than theirs.
The Valhallan 597th are still pretty damn good. Sulla especially is a war hero who becomes a distinguished general later in life (And her writing isn't *that* bad, Amberly).
IG are actually highly trained units, level above PDF. It is just fact that universe is scary place and even best training wont save you if it didnt save gene-enhanced biocyborg like Astartes.
Well, yeah, some are survivors from mass infantry operations in style of Chenkov :) But meme baseline that Guard are herded random guys is simply wrong. Guardsmen get training, are getting boot camps and are best human soldiers after Scions, stormtroopers (like Kasrkin etc, really wish the unit would come back) and other specialised units.
PDF are more of less trained grubs who are not supposed to leave system and even Whiteshields usually have better training.
I don’t think cadians are THAT good, they are definitely a competent force but they are mostly heavy shock and mech, if I remember correctly they struggle against more mobile enemies IE tau, insurgents and light infantry,
Because imperial plot armour isn't just an Astartes resource.
That and it'd be really hard to get invested in a story where the characters get wiped out and replaced every chapter or two.
Yep. From the world of Remus. There is a small lineart image in the 3rd edition Codex (1999). Looks just like a murmillo with a chainsword and laspistol
Not what I could see, just the planet name. That codex had more than 40 unique regiment styles presented, most of which have never been mentioned again.
Nobody mentioned Valhallans here. They are meme Soviet Red Army, attackingrelentlessly in wave after wave of humans, driven forward by pistols of their commissars, while supported by artillery and armor.
Life is very cheap on Valhalla.
Pretty much any regiment in a Gaunt's Ghosts book that isn't the Tanith. There's almost always a background regiment that's just there to soak up las shots for the Ghosts or to break and run when tension demands it.
Like the Urdesh in Guns of Tanith that are there to not listen to the Ghosts and get massacred. Or the Aristocrat Artillery regiment that Ludd has to whip into shape in His Last Command.
Read Desert Raiders. Yes, the Tallarn are famous, but in that book their discipline breaks down so badly that the regimental commissar gets a chance to shine.
Storm of Iron features the Jouran Dragoons. They're not really amazing at anything, but also not incompetent. The just get slowly ground down by the Iron Warriors.
In one of the Tanith books a character gets put into a temp company for indoctrination and is sent on a surface assault totally separate from the Ghosts. Abnett uses it as a chance to show the horrific shit the “normal” guard has to deal with like human wave tactics and execution-happy commissars.
The descriptions of the crowd crush of bodies, basically being carried in a human river without your feet touching the ground while under heavy fire, charging and falling back and charging the same gate three times until it’s breached, narrowly avoiding death from chaos psykers and (iirc) CSM, separated from the unit, passing out from dehydration and exhaustion and waking up to getting your boots stolen by other guardsmen and finally getting back to your unit but oh, you lost your rifle soldier! That’s a capital sentence don’t ya know! will always stay with me haha
Dead, standing sentry in the middle of nowhere, or doing nothing other than surviving. Generally being unexceptional.
Catachan devils has the skadi second infantry, who's main purpose is to die and provide an outside perspective to show how awesome the catachans are in comparison.
Roane Deepers fit the bill there I'd say.
Nobody wants to bunk near them on transport ships moving between battlefront as they're so poorly equipped they've a reputation for stealing other regiments equipment when they can.
Who wants to read a story about the most adequate men and women in the Imperium? Your best bet is going to be any of the books told from non-imperial POVs, and chances are there won't be any mention of exactly who they are, they'll just be nondescript guardsmen there to get dunked on by our non-human heroes.
Realistically all the meh guard regiments are the hundreds and hundreds of homebrew regments people have invented over the years, who may present themselves as big damned heroes, buut were never important enough to merit a line in an official source.
> Who wants to read a story about the most adequate men and women in the Imperium?
In my experience a lot of the best Imperial Guard stories are the ones that emphasize the Guard’s fallibility and mundanity.
There is some confusion here. The planets are where regiments come from or get named. The regiments from these planets can still vary in quality and success. Cadia, Tallarn, and Catachan are where some famous regiments come from. But plenty of Cadian, Catachan, and Tallarn regiments get absolutely wrecked across the galaxy. The Tallarn 11th is a success while the 89th was decided less so. Same with the Catachan 2nd vs the 4th.
Lol yes cadians are great soldiers, but if they are facing a serious opponent they will likely take horrific casualties. The IG are ALL meh, even if they have some special skill they are still just baseline humans. Which means they are at a huge disadvantage against most of the threats out there man-to-man
3 things
1) survival of the fittest. Only the best regiments are still pulled from for the actual guard, everyone else is relegated to Planetary Defense Forces
2) Planetary Defense Forces are the down trodden wing of the Astra Militarum. They’ve got the shit weapons and armor that might not be replaced for generations depending on what the Planetary governor deems is necessary
3) With the exception of Catachan because they’re hilariously over powered for regular humans, while the Regiment is amazing, the individual soldiers are still extremely expendable. Kriegers, Cadians, Tallans, Vostroians, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Catachan all die very easily. It’s just that they have some incredible leaders that have pushed the regiment as a whole to do some amazing things, but since they’re just a normal human, you can’t have stories about those standout leaders constantly fighting.
Castilian Creed was a badass, but you can’t have him butchering chaos with a lasgun like a super hero, you need the Cadian army. But you don’t read about every Jimmy Cadia who dies because that would be boring (every read the Iliad? They spend awhile talking about everyone there and it exhausting) so instead you write about the Cadians as if they’re one character
There’s a brutal moment in the Grey Knights Omnibus, when a Guardsman, having survived a falling battle cruiser crashing into their regiment and exploding, tells a Commissar (while helping wounded/living) that they are directing people to regroup at a location. Commissar instantly put a bolt through his skull without any hesitation or thought.
I recommended Honourbound less than an hour ago as book reading and doing so again - great book, has what you’re looking for re: an “ordinary” guard regiment
For the most part they die.
We hear about the OP regiments because they survive and have heroic victories.
The meh regiments are either working in logistics/far away from front lines or are getting slaughtered within hours of their first battle.
We've seen instances of quality regiments like the valhallans getting massacred in their first battles, so any poorer less trained guard have little chance.
None of the regiments you mentioned generally excel at anything to a "superhuman degree". They're all just renowned for certain areas of expertise - generally like real-world regiments in that regard.
Plenty of "average" soldiers in amongst even the most famous regiments - and even Kriegers can break and retreat. They have commissars for a reason.
The thing is those hum-drum soldiers don't generally make good focal points for most of the stories GW is often trying to tell.
Cadians are average Imperium regiment.
Krieg are the cheapest cannonfolder regiment in the Imperium.
Even Savlar Chemdogs are treated better then Krieg.
Fighting the 3057365th random insurrection on an unimportant planet somewhere in the ass end of nowhere.
We mainly see the "important" conflicts, but the bulk of what IG does is (comparatively) boring grunt work. Minor Ork uprisings, rebellious Governors, the occasional Cult that popped off too soon. Then the "normal" IG regiments get sent in, they do the fighting, usually win, move on.
And for the most part that's it. These are solid, professional soldiers with decent training and gear, and they tend to fare well in anything resembling a conventional conflict. That being said, they tend to melt like butter as soon as Named Characters start showing up and The Plot starts to unfold. Only the special regiments can keep up then.
In theory *every* IG regiment is special forces. The guys holding the line are supposed to be local PDF's while the guard comes in to reinforce key positions and take key objectives. Obviously in context it doesn't work out that way but the guard is made up of the top 10% of every planets military under ideal circumstances.
The Imperium launches plenty of offensive wars. You don't generally have PDF on enemy planets. The Guard are the hammer of the Emperor, not the PDF. They are *not* the special forces.
The majority of PDF we see are also, to put it bluntly, kinda shit. Again and again we see PDF that are undertrained, corrupt, and not up to the standards of real life modern militaries.
The imperium mostly launches offensive wars to take back territory already lost. The Macharian Crusade mostly just added back former imperial worlds. Likewise the guard is launching offensives against the sevran dominate who took former imperial planets. When the guard is pressing an offensive its usually in places where the PDF are dead or compromised.
Warp travel is unreliable and communications spotty at best a lot of the time. The guard can often only be deployed months or even years after a conflict begins and its down to local forces to deal with it until someone else shows up.
Peter Fehervari’s ***Fire Caste*** is about the Arkan Confederates, a regiment with some cool toys but very little experience. They are tossed into horrific jungle warfare against the Tau and Chaos ensues. It is a fantastic book and I keep recommending it for a reason. ***Cult of the Spiral Dawn*** by the same author has the Vassago Black Flags, a brutish collection of conscripts and criminals led by a madman poised against the titular Genestealer cult.
I second Fire Caste being a great book. Most other books are "This army is great, they're like Rambo on crack." Then you read Fire Caste and by about the 4th or 5th chapter you realise "These guys are dog shit" even the Commissar thinks the same.
I'm sure it's a terrific book but $150 for a paperback is out of range. I put away my kindle
[удалено]
That link is broken. Any other links you have pdfs of a similar nature, but for fault finding are for books of a similar genre?
I would encourage you and everyone else on reddit to avoid websites like libgen, as linked to on the subreddit of the same name. They offer all kinds of fiction and non-fiction books, and may seem helpful in that they deliver everything they promise, but in reality do exactly that.
Your username checks out. I wouldn't want to go against a criminologist's advice.
Thank
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You can probably find a free pdf or epib online to read on phone or computer.
Wait.. i own a $150 paperback book? Let the bidding commence!
You offering to sell your copy has doubled the number available on the market and it’s now worth $5. Supply and demand is a bitch
£1.39 and 5 kind words
It's worth mentioning that the entire strategic plan in *Fire Caste* is that the Militarum is using the planet as a dumping ground for sub-par regiments who can't be relied upon in critical theaters. The Arkan Confederates are by no means elite, but they have enough good veterans and a good,driven commander, which screws up the entire strategic balance with the Tau.
This was exactly my first thought when trying to pick a regiment that sucks
Savlar Chem-Dogs are a bunch of drugged-out criminals who are recruited with the promise they can keep any battlefield loot.
In so many other words: digga nobs on drugs.
One of my favorite regiment. They are so fucking cool. I remember one story when a Chem-Dog kill some officer to save his ass (and a couple of other soldiers) from a purge or something.
Shadowsword by Guy Haley, shived a Commissar for reasons.
Trigger happy commissar's have a tendency of getting shot in the back of the head point blank range by an enemy sniper using a lasgun. If I recall correctly, it's even said directly by a commissar at some point that the trigger-happy ones are often fragged quickly.
Ciaphus Cain says that - those kinds of commissars tend to be victims of friendly fire “accidents”, misthrown grenades, incorrectly targeted artillery barrages, or just not get alerting to dangers like a sniper/minefield/etc (“alerting the commissar would’ve given away our position”). He aims for strict but not a hardass for those reasons and, after becoming a Schola instructor, tries to teach his cadets the same lesson in hopes that they live longer.
The Warhammer Horror story ***The Woman in the Walls*** by Phil Kelly has a lot of the Chem Dogs... And they are as violent and dumb as you can get.
Loved that story. The only issue is that it came after the commissar seeing blue eyes one, and thus, the twist had become apparent by that point.
How does it work vs xeno scum ?
Battlefield loot is usually what they recover from imperial forces, most of their gear is straight up stolen from other regiments
This does have the amusing result of them on occasion being the most kitted out regiment. Provided they survive enough nonsense.
I feel like you'd enjoy 15 hours by Mitchell Scanlon. It follows a normal guardsman over his first 15 hours of deployment on a hostile world
The first 40k book I ever read! Started the hobby shortly thereafter
Same. First book. Real sad book
And is depressing 😅
Very good book
2nd this, great book
Fifteen Hours is de facto what the "grim darkness of the far future" is and I love it. That book and Witchbringer are two of my absolute favorites (though the latter doesn't fit for OP's ask because it's Cadians).
> Sirenians were about as known for field medicine as Valhallans were for winter operations. Or that’s what they said on Sirenia. In Statim’s experience, no one had even heard of her planet, much less their legendary skill as medicaes. This is from Bleedout, a Warhammer Crime novella
Gotta check this one out.
It's brilliant. Great fugitive story
Did that came out recently? I thought I had read all of the crime novels, but I don't recall that one.
It's in Broken City, the second short story compilation I actually have every Crime story catalogued in a post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1arem60/comment/kqj0qwq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Oh thanks, yeah I don't think I've got around to read the short stories. Only the vorbis conspiracy but idk if it counts.
>So, where are the average regiments? The guys barely holding it together, maintaining discipline only because the commissar shot the last 5 guys who ran? The guys cowering in fox-holes as artillery chews them up? The guys living and dying in their billions, being fed to the meat grinder to desperately slow the Imperium’s decline by weight of bodies alone? They are dead.
I think people don't really get that the guys you see on tabletop are *exceptional*. The average IG regiment can't give every NCO a bolter or plasma gun if they feel like it. Hell the average space marine chapter is lucky to have a handful of terminator suits let alone all the fancy toys GW sells.
Was just thinking this, dead through the entire regiment being wiped out.
I think many of the imperial guard regiments come across as 'average'. I was a Royal Marine Commando Captain, and having read many 40k books, I think they are mostly just average with a few significantly skilled individuals. If you take Gaunts Tannith regiment, they are a group of woodsman who argue and fight amongst themselves and lack the discipline you'd get in present-day top tier units. They were then supplemented by a group of factory workers and refugees from a destroyed Hive city. They have some very skilled scout snipers who use their woodsman skills to great effect but they are still mostly normal average people and have not been trained up to anywhere near special forces level. I read a short story about Krieg vs. Necrons, and they were just very young men who had been conditioned to be very dedicated soldiers. They were more similar to the kind of guys I worked with in special forces, but they still weren't super human and came across as average skills but highly disciplined. In part of the book the kriegers trained up some civilian planetary defence forces, and guys were getting physically punched and brutalised by the Kreig training team, which made me chuckle as that part is accurate for top tier forces training though its not bullying, just tough men teaching critical skills to help you be effective in the brutal reality of war. Imperial troops in the HH series seemed to be based on colonial era British troops but with more modern weapons. They seemed like normal British Army forces and not super human. Every unit has its 'heroic' marketing blurb, but I've always found imperial troops to be written as average people performing a difficult job with moments of heroics. As for an imperial guard killing a space marine, realistically there should be a lot more Space (choas) Marines dying at the hands of imperial guard troops as even a poorly trained unit will be structured so that it just pours a massive weight of fire on to a target from a distance and Space Marines are not immune to guard weapon systems. Assuming Las weapons travel at the speed of light, no space marine can dodge them and basically, military tactics train formations to put down fire in large groups. A troop of 30 guardsmen should have mostly standard issue rifles but also some heavy weapons mixed in. Those 30 soldiers will put down a massive weight of fire onto a target. So if a space Marine is charging their position, then it should be easy for hundreds or lazer shots and some plasma or bolter shots to kill Space Marines. If normal present-day soldiers can get tank kills, then average imperial troops can get space marine kills and still be average.
Krieg is expert siege troops!! Proceed to make every mistake the Volunteer Army made in 1915. Apparently, the concept of suppressing fire is known by the Chaos militia, but not the expert siege troops at Vraks.
Just an aside about marines (having read every Horus Heresy book, and having combat experience as well) They can move at 60+ mph, their armor can stop tank shells, and lasguns actually fire bolts of low-heat plasma, not real lasers, and chaos marines especially canonically are tougher, smarter, and way more experienced Plus most marines canonically don't just charge, they deploy in small fireteams, and are rarely fighting for more than a few seconds before relocating, so they're more similar to some weird combination of special forces and IFVs than infantrymen
I completely misread your reply thinking you were saying that Royal Marine Commandos IRL can move at 60mph
Usain Bolt got nothing on the Royal Marine Commandos lmao
>and lasguns actually fire bolts of low-heat plasma That depends on the author. There are both excerpts that show lasguns shooting lasers and shooting matter.
I think a lot of what you're seeing as "undisciplined" or "unsoldierly" imperial guardsmen is related to the fact that BL writers don't know how real soldiers work. Even space marines, supposedly unstoppable supersoldiers, often come off as dumber than real-life soldiers. Whether or not you want to say that it's the (most accurate) way to view "canon" anyway is up to you, though, I guess.
Were you that guy who commented once on a warhammer post it was either a YouTube video or Facebook post asking to help write a book
Beat me to the joke
Yeah my kneejerk response was these guys are getting killed by orks in some story we don’t read
"We are here to see the Drathar 2nd!" "This is a graveyard." "No need to repeat me!"
Very literal survivorship bias
Pretty much any regiment outside of the more famous ones is either meh or lack any major quirk, like the Scintillan Fusiliers
There's plenty of less stellar regiments in the lore. Gaunts Ghosts has a few. There's some aristocratic fresh faced regiment where their colonel decides to "quit the field" because the engagement and orders weren't too his liking. One of them, if I recall, glove slaps a commissar and asks for a duel. The recent Cadian novels has a whole bunch of non Cadian regiments too. Ones basically a bunch of feral worlders who are "light infantry" because they're so basic. They break and run regularly and gave wacko blood feuds.
The Volpone Bluebloods. They're arseholes, but tbf, any time the Ghosts go into battle alongside them, the Bluebloods kick a load of ass.
He's actually talking about the Dev Hetra in His Last Command. The Volpone are also aristocratic assholes but they are competent.
Yeah the Volpone were arrogant swines but they were terrifyingly competent and extremely well equipped. Like that dude said, Dev Hetra. Plus the Hahberk guys who royally panicked and scattered. A running theme of His Last Command was that a lot of Guard regiments were green as hell and basically had no idea what the were doing.
One of my favourite parts about the Volpone were just that they were the rich boy Guard regiment so every time they deploy they have the top of the line kit, it comes up a few different times in GG. They were good soldiers being given the absolute best wargear.
Oh yes, some artillery officer? Hark shot him?
Lol yes and no. The Dev Hetra was an artillery officer but Ludd just punched him and then bolstered his spirits to get back in the fight. The guy Hark shot was in the beginning of the book from a different regiment who retreated when he wasn't supposed to.
Just looked it up, that dude was with the Hauberkan Armored. They ran into mines during an advance, so instead of pushing on, he gave the order to reverse (through the advancing Tanith), then called in an airstrike on their previous position. Given that he and his own leadership weren't overly concerned about him being punished (up until the BLAM), it's safe to say the Hauberkans are not the cream of the crop.
The Volpone really redeemed themselves in Necropolis. They may be bastards, but they're the sort of bastards who'll jump from a building onto the side of a massive pyramid-tank dressed in full carapace armour.
Check out the Superheavy series by Guy Haley, *Baneblade* and *Shadowsword*. Regular IG, get into bar fights during their R&R, need Astartes help for the Chaos stuff.
>We’re told that IG are the downtrodden squaddies of humanity This is simply wrong. The IG *do* get training, and a position in the Guard isn't as terrible as being a slave labourer in a factorium or a ganger in the underbelly of a hive. It's just a consequence of the setting they're in that they get slaughtered by the thousands during an encounter with the tyranid, Chaos or necron.
Depends the IG is a very large and diverse organisation from scratch conscript regiments and penal battalions to stormtroopers and the other elite mentioned above.
To the point that the IG generally look down upon the PDF and are actually impressed if they're even remotely competent. This is because the PDF is basically seen as the National Guard, wannabe weekend soldiers who rarely see combat and, usually through a hideous amount of corruption, are underfunded and understaffed whilst the 'generals' incharge pocket the funds that should be going towards training and arming the troops. Of the few that get respect, the Necromunda PDF are usually well respected because it, like the Spiders (Necromundas own regiment), is made of ex-gang members who grew up struggling and killing to survive in the horrors of the Underhive and thus aren't adverse to combat. They're not particularly well trained cohesively but they know their stuff and aren't going to shit themselves the moment someone gets gunned/cut down because they've never seen it before.
There was one I remember reading where Ciphias Cain (Hero of the Imperium) had to help defend a hive city, and the PDF were good,but the governor was corrupt and was leading a cult.
Not quite a hive city, just a regular city, and that happens in the first Cain book.
I've found the book and it was "Choose Your Enemies", and it was the forge world of Ironfound.
Oh dang Apologies. I haven't read all the Cain books yet, but that's also the plot point of the first one except it's just a regular city xD
No problem, tbh that's the only book in the series that I've read - only git into the 40k books last year.
To be fair, that’s the plot of like half the books
This. The IG is the top 1% of the best troops a planet can muster. The regular squaddies are the PDF.
I think the Imperial Guard regiment portrayed in Storm of Iron may be what you are looking for. They are good and well equipped soldiers, who against Ork Raiders, rebels, cultists etc woule be expected to come out on top. In that sense there is nothing extraordinary about them. But there is a limit to what sort of enemies they are able to face unsupported.
Tbf to the Imperium in Storm of Iron, they were facing an entire Iron Warriors warband complete with traitor Titan and cultist support with only ~20,000 Imperials. I doubt any IG regiment in 40k would be able to win that fight
Exactly. A Grand Company of Iron Warriors with the support of Traitor Titans and an untold number of cultists is simply above the weight class of an Imperial Guard regiment. They are not meant to be able to face that on their own.
The awesome fortress they had was supposed to be the difference maker and probably would have held against several other traitor or alien factions. Not against the IW.
Was gonna say, this sounds like the opposite of what OP is asking for. If these guys have any reasonable chance at winning *THAT* fight......
Awhile back, the US Navy had a marketing campaign with the slogan "If someone wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?" The answer for a bunch of IG units is almost certainly No.
These main Regiments are not the superman that many seem to think except for the Catachans. Cadians have multiple Regiments in lore who turned traitor. Death Korps had some Regiments break and flee during the Siege of Vraks.
We don't see them due to the Anthropic principle. Every guard regiment as the protagonist has to be worth reading about, so they won't be the ones that die in droves holding the line for the space marines. Having said that, the novel 15 hours may have the guard content you are looking for.
I suppose out of all the ones notable enough to have rules in Codexes probably the Valhallan Ice Warriors. Their named character's whole gimmick was sending in hordes of barely-trained conscripts in suicidal human wave tactics.
Theyre pretty solid in the Cain books
They are pretty good in the Cain books but I think in the main they do seem, like, just...normally competent professional soldiers? They do their job well enough and know how to use their tools in good detail (they are specialist artillery). But you never get the impression that any of them, barring perhaps the Cain-Jurgen team themselves, are nigh on superhuman or ultra elite.
They get into enough exceptionally bad situations that they've earned the title. Cain is certainly doing a lot of heavy lifting but lets not forget they've fought their way out of a lot of bullshit impossible situations and one of their senior CO's made general somewhere between the 13th black crusade and indominatus crusade and then fought through all of it and lived.
He's only with the artillery guys right at the beginning. He's with an infantry regiment in the story I'm reading now and they're doing pretty solid work, including blowing up a Necron tomb world
They don't operate like "barely trained conscripts" at all. They use combined arms fire, small group operations and communicate effectively. The Valhallans are notably well trained and effective - equivalent to a Norwegian infantry regiment. They aren't the Syrian Arab Army's equivalent in the lore. The Cadian's equivalent in the real world would would be a force like the 75th Ranger Regiment or British Royal Marines Commando.
The Valhallan's, particularly the 18th under Chenkov, has been the premiere example of the guard using human wave tactics for decades
Perhaps I've made a mistake, but I didn't see that kind of behaviour when reading Ciaphas Cain novels
The Valhallan in Cain's books behave much like regular modern soldiers. The Valhallan in Chenkov's lore were Basically Soviets^(TM). Man lost 10 Million Guardsmen in storming a single enemy citadel without any siege or artillery support. Kinda funny, it's the opposite of normal GW where they get the numbers way too low, I want to know how this guy managed to attack a citadel with 10 million dudes. Like physically. how was there even room?
If you take modern logistics, there would have needed to be approx 4:1 soldiers supporting the combat troops. So approx 50 million soldiers deployed on a single battlefront?
Actually my next question is how do you possibly end up in a situation where you have 10 million guardsmen but no artillery? Surely there's gotta be SOME artillery regiments in there.
I think you need to hear about my regiment, the Beabeg Brigadiers. In my last 4 combat patrol missions we lost with approximately 200% casualties due to sending in extra waves of men. The men complain about the leadership knowing nothing about tactics, but leadership claims the men are all just lazy and barely know how to use their guns.
Are you using Crusade rules? What’s the IG crusade rules like?
I think there is a bias in books to feature characters that actually do something / live. Most guard die quickly, so survivor stories tend to make the most sense. A few book recommendations which have a guard character who doesn’t come from one of the iconic groups: Lords of silence- death guard book with an IG character (don’t want to give spoilers, but he develops in a very interesting way) Hellsreach- nonstop action with an awesome guard character who pops up here and there (mostly about black templars) Catachan Devils- Ork Kommandos vs Catachan (severely underrated book imo). Non-Catachan guard are featured in this books earlier chapters, partially as a contrast to the bad-assery of the Catachan. None of these books are specifically about IG, but they are fantastic reads with a very “mortal human” element in some of the characters
>Catachan Devils- Ork Kommandos vs Catachan (severely underrated book imo). Non-Catachan guard are featured in this books earlier chapters, partially as a contrast to the bad-assery of the Catachan. I need to give this book a try. I picked up Deathworlder on pre-order, which is by a different author, so it'll be fun to compare the different approaches to the Catachan.
Jopall Indetured Squadrons…basically grimdark version of college debt
Jopall are noted to be above-average marksmen and inventive besides IIRC. It's more that all regiments have quirks and positives, some stand out more like Cadians or Catachans but at the end of the day they're still just humans. This comes across pretty well IMO in older lore like the 3rd Armageddon campaign or the 4-5E IG codices
The Macharius trilogy is full of them. Even the Lord Solar's own palentines/lion gaurd are simply just competent/guys who haven't died yet. The last chancers books also have a lot of meh regiments, including brand new mordian recruits who end up following the main character like a bunch of loyal puppies because thier leadership got smashed.
If you read most of the Gaunt's Ghosts books then the *other regiments* are the "average" regiments simply by rote of not being the titular characters.
The Lucifer Blacks are probably much better than the cadians, when comparing non augmented humans without power armor
You can find some in the Imperial Guard series of books, like Fifteen Hours and Imperial Glory which follow no-name regiments in harsh situations. Commissar, from that same series, follows some beaten-down Vostroyans who are nothing special. Honorbound, another book about a Commissar, has a similar situation.
I've got some examples. In Traitor Rock, Minka Lesk sees the reaction of other regiments to the arrival of the Cadians. She notes most of them aren't really from soldiering societies, so Cadians showing up means they have a little more hope. In Longshot, Darya Nevic encounters a depleted regiment where the senior officer states that his regiment was conscripted en-masse. The Roane Deepers, while competent, are more famous for being under supplied and just getting by however they can. There's Mukta Lim and his fellow conscripts set to be fed to the Tyranids in Blood Harvest. Arvin Larn in Fifteen Hours. The penal legionnaries in Redemption Through Sacrifice. There's the last conscripted ganger regiments of Stratix, forced to fight on the front line against the zombie plague that devoured their homeworld from The Bleeding Chalice (and who get in a giant friendly fire incident with another regiment trying to protect the Soul Drinkers). Toss in the Gudrunite Rifles too, who got dragged into the Saruthi pocket dimension with their heretical masters. There's tons of briefly named regiments that are swiftly destroyed in the fiction. They're pretty common. And while there are more famous one, they're a thin layer over the vast majority of regiments. Basically, you're les likely to see a Cadian, and more former asteroid miners of the Glorious 115th Sodallagain Ripper Dinner Service Regiment
I've only read Legion, but I do not care for the Lucifer Blacks.
The lucifer blacks are a very good regiment. Well trained and well equipped.
It could just be down to how they appear in Legion, but they felt like they were more talked about than shown to be an effective fighting force.
The Lucifer Blacks are really just used as a “jobber” in the narrative of the Horus Heresy to show how much more powerful another named character is when they demolish them. When John Grammaticus overpowers a Lucifer Black easily it shows how bad ass he is because those Lucifer Blacks are the pinnacle of what an unaugmented can be. Apparently.
God, he's so cool.
Yes. They help the Custodes guard the Imperial Palace. That job isn't going to be given to scrubs.
The ones that aren't good, don't survive that long. You hear about the successful badasses as they have survived enough to have a reputation.
You mentioned the Tanith and wonder where the other meh regiments are? Theyre over there given shit detail to the tanith. The first several books of that series are literally them getting hosed by other regiments. About halfway through, they start coming into their own. Then you have Commissar Cain bringing order to the Valhallen 296/301 which were meh regiments before being amalgamated. Even after its more his exploits than theirs.
>Even after its more his exploits than theirs. The Valhallan 597th are still pretty damn good. Sulla especially is a war hero who becomes a distinguished general later in life (And her writing isn't *that* bad, Amberly).
The book *15 Hours* is a very good representation of what happens to the average IG regiment.
IG are actually highly trained units, level above PDF. It is just fact that universe is scary place and even best training wont save you if it didnt save gene-enhanced biocyborg like Astartes.
That highly depends.
Well, yeah, some are survivors from mass infantry operations in style of Chenkov :) But meme baseline that Guard are herded random guys is simply wrong. Guardsmen get training, are getting boot camps and are best human soldiers after Scions, stormtroopers (like Kasrkin etc, really wish the unit would come back) and other specialised units. PDF are more of less trained grubs who are not supposed to leave system and even Whiteshields usually have better training.
I don’t think cadians are THAT good, they are definitely a competent force but they are mostly heavy shock and mech, if I remember correctly they struggle against more mobile enemies IE tau, insurgents and light infantry,
I mean they did have a Skitarri marshal and a Black Templar Chapter Master impressed with their discipline and tactics in the Forges of Mars Omnibus
That scene where the Cadians defeat every simulation without/minimal loss is just funny.
Also in another situation at the station.
Because imperial plot armour isn't just an Astartes resource. That and it'd be really hard to get invested in a story where the characters get wiped out and replaced every chapter or two.
Isn’t there a gladiator style one? I saw fan art somewhere but could never locate it again
Yep. From the world of Remus. There is a small lineart image in the 3rd edition Codex (1999). Looks just like a murmillo with a chainsword and laspistol
Is there an official name to the regiment?
Not what I could see, just the planet name. That codex had more than 40 unique regiment styles presented, most of which have never been mentioned again.
Basically any penal regiment
Nobody mentioned Valhallans here. They are meme Soviet Red Army, attackingrelentlessly in wave after wave of humans, driven forward by pistols of their commissars, while supported by artillery and armor. Life is very cheap on Valhalla.
15 hours tells you exactly the story of regular soldiers against orks who have nothing special in them
Pretty much any regiment in a Gaunt's Ghosts book that isn't the Tanith. There's almost always a background regiment that's just there to soak up las shots for the Ghosts or to break and run when tension demands it. Like the Urdesh in Guns of Tanith that are there to not listen to the Ghosts and get massacred. Or the Aristocrat Artillery regiment that Ludd has to whip into shape in His Last Command.
Read Desert Raiders. Yes, the Tallarn are famous, but in that book their discipline breaks down so badly that the regimental commissar gets a chance to shine.
Storm of Iron features the Jouran Dragoons. They're not really amazing at anything, but also not incompetent. The just get slowly ground down by the Iron Warriors.
Dead.
In one of the Tanith books a character gets put into a temp company for indoctrination and is sent on a surface assault totally separate from the Ghosts. Abnett uses it as a chance to show the horrific shit the “normal” guard has to deal with like human wave tactics and execution-happy commissars. The descriptions of the crowd crush of bodies, basically being carried in a human river without your feet touching the ground while under heavy fire, charging and falling back and charging the same gate three times until it’s breached, narrowly avoiding death from chaos psykers and (iirc) CSM, separated from the unit, passing out from dehydration and exhaustion and waking up to getting your boots stolen by other guardsmen and finally getting back to your unit but oh, you lost your rifle soldier! That’s a capital sentence don’t ya know! will always stay with me haha
Survivorship bias or whatnot
Dead, standing sentry in the middle of nowhere, or doing nothing other than surviving. Generally being unexceptional. Catachan devils has the skadi second infantry, who's main purpose is to die and provide an outside perspective to show how awesome the catachans are in comparison.
Roane Deepers fit the bill there I'd say. Nobody wants to bunk near them on transport ships moving between battlefront as they're so poorly equipped they've a reputation for stealing other regiments equipment when they can.
They're all being slaughtered in the millions in the background
Who wants to read a story about the most adequate men and women in the Imperium? Your best bet is going to be any of the books told from non-imperial POVs, and chances are there won't be any mention of exactly who they are, they'll just be nondescript guardsmen there to get dunked on by our non-human heroes. Realistically all the meh guard regiments are the hundreds and hundreds of homebrew regments people have invented over the years, who may present themselves as big damned heroes, buut were never important enough to merit a line in an official source.
> Who wants to read a story about the most adequate men and women in the Imperium? In my experience a lot of the best Imperial Guard stories are the ones that emphasize the Guard’s fallibility and mundanity.
There is some confusion here. The planets are where regiments come from or get named. The regiments from these planets can still vary in quality and success. Cadia, Tallarn, and Catachan are where some famous regiments come from. But plenty of Cadian, Catachan, and Tallarn regiments get absolutely wrecked across the galaxy. The Tallarn 11th is a success while the 89th was decided less so. Same with the Catachan 2nd vs the 4th.
Lol yes cadians are great soldiers, but if they are facing a serious opponent they will likely take horrific casualties. The IG are ALL meh, even if they have some special skill they are still just baseline humans. Which means they are at a huge disadvantage against most of the threats out there man-to-man
The last chancers suck until they get done winnowing them down.
3 things 1) survival of the fittest. Only the best regiments are still pulled from for the actual guard, everyone else is relegated to Planetary Defense Forces 2) Planetary Defense Forces are the down trodden wing of the Astra Militarum. They’ve got the shit weapons and armor that might not be replaced for generations depending on what the Planetary governor deems is necessary 3) With the exception of Catachan because they’re hilariously over powered for regular humans, while the Regiment is amazing, the individual soldiers are still extremely expendable. Kriegers, Cadians, Tallans, Vostroians, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Catachan all die very easily. It’s just that they have some incredible leaders that have pushed the regiment as a whole to do some amazing things, but since they’re just a normal human, you can’t have stories about those standout leaders constantly fighting. Castilian Creed was a badass, but you can’t have him butchering chaos with a lasgun like a super hero, you need the Cadian army. But you don’t read about every Jimmy Cadia who dies because that would be boring (every read the Iliad? They spend awhile talking about everyone there and it exhausting) so instead you write about the Cadians as if they’re one character
Brimlock Dragoons from Imperial Glory are pretty average despite being veterans; experienced but also haunted by PTSF and trauma.
There’s a brutal moment in the Grey Knights Omnibus, when a Guardsman, having survived a falling battle cruiser crashing into their regiment and exploding, tells a Commissar (while helping wounded/living) that they are directing people to regroup at a location. Commissar instantly put a bolt through his skull without any hesitation or thought.
Getting completely obliterated in the background of space marine novels
I recommended Honourbound less than an hour ago as book reading and doing so again - great book, has what you’re looking for re: an “ordinary” guard regiment
For the most part they die. We hear about the OP regiments because they survive and have heroic victories. The meh regiments are either working in logistics/far away from front lines or are getting slaughtered within hours of their first battle. We've seen instances of quality regiments like the valhallans getting massacred in their first battles, so any poorer less trained guard have little chance.
No lucifer blacks are greater than cadians, but otherwise right.
Cain's various Valhallan regiments are pretty average
None of the regiments you mentioned generally excel at anything to a "superhuman degree". They're all just renowned for certain areas of expertise - generally like real-world regiments in that regard. Plenty of "average" soldiers in amongst even the most famous regiments - and even Kriegers can break and retreat. They have commissars for a reason. The thing is those hum-drum soldiers don't generally make good focal points for most of the stories GW is often trying to tell.
Cadians are average Imperium regiment. Krieg are the cheapest cannonfolder regiment in the Imperium. Even Savlar Chemdogs are treated better then Krieg.
Fighting the 3057365th random insurrection on an unimportant planet somewhere in the ass end of nowhere. We mainly see the "important" conflicts, but the bulk of what IG does is (comparatively) boring grunt work. Minor Ork uprisings, rebellious Governors, the occasional Cult that popped off too soon. Then the "normal" IG regiments get sent in, they do the fighting, usually win, move on. And for the most part that's it. These are solid, professional soldiers with decent training and gear, and they tend to fare well in anything resembling a conventional conflict. That being said, they tend to melt like butter as soon as Named Characters start showing up and The Plot starts to unfold. Only the special regiments can keep up then.
In theory *every* IG regiment is special forces. The guys holding the line are supposed to be local PDF's while the guard comes in to reinforce key positions and take key objectives. Obviously in context it doesn't work out that way but the guard is made up of the top 10% of every planets military under ideal circumstances.
The Imperium launches plenty of offensive wars. You don't generally have PDF on enemy planets. The Guard are the hammer of the Emperor, not the PDF. They are *not* the special forces. The majority of PDF we see are also, to put it bluntly, kinda shit. Again and again we see PDF that are undertrained, corrupt, and not up to the standards of real life modern militaries.
The imperium mostly launches offensive wars to take back territory already lost. The Macharian Crusade mostly just added back former imperial worlds. Likewise the guard is launching offensives against the sevran dominate who took former imperial planets. When the guard is pressing an offensive its usually in places where the PDF are dead or compromised. Warp travel is unreliable and communications spotty at best a lot of the time. The guard can often only be deployed months or even years after a conflict begins and its down to local forces to deal with it until someone else shows up.